Guest Blogger – Pastor Steven Furtick

I’m just going to put it out there. As a Christian, I’m struggling. I currently struggle to read my bible, to care at all, to want to know or talk to God, and to want to meet with other Christians. I’m just struggling to see the point. Thankfully, I don’t want it to be this way, and I am (and would ask you to as well) praying that God would change my mind and heart and provide me with that motivation once again. The other day, however, this post really encouraged me. Yet another step along the road. For your convenience, I have copy-pasted it here (without permission, sorry!):

I read today’s passage in the New Living Translation and saw something pretty cool:

John announced: “Someone is coming soon who is greater than I am—
so much greater that I’m not even worthy to stoop down like a slave and untie the straps of his sandals.”
-Mark 1:7

Jesus said that John was great in Matthew 11:11. Specifically, that he was the greatest man ever born of a woman.

But John knew that Jesus was so much greater.
And that’s what made John great.

Reminder:
Jesus is so much greater than any trial you’re facing today.
He’s so much greater than the pleasure of any sin you’re considering.
He’s so much greater than any other ambition you could pursue.

To truly be great, never forget that He is so much greater.

Eric.

Because we haven’t posted in a while…

Maybe, just maybe the other two will post on the weekend… But for now, here’s an image of my current desktop:

 

 

I like things to look neat, tidy, and sorta fresh. So there ya have it.

 

Eric.

Exams!

If you currently read this blog (although web traffic is low around here!) we haven’t posted for quite a while. It may be a bit longer yet, as the three of us are doing the HSC, and currently preparing for trial exams.

Eric.

Because we just can’t get enough…

Each of us peabrainers has an individual blog (actually, we each have two) else where on the interweb. Only one of mine is even slightly active due to the HSC, but i thought we could list them (or at least one) here anyway.

The P: Cursory Glance and PaulVaartjes.com

The E: Review.

The A: Blog of a Girl and Alyssa’s Books

The Word of our God stands forever

This week I found a beautiful image. The visualisation below shows all the cross-references in the Bible. (click to see it in a larger size)

Visualising the Bible - By Chris Harrison

Here is how the image’s creator, Chris Harrison explains it:

The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

News worth spreading.

Yesterday, 9000 people were evacuated from Grafton due to floods. Yesterday, the same number of people died from malaria.

In the past 60 days, 80 people have died from the swine flu. In those very same days, 6 000 000 people have died from hunger. That’s 75 000 for each swine flu death. It’s also over one quarter of the population of Australia. 960 000 of those deaths were innocent children.

On Wednesday, a petrol station in Sydney lowered petrol prices to 41.8c for one hour. That same day, 100 people died in a plane crash in Indonesia. They were pushed three ad-breaks later.

While you’ve been reading this, just in our own country 100 000 people are living on the streets.

While you’ve been reading this, 100 babies were killed in abortions.

While you’ve been reading this, 250 babies were born. 125 of those were born into poverty. Of those 125, about 25 will not live to see their 5th birthday.

Pop-culture Jesus

I’ve long been frustrated by the new age Jesus that is so predominant in emerging mega-churches. Here’s a challenging quote from a conservative calvinist on such a Jesus:

“There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.”

—Mark Driscoll, Relevant Magazine[10]

Can i highly recommend Driscoll’s podcast on dating and relationships here (click on downloads -> direct link to audio. It’s not big, and it’s awesome.)

Eric.

Emerson’s Engagement…

So for those of you who may not know, Emerson Spartz from Mugglenet is engaged as of a few days ago. Anyway, on the site, he posted some photos from the proposal, which happened to occur at halftime during a basketball game with over 20,000 people looking on. Brave man.

“Here’s what happened: I told Gaby I “pulled strings” and she was going to get to do a contest at center court during a time out at the Chicago Bulls/Philadelphia 76ers game. She was blindfolded, spun around, and told she had to “find” Benny the Bull in 30 seconds. The crowd cheered and booed to help her out as she blindly made her way around the court in front of 22,000 people.
But she didn’t find Benny… !”

There’s some pics on the site, but i’ve gone to the effort of putting them here for you. I aww-ed, which i don’t do. so make sure you view them in order:

On the Voddy

Hopefully I get to post before 4.15, but if I don’t, tune in to On the Voddy at that time. For now, hi from ipod touch, later dudes.

Evolving Theories and “God” Figures

I subscribe to a daily email called “A Word A Day.” Yes, quite a nerdy thing for a 17 year old to do but, i am that. Now, about a week or so ago I recieved the first for the week, which usually describes what the theme for the words that week are and how he arrived there. This particular week’s theme was Words from Darwin and Linlcoln because its both of their 200th birthdays this year, or something like that. So the dude running the emails says, “you’d think 200 years would be enough time for people to accept the evidence that evolution is true,” and I thought ouch!Because I don’t believe in evolution, and I know like, tonnes of people who don’t. It was really, i think, quite insensitive of him (who I’d learned to respect). And then I thought (too late to send an angry email back about it) that I should have replied with something like, “well you know what, people thought there was evidence to believe that the earth was flat and then, when that was disproven, that it was still the center of the universe.” And then he would have probably got angry at me, but it’s true! Scientific theories are just that, (ERIC WAS HERE ON HIS IPOD =P) despite the fact that I’ve heard many say that a scientific “theory” is as good as a scientific law but can’t be proven. People who claim that evolution is 100% true, have no doubts and are absolutely scathing to any other beliefs are, i think, arrogant in that they think they know enough to say what’s been happening on the world for at least 6000 years when you just can’t know. And now people will say, ah but you christians, you’re 100% certain that you know where we came from and i would say that it’s because we have a God figure we believe knows everything and has told us what we need to know (creation being one of those things) so we can be 100% certain of creation. What I don’t like is people who don’t believe in a god elevating themselves to the status of one by thinking they know all possibilities and narrowing it down to one they’re certain of. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but that’s me. Personally, I won’t put absolute trust in scientific theories (even laws depending on which one it is) because there ahve been so many that have been disproven over the years that we just can’t know. Flat earth, geocnentricism, plum pudding atoms and more I can’t think of right now. So yes. That’s my thoughts, deal with them.

Alyssa – condemner of society