FaithHack

Just about every morning, one or both of my two youngest boys wakes us up to crawl in bed for a morning snuggle. It is pretty easy to predict how the day will go for them by how they act in those early morning minutes. If they are whiny, or argumentative, or sullen, it’s going to be one of “those days”. If they are cuddly, or silly and playful, or asking about what they get to do today, it is likely to be a good day.

The sovereign LORD has given me the capacity to be his spokesman,
so that I know how to help the weary.
He wakes me up every morning;
he makes me alert so I can listen attentively as disciples do.
- Isaiah 50:4

Isaiah had it right. Our countenance, our outlook, our focus for the day, is often set in those early morning moments. If the first thoughts in our mind are, “Oh, no. Not another day!” or “I hate mornings, I don’t want to go to work!” then it  is likely that our “prophecy” will be fulfilled and it will be a bad day.

If, however, we wake with Him on our mind, and acknowledge that He has something special for today, then it is just as likely that it will be fulfilled and we will see God’s hand in our lives.

I usually wake up telling my Father, “Good morning”, ask Him to open my eyes to the provision He has for me and my family, tell Him that I will be open and expecting an opportunity to share the Good News of His son with someone, and thank Him for His Word and the chance to know Him better through it.

Try this. When you go to bed in the evening, ask the Holy Spirit to wake you up in the morning, before your alarm clock rings. Ask Him to remind you who your provider is and where your hope is. Ask Him to full you with a hunger for His word that will over power your normal hunger for coffee and a bagel.

When it happens, and it will, thank your Father for the wake up call. Remember that He will be faithful to open His Word to you and give you a gem to start your day with. Then get your butt out of bed, and, start the coffee (your spouse will thank you!) and open a good book – The Good Book.

If you take this challenge, leave me a comment about what happened!

Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth. – Deuteronomy 11:18-21

I recently read how modern-day Jews still follow this admonition by attaching something called a mezuzah, a small box or scroll shaped container attached to the front door frame containing a small roll of parchment inscribed with a prayer from the Torah called the Sh’ma and one of the names of God, Shaddai. ( “God Almighty is sufficient” )

My wife has also taken this scripture to heart, so it is easy to encounter a verse or an encouragement as you look around our house.

Here is an example over the dining room table (where many chores originate and much homeschooling takes place):

I have to admit that, in the past, I have struggled with scripture posters, framed samplers of Psalms, fish symbols on cars and WWJD wristbands. It always reminded me of the Applebee’s watresses trying to fit in one more cheery button to “prove” they cared deeply about my cullinary happiness. Getting my order right and on time should be proof enough.

But I am learning that this, like so much of my relationship with the Living God, is more about my intent and the condition of my heart than posters and stickers. Yes, wearing a WWJD wristband can be motivated by a spirit of pride, the desire to look and act like the cool Christians at church, but… BUT, it can motivated but the humbling realization that sometime we need daily, even moment-to-moment, reminders to put on the mind of Christ.

Putting up scripture posters or cross-stitch samplers of Psalms could be a way to impress your church friends with how holy your home-life is, OR, it could be an attempt to fix God’s word in your heart and mind and in the hearts and minds of your family.

I put a fish symbol on the back of my VW Bug, not to show off my Jesus chic, but to remind me to drive courteously and with tolerance of others varied driving skills. It’s far less likely I’ll communicated to the driving-challenged with creative sign-language if I am reminded of whom I serve, but, more to the point, if I know the other drivers know whom I serve.

So, scribble a verse or two on the door post, the window frame, the refrigerator. Hang a poster with meaningful verse and a sunset background. But don’t forget to read them, fix them in your heart, let His Word encourage, admonish, convict, and direct you.

I was stumbling some blogs (ouch! I seem to have a bad buzz word infection!) and ran across this this of 12 Ways to turn a bad day into a better one. There is some good advice near, but the one I focused in one was:

3. Sing in your car.

And sing as loud as you can. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to frown while you are singing?

I had to laugh. It’s not a secret that I am among the ranks of the harmonically challenged. I am also called to serve in a fellowship that has a talented worship team and a strong focus on musical worship. Now, nobody has an expectation that everyone be on key, we all know that the focus of our worship is to bring a sacrifice before the King of kings, a sacrifice of our praise, our hearts, and our lives. But… there is something to be said for not sounding like a crow entering adolescence.

With that in mind, I have been changing my drive-time listening habits from preaching/teaching radio to worship and contemporary Christian music. So, if you pass a blue VW Bug blaring out a mix of Third Day and a tom cat in pain, it’s just me, giving God what I have, if not what He deserves.

The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. – Proverbs 22:7

My wife and I are big Dave Ramsey fans. If you not familiar with his top-rated, 3 hour-a-day radio program, his 3 NY-Times best selling books on personal finance, his Fox Business Network TV show, or his down-to-earth, biblically based financial advice, you have a couple of things you need to do:
First, get out more often! Second, go to his site, http://www.daveramsey.com, find a local radio station that caries his show and get a copy of his “The Total Money Makeover“.

