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To Save A Life

What does inerrancy mean? Is it essential to Christian belief?

Spend five worth-while minutes via video with scholar D. A. Carson on the topic of the Bible’s inerrancy:

Beggars

All you great men of power,
you who boast of your feats,
politicians and entrepreneurs:
Can you safeguard your breath in the night while you sleep,
keep your heart beating steady and sure?
As you lie in your bed,
does the thought haunt your head,
that your really rather small?
If there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

All you champions of science,
And rulers of men:
Can you summon the sun from its sleep?
And does the earth seek your council on how fast to spin?
Can you shut up the gates of the deep?
And don’t you know that all things,
hang as if by string o’er the darkness,
poised to fall?
If there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

All you big-shots do swagger,
and strive with conceit.
Did you devise that your fray would be fought?
If you’ve been raised in a palace,
or live about on the streets,
(did you) choose the place or the hour you’d be born?
Tell me what can you claim?
Not a thing!
Not your name!
Tell me if you can recall,
just one thing, not a gift, in this life?
Can you hear what’s been said?
Can you see now that everything’s graced?
After all,
if there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

Barack Obama’s Inspiring Life Story

by Glenn Beck:

Today is a very special day: It’s President Obama’s birthday. He turned 48 — only 16 more “czars” to appoint before his age equals total “czars.”

Here’s the One Thing: It’s been an amazing life for the 44th president. I, like the rest of America, am inspired by his story, so I’d like to share it with you.

The story of Barack Obama starts with his parents, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr. It began like any other classic American love story, when these two lovebirds met while taking a Russian language class in 1960 at the height of the Cold War. By 1961 they were married and later that year Barack Obama, Jr. was born.

President Obama so movingly told the story during a speech commemorating the anniversary of the civil rights march in Selma:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, MARCH 4, 2007)

BARACK OBAMA: “But something stirred across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama… because some folks were willing to march across a bridge… so they got together and Barack Obama, Jr., was born….”

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Wait, didn’t that march happen in 1965? Obama was born in 1961. I’m going to cut him some slack — it’s his birthday.

When little Barack, Jr., was 3-years-old (still one year shy of the actual Selma march) his parents divorced. Dad moved to Kenya and mom married an Indonesian man. From ages six to 10, Barack Obama, Jr., attended school in Jakarta.

At age 10, now living with his grandparents and back in Hawaii, young Barack yearned for a father figure. He eventually gravitated towards a family friend named Frank — also known as Frank Marshall Davis, would become his childhood mentor.

Frank just happened to be a communist. The good news is, mom already spoke Russian. No one knows for sure what mentor and pupil talked about, probably baseball or something else teenage boys enjoy. But definitely not communist propaganda.

Now 19, armed with a new worldview and an eagerness to learn, Obama attended Columbia University. His mentor, Frank, would have been proud of how he made use of his time there:

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, ‘DREAMS OF MY FATHER’)

BARACK OBAMA: Political discussions, the kind at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conference I sometimes attended at Cooper Union.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

And when he wasn’t attending socialist conferences, Obama stayed on campus and chose his friends carefully:

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, ‘DREAMS OF MY FATHER’)

BARACK OBAMA: To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

Once his “Marxist professor” friends completed his education, it was on to the real world. In his mid-20s, Obama moved to Chicago and became a community organizer.

While he was organizing things there, many friends and friendships budded. He met like-minded people like William Ayers. Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground and participated in the bombing of the Pentagon in 1972 and other bombings of government buildings.

Oh, Glenn! Stop your hatemongering! Ever hear of forgiveness? We make mistakes, own up to them and move on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, FEBRUARY 23, 2009)

WILLIAM AYERS, FORMER WEATHER UNDERGROUND LEADER: I don’t regret anything I did to oppose the war. Anything I did to oppose the war. Don’t regret.

ALAN COLMES, HOST OF ‘THE ALAN COLMES SHOW’: You wouldn’t regret setting bomb at a police station or setting a bomb at the Pentagon or the capital?

