Blogging

I was a day early with this regular column last week so this week’s edition is a little late. Huh, what!? Clockwork? Never heard of that term!

Anyhow…

# Here’s a well-researched and well-written Biblical look at the teaching of a Pre-Trib rapture by Lavrai. Like her, I don’t subscribe to a Pre-Trib rapture either.

# I’m not looking to start another Calvinism versus Arminianism debate, but the folks at Tominthebox had me laughing out loud with this piece claiming that the recently-concluded John 3:16 Conference has declared that Calvinism is finished.

# On a serious note, here’s Steve Camp responding to the commentary of David Allen during the above-mentioned conference.

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It’s hard to put off this column by just one more day (I had intended it to be a weekly column)! Alas, I am one day early this week so, uh, ah well, what does it matter, really? I’ve never been a blogging legalist anyhow.

# In case you’ve forgotten or not noticed, Phil Johnson and the Pyromaniacs are back after their month-long hiatus, signaling their return with a post on 31 Oct, Reformation Day.

# Yes, yes, I know Reformation Day is over (hope you had a great one!), but the Reformation is still relevant and so are the 95 theses Martin Luther posted. In the spirit of the Reformation, Chris Rosebrough at Extreme Theology published his 95 theses in light of the “present crisis in American Christianity”.

# Alan Higgins at Real Christianity shares a great post on the phenomenon coined by sister Brady as “Church Theatrics and the Jesus Marketing Campaign“. A great read and a good question posed — are you a buyer or a seller?

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My brethren and sisters have really been busy the past few days with a good number of posts!

# The Passion of Reformation: Our Great Salvation… Chosen by God; Sanctified by the Spirit; Redeemed by the Son by Steve Camp.

# With many of our brethren and sisters poised to vote for the next President of the United States soon, Dr. R.C. Sproul gives us some food of thought with Principles for Voting.

# Tim Challies reviewed Michael Horton’s book Christless Christianity, and it sure looks like it’s a must-read! Here’s his conclusion:

This book is a call for the church to return to its biblical foundations and to remain true to those convictions. It is a clarion call and one that Christians would do well to heed. Christless Christianity is an excellent and timely book and one I would not hesitate to recommend to any Christian.

# My good brother and friend Daniel recently bought himself a molehill of books and has done reviews of two that he’s read so far — Logical Criticism of Textual Criticism by Gordon H. Clark and The Market Driven Church by Udo W. Middelmann.

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The second installment of my pick of the best reads from the list of blogs I read on a daily basis in my Google Reader:

The Problem With Free Will
At Caffeinated Thoughts, Eric Goransan writes:

The man who fights for discipline and holiness will open himself up to lies when he fails (God didn’t help me, I failed, I’m not going to win this, etc.) while the man who dies to himself and clings to God will have rest in his relationship with God and his depravity knowing that his heart is renewed and desires holiness. There is a security in attacking the problem from God down instead of from effort up.

Human nature strives after free will. A regenerated heart seeks to die to self. Daily death is better than fighting for life.

Read more…

Seven Implications Of The Book Of Job
Abraham Piper gives us four theological and three personal implications of the Book of Job, which I thought an apt summary in these times.

What Is Secular Humanism?
With humanism having already made inroads into our churches, some Christians might still be clueless as to what the philosophy advocates when set against orthodox Christianity. It’s a good thing, then, that brother Mike Ratliff at Possessing The Treasure has posted a great primer on secular humanism.

Would You Grow In The Grace Of The Fear Of God?
Reformation Theology posts an excerpt from John Bunyan’s The Fear of God.

This Is For The Circus Churches
Great quote from Archibald Brown over at Symphony of Scripture:

Jesus pitied sinners, pleaded with them, sighed over them, warned them, and wept over them; but He never sought to amuse them! Read on…

In response to concern at how religious blogs can quickly descend into vitriol, the Evangelical Alliance (an umbrella group founded in 1846 that represents thousands of churches of most denominations) has drawn up a set of 10 commandments for Christian bloggers based on those delivered to Moses by God at the top of Mount Sinai.

Aimed at delivering Christian bloggers from the temptations of online arguments, the “commandments” include advice to not “make an idol” of their web space, not to misuse their screen name by using anonymity to sin and to remember the Sabbath by taking one day off a week from blogging. In addition, Christian bloggers are “commanded” to honor their fellow bloggers and not to get too upset by their mistakes. They shall not murder the reputation of another blogger, shall not give false testimony against a fellow blogger and shall not steal the blog content of another.

Krish Kandiah, executive director of Churches in Mission, said: “These commandments are virtual rather than set in stone, but are offered to the blogging community as a way to link the Ten Commandments with the art of blogging. In the ever-changing information age, what we need is wisdom for life, and God communicates wisdom to our culture through the Bible on every issue from social justice to social networking.”

The Ten Commandments:

1. You shall not put your blog before your integrity.
2. You shall not make an idol of your blog.
3. You shall not misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin.
4. Remember the Sabbath day by taking one day off a week from your blog.
5. Honor your fellow-bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes.
6. You shall not murder someone else’s honor, reputation or feelings.
7. You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind.
8. You shall not steal another person’s content.
9. You shall not give false testimony against your fellow-blogger.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s blog ranking. Be content with your own content.