After facilitating a couple of his Financial Peace University classes in our home, wrestling with budgets and bad spending habits, falling off the wagon and getting back on, we are finally free of the bondage of school loans, credit cards, and car loans. With the exception of our home mortgage, we are debt free!

Depending on your translation, the Bible mentions the word ‘debt’ between fifteen and thirty times. In each case, it speaks of getting out of debt, avoiding debt, or forgiving other’s debts. The only verse that says we should have debt is Romans 13:8

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. – Romans 13:8 NIV

And I would prefer that kind of debt to the monthly credit card extortion letters, any day!

There is no doubt that debt is a form of bondage and imprisonment. While there aren’t bars on the windows or guards tapping on your cell door, your are still locked into your current job (especially if you live paycheck-to-paycheck), shackled to your current car (especially if it is “upside down” or you own more than it’s worth) and walled off from the freedom to do with your money what you want to do by the fact that your debtors (or jailers!) are first in line to grab their share when that paycheck gets the bank.

After paying off our VW Beetle, I realized that, not only are we free from the bondage and stress of debt, but I just got $260 a month raise! My boss wasn’t planning to give me a bump like that anytime soon. With each debt we payed off, more and more money became available in the budget to pay off more debt, do more for our family, friends and church, and be less and less concerned that I had to keep up the frenetic pace I had set for myself to keep ahead of the wolves at the door.

If you are looking for some mental, emotional and financial peace (funny how linked they are), consider making the commitment to cash in your “get out of jail free” card and looking for an FPU class in your area.

( I’m shouting in my titles again, sorry. ) I psyched! A group of my brothers and I are headed to a Christian Men’s Conference called Iron Sharpens Iron in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Saturday.

There is a lot of cool stuff that can come from getting some friends together and heading off to a big Christ-centered event. Whether it the conversations and goofing around on the long road trip, praying and worshiping with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people who you don’t know but still have a connection with, getting to hear inspirational speakers you may not have heard before, or just the chance to pick up a cool new book or t-shirt, Christian events have a way of letting you get out the grind we can get into (even us on fire, swing for the fences, shake ‘em and tell ‘em about Jesus types!). They encourage us, build us up, allow us to make new connections and new friends, inspire us to return to our harvest fields with new energy and fervor.

In the past, I have avoided going to a lot of conferences, because, as much as they lift you up, there often seems to be a bit of a let-down right after the conference. The problem seems to have been that all the effort goes into plan for and attending the conference, but little though seems to go to what happens next. Our men’s leadership team has been going through Pat Morley’s No Man Left Behind, which places a lot of emphasis on planning for after the big event. I my case, my small group of guys will be going through Focus on the Family’s Truth Project in the weeks following Iron Sharpens Iron.

So If you’re worried that a Christian event will just pump your sneakers for the short run, or you want to build on the momentum, make some plans for after the event. Plan to joint a new study group, start coffee club with some friends, volunteer for a service ministry like the food bank or life skills mentoring.

So, next time a group is getting together to head off a men’s or women’s conference, a worship seminar, or even Christian music festival, plan to go, plan to be inspired and encouraged, and plan to keep the fire burning when you return home.

Opps, I meant “Free Word“!
I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of copyrighting and limiting the reproduction of translations of the Scriptures. I think I understand why the people at copyright holders like Zondervan, the American Bible Society, and the Lockman Foundation have resorted to copyright. I understand the desire and need to protect the integrity and trustworthiness of a bible that is published with their respective titles such as NIV or NASB. I even understand and agree with the need to make money to pay a fair wage to the people who maintain the translations and create the huge range of different formats, notes and helps, and additional content included with modern print bibles. I recently ordered an NASB wide-margin from Zondervan.

But… ( You knew there was going to be a “but”!)

Telling someone they can’t reproduce more than 200 hundred verses, or that any use must not exceed 25% of the total text being published, just seems contrary to God’s expectations for the spread of the scriptures.

Again. I don’t condemn bible publishers for doing what they do, but I am glad there are alternatives and thought it might be helpful to share some of them. The following is not an exsahsive list, more information can be found at  BibleGateway and the SWORD Project :