AYERS: You know I don’t look back on those things and regret them…

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Nice, kind people kept popping up in Obama’s adult life, like slumlord Tony Rezko, who helped him buy a nice house. Obama shared many dinners with former University of Chicago professor and terrorist sympathizer Rashid Khalidi. Obama thanked Khalidi for opening his eyes to the problems of the Palestinians and praised him in a sendoff speech as Khalidi headed for Columbia University.

About the same time, Obama also sought a relationship with God and he eventually settled down in a quaint Chicago Church, where his worldview continued to sprout:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT: The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Life was turning out grand for Obama: A communist family mentor, super radical friends, a wonderful church. It couldn’t get any better, could it? But it did, when he met his soul mate, Michelle:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, FEBRUARY 18, 2008)

MICHELLE OBAMA: For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Spiritually, physically and ideologically the two were a perfect match. They married and the faithful Michelle would stand by her man on his political journey from the Illinois Senate in 1996 all the way to the Oval Office.

Despite the meteoric success, Obama hasn’t forgotten his roots. He’s still honoring his communist childhood mentor with each policy he drafts and he’s still networking and organizing and meeting and new friends. Friends like:

• Green “czar” Van Jones, the self avowed communist

• Science “czar” John Holdren, who is pro putting sterilants in the drinking water, forced abortions and government confiscation of babies

• Regulatory “czar” Cass Sunstein, a champion for getting animals legal rights

• Energy “czar” Carol Browner

I could go on forever about your crazy, wacky friends, Mr. President, but that would take time away from you on your birthday.

I want to wish you a happy birthday, but that wouldn’t be sufficient. So, Mr. President, we — the collective — wish you a very, happy birthday.

Snow Leopard, Finely tuned

While PC users sweat, complain and ponder which over-priced version of Windows 7 they’ll be forced into buying to fix everything wrong with Vista, most Mac users are likely licking their chops at what Snow Leopard will bring, and how little it will cost.

You’ve heard it’s cheaper, faster and even more stable than ever before. Though Apple has stated that, beyond a few high-profile features like a new version of Quicktime, Snow Leopard is more of a maintenance upgrade for Leopard users, rather than the feature-packed blockbuster we’re normally used to with a full version number upgrade. You might call Snow Leopard a comprehensive tune-up.

As is almost always the case with Apple, though, it’s those little tune-ups to Mac OS X that can make all the difference in your daily computing experience. If you happened upon the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page on Apple’s Web site, you no doubt found at least a handful of things that brings a smile to your face.

Sure, I’m looking forward to a speedier, fully-Cocoa Finder, a fancy new version of Quicktime, and a faster, much smaller OS X installation just as much as the next guy. But of much more interest to me are all of the minor tweaks that will make more of an impact in my daily routine.

Gamma Update

For starters, and one thing near and dear to my heart; Apple has chosen to change the default Gamma from 1.8 to 2.2. For many users the benefit may not be obvious. If you’ve ever noticed photos and graphics on the Web that appear much lighter or washed out than the ones you have on your Mac, it’s because Windows, the Internet, and most television content standardized on Gamma 2.2 long ago. With Snow Leopard, Mac users will enjoy more consistent color across platforms by default.

Finer Finder

iStat calendar menu feature

The Finder’s menu bar clock will soon show the date alongside the time. You can do this now with a finicky hack, but it’ll be handy to turn it on and off with the click of a button. One thing I wish Apple would add here is the ability to display a small calendar with clickable dates that launch iCal without using any third-party utilities, such as iStat. Baby steps, I guess.

Another minor Finder annoyance are the window sidebar headers: Search For, Devices and Places. They can be turned off in Snow Leopard. I always found them to be uselessly taking up space, since I don’t use the search feature, and rarely require Devices and Places. This leaves room for three more folder shortcuts in my sidebar without resizing the window. Adjusting the size of icons via a small slider in every Finder window, saving a trip to the View options window, will be a small, but welcome addition as well.

Apps and Utilities

iChat will see numerous improvements under Snow Leopard such as a lower bandwidth requirement, as will Preview, which will offer improved image scaling and an annotation toolbar. Preview is one of those apps that most users overlook. But if you take the time to investigate, you’ll find it to be quite a powerful and useful little app. For many consumer users, there’s no need to download Acrobat Reader because Preview actually offers more features.

