Jess teaching the book of Ephesians!
My wife is a rockstar She’s finished up her first week of teaching…
Jess taught the book of Ephesians to the Chronological Biblical Core Course (CBCC) that is running right now.
On Monday morning Jess taught on the historical background of the book. (She didn’t want me to go to her first lecture because she thought it would make her nervous.) But she let me come to Tuesday’s lectures where she went verse by verse for chapters 1-3. Then Tuesday night she held a workshop to help the students “chart” the book. Charting is just the system that the bible schools here at YWAM use. Por ejemplo…
I’ll do a whole other post on the Inductive Method that we use someday soon. But quickly, above is an example of a vertical chart. It involves paragraph titles, short summaries, observations, interpretative questions and answers, themes, and timeless truths. The above chart is just for the first twenty verses of 1st Timothy.
Then Thursday morning she taught them the rest of the book by having them read some of the passages and make observations about the text.
Jess did an awesome job. The CBCC students are an amazing group. I got to spend some time with the one male student this week, we went out to lunch. It was so refreshing to hear the story of how his life got completely changed during his DTS and now what God is showing him through his study of the scriptures.
This past week was interesting. It totally threw me off of my regular groove, because I was sitting in some of Jess’ lectures, and also covering some of her reception desk hours. It was a productive week relationally but I didn’t feel like I got done much of what I wanted to get done. But this past week was a great reminder of why we do what we do. It was great to interact with some of the students and hear what God is doing in their lives. We’re blessed to be able to pour into a group of twenty-somethings who are hungry to know more of who God is and to change the world.
I know Fridays are suppose to be my bible posts… but uh… I was not very consistent at bible reading this week at all.
Engage: Leave Jess some love in the comments
hello futon. (I feel like a bad photographer for posting such a low quality photo)
So we had been praying for, and asking people to donate towards a new futon for our new place so that when we had visitors they would have a place to stay…
Then yesterday the housing director called me up and said this “Jim, someone donated a futon, do you want it?” Well yes… yes I do.
Coincidence that someone just stops by and donates a futon because they are moving off of the island? Maybe… I like to see it as a miracle of God’s provision.
We’re thankful. God continues to provide for us in crazy ways.
Engage: How have you seen God provide for you recently? Share with us in the comments!
Are you still reading along with me? Here’s my thoughts on the three books we’ve read in the past two weeks…
I’m going to have to blaze through my thoughts here really fast since I’m trying to cram two weeks worth of reading into one blog post.
Acts – The history book of the New Testament The second half of Luke. Written to show that the Kingdom of God is kingdom NOT looking to take over Rome. Here we see Peter as the lead character and then transitioning to Paul.
I like that Peter is running with his leadership role, he’s not licking his wounds from denying Jesus, he got back up and is going for it.
I like that in Acts 6 it describes the need for deacons and names Stephen as one of the deacons then it talks about Stephen doing signs and wonders and preaching the gospel. Just because he was a deacon didn’t mean he wasn’t still out on the front lines.
A huge theme that we’re going to see repeatedly in the New Testament is Gentile believers. This caused quite a stir, but the Holy Spirit was poured out on them and Peter had the “everything is clean” vision. Acts 10.
Paul’s conversion is pretty important.
Acts 16:10 is the first use of “WE” meaning that Luke is now with them. We have a first hand account.
And the rest of Acts goes on to document Paul’s missionary journeys and imprisonments.
Something I do want to point out is Acts 2:42-47. I see this verse quoted a lot about how our communities should be. I think that we’re asking the wrong question when we are thinking “How do we form community” The early church wasn’t trying to form community, their community was the outcome of people living radically for Jesus and preaching the gospel at all costs.
Romans
I feel like I know a lot of people who LOVE Romans. Romans is hard to just “read” through because its so deep. I found myself often just having no clue what Paul was talking about. I think the chapter breaks here mess me up a bit… I expect each chapter break to be an end of a thought, but it’s usually not. So I’m thinking Paul is moving on… when he might be building on something he previously said.
Repeated words I saw, justification, righteousness faith, circumcision.
I think again a huge theme that Paul is dealing with is the Jew/Gentile Christian thing.
Romans 12 switches from theology to application and gets a lot easier to understand.