• King James Version (1611) – It’s the bible Paul carried, right? Because of it’s age, the KJV has fallen into the public domain and is free to copy and reproduce in any format. The availability of the KJV text has also started somewhat of a cottage industry creating updates and derivations original texts.
• American Standard Version (1901) – The ASV is not quite are archaic as the KJV but it has also passed into the public domain. Also like the KJV, the freely available text has spawned at least to other translations, including the freely available WEB (World English Bible) and the copyrighted NASB.
• World English Bible (current) – As noted above, the WEB is based on the ASV ( with some help from the Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensa Old Testament, and the Greek Majority Text New Testament ) with more contemporary language and grammar. The WEB currently a work in progress, with some archaic grammar remaining to be fix in the Old Testament. One cool aspect of the WEB is that it is specifically intended to deal with the copyright issue and makes the text available in a wide variety of open formats including an audio version in Vorbis Ogg.
• New English Translation (2005) – The NET is a bit of a hybrid in terms of copyright, in that it is copyrighted, but the biblical text is available in whole for personal use in a number of formats. However, the massive number of translation notes are only available for a fee or on their online tool. I have to point out that I may have a bit of a bias, since I had the opportunity to work with the NET and Bible.org folks.
• Young’s Literal Translation (1898) – For something a little different, the YLT attempts to preserve the tense and word usage of the original Greek and Hebrew text while still being readable in English.

Given the number of good quality, free translations available, there is no reason not fill out your study library with some new bibles translations. You probably wouldn’t want to print them out, so a good (free!) bible study program would be the next order of business, but I’ll save that for another blog entry.

When I was first saved, I had the strange idea that bibles were sacred. I don’t mean The Bible, the Word of God, I mean those paper and ink books that had the Word of God written in them. It might seem like a semantic thing, but the effect of this odd idea was that I thought it was wrong to write in your bible. Like letting the American flag touch the ground or not taking off your hat when you ate, I thought it was somehow disrespectful to underline, hi-lite, or add little notes or cross references. It wasn’t until I got to know some real lovers of the Word, people who lived in and by the Word, and looked at their bibles that I began to change my view on writing in my bible. Seeing their personal walk with, and revelations of, the Word of God spelled out in the margins and between the lines, helped me see my bible as less of a holy relic and more of a daily companion and confidant.

For the past couple of years, I have carried a beautiful leather-bound NET bible that I got as a gift from the folks at Bible.org that I just haven’t been able to bring myself to write in. As a compromise, I have been using the Personal Commentary module in my Gnomesword software to keep notes. This has worked pretty well, but I am finding myself in more and more situations where I have a paper and ink bible with me and firing up my laptop just isn’t convenient.

With that in mind I just ordered a wide-margin Zondervan NASB. This will be the first bible I have purchased with the main intent of writing in it.

If your more of a digital life type, you might want to checkout MyVersion. MyVersion not only lets you make notes, but you can add links, images, and videos and share them with others.

If you have an iPod or other personal media player, I bet it is stuffed full of good music, Christian and otherwise. I found a pretty cool project called Scripture Release that has taken a number of scriptures verses recommended by the Navigators Topical Memory System and put them to music. A plus for me is that some of the songs are performed by Kim Hill, whom I have been a fan of for a long time. The basic idea is that music and song have a way of fixing God’s word in our hearts better than just about any other method.

Since it’s not likely the musical style of the Scripture Release tracks will appeal to everyone, I want to hear about any songs that accurately recite scriptures – songs that, when you hear the tune, the scripture automatically comes to mind.

There is one for those datebook/daytimer fans out there. To start with, check out D*I*Y Planner It is a great site with lots of good advice on getting and staying organized. One of the coolest parts ( for you daytimer fans, anyway ) are the amazingly useful and attractive D*I*Y Planner datebook insert templates as well as the dozens of community submitted templates. If you’re the creative type, there are component pieces available to help you create your own daytimer pages when the available one’s don’t quite fit the need.

Now that you know the best place to get datebook fillers, take a moment to pencil God in to your schedule. Add worship services, small groups meetings, and any other faith-based activities you participate in. Then carve out some regular time for prayer, devotionals, and personal bible study time and add them to your datebook as well. The point is to make God a first-class priority in your schedule. It’s easy to say God is a priority, but a quick look at our schedules often prove otherwise. A great side-effect of actually blocking out the time, it that it is less likely you will schedule other activities over your God time.

Does your letter carrier come to your house with a wheel barrow full of credit card offers, used car flyers, Buy-one-get-one-free pizza postcards, and StuffMart sales ads? Since you have to sort through the pile so you don’t accidentally throw out the phone bill, when not get some junk-mail with a message that encourages your faith?

We get a number of catalogs, ministry newsletters, and Christian business fliers in the mail each month that one member of the family or another has signed up for or ordered product from over the years. So, now sorting junk mail not only includes the latest bargains in flat-screen TV’s and laundry soap, but also the current hot releases in Christians music, books and movies, as well as what is happening in ministry in Southeast Asia.

There are tons of sites on the web where you can signup for catalogs and newsletters, for example signup for for the Christian Book Distributors catalog online and get great ideas for books and movies.

One newsletter we get that I tend to read cover-to-cover is from Voice of the Martyrs

If you already get catalogs and newsletters that you enjoy, please share – especially ones that can be easily signed-up for over the web.