geekery.of.all.sorts

The setup: So I’m walking today, clearing my head before the next big thing I had to do. I was praying, telling God I wanted to know Him, wanted to have the Holy Spirit teach me ( John 14:26 ) So I start thinking about the Beatitudes. I grew up having to memorize the Bible at school, so ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ is pretty drilled into my head. Some of the others are harder to remember, but the first few are usually right there. So I got a big lightning bolt about the Beatitudes... Right. What's a beatitude? The Beatitudes are found in Matthew 5:1-12, at the top of the sermon on the mount. ( Beatitude means ‘blessedness’, meaning that this list of things is about how to be blessed. ) There are some in the Church that have noticed these verses are important – hey form sort of a contract about how a Kingdom mindset works. The Beatitudes can be seen as the basis of God’s value system. The Beatitudes are a good thing to have i...

I found an app for my phone that lets me post to my blog directly. more geek-fu for the darren.

comparison of different descriptions of the Father and Jesus in galatians 1 Galatians 1:1 god the father... Galatians 1:3. Our father Galatians 1:1 father raised jesus from the dead... Galatians 1:3 jesus gave himself according to the will of our father observation Paul could have said 'i am astonished that you are deserting ME'. But instead, he writes '...the one who called you by the grace of jesus christ', which is waaaay longer. What's so important about that identifier that Paul took the trouble?

I've been talking with my oldest daughter about how to read/journal the Bible. Here's some notes from our conversations. Instructions: Take 30 minutes to read and think and write. ( Katy is starting Galatians Ch 1. ) You should have: A bible, pencil, journal, and a dictionary. Goal: As long as you're busy thinking about about what you're reading and writing down what you think, you're using your time well. Use the act of writing to keep your mind focused. Before you start to read: Take a minute to get quiet in your heart. Ask Holy Spirit ( H.S. ) to come and reveal the truth in the Bible to you. ( John 16:13 ) Expect that H.S is going to do what you asked. ( Matthew 7:7-11 ). When you ask, expect to receive. Expect a good gift. Believe He is alive inside you, and ready to teach you. How to read a Bible verse Have pencil and paper ready while you read write down all the important words in the verse For each of those important words, ask yourself: Do I know ...

So logos.com isn't such a bad site after all... Back when I was on staff at East Hill Church and looking into buying bible software, Logos was the Rolls Royce of the various software options. It had all the bells and whistles, but was also the most expensive. I never looked much further than price... I ran into bible.logos.com the other day, and my first impression is that it works more nicely than biblegateway.com. One of the things I spotted was this continuous scrolling that it uses. Want to read through Galatians? ( I do. ) In biblegateway.com, you'd have to click 'Next chapter' to jump between Galatians 1 and Galatians 2. Want to scroll backward from Romans 1:1ff into Acts 28:31? Biblegateway: no way. Bible.logos.com: No problem. So that's cool - but they also do this other handy thing: http://www.logos.com/reftagger is a service that notices bible references in your website and shows the bible verses on your site. You stick a bit of javascript into you...

So this post is a combination of bible-fu and geek-fu. Note: ( relative ) mastery of a specific skill may be referred to as I do above, by suffixing the topic with -fu, as in kung-fu. Example: My kitchen-fu was particularly strong today, as I whipped up a perfect chocolate souffle... The focus of my geek-fu today was bible study. Sometimes it can help to view things from a different angle...I'm starting to talk Bible with my oldest daughter, and was thinking about how to enter into a conversation about Galatians with the greatest ease. And a thought hit me - 'you should tag cloud it'. So without further ado, here's a tag cloud of Galatians, courtesy of the handy dandy TagCrowd online service. I pulled the text of Galatians from bible.logos.com and massaged it a little with my geek-fu before dropping it into TagCrowd to get the following result: abraham (9) bears (3) become (5) believe (4) belong (3) blessed (3) born (6) brothers (8) calls (3) ...