Eight Reasons For Not Sharing Your Faith?

Recently I have been preaching to remind people of the great good news of the gospel that we have been given to share. I have done this first to remind them of that good news because it is easy to forget it over time and not live in it's joy as we should. The second reason is to seek to move them to actually get involved with unbelievers by realizing the power of the good news of Jesus Christ lies not in them, or even in their fine words and arguments to the truth of the gospel, but in God. I want them and myself to realize that the power of God is active in the message of the cross, so we can be freed to speak it not depending on ourselves, but on God to work through it by the Holy Spirit. In that line of thought I stumbled upon this video posted by the people at The Rebelution speaking of eight reasons the main character in this short video does not share his faith with others. Enjoy.

One Sermon A Week?

I stumbled on to this post on The World From Our Window blog. In it Ken Fields gives some very good reasons for a pastor with a family to only preach one sermon a week. I don't know if I agree with him completely, but as Justin grows I find that he want to play more, and often I need to keep working to get both sermons done for Sunday. After a while this gets to be a fairly grueling schedule, and I don't get all the work into a sermon that I know I should. By that I mean I start to cut corners, simply to get the sermon finished. With that in mind I have a tendency to agree with him. Yet, I know I could do more than 4 sermons a month, but doing 8 in a typical month becomes mentally challenging. Add the special services (which thankfully my board of Elders will often cut out other services so the preaching load doesn't go up too much) such as Christmas and our practice of doing a New Year's Eve and New Year's Day service, and it can quickly make sermon prep something that disappears for the need to have the sermons done. Not to mention making it easy to neglect family time completely. I know some pastors who have on evening a month off, and others who have something like that and get off a whole Sunday when there are 5 Sunday's in a month. Something like that certainly helps to deal with things like this. At the very least this has got me thinking about what is best for those I am called to preach to, my family, and myself.

Flash Drives Are Great . . . But

Today was one of those days. I woke up, having not slept very well, with a fuzzy head. Not really a headache, but just mentally tired. I figured it would not be a particularly productive day, but I set to work none the less. I did the editing for the upcoming broadcast of our worship service, and got that rendering. Got the order of worship all laid out, hymns picked and announcements written. I even had several pages done on my sermon. Thankfully it was only the sermon and bulletin information saved on the flash drive, because about 4pm my darling son decided that he should push my laptop off the table where I had set it so I could put his sweater on so he could go for a walk with his mom. It landed on the flash drive bending it over. That in itself would not have been fatal, but in bending it over one of the small components that is surface mounted right near the plug end was pushed off the board of the flash drive. So now I have a flash drive with quite a lot of information that will not work. I did try re-attaching the part in hopes that I could get it to run long enough to get the data off of it, but I put in on backwards and while the drive was recognized, it gave an error. So, I tried to switch things around, only to break off what little bit of connection was left. I figure that pretty much does it for that drive. At least it was only a $40 flash drive, and not my $900 laptop. The information is not irreplaceable as all the stuff I also have as hard-copies except for the stuff I had been working on today. On the positive side, I got some work in with my soldering iron, and found my hand is getting better at that :)

Excellent Statement on the Biblical Roles of Men and Women

Annette found this excellent statement on the role of men and women as taught in Scripture. It is balanced and seems to seek to reflect the Bible's teaching on these topics. Check it out.

To View Videos

I heard from my wife that some of her friends were having problems viewing the videos I have posted. They both use Internet Explorer. Other than my constant suggestion to people that they should switch to Firefox the fix for this problem (if you are facing it) is to get the newest flash player. You can download it from Adobe here. I hope that helps people out.

Toronto Sola Scriptura Conference Blogger Get Together

Carla Rolfe has suggested that at the Toronto Sola Scriptura conference, that various bloggers try to get together. Early on my wife Annette and I chimed in that we would be there, and now Tim Challies has announced it in his blog as well. If you are interested, it would be great to have you come out.

Don't Waste Your Life

If you want an excellent book written by one of my favorite authors, John Piper, absolutely free, go to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to get one. I particularly encourage those who read this blog who are interested in what Christianity is all about, and why following Jesus is not wasting your life to take advantage of this.

One More Justin Video

I know some of you might be finding this uninteresting, but what can I say, I am a proud daddy. One of the things my wife does is dog sit. This past weekend we were dog sitting an English Setter by the name of Spirit. She is great with kids, and Justin very quickly discovered that. Here are several videos edited together of him and Spirit.

Some more videos of Justin from our last vacation

While we were camping there we a few rainy days, and Justin discovered the joys of mud puddles with a little encouragement from his mom. He also had fun running back and forth looking at the turkeys at the CNE agricultural pavilion. And finally we have Justin at the CNE petting zoo. And after a long day of seeing exciting things . . .

Videos of my boy

Here are some videos taken with my digital camera of my son Justin. This first one was taken when we were camping in July. My mother was dog sitting, and we came over to visit as where she was dog sitting had a pool. The dog named Wiley is a friend of our dog Riley since they were both puppies, and he is great with kids--much better than Justin. Well, Justin realized this very quickly how fun Wiley is. Here is the result. The next video is from the same trip, but at our campsite. Justin discovered that he could sit in Sassy's food dish when it was empty. Here is the result. Finally, from our most recent trip here is a video of Justin at the Seal enclosure in the Toronto Zoo. Part of me wishes I had my good video camera with me for these scenes, but I am very happy we have these memories stored even if the quality is not what I might like. Enjoy!