We Want to Get Rid of Jesus

How is that for an attention grabbing title?  Recently, I have been reading John Stott’s seminal work, The Cross of Christ and I hit this section that just really leapt off the page at me.  The context is Stott talking about the first century Jewish people and their priests and how they reacted and responded to Jesus’ ministry:

“So they felt threatened by Jesus.  He undermined their prestige, their hold over the people, their own self-confidence and self-respect, while leaving his intact.  They were “envious” of him, and therefore determined to get rid of him.  It is significant that Matthew recounts two jealous plots to eliminate Jesus, the first by Herod the Great at the beginning of his life and the other by the priests at its end.  Both felt their authority under threat.  So both sought to “destroy” Jesus (Mt 2:13; 27:20 AV). However outwardly respectable the priests’ political and theological arguments may have appeared, it was envy which led them to “hand over” Jesus to Pilate to be destroyed (Mk 15:1, 10).

The same evil passion influences our own contemporary attitudes to Jesus.  He is still, as C. S. Lewis called him, “a transcendental interferer.” We resent his intrusions into our privacy, his demand for our homage, his expectation of our obedience. Why can’t he mind his own business, we ask petulantly, and leave us alone? To which he instantly replies that we are his business and that he will never leave us alone. So we too perceive him as a threatening rival who disturbs our peace, upsets our status quo, undermines our authority and diminishes our self-respect. We too want to get rid of him.”

–John Stott, The Cross of Christ. p58

Meg on Putting Our House on the Market

My wife has posted some thoughts on putting our house on the market.  Check them out on our family blog.

For Sale

As of last night our house is officially on the market. This is a huge step in our journey to Lincoln. We now enter free fall and trust in the perfect timing and provision of God. If you think of it please pray for our sanity, stress, and anxiety. Pray that we would rest in the confidence of what God has called us to. And if you happen to know anyone in the St. Louis area looking for a house, please feel free to point them to the listing.

Random Nerd 10.2.2009 – Twitter Stats

I am a stats guy.  I love them.  I eat them up.  Recently I came across a study done by some researchers out at Rutgers University on the usage of Twitter.  You can read the whole thing over at Mashable, but just to give you a taste, here are some summarizing graphs (because I also love graphs) and other stats.  The table below helps you interpret the graph:

• Informers have a higher proportion of mentions of other users in their messages (that is they @reply to more Twitterers)
• 25% of messages come from mobile phones
• 51% of mobile-posted messages are “me now” messages, compared to the
• 37% of “me now” messages posted from non-mobile applications

Do you use Twitter?  How do you use Twitter?  Why do you use Twitter?

(HT: Mashable)

Random Nerd 9.25.2009: Did You Know 4.0

Here’s another one of those fascinating fact-filled videos on the emergence of new forms of media and communication.  Watch and be amazed.

The Place of the Law

After God gave the promise to Abraham, he gave the law to Moses. Why? He had  to make things worse before He could make them better. The law exposed sin, provoked sin, condemned sin. The purpose of the law was to lift the lid off man’s respectability and disclose what he is really underneath — sinful, rebellious, guilty, under the judgment of God and helpless to save himself.

And the law must still be allowed to do its God-given duty today. One of the great faults of the contemporary church is the tendency to soft-pedal sin and judgment… We must never bypass the law and come straight to the gospel. To do so is to contradict the plan of God in biblical history… No man has ever appreciated the gospel until the law has first revealed him to himself. It is only against the inky blackness of the night sky that the stars begin to appear, and it is only against the dark background of sin and judgment that the gospel shines forth.”

–John Stott, Galatians, pp. 92-93.

Re-Thinking Facebook Strategy

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Inc and social media extraordinaire has a helpful and insightful post on Re-Thinking My Facebook Strategy.  I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking through social media strategy in general and found this helpful.  Of course, it’s probably most helpful if you’ve got more Facebook “friends” than you can handle (not really true for me…I’m just not that cool).  Hyatt does a great job of breaking down and defining who is a friend and who isn’t and how to approach Facebook from that understanding.