At the end of Romans 1, you’re feeling pretty good about yourself .. yeah dang sinners… and then you read chapter 2 and it’s like oh yeah… lets take the log out of our own eye before we take the speck out of our brothers…
Romans is a book that I should probably go back and study and know pretty well. Have you ever studied Romans?
1 Corinthians
A much more direct and seemingly “lighter” book than Romans. A lot of application here. Paul is writing to this church with a lot of instructions on how not to do things.
There’s still some difficult passages. 1 corinthians 12 and 14 talk about spiritual gifts. Something I didn’t grow up learning about.
However… here’s the BEST teaching on Speaking In Tongues that I’ve ever heard. If you’ve got 90 minutes and want to hear a great teaching based right out of scripture please take a listen. This is Steve Gregg who teaches in our School of Biblical Studies.
1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is another difficult passage that talks about women needing to remain silent. I think this is cultural and context helps us here. The church in Corinth was a very spiritually gifted church, coming out of pagan worship. The practice for Pagan women was to be prostitutes, and go into ecstatic trances during worship. I’ve also heard it said that women were seated on the opposite side as the men so to have them asking questions to their husbands would be a disruption.
The centrality of the book is all about love.
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There that was pretty brief.
Engage: What do you think? What did God show you through these books? Share with us in the comments.
Anna Swink, Jess and me at the Kalalau Valley.
Greetings. Here’s a quick update to let you know we’re back in Honolulu…
Some of you probably didn’t even know we left. This past weekend we went over to Kauai (another island) and stayed with our friend Anna.
It was a great trip, I’ll try and update you all with some photos and stories soon.
Right now, we really have to get this new house unpacked and get caught up on things we missed while we were gone.
Engage: Have you ever been to Kauai? Have you vacationed anywhere in Hawaii? What were some of the highlights of your trip?
Here are some photos of our new place.
We moved again! Check out some of the pics of our new place!
This is the 6th place we’ve lived on this small campus in the 12 months we’ve been here. Rumor has it this should be pretty permanent. We’ll see
So if you watched the video tour of our last place I look out the window of the old room we were in and show you the house across the way. If you walk around the back of that house that I’m pointing out, you come to a set of stairs that lead you up into the kitchen (photo above.)
We are sharing this kitchen with another awesome family here on base. They are married and have one kid. If you turned 90 degrees right in the photo above you would see a stove and a door that leads into their house.
I actually hopped into the house and snapped these photos before the housing department got a chance to pick it up, I was suppose to wait, but I wanted to see it! A big thanks to Erin McFarland and Maria Daughtry for cleaning it up before we moved in!
So walk down the hallway in the above photo and turn right where that door is… and you come into our living room.
Here’s our living room. That bed was replaced with a couch. And the tv was removed. (We could have kept it but we’ve never owned a tv, no point in starting now) If you turn left you come into our bedroom.
This is our bedroom, the bunk bed was replaced with a full size bed. I’m going to be getting a desk to put in that nook area. A real office area!!! There’s a lot more closet space too. If you turn left in this photo you come into our bathroom.
I’ll do a video tour soon once we get moved in… right now all of our stuff is strewn all over. Another big thanks to Jared, Gabriella, Erin and Cortney for helping us move!
We NEED your help! Are you an awesome interior decorator? Did seeing these photos spark your creativity? Do you have some ideas for our space? Let us know in the comments! If you’d like to donate to our home furnishing, you can use the paypal button below. All giving is tax deductible. We are in need of a futon for our living room so that when we have guests they will have a place to stay.
We are headed out of town for the long weekend. I’ll post my bible reading post next week sometime.
cheers,
the BAKERS
a photo of a watch. i used to wear a watch, i don’t anymore
Funny that Monday’s post was about productivity. Tuesday morning was NOT productive… I woke up yesterday morning without my alarm going off…
Only it was 30 minutes after I wanted to get up. Which means I didn’t get into my morning routine. I immediately checked facebook and e-mail and kind of said “forget it” to the routine… It’s real hard to get your mind clear after you’ve been bombarded with social media.
Monday night we had worship practice, it went well, but we started an hour late and therefore went an hour over. I don’t eat before I sing, which has just become a habit. So when I came home I was hungry, but I decided it was to late to eat. Jess tossed her water bottle that she had just filled onto the bed, but it wasn’t closed all the way. We didn’t notice that for a while, so it soaked through all of our sheets and onto the mattress. We only have one set of sheets so we stripped the bed, toweled off what we could and I put one of our fans on it over night. We slept on the floor. None of that was too bad.
