This is the sermon I preached last weekend at the close of our Faith series. Obedient Faith from Mountainview on Vimeo.
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I'm in a Wednesday morning Bible study with a group of leaders at our church. We've been working our way through the book of Acts. This morning we landed in Acts 19. Tucked in verses 13-16 is a little story about a group of Jews who are trying to cast our demons in the name of Jesus. It's not working. Finally, the evil spirit speaks up: "Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?" That happens to be a great question to everyone trying to pass themselves off as something they are not. Then the demon-possessed man gives the seven sons of Sceva such a beating that they run off naked and bleeding (never a good combination). Here's the result: "When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus, they were all seized with fear, and the name of the Lord Jesus was held…
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“When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur.” -- John Wooden
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I just read an interesting article in Wired magazine about how we learn. The author interviewed Robert Bjork, the director of UCLA's Learning and Forgetting Lab (yes, there is such a place). Below are a few take-homes. Interleaving. Instead of trying to master one topic or skill at a time, interleaving is the process of rotating through several related skills or topics. According to Bjork, memory works better when many different connections are made as opposed to just one. Get mobile. In other words, vary the places where you study. If you will need to know the information in more than one location, Bjork suggests studying in more than one location. Wait. "The more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is." Bjork suggests spacing your studying times in a way that requires the mind to dig deeper and work harder at remembering what you studied the first…
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Why do people in churches seem like cheerful brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?. . . On the whole I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return. -- Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
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