Redemption: Not Just Accomplished but also Applied

I am a seminary student.  What that means is that I do not have everything figured out.  In fact, I am a human so the reality is that I never will have everything figured out.  I am okay with that, but I don’t always like it.  I experienced this first hand recently when struck with a new doctrine that I had never heard of as part of a recent seminary course I took.  The doctrine? Union with Christ.

John Murray starts the ninth chapter of his book, Redemption: Accomplished and Applied with some bold and broad statements.  In the opening paragraph he states that without union with Christ, “our view of the Christian life would be gravely distorted.”  Further, Murray states that, “Nothing is more central or basic than union and communion with Christ.”  Still on the first page, he notes that it is a very broad and embrasive subject and that it “underlies every step of the application of redemption” as well as being “the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation not only as its application but also in its once for all accomplishment in the finished work of Christ.”  These are bold and broad claims.  To someone who calls themself a Christian, but has never even heard of this thing called ‘union with Christ,’ they can be offensive and even deterring and thus create resistance in the reader.

“In Christ” – what does that mean?  How many times have I read a passage of Scripture and been confused or simply unclear of exactly what that meant? 164 times in the letters of Paul alone according to John Stott.

Drawing from passages like Romans 6:4, Murray shows that the Christian life is lived by virtue of our union with Christ.  Not only that, but that we also remain “united with Christ” in our death (1 Thess. 4:14, 16).  And finally that “in Christ” we will also be made alive again when the last trumpet sounds (1 Cor. 15:22).

When I’m honest with myself, I am resistant to some of the bold and exhaustive claims that Murray makes in the opening of this chapter in Redemption: Accomplished and Applied.  As I’ve prayed, read Scripture, and reflected however, I’ve begun to see that the root of my resistance has been – in some way – pride.  Pride in the fact that I call myself a Christian and that “I’ve never heard of this union with Christ thing before.”  I’d heard of sanctification and had a quasi-Lutheran based view of it as a process in which God was at work in me do make me more like Jesus.  However, my understanding of sanctification was fuzzy at best.  I knew that my sanctification wasn’t based on my works but that really just left me clueless to how it actually progressed.  I knew it was by the work of the Holy Spirit, but I did not cleanly grasp the concept of being purely adopted and given a new heart at my justification.  Wrestling with all of this has taken me from a focus of ‘Who God is and what He’s done’ and expanded upon that to add ‘Who I am as a Christian because of it all.’  I’m a child of God.  I have been blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose me in him before the foundation of the world…(Ephesians 1:3-4).  For most of my Christian walk I have focused on “redemption accomplished” at the neglect of “redemption applied.”

In wrestling with the doctrine of union with Christ for the last four weeks I have found extreme confidence in my assured and secured salvation by growing in my understanding of this doctrine.  And not just my confidence in eternal salvation, but also in grasping God’s love for me from eternity past to eternity future.  It puts God’s unconditional election despite my depravity in a whole new light.  It puts his irresistible grace despite my sinful nature in a whole new light.  These words of Murray really struck me in this regard, “Apart from union with Christ we cannot view past, present, or future with anything but dismay and Christless dread. By union with Christ the whole complexion of time and eternity is changed and the people of God may rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”

I feel a little like I’ve opened up the doors of a wardrobe to find a whole new world existing that I never even knew was there.  If you’ve never heard of this concept of ‘union with Christ,’ pick up a copy of Murray’s book and go wrestling.  My prayer for you is that Murray will win.

Random Nerd 8.28.09: Is Social Media a Fad

Is social media a fad or is it a fundamental shift in how we communicate? I vote for the latter.

The Prodigal God

I recently picked up and devoured Tim Keller’s little book titled The Prodigal God: Rediscovering the Heart of the Christian Faith.  What I found was one of the most concise, succinct, and engaging depictions of the gospel that I’ve ever encountered.