I woke up Tuesday morning and turned my computer on. The right fan in my computer was making a racket and my computer has been running hot because of it. That in itself was frustrating me. I don’t like when things don’t work.
Then I went and opened our cupboards to get a dish to make breakfast. And I found a giant cockroach. I’ve worked diligently to eradicate our home of cockroaches, and I haven’t seen any in quite some time. I killed this one but it made me grumpy.
I wish I could tell you how I choose to have a great attitude through these trivial things but… today, these little, first world annoyances, altered my attitude. And it was hard to shake it off and get back on track and be productive.
As I sat in my chair soaking in my bad attitude, I felt this question go through my mind…
“How is God going to trust you with anything big if you let these little things derail you.”
Oh.
Engage: What little things derail you? How do you get back on track? Let us know in the comments.
Here’s a few things that are helping me in the journey to being more productive.
The other day, I was cleaning out ALL of my internet book marks. Have you noticed how those bookmarks just add up and then it turns into a jumbled mess? Digital clutter. I want to use my book marks for articles that I see and want to go back and read and that’s it. So I either deleted the book marks I had that I didn’t care about, or stored them in EVERNOTE. (If you aren’t using evernote, you should be! I store any useful internet articles there so that I can easily go back and search for them later)
Anyway, in this process of deleting bookmarks, I found a blog post saying that Michael Hyatt switched his RSS feeder over to using FEEDLY. I decided to give it a try since google reader, which is what I use now is ending in July. The interface isn’t QUITE like google reader… but after a few days of using it, I like it.
If you want to keep up with blogs, a RSS feeder is the way to go. It puts all of your blogs in one place so you can see any new content that is posted but don’t have to be going to each website.
I’m really trying to get organized and simplify things. I used to have my “to do” list on a text edit file. And it quickly became a catch all file. Then I got overwhelmed when I looked at it, not really knowing what was a priority and what wasn’t…
I downloaded the app WUNDERLIST. My friend Michaela told me about it. I had messaged her a little while ago thanking her for being an inspiration. I told her that she seems to really LIVE life and is involved in a ton of stuff. Seeing her life inspires me to be doing more, producing more, being more creative. Anyway, when I asked her about some of her keys to productivity she said she uses Wunderlist as a kind of bucket list. I’m checked it out after getting overwhelmed with my text edit to do list. I like it. Having a clean to do list helps me get through the day. When I finish a task, I can easily pull that app up and see what I have to do next. It keeps the momentum going.
I struggle with productivity. I REALLY want to be more consistently productive. I feel better when I’m getting things done.
I typed in “productivity” on Amazon and up popped this book. Getting Things Done by David Allen. I did a quick google search of reviews of this book, which is an easy way of getting the cliff notes of the book. Then you get the main point and don’t have to buy it, read it or have one more book sitting on your shelf.
Anyway, he’s set up a pretty good system. I won’t get into that… the one take away I had was breaking down bigger tasks into smaller more manageable tasks. That’s something I need to implement.
The last thing that’s helped me is reimplementing my morning routine. I’ve been setting my alarm to start getting up earlier, and for the past couple of days I’ve been waking up before my alarm. I don’t check my e-mail or facebook until my morning routine is complete. My morning routine consists of most of things that I say I value but seem to never get done if I don’t schedule it. Making sure they get done first thing helps me be more consistent. Check out Michael Hyatt’s post on “How To Set Yourself Up For A Productive Day.”
Engage: What are some of your tips and tricks to staying productive? Let us know in the comments.
Are you still hanging in there reading through the New Testament with us?
I encourage you if you are behind, to just start with TODAY’s reading. There’s no point in trying to play catch up, it’s just more overwhelming. The point of this is to become more familiar with the New Testament, starting from today’s reading and continuing is better than getting overwhelmed at trying to catch up and then not reading at all.
Today’s reading is John chapters 13-17
When do you do your bible reading? I’ve been doing mine in the morning, I just got back on a solid morning routine. I also sometimes do some reading before bed. I’m a day behind, I’m going to have to read tonite’s reading 13-17 before bed or later in the day, I just finished up yesterdays reading this morning.
