Being a Christian Does Not Mean Being Self Righteous

Reading this article “Foes, soldier’s mother counter protesters at funeral” made me sick. As a Christian I find the actions of some who call themselves Christians (and undoubtedly some of them are, grace covers all sins, even those yucky ones you don’t want to talk about or that offend others) to be repulsive. If they think that God is striking this country down because it politically tolerates homosexuality then they can move to another, more righteous, country! But instead they insist that they will turn it around through mockery, insults and what could never be described as evangelism. Speaking of which Evangelism means ‘spreading the good news.’ How on earth do they present the good news at a funeral wherein they insult the decesed, the mother and all those attending? “Jesus doesn’t love you,” seems the wrong message to me.

So, I’m glad to say that the truth of the Christian message is that we all sin, but that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. Even those of the homosexuals, those of the sickos who drag His name through the dirt at funerals, those who speed 5 miles an hour over the speed limit and those who rape murder and steel. Christ came to love – these people need to learn that.

Hitting the Nail on the Head

I just used the figure of speech, “… hit the nail on the head.” Which is really a dumb figure of speech. It is like saying something is not rocket science. Or maybe the coolest things since sliced bread. Or killing a bird and wounding a lawyer with one shotgun blast two birds with one stone. Where do these come from? They must have been created by people who didn’t use computers.

If you think about it a nail gun, unless it is really screwed up (which is a bad figure of speech to use when describing a nail gun), will always hit a nail on the head. And rocket science relies on computers now that are made by computer scientists. Those very computer scientists were raised by mothers who were sandwich artists before Subway started calling their minimum wage employees Sandwich Artists. And if you’ve ever seen Shelly Duvall in ‘Rocketman’ then you know that mothers of rocket scientists can make a pretty mean sandwich. And that’s another figure of speech I don’t get: ‘mean.’ Is a mean sandwich one that gives you, to quote a friend, an, “after lunch gas attacks??” Or is a mean sandwich one that is like a gangster with a head tatoo in a foreign language that they don’t read that says, “ice-skating” [Apparently Justin Timberlake’s upcoming movie has a fake tatoo on him that says this ]?

And lastly, sliced bread stinks. It goes moldy faster, gets dry, and when someone forgets to re-attach the twist-tie or the plastic clippy thing from hell, the bread could go spilling all over the floor. And I don’t want to cry over spilt bread.

Please press any key now.

The HD Boycott Begins Now

I’m not a huge fan of TV, I don’t like the content that’s often shown (which makes Personal Video Recorders handy because I can record shows on at all hours of the night). Recent announcements show that High Definition Television (HDTV) will include massive Digital Rights Management (DRM) features that will prevent people from manipulating the content on their devices or moving them to other devices. Please read: The HD Boycott Begins Now

Sex Sells

This post will probably be the downfall of this blog. I will probably be marked by the search engines as a spawn of spam and all that is evil on the web. That being said I’m going to be teaching about Sex for an adult Sunday School class and I’m requesting that the readers of this blog help me out. What I need is for you to email me privately (randy@randypeterman.com) or leave a comment with what you think the Bible or Christianity teaches about sex (except my parents, who are requested NOT to send me anything of the sort). If you leave a comment it will NOT be published publicly, pretend its an email. I don’t care if you’re a Christian or not, in fact if you’re not a Christian I’m particularly interested in what you have to say. I may read quotes from your emails in the class but I will do so anonymously so that your name, age, height, food preferences and spelling mistakes stay private.

I’m particularly interested in the following questions:

  1. Is sex considered bad by the Bible/Christians?
  2. What does the Bible/Christianity say about sexual morality?
  3. How should cultural shifts between the times of the Bible (granted we’re talking about thousands of years just between Genesis and the writing of Revelation) and our modern culture be considered? That is does the change in culture and cultural attitude about sexuality nullify the Bible/Christian view that you understand?
  4. Anything else you can think of that you’d like to tell me, even if its something you strongly disagree with that I’ve said 🙂
  5. This does not have to be heterosexual or homosexual only, it can be any type of sexuality as long as it addresses your opinion/understanding and Christianity.

