If you are looking for a fun Bible to read in 09 - you might check out the ERV. I started it a month ago and so far - I like it. It’s a paraphrase but not overboard like the Living Bible. Still sticks to the original languages, but is easy to read and uses modern phrases. It’s not a great study Bible - but a nice addition to your Biblical library.
This is great little article to help all of us who take more bad pictures than we do good ones!
Let me wish all you fellow blogites a happy new year. I am sure you’re like me and can’t believe 09 is here. Last year went fast - but it was a good year. Most of my life is wrapped up in my family and church and I guess that’s a good thing. I did get to travel to some new places and minister to some great people. I saw a couple of new amazing sights like Mount Ararat when I was in Armenia and of course just last month Donna and I went to the Galapagos Islands off of Ecuador and came home even stronger believers in creation. I mean what was Charles Darwin smoking anyway? It would take amazing faith to see that place and actually think it some how all evolved. I mean to look into the face of the marine iguana … scary ugly …and then into the face of my gorgeous wife and try to believe they are somehow related… get real. Anyway I enjoyed the experience.
I got up this morning and prayed and it was a challenge because I laid before the Lord all the things in my life I need him work on and the list just kept growing. Of course like the majority of the American population I prayed about dieting and losing some weight and I prayed about him helping me to be more godly and productive.
Most of all I prayed that what I wrote in my sermon yesterday (I will preach Sunday) - is I want to experience the extraordinary life the Bible talks about. So my blog-wish and prayer for you and me is that we may go into 09 and experience anything but an ordinary life. May the fullness of God rest on each and ever person every day.
I wanted to finish my Christmas morning blog by personally thanking Hank Steinbrenner of the Yankees for the wonderful gifts of CC Sabathia; AJ Burnett; and now Mark the Tex man! You are so generous… thank you.
Christmas Eve - Don and Donna… and yes that is a tie Don’s wearing.
Christmas Eve At Bethany… Chad and the bands rendition of Trans-Siberian Railroad’s God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen… was hot!
Last night (Christmas Eve) at church I shared a quick devotional thought during the service - I just wanted to pass those thoughts your way as reminder to those who were there and for those who weren’t something to think about.
In a nutshell by the end of this Christmas day more than likely every present under the tree will be unwrapped and move from the idea of being simply purchases by someone else to a “gift” for you. Remember it’s not really a gift until we receive it… and better yet until we open it and make it our own.
That’s what God wants each of us to do with the “gift” he has given us. Jesus Christ came as God’s personal gift to us. Jesus is not only the gift - but he was the one who paid the price to purchase the gift of for you. This gift brings forgiveness of sin, the abiding presence of God in our life, and hope for the future.
So why in the world would anyone want to leave a gift like this unopened or worse yet - unwanted! If you are one my friends checking out this blog that has never opened God’s Christmas gift to you… don’t wait do it right now… it will change your life forever.
And if you are one my friends who has already opened the gift… then please today of all days - behold it with wonder, and marvel at this thing God has done for you.
Just a thought.
Since it’s Christmas _ I thought you might enjoy or gain some insight into how the original name of Jesus came about. This is a little long, sorry - but it’s worth the read I think.
Today, as Christians we will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Was the Christian Messiah the first to have that name, or were there a lot of Jesuses running around back then?
Many people shared the name. Christ’s given name, commonly Romanized as Yeshua, was quite common in first-century Galilee. (Jesus comes from the transliteration ofYeshua into Greek and then English.) Archaeologists have unearthed the tombs of 71 Yeshuas from the period of Jesus time. The name also appears 30 times in the Old Testament in reference to four separate characters—including a descendent of Aaron who helped to distribute offerings of grain (2 Chronicles 31:15) and a man who accompanied former captives of Nebuchadnezzar back to Jerusalem (Ezra 2:2).
The long version of the name, Yehoshua, appears another few hundred times, referring most notably to the legendary conqueror of Jerisho (and the second most famous bearer of the name). So why do we call the Hebrew hero of Jericho Joshua and the Christian Messiah Jesus? Because the New Testament was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic. Greeks did not use the soundsh, so the evangelists substituted an S sound. Then, to make it a masculine name, they added another S sound at the end. The earliest written version of the name Jesus is Romanized today asIesous. (Thus the crucifix inscription INRI: “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum,” or “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”) The initial J didn’t come until much later. That sound was foreign to Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Not even English distinguished J from I until the mid-17th century. Thus, the 1611 King James Bible refers to Jesus as “Iesus” and his father as “Ioseph.” The current spelling likely came from Switzerland, where J sounds more like the English Y. When English Protestants fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I, they drafted the Geneva Bible and used the Swiss spelling. Translators in England adopted the Geneva spelling by 1769.
n contrast, the Old Testament was translated directly from the original Hebrew into English, rather than via Greek. So anyone named Yehoshua orYeshua in the Old Testament became Joshua in English. Meanwhile, the holy book of the Syrian Orthodox church, known as the Syriac Bible, is written in Aramaic. While its Gospels were translated from the original Greek, the early scribes recognized that Iesous was a corruption of the original Aramaic. Thus, the Syriac text refers to Yeshua.
What was Jesus’ last name? It wasn’t Christ. Contemporaries would have called him Yeshua Bar Yehosef or Yeshua Nasraya. (That’s “Jesus, son of Joseph” or “Jesus of Nazareth.”) Galileans distinguished themselves from others with the same first name by adding either “son of” and their father’s name, or their birthplace. People who knew Jesus would not have called him Christ, which is the translation of a Greek word meaning “anointed one.” Thanks to Brian Palmer for the research and help.
It’s this time of the year when we think more than ever about the name of Jesus and of course the very mission of the Messiah. Joseph was told in a dream, “give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from the sin”. We should all consider the power of the verse for our lives on a daily basis. First his name means God (Jehovah) saves. This reminds me God has a better plan for my life than I do for myself. Second, Jesus (Jeshua) came to save me from sins. Now that’s important to think about because we all know the negative effect of sin. Undoubtedly, this is why 1 John 1:9 tells us “if we confess our sin, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”. Awesome verse. We need to be cleansed and it needs to happen daily. Sin can build up in our lives until it has tremendous damaging affects. It can weigh us down. It makes me think about the excess build up of pigeon poop on a gas station awning in California. The poop build up became so bad the weight of it caused the awning to collapse and fall on top of two luxury cars! (see link). That’s what “excess sin” will do in our life. If we don’t confess our sins daily - it will cause a great collapse and ruin things that are precious in our lives. Just a thought.
We take them with us to the dinner table, the bedroom, even the bathroom stall. But in recent years, some of us have started taking our beloved cell phones someplace really startling: the grave.
“It seems that everyone under 40 who dies takes their cell phone with them,” says Noelle Potvin, family service counselor for Hollywood Forever, a funeral home and cemetery in Hollywood, Calif. “It’s a trend with BlackBerrys, too. (from MSN)
Well this is a new thought huh? I will have to think about the validity of being buried with my beloved Blackberry Pearl friends, however, it did make me think of the one thing you never want to be buried without and that’s JESUS! Knowing God and his mercy maybe he has a place in Heaven for your cell phone… who knows. However, I can tell you that in my opinion if you die without Jesus - I doubt if your cell phone can stand the heat of the other place!
Just a thought…