Do you ever have this happen? You’re reading… and your eyes are “reading” the words, but your mind is somewhere else completely? Yeah… that happens. Something I try to do to combat that is to LISTEN to it as well as read it. If you go to biblegateway.com there are audio options as well.
Also I realized that I can read 5 chapters, and take notes, and then have no idea what I just read like 5 minutes later. So this morning, I set up a table in my notes and used one column to give a short summary of the main events, and then write any verses that I thought were interesting in another column. Then I went and reviewed it. Super helpful in remembering.
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I like Luke. It’s an “orderly account” Luke 1:3. I think this is written a bit more in the way we think. More detail.
I always forget that the Old Testament law and sacrificial system is still in play for the New Testament. I think I figure because it’s the New Testement that it’s been done away with, but it’s still going. I think this dawned on me when I was reading about Zachariah’s service in the temple.
Here’s a question I have. How did they get direct quotes from people? Or are these just what people remember? I have a pretty bad memory, so I’m not sure I could remember these things, however what is written down is pretty detailed. So did Luke go and do interviews with people?
Well… yesterday in the lunch line (this was the first time we’ve eaten lunch on base, it was salad bar so we paid our $1 and ate salad) I asked Plamena Williamson this very question. Plamena is the SBS director here for YWAM Honolulu. She is BRILLIANT, she knows the bible really well and teaches all over the world. I’m so grateful that Jess gets be under her and learn from her!
Anyway, she reminded me that Luke traveled with Paul, and probably did meet a lot of these people, as well as use the other gospels that were already written. She used an example of Mary’s song, that Luke most likely went and interviewed Mary when he was traveling with Paul. She also said that cultures that are more oral tradition based are better at remembering things people say.
How awesome is it that we have first hand accounts of people that actually spent time with Jesus.
Reading about the story of Jesus sitting in the temple as a child made me wonder about His childhood. What was that like? Did He have the terrible twos? Did He go through a season of teenage angst? His public ministry didn’t start until He was 30. 30 years… that seems like a long time for God just to be a regular man, doing regular things.
In Luke 5 they recall the story of the man being lowered on the mat through the ceiling. If I’m remembering correctly this has also been told in Matthew and Mark. This has to be like one of the highlights of Jesus’ ministry and a story that got talked about a lot. The audaciousness of someone digging through the roof to lower their friend down. I want those kind of friends.
Here’s a zinger…
“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’BE)’> – Luke 6:46 Ouch.
Or how about this one…
“In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.” – Luke 14:33
Or maybe this one?
“He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselvesB)’> What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.” – Luke 16:15
Or how about this one?
‘Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10 So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’” – Luke 17:9
Every time I read through the scriptures, I realize how serious Jesus is. I think American Jesus is a lot friendlier and polite than the real Jesus. He’s pretty serious and sometimes even seems harsh about the realities of following Him. I guess it IS the most loving thing to do, to truly admonish us to live lives like He’s telling us to live, because He knows it’s in our best interest. You should read that sentence again.
It also seems to me that Luke seems to emphasize all of the sinners that Jesus is spending time with, instead of focusing on the arguments he’s having with the religious leaders. Whereas Matthew and John really seem to emphasize the arguments. Did it seem that way to you?
Other interesting things…
Angels don’t die? Matt 20:36
What do you think the praise was like at the temple after Jesus was resurrected in Matt 24:53 I don’t think it was a somber celebration. I’m smiling even thinking about it!
The Gospel of John
I think the gospel of John must have been written to an audience of Jews and Gentiles. In John 1:38 he explains what rabbi means, but he starts out his gospel with “in the beginning which is how Genesis is started out.
There is a lot of familiar one liners in John. It’s interesting that a huge emphasis has been put on being “born again” in American Christianity but only John includes this teaching of Jesus in his gospel.
The story of the invalid who was trying to get into the pool stuck out to me in John 5:38. It reminded me that sometimes we don’t need conventional religious wisdom, we just need an encounter with the living God.
I’m not trying to open up the calvinist debate but John 6 sounds like God is choosing people, but then in vs 50 he says that anyone may eat… then in vs 65 it says that no one cane come unless the Father has enabled them.