Thanks for any and all help that I may (or may not) get. It would be handy if you have a blog or email that you might post a link to this so that I might get a wider result set for my minimal research. If in your email you specify that I may later blog parts of your email I might do a posting that tabulates some of the data, but only if I’m given explicit permission to do so.

Thanks!

Uh-lympics

After the first week of half-heartedly keeping up with the Olympics I’ve got the drive of a jellyfish to watch this week’s athletic feats [and feets]. Is it just me or do they just have too many olympic events? Do they have to have so many side stories and announcers that are so lame that you just can’t watch more than a few hours of athletics in combination of some of the mind numbing drivel that comes out of their mouths? I imagine that the human interest angle of the Olympics is important now due to several reasons:

  1. Sesame Street – The Children’s Television Workshop has been putting together short video montages since MTV was the twinkle in Satan’s eye (that’s a joke, not a Rock is from the devil comment).
  2. MTV – We’ve been having short videos played to use for several decades now. We can’t handle an hour long televised event unless the commercials are so stellar that we actually watch the event for the commercials (see: Super Bowel Sunday)
  3. The Women of Wisteria Lane – If there’s no drama involved wherein scandals, knee surgeries, single parents with one kidney who nearly died of a gangreen in their pinky-toes from the Olympics in 1611 then the Olympics are just not exciting enough.
  4. CNN – OK, so this ‘news network’ is more like a snooze network. We’re bombarded by twenty-four hour television news feeds which are loaded with human interest stories because gosh darn it: there is not enough really critical news to cover. This is also why the media spent thousands of man hours researching Dick Cheney’s hunting accident.
  5. Dick Cheney’s Hunting Accident – If you’re going to compete with the media frenzy that is the walking medical unit of our Vice President of the United States you have to have something more attention grabbing than ice prancing. 11 out of 8 guys who are flipping through the channels are going to see a man that they presume is homosexual lifting up a woman who’s not as naked as her skin tone outfit initially indicates and keep going until they see that someone that is in a sub-level-power has had an accident with a gun. Who hasn’t had an accident with a gun? Or who hasn’t been related via six degrees of separation to a person who had an accident with Kevin Bacon’s gun?

Clearly the Uh-lympics should be amazing, but I’m amazed by the coverage being so heavy in hours yet so light in content.

My Car Must Be Doing Drugs

Our windshield was cracked yesterday afternoon when we exited the restaurant that we went to with some friends from church. There is a crack that runs all the way across the bottom of the wind screen! I can’t see a cause, it wasn’t there when we left the church (at least to our knowledge), and the only theory I have that seems probable (other than the wrath of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) is that there was such an extreme temperature change when my big old bag of hot air got in the car and opened its mouth (I’m referring to me and not my wife or daughters in case that doesn’t come across, I don’t want to be accused of insulting my family). Seriously, I have no other damage to my car in case someone is thinking that maybe I got hit by another car.

Signed,
No clues and not wanting to buy a new windshield/screen.

Such is life.

Phoneme

Jessica and I got new cell phones last night. We’re dumping our land line shortly (I’ve got to switch to cable for ISP) and I’m thrilled that I should be able to get much better service from cable for speed (I need speed for work something fierce), so this should be good. We’ll have more minutes than we know what to do with due to the fact that much of our extended family is on Cingular (there are a few not on Cingular, but we’ve got more hours in this plan than I ever want to be on the phone for). My old phone would work with one bar in the basement… sometimes. The new phones work well in the basement so we shouldn’t run into any issues with reception. Yes. One more step in breaking free from Qwest and we get to operate like we’re in the 2000’s 😉

Oh, and yes, I’m aware that phonemes are the smallest syllable in a language that the language speakers can recognize 🙂

Happy ‘Versary, Jessica

Jessica and I are celebrating our universary today. That is to say that today, or tonight, at approximately 10:20 PM mountaint time we will have been going out for 11 years. It was actually closer to 9:20 Pacific time that I asked her to go out with me, but we’re ahead a time zone so I had to bump the hour upt for scientific accuracy. Jessica was so nervous that she asked her mom if she thought it was a good idea for her to risk her friendship with me because if the boyfriend/girlfriend thing didn’t work out she didn’t want to lose a friend. Of course this tidbit of information made me think things wouldn’t last longer than 2 weeks, but I was wrong and now we’ve been ‘more than friends’ for 11 years. I can only imagine what the next 11 years will be like. Abby will be 14, Evie will be 11, and I’ll be 39. Jessica will be a gorgeous 38 and Goldy the goldfish will more than likely be flushed. However, we’re a happy family and after 11 years of being together I can say that I am thankful to God each and every day for my bride 🙂

Oh, and the rumors are all lies, I never married my sister [MP3].