Working from the Parable of the Two Sons (which he uniquely twists into his title of the prodigal God), Keller unpacks the gospel while hitting you smack in the face with your own self-righteousness.  If you’re new to Christianity, if you’re stale in Christianity, or if you’re simply wrestling with trying to know God better, give this book a read.  Below is a quote from the book which I highly commend.

“Through this parable Jesus challenges what nearly everyone has ever thought about God, sin, and salvation. His story reveals the destructive self-centeredness of the younger brother, but is also condemns the elder brother’s moralistic life in the strongest terms.  Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and the religious are spiritually lost, both life-paths are dead ends, and that every thought the human race has had about how to connect to God has been wrong.”

Random Nerd 8.21.09 – There’s an App for That

Need to call in an airstrike?  There’s an app for that:

Via Gizmodo:

MIT Professor Missy Cummings (a former F-18 Hornet Navy Pilot), and her team of 30 students and undergrads, have successfully demonstrated how an iPhone could be used to control an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV.

As part of their work at MIT’s Humans and Automation Lab (HAL, heh), the team thought about ways to improve on the suitcase-sized controller that soldiers must currently lug around to control hand-thrown Raven UAVs.

The iPhone app they developed sends GPS coordinates to the craft, which then in turn can send photos and video back to the iPhone.

Make Your Soul Dance with Joy

“Why, man, it ought to make your soul dance for joy within you to think that sin is pardoned, and righteousness is imputed to you.  This is an unchanging fact, that Christ has saved you.  If it was ever a fact, it is always a fact.  If it was ever true, it is always true, and always alike true, as true now that you are depressed as yesterday when you were rejoicing.  Jesus’ blood does not change like your poor heart.  It does not go up and down in value, like the markets, and fluctuate like your faith.  If you are saved, you are saved.  If you are resting in the blood, you are as safe to-day as you were yesterday, and you are as safe for ever.  Remember that his is true of all the saints alike.  It is true to great saints, but equally so to little ones.  They all stand under this crimson canopy, and are alike protected by its blessed shadow from the beams of divine justice.  It is true to you now.”

-Charles Spurgeon, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 56: #3203.

Random Nerd 8.7.09 – Twitter Stats

For the past couple of weeks, I have been doing a lot of critical and strategic thinking about the use of social media (namely blogging, Facebook, and Twitter).  In doing some research, I stumbled across these stats on Twitter from the Influential Marketing Blog. The data originated via a Sysomos report issued on the usage of Twitter.  You can find a link to that report in the Influential Marketing Blog post titled, 10 Stunning (and Useful) Stats About Twitter.

I found #3 and #5 to be the most stunning; #4 and #7 to be the most helpful. Here are the stats:

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to “follow back” all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for “lifecasting” their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not “active.” If you take a general description of being “active” on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter’s growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter’s notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Seminary Intensive Week

This week I’m at Covenant Theological Seminary for a summer intensive course titled “Spiritual and Ministry Formation” taught by Dr. Phil Douglass.  This was originally a course that I had somewhat poo-poo’d, but as I’m learning, it is probably one of the most important classes of my degree program focusing in so hard on what it means to be in union with Christ and drawing from historical examples of heroes of the past (Schaeffer, Edwards, Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon, Owen, Taylor, Bunyan, and Baxter among others) to illuminate the concept of sanctification.

Below is the reading list for the course:

• Transforming Grace, Jerry Bridges
• Children of the Living God, Sinclair Ferguson
• The Call, Os Guinness
• Christian Spirituality, Donald Alexander ed.
• Several readings on the union with Christ including pieces from:
  • A. A. Hodge
  • John Murray
  • John Stott
  • Michael Horton
  • Mark Saucy

Social Media Saturation?

Is there a saturation point that can be reached with social media?  How do you make use of social media?  How do you use Facebook?  Do you use it personally?  Does your organization use it?  How do you use Twitter?  Do you use it personally?  Does your organization use it?  How is your use of Twitter different than your use of Facebook? Do you post more often on one with respect to the other?  Why?  Do your tweets feed to your Facebook status? Why?  How are these two different?  Are they?

