Here is one chilling reason NOT to join the Orthodox Church!

He [God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption. – 1Co 1:30 (ESV)

Is that not an incredible truth? Christ is our righteousness. We know that, He lived the perfect life we couldn’t and died the death we should have. He alone is our righteousness, no problem here (unless you’re Roman Catholic and then you have to do funny things with texts like this and then claim that only the Church can interpret them correctly).

Jesus is our sanctification. How about that one! “Sanctification” can mean various things in the New Testament from our status as holy to the process of being conformed to the image of Christ. Either way, Jesus is our sanctification. Not “yielding” not “cooperating” not “trying harder” but Jesus. He is the one who is our holiness and it is He who makes us holy.

Jesus is our redemption. When you take bottles in for recycling and get cash for them, it is called redeeming them. It is a buying back. Jesus is our redemption. He was the price for us to be bought back from slavery to sin to slavery to God. It isn’t Jesus and our sincerity or Jesus and our forsaking the world or Jesus and me. He is our redemption, my contribution is only my sin.

I just wish I believed these precious truths more fully and actually acted like they were true. When we’re tempted to doubt that God really loves us or even cares, when we believe that He is favoring us because we did this or denied us that parking spot because of that thought, we need to hold on to this. Jesus is our righteousness, sanctification and redemption. And that is because God is the source of our life in Jesus. No us.

Three more missionaries shot dead and one critically injured, this time in Yemen. The Church has always grown out of the blood of martyrs. Could this be the beginning (the very beginning) of God’s work in bringing down Islam?

These folks were working in a Southern Baptist hospital and were shot dead at the hospital. This kind of selfless service in the name of Christ speaks to people. More moderate Muslims might see this and begin to wonder how these Christians can be so loving. May it be that God is beginning to wrend the veil of deceit from the faces of Muslims!

I’ve been thinking about worship lately. I have to organize my thoughts but three things stand out. First, worship should demand something from us, not give something to us. It should be work, spiritual work. Second, there is no explicit sacred liturgy set down in Scripture, though Church history has different models, they have some similar elements. We shouldn’t ignore that. Third, there is infantile and mature worship. It isn’t seen in the form or the style of music (or lack of it) or in the dress code. It is in the content. More mature worship wonders at and delights in Christ. Less mature worship considers God only be looking at ourselves. Mature preaching exalts Christ by drawing us to the cross. Less mature preaching presents the facts and the principles and rushes to application. Both may use illustrations to make the point but one is about what God can do for me and the other is about what God has done for me and how I should now live.

As I said, more needs to be said. I have a six-hour drive ahead of me tomorrow so maybe I can organize my thoughts more. BTW, I said that there was no sacred liturgy explicitly spelled out in Scripture, but I need to draw that out a little. The elements of worship are present and include public prayer and public reading of scripture in addition to the Apostles teaching (i.e. preaching from a New Testament perspective) and singing and collecting donations. The first two are often overlooked at the expense of the last three. All of them must be God-centered. Lord, revive your Church. Shake the ashes of pride from her wedding gown and wash her in your blood. Fill her heart with a love for her Bridegroom such that her eyes wander nowhere else. Begin that revival in my prideful heart and then in my family and then my church. Amen.

Busy night at work! The store finished the day with somthing like $90k in sales, and that friends is a lot of organic food! The deli was pretty busy too. However, the night ended on a down note. One of my guys took a pretty good chunk off of his thumb cleaning the cheese slicer. He’s at the hospital now. I’d intended on closing quickly and getting home and in to bed. Insert a glass of wine in there to help me unwind.

Mark was really hurting but my Air Force “Self-Aid/Buddy Care” training kicked in. I washed the wound quickly and then dressed it. I had him apply direct pressure. Someone wound some tape around his thumb as a makeshift tourniquet. I took that off pretty quick. You can loose a limb that way! I had him sit down for fear of shock kicking in and him passing out. He didn’t but better safe than sorry. We filled out the paperwork and sent him off to the hospital. I then sanatized the slicer, the counter space around it and behind it. My hands smell like bleach.

I have to get up around 4 AM or maybe 4:30 and get to work by 5:30AM to open the store, then take off for Michigan to catch up with my family at my Mom’s for Christmas. This will be the first Christmas we spend together in quite a while. I need to get to sleep and it is ten till midnight. I’m praying for Mark and I told him so.

Update update. I downloaded and installed the latest Chimera build and it does improve it. No faster but some features have been added like history. We’re getting there!

Also, I started the OS X 10.2.3 update download and went to work. When I came home it said something went wrong. It also said to select “dowload to desktop” from the Update menu. I reestablished the internet connection thinking that I’d be downloaded through the night. Nope. The package showed up on my desktop in a second and installed no probs. No improvements noted but not difficulties injected either. :)

Okay, so I’m at Starbucks sippin’ a capp Grande and wirelessly surffin’ the internet. I’ve got my cell phone and my Visor sitting next to me. How high tech geek can I get?

Really, I’m not too thrilled with the internet connection so far. The signal strength is only about half at best and the connection keeps disappearing. I’m glad I’m not paying for this. I signed up for the free 24 hour access in order to check it out. This is my second attempt to post this (thank you Blogger for saving this in a cookie for me!) The other down side to the network disappearing is that I have to keep logging in.

Set up on the iBook was a breeze. I don’t think I would have to do anything except turn on the Airport card but I did hit the preference panel and set to the network name just in case. Now if the base station would just stabelize! Eerrgh.

I’m done, I’m done, I’m done. My family and I survived the first term of seminary! I finished my last final on Thursday and now I am free to do all the work I didn’t get to do while I had everything on hold for school!

My exegetical paper for Greek Exegesis I came out well. I need to work on the format and then I think I’ll post it in the Theology section as an Adobe Acrobat file. It is rather technical but I sort of like it.

Also related, I hope to up the blog content and frequency.

Lookie here! Razormouth got a bit of a face lift! The website looks better but unfortunately the content is still the same old “we’re smarter than everyone else” routine. So why is it still in my list of links?

I just got a letter from the University president. He quoted a poem by U. A. Fanthorpe from Oxford University. Seemed worth passing along:

THE WICKED FAIRY AT THE MANGER
My gift for the child:

No wife, kids, home;
No money sense. Unemployable.
Friends, yes. But the wrong sort-
The workshy, women, wogs,
Petty infringers of the law, persons
With notifiable diseases,
Poll tax collectors, tarts;
The bottom rung.
His end?
I think we’ll make it
Public, prolonged, painful.

Right, said the baby. That was roughly
What we had in mind.