Fundamentals for Maturity

As I’ve grown in my walk with the Lord there are a list of concepts that I have found to be revolutionary and rooting in my walk:

  1. Identificaion Truths
  2. Positional Truths
  3. Abiding
  4. Hermeneutics
  5. Understanding of Covenants and Dispensations

Identification Truths
This is the concept that is presented strongly in Romans 6 and various other places confirm and expound on the idea that we were identified with Christ in His crucification, death, burial and resurrection. We were identified with Christ and so we therefore are not slaves to sin. We still will sin due to our bodies being strapped to the sin nature but that is why Paul writes that we should reckon our bodies dead. Instead of focusing on the flesh we should set our minds on the things above (Colossians 3:1-3).

Positional Truths
This is the concept that my position is in Christ. Right now I’m hidden with Christ (Colossians 3 again) and no matter what I do in this human body I am baptized into Christ and cannot be seperated from Him. My relationship with Christ should be consuming and not my keeping track of my condition. My condition is what I’m experiencing now on the earth. My position is perfect in Christ due to my identification with Him, but my condition can at times not match my position. However, as we walk in fellowship with Christ we will have our condition match our position. This is the process of sanctification, there is no hindrance to our sanctification we will be conformed to the image of Christ, even if we have ‘Jonah’ moments where we walk in the flesh and try to walk away. Ephesians 2:10 says that God has good works planned for us, which means that even if he needs to bring about a large fish to relocate us, get a donkey to talk to us, or bring us to the bottom of things in our condition, He is sanctifying our lives and conforming us to the image of Christ!

Abiding in Christ
Instead of trying to figure out what righteousness looks like in a to-do list fashion we should be focusing on our relationship with Christ. This guarantees us a righteous walk and that we will exceed any set of rules or laws that we may be able to construct. Instead of trying to live down to laws, which only put us into bondage, we need to abide in Christ (see John 15) and this will produce the fruit of Christ in our lives. Don’t get distracted by junk that you can do, but instead be focused on Christ who will do pure and rewardable things in your life!

Hermeneutics
This is a consistent and methodical approach to reading and understanding scripture. Inconsistancy in interpretation is one of the major reasons that there are differences in believer’s theology (that’s a rather obvious statement, sorry). Paul tells us that we need to be united in our doctrine and I think that one of the big issues that I see today in the church is that we don’t recognize that the author of scripture (the Holy Spirit) had one intended meaning for what He inspired through the human writers. I have written about hermeneutics before, you can read it here.

Understanding of Covenants and Dispensations
Understanding the major sections of scripture and the agreements God made with mankind helped me get a feel for the plan of God for the world. Understanding the Noahic covenant was critical in grasping God’s plan for grace, capital punishment, God’s provision for eating meat, and God’s faithfulness in not destroying the world with another flood. Then you learn about Abraham’s covenant, which is really God’s covenant with himself to Abraham and his descendents. After that you learn about God’s covenant with Israel, God’s covenant with David and then the New Covenant in Jeremiah. Grasping these covenants, seeing who they relate to, when they relate to and how they fit into the timeline of scripture is awesome and something I suggest every believer study and grow in.

From there you can grow in many, many areas because of God’s word being so amazing, but those things really helped me grasp my relationship with God and helped me understand the Bible more wholely. Reading scripture (or listening) and understanding what your reading makes it easier to grow as well as discern when others are teaching law or mis-understanding God’s word because you know what it means with certainty because you have a consistent method and a broader knowledge of the Bible.

Resting in Him,

Randy Peterman