Do you blog? Do you blog personally?  Does your organization have a blog? Do you post new content on your blog and feed it to Facebook and Twitter?  Do you drive Facebook and Twitter exclusively from your blog or do you add additional content on top of blog feeds?  If so, is there a saturation point?  Do you bother yourself with asking whether or not someone that follows your blog gets hit with your auto-fed Twitter updates and also has to scroll past them in their Facebook feeder?

If there was a way to filter out of Facebook and Twitter auto feeds from blogs you follow, would that be useful?  If there was a way to filter out of Facebook auto-fed Twitter updates of people you follow on Twitter, would that be useful?

In addition to Facebook, Twitter, and blogging, what other forms of social media do you use (Delicious, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)?  How are they different than these three?  How do you use them differently than these three?

Where is the saturation point?  What sort of strategies exist? Do you have a social media strategy or to you just vomit information all over the web?

Comment away.  I’m eager for feedback.

For the record: I have no strategy and am guilty of spewing info onto all three of these mediums.  Currently I have a personal blog, an organizational blog, personal FB, and personal Twitter and they’ve all go varying linkages and feed one another.  I’m considering adding an organizational FB and Twitter, but need to get some sort of organized strategy down before the internet puke police arrest me.  This post originated in WordPress but will feed to Twitter via Twitterfeed and it also will feed to Facebook via Yahoo Pipes.  If you make it back here to comment, let me know where you started (blog reader, FB, or Twitter).

Greatest Capacity, Yet Without a Clue

[E]ven if we can do what we want, the question remains: What do we want? The near-omnipotence of our means of freedom doubles back to join hands with the near-emptiness of our ends.  We do not have a purpose to match our technique.  So, ironically, we have the greatest capacity when we have the least clue what it is for. Which makes us vulnerable to all the “expert services” whose “self help” methods promise us everything we crave, but end in delivering to us new forms of constraint – and charging us for them.

–Os Guinness, The Call (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson), pp 22-23.

Bridging the Chasm

If the chasm is to be bridged, God must bridge it.  If we are to desire the highest good, the highest good must come down and draw us so that it may become a reality we desire.  From this perspective there is no merit in either seeking or finding.  All is grace. The secret of seeking is not in our human ascent to God, but in God’s descent to us.  We start out searching, but we end up being discovered.  We think we are looking for something; we realized we are found by Someone…What brings us home is not our discovery of the way home but the call of the Father who has been waiting there for us all along, whose presence there makes home home.

–Os Guinness, The Call (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson), p 14.

Delicious Blogs

I spent a bunch of time over the holiday weekend getting caught up on some blog reading.  I use Google Reader to take in all of my blog content and lately have been feeling the back-pressure build.  Going into the weekend, there were over 1000 unread blog posts piled up.  Slowly but surely I chipped away at them by quickly scanning through them, starring the ones I want to read, and trashing those I don’t.  I’m now making my way back through all of the starred posts.  As I do so, you’ll see the “From My Reader” list on my left sidebar update as I tag many of them via my Delicious account which is linked in via WordPress.  Stay tuned to that list for links to some great blog posts.

The Inescapable Question of Biography

Part of our contemporary crisis of identity can be summed up by saying that modern people are haunted by an inescapable question of biography: Who am I?  From magazine covers to psychiatrists’ couches to popular seminars, we are awash with self-styled answers to this question.  But many people are dissatisfied with the answers peddled because they have a terrible deficiency: They don’t explain what to each of us is the heart of our yearning–to know why we are each unique, utterly exceptional, and therefore significant as human beings

–Os Guinness, The Call (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson), p 20.

Schlafly Gets Props in the L.A. Times

My favorite local brew gets props in the L.A. Times.  Read the article, Saint Louis Brewery Leads Microbrew Market. My favorite is their Pale Ale.

The Avett Brothers

This past Thursday night, my lovely wife and I had the opportunity to go see one of our favorite bands live in concert at the Pageant here in St. Louis.  If you’ve never heard of the Avett Brothers, it’s time you do.  We’ve been captured by their music for about a year now, and seeing them live was amazing.