In chapter 7 it’s funny to see Jesus’ brothers encouraging him to go work the crowd more or less. Again, conventional wisdom…
I liked John 8:44 that tells us the character of the devil. That he’s always lying.
Jesus got accused of being demon possessed a lot.
Jesus continues in John with a lot of I AM statements… I am the good shepherd, I am the gate, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the light of the world.
John 11:16 – Thomas… what are you saying? It’s funny whenever the disciples speak… are they ever quoted saying anything intelligent?
I think its crazy that in John 12… they were mad at Jesus and Lazarus and wanted to kill them both.
Two more verses that stuck out to me.
John 12:31b – “…now the prince of this world will be driven out.”
John 12:48 …”for they loved human praise more than praise from God.”
Engage: Are you reading with us? What’s been standing out to you? Let us know in the comments.
Sorry about no posts recently… I have bloggers block. I think this is the first time I’ve had it.
I’ve got stuff to write about, I’ve got like 80+ different drafts, all in various stages, some are just an idea jotted down, and some are full on posts.
But I keep sitting down to write things and I can’t bring myself to hit publish.
Anyway…
Engage: How do you push through whatever “block” you are having? Let us know in the comments.
A photo I took last year of our SBS students in lecture
Alright so Friday is our day to talk about the bible reading from the past week!
This is going to be short because its 1230am but I wanted to get some stuff written down.
So this week we finished up the last half of Matthew and all of Mark.
The last half of Matthew I saw a lot of repeated or similar stories, things seemed familiar. I don’t think I realized that Jesus told these stories more than once, thats one of the reasons why reading through at a faster pace is helpful. Things like in chapter 17 Matthew includes again a story of God saying “this is my son” which is also done in chapter 4 at Jesus’ baptism. In chapter 18 Matthew includes Jesus’ teaching on gouging out your eye if it causes you to lust like in chapter 6. It’s interesting to see which stories Matthew repeats.
Literary style is also important, Matthew was using a literary style that would have been well known in that time. When we read it we don’t always understand that style of writing.
I’m sure you know this but it’s worth putting here. The bible wasn’t written with chapters and verses originally that was added on later.
I want to look more into the symbolism of the fig tree. It seems to be referenced a lot, with a quick word search it looks like it was always used in the OT as a sign of prosperity, like when things were going well.
Authority is a repeated word in the book of Matthew.
I think there is some changing of word usage too, this is what I wrote in my notes that I noticed, I might be wrong. Matt 21:31 uses Kingdom of God instead of the usual Kingdom of Heaven like in the rest of the book, I didn’t look it up to see if it was used before this or not. But this time it jumped out at me. And then Matt 24:39 Jesus is referred to as the son of MAN and not the son of David like He had been before… again, maybe this was just the first time it jumped out at me and it had been used before. Probably worth going back and looking up… but its already 1240pm.
Matt 21 – Jesus rides in on two different animals at once? What did that look like? One of our students pointed out the significance of Jesus riding in on a donkey instead of a horse. A horse was a military symbol in Rome and Jesus was showing that His kingdom was a military take over… but He was making his triumphal entry on a beast of burden.
In Matt 23 when Jesus started busting out His woes… I felt a little uncomfortable. Did you get that way?
Matt 27:46 – “why have you forsaken me?” this blew my mind when I learned this… because you’ve probably heard a sermon about this passage about how God is turning His back on Jesus because of the sin… but Jesus is quoting the first line of Psalm 22 and everyone there would have known that He was quoting that passage. Go read that psalm in light of what is going on.
K… onto Mark.
It was fun to read Mark right after Matthew because it seemed like Matthew included all the same stories as Mark so it was nice to get a refresher on some of those stories.
Mark made Jesus seem like an introvert… and kind of moody. “Withdrew” was a common word in Mark. Which I can relate to, I get uncomfortable when I’m around too many people or large crowds. It also seems like they are hanging out at lakes and on boats for most of it. I didn’t notice that in Matthew. Three other themes I saw repeated were, Jesus’ compassion, suffering and Jesus predicting His death a lot. The only story Matthew didn’t seem to have was Mark 14:51-52 the story of the streaker, haha.
Alright it’s almost 1am. I’m not even going to proof this.
I’m really enjoying reading!
Engage: Are you reading along? What has stood out to you? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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by Jim Baker
YIPEE!!!
GO JESS!!!!