Gee, I thought the original Ten Commandments already covered all these points, although I’d say it’s a good reminder nonetheless.

Source: The Telegraph.
HT: LoCTY!.

Wow, it feels like a decade that I’ve been away. For those who have been accustomed to me updating this blog daily, you might be wondering where I was.

First off, I migrated the blog from the hosting service I was using (and which was giving me headaches going down every so often in the past week or so) to a new host. Thanks to some friendly pointers and recommendations, I’m settled with a new hosting service company that’s offering me a ton of disk space (350 GB to be exact) and loads of options.

With thanks to God, the migration went well!

At the same time, because I can now host an unlimited number of domains and sites on my account, I decided to set up a blog that I’ve been meaning to for the longest time.

And this is where this call for contributors comes in.

Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. (Source)

Personally, I use Twitter to update my friends and acquaintances on the going-ons in my life. Since some events simply just don’t warrant a blog post or even an email to said persons, tools like Twitter and even Plurk are perfect for doing so. Besides, it’s easy to know what your friends are up to since you can easily “follow” them on their Twitter (yes, stalking has gone digital. I kid! I kid!).

In fact, Twitter has become so pervasive that some ministries now have their own Twitter presence! Ligonier Ministries (R.C. Sproul) just got on, and I also discovered that John Piper’s Desiring God is there too, along with Mark Driscoll.

For those who enjoy his blog and book reviews, you can “follow” Tim Challies of Challies.com on Twitter too.

And, last but not least, if you would like a daily verse with your Twitter feed, you can choose to “follow” the ESV Bible’s daily verse tweets.

If you have a Twitter account, consider adding them to your feed, and if you like, stalk “follow” me on mine as well.

Before I go, my congratulations to Adullamite and Bobby for getting the answer right on the last poll. Matthew Henry (October 18, 1662 – June 22, 1714) was the one who said, “I reckon him a Christian indeed who is not ashamed of the gospel or a shame to it.”

Good job, brothers!

After much thinking, prayer and receiving some confirmation, there’ll be a little shuffling of content on this blog from now on — I’ll be spending more time on devotional thoughts and sharing my personal walk here while most discernment articles will be posted to DefCon, a blog that I am honored to be a contributor at.

Some of my long-time readers know the reason behind the re-organization, and I won’t go into too much details except to say that you’ll probably get a good picture why if you re-examine the tagline for the blog.

Shalom Aleichem.

I thought it’d be fun to add some interactivity to the blog with a regular poll which you’ll be able to participate in. If you haven’t noticed, there’s one now running that you can see on the sidebar (right below the recent comments) if you go to the front page.

I’m sorry I can’t provide prizes for those who get the question right since I don’t have any sponsorship and I’m not well-off.

What I can and will do, though, is list the winners, i.e. those who get the question right, with a link to your blog (if you have one) in a post after each poll that, I hope, will introduce everyone to good, God-centered blogs and help us discover the excellent writings of faithful men of God.

At the moment, each poll will last three (3) days.

Try to answer the polls without using Google or other search engines.

Have fun!

I’ll be taking this blog off ping.sg, a local blog aggregation site, so if you would like to continue to be updated on new posts on this blog, please subscribe to my RSS feed instead.

Or you can become a member at Plurk and add me as a friend or follow my plurks to receive updates whenever I post something new.

My thanks for all your support all this while.

Shalom Aleichem.

I never set out to blog to gain popularity (by becoming a star blogger), garner accolades or even earn money, but when I started this blog more than a year ago (first at sicarii.net then subsequently moving here recently), I’ve been blessed by the love and encouragement of many brothers- and sisters-in-Christ and this to me is more precious than silver and gold!

At this point, please allow me to go off on a tangent:

Yes, I know that my blog can sometimes be a little controversial and even start debates among brethren, but it has never been my intention to sow division among those who truly love the Lord. In case some of you are unaware, it does disturb me sometimes and many times I wonder, on hindsight, if I should have expressed such views on my blog. On the other hand, I don’t think I should restrain myself — these are issues that come to mind as I study God’s Word and I believe in sharing what I’ve learned (well, perhaps, a little too much at times).

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I’ve been led to two new blogs (new in the sense that I’ve never seen them before) just yesterday. Having been blessed by the content of the blogs, I’m excited to share them here with you. In alphabetical order:

Berean Wife

Berean Wife

Living Journey

Living Journey

Feed Me, Feed Me!

Just a sidenote to brothers and sisters who have been so kind as to add my blog to their RSS readers: Please update the feed address to the following when it’s convenient:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordnverse.

Much thanks.

You might be pleased to learn that I have enabled the embedding of YouTube videos into comments, i.e. instead of just simply putting a text link to a YouTube video, you can now insert the video into your comment!

To do so, simply add the letter “v” to the “http” part of the video URL.

For example, if the YouTube video has the following URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUTCWLoD4-4

Simply add the “v” to “http” to embed it into your comment, like so:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUTCWLoD4-4

You can see a live demo of the plug-in at this comment.

For those who would like to enable the same feature on their self-hosted WordPress blog, you’ll need the Smart YouTube plug-in.