Where else can you see one dude playing a cello, another the upright bass, while one of the two guys on lead vocals plays (simultaneously mind you) the banjo and bass drum while the other lead plays the acoustic guitar and a high-hat.  Incredible.  These guys have talent.  The two leads also took turns on the piano and one them would occasionally jump back to a full-up drum set or strap on the harmonica.  Crazy fun.

In addition to their great musical talent, these guys can write songs and they seem to have a gift for capturing a sense of emotion in their songwriting.  They’re storytellers and so some of their stories express grief and the challenges or hurts or pangs we experience in this life while mixing it all together in a very unique blue-grassy harmony that keeps you on your toes.

Final word – check ‘em out.  I understand they have a new album coming out at the end of September.  You’ll want to buy it.

Random Nerd 6.27.09 – iPhone Teardown

iPhone teardown articles are now out.  Be sure to checkout the iSuppli teardown article which concludes a $172.46 bill of materials and a mere $6.50 in assembly costs.  Crazy low assembly cost if you ask me.  EDN has an article that draws on the iSuppli report while GigaOM has a nice picture and writeup themselves.

Finally, if you’re into the tech stuff, stop over at Gizmodo and read Bill Nye’s layman’s description of the oleophobic touchscreen.  Go ahead…get your nerd on.

Music of Late

My wife and I are very excited to be heading down to the Pageant tonight to check out the Avett Brothers.  If you haven’t ever heard of them, please give them a sample listen via their MySpace page.

In other music of late news, I’ve been sneaking some time checking out (and enjoying) the following bands on MySpace thanks to some recommendations from various blogs and tweets,

• Manchester Orchestra
• Grizzly Bear
• Frontier Ruckus
• Whitley

Relevant Mag on Our Generation

Have you ever asked the question, or been asked the question, “who are you trying to impress?”  Relevant mag writer Adam Smith addresses the hipster culture in an interest piquing article, Who Are We Trying to Impress.  A snippet:

Our generation, the 18-to-34 set, tend to share a common characteristic. We are remarkably self-satisfied. We are socially aware, politically sensitive and culturally savvy, and we like this about ourselves. The question it raises, however, is if all our sensitivity, savviness and awareness has led anywhere. Certainly, social justice campaigns abound within our generation. One would be loathe to be identified within the subculture without a keen passion for grassroots, countercultural movements. However, where have these movements led? Is ours a generation that is quietly changing the world, or is social conscience just one more accoutrement of fashion for us? An accessory we wear with our Chuck Taylors and horn-rimmed glasses? It seems we’re out not just to change the world, but to impress. The question is, who exactly are we trying to impress?

:

:

Moreover, we’re certainly not blind to the problem. In surveys conducted by cable network The N, our own generation described itself as lazy, materialistic and self-absorbed. So, if we know this about ourselves, what are we doing to change it? The problem, I think, comes in the fact that it’s easy to apply these epithets to our generation without applying them to ourselves as individuals. Let me be the first to say, I embody these traits as much as any of us. It’s time for us to take responsibility, not as a generation, but as individuals to live the kind of outwardly focused life we hold in such esteem. Who are we trying to impress with our cultural savvy, our rebellious fashion sense and political awareness? Essentially, it’s each other. On a whole, we’re trying to impress our peers, strangers we pass on the street who—in reality—notice us no more than we do them.

None of these things (cultural awareness, political activism, mode and standard of dress) are bad in and of themselves. The problem comes when we elevate the veneer behind our efforts above the causes we claim to stand for. I adamantly believe that this is a fantastic generation, capable of amazing things. Not only capable of amazing things, mind you, but in reality already doing amazing things. It is time, though, that all of us (myself included) take a deep look at our motives and priorities. It’s time we stop trying to impress, and start making a difference for the sake of making a difference.

Read the whole thing here. (HT: HB)

Random Nerd 6.19.09 – It Will Be Mine..Oh Yes

My 3GS should arrive later today.  For you iPhone junkies out there – what are your favorite apps?