File sharing via Airport Express will be improved for local network users. If you have a Mac acting as a file server over an Airport network, it will continue to share those files, even if the host Mac goes into sleep mode. And now your Airport strength meter will display the signal strength of all available networks before you connect to them. Nice!

Internet Improvements

Safari isn’t the only Internet app Apple has been working on. Mail and iCal have received some much-welcomed improvements, too. Mail’s ability to reorder mailboxes in the sidebar is enough to quench my thirst alone, but I won’t complain about the speedier display of messages, and improved HTML mail composition thrown-in for good measure. iCal will also make it easier to set up your Gmail or Yahoo calendars, and being forced to open a new inspector window for each task will be a thing of the past. While business users will surely love Microsoft Exchange support, most-everyone else could care less; these modest changes will give everyone something to feel warm and fuzzy about.

In Conclusion

While none of these features are game-changing, they’re all extremely useful. In my eyes, they’re much more sexy than Cocoa Finder, OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch, smaller installation size, and the other big-ticket items. These little features are the ones I’ll interact with on a daily basis, along with faster start-up and shut-down times. I liken it to the cup-holder locations in a new car — it doesn’t mean a lot on its own, but if done poorly can certainly sway your buying decision whether you realize it or not.

For a $29 upgrade price for Leopard users ($169 for non-Leopard users), you’re getting some stunning under-the-hood improvements, and some pretty darn nice refinements that may not be typical Apple front-page news, but are incredibly useful. Finely tuned indeed.

No, Mr. President

John Piper provides a thoughtful and firm response to the cloudy, contradictory, and killing view that most of our culture, including our President, holds . . . for now that is.

New Hillsong Live!

Let me be one of the first present the world premiere video of Joel Houston singing “No Reason to Hide” from their soon to be released album FAITH + HOPE + LOVE.

If that makes your ears happy, you won’t have to wait for long to own the entire album. It releases on August 4. You can use my Amazon link to pre-order this bad boy today.

Obama booed at All-Star game

At last night’s MLB All-Star Game, President Obama was booed after throwing out the first pitch. Actually if you listen closely, it sounded like they were booing him from the introduction. Fans at home weren’t able to see exactly where the ball landed, but it seemed to me that Obama threw a decent pitch.

Baseball aficionados said he threw like a sissy, but really, give the guy a break, you can’t expect him to be good at everything. Sporting his black and white Chicago White Sox jacket, Obama jogged onto the field and waved to the St. Louis crowd before the first throw.

Compared to George W. Bush’s famous strike in the 2001 World Series, Obama couldn’t compare. But Cardinals star catcher Albert Pujols noted that pitch did make it to the plate.

Twitter will KILL YOU!

Billy Graham – Atheism Is A Fad Only Fools Follow

Yes, atheism has been in the public eye more in recent years, largely because of a few atheists who've captured the public's attention through their books. They aren't large in number, but they do tend to be aggressive in promoting their ideas.

Why have they drawn so much attention? One reason, I believe, is because they know how to use the media very effectively. They also appeal to people who want to be free from God or any moral restraints. Like the philosophers of Paul's day who were constantly looking for new ideas to debate, many people today eagerly latch on to the latest fad (see Acts 17:21). Atheism attracts their attention, at least for a while.

In reality, however, modern atheists have very little new to say. In fact, atheism has been around for thousands of years; even the Psalmist, writing hundreds of years before Christ, referred to them: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God' " (Psalm 14:1).

Don't be misled by those who claim God doesn't exist, because he does. And the ultimate reason we know it is because he came down from heaven and walked on this earth in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ was God in human flesh, and he proved it by rising from the dead.

R.I.P. Michael Jackson 1958-2009

(via TMZ)

It Might Get Loud

Josh White at Revival

Josh White actually sang some time ago at Revival. Here it is, great worship set!
http://www.vimeo.com/5296542

Strange iPhone 3.0 UI Behavior

Has anyone ever seen this? Some of the UI is all messed up on my iPhone mail app.