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My wife and I served in Lima, Peru for two years prior to coming to Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary. It was an amazing experience and God taught us a lot of things that continue to have an impact on our lives and ministry.

We did a lot of traveling in the Andes Mountains when we lived in Peru. On one of these trips we met a man named Daniel, a village doctor. Daniel seemed good-natured, but was very skeptical of who we were and what we were doing in Peru. The following day our team leader, Mike, visited Daniel again and gave him a New Testament. We assumed that was all we would hear of him, but we were wrong.

The next morning Mike returned from town with some exciting news. He told us that as he was walking through the village Daniel ran out to meet him. “His face was beaming!” Mike said. He told Mike that he had read through the New Testament the night before and realized his sin and need for Jesus. Daniel had given his life to Christ!! The team was pumped, but God wasn’t done yet.

That night we had scheduled town meetings in two neighboring villages. In these meetings we handed out New Testaments and taught people how to study God’s Word. Daniel, our new brother in Christ, came along with us. At the first village, Daniel shared his testimony and how God’s Word had changed his life. Twenty-five people put their faith in Christ!! At the second village, he shared his faith again and over twenty more people trusted Jesus!! God used the seed we planted by sharing his Word to bring over forty people into his kingdom!

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul said “My job was to plant the seed in your hearts, and Apollos watered it, but it was God, not we, who made it grow. The ones who do the planting or watering aren’t important, but God is important because he is the one who makes the seed grow.” The Corinthians had made the mistake of forgetting that it was God who gives the increase. It is important that we recognize that we are simply vessels or tools that God uses. When someone builds a house, the hammer is not praised, the man who built it is. We are the hammer, God is the builder.

Nothing like an exam to snap me out of my Christmas Break fog.

I’m taking New Testament 2 this semester with PhD student Mike Baker. I’ll be tested over both the Corinthians, both Thessalonians, and Galatians in a couple of days.

Incidentally, I found the required text on a discount rack. It was priced significantly cheaper than sticker price. The only thing, however, is that is the Spanish edition. I bought it. We’ll see if the money saved is worth the inability to speed read it.

I just finished my second semester of Koine Greek. This language thing is a process.

Stage One: You are interested and intrigued by the scriptures. They speak to you and they apply to you. Learning Greek is still novel and exciting.

Stage Two: You begin to learn the ins and outs of Greek. And it gets tough. You essentially begin to dissect the scriptures. The problem is when you dissect something, it dies. This is the hard part. You have to wade through hour after hour of participles, adverbial phrases, cases, conjugations, etc. And, in some ways, the New Testament dies. It just becomes a jumbled mess of grammar and vocabulary.

Stage Three: You have dissected the language enough to know how it works. You see a Greek sentence, and you have so familiarized yourself with the mechanics that you no longer have to think about them. It’s alive again. Only this time, it’s more alive than ever because you understand it in its deepest sense.

I’m still in stage two.

Every once and a while I’ll have a really stressful dream. It usually is somewhere along the lines of me being in college, the semester is almost over and I realize that I have forgotten to attend a class the whole semester and now I desperately scramble to try to make up work and get ready for the final. Or, I will have forgotten about some important work that I can’t pass without and I’ve only a few days to get it in.

That dream came true. I’m in an online class at The Southern Baptist Seminary out of Louisville, KY. It’s a class on the New Testament. The thing is, this class is in Spanish. That’s my excuse for what happened. I got the syllabus at the beginning of the semester and I read it, but not very well. I just skimmed it and focussed on what books I needed and the work that was due the soonest. Unfortunately, I never really went back and read it over really well. I had a paper due October 1st and November 15th and I didn’t realize it until last week. Talk about almost losing my lunch. It was that old bad dream feeling . . . except it was for real!

Anyway, I emailed the professor and he was very graceful and said I could turn them in still. Thank you Dr. Hatfield!

Hitting the Books

Amanda has been in Crossett the past few days (she has several more vacation days than me because of my Peru trip), so I’ve had a lot of extra time. I’m an introvert by nature, so this alone time has actually been very refreshing and restful for me (though I have missed Amanda and Sophia a lot).

I think I’ve read one book in English in the past three years. So, I figured this would be a great time to double that stat, and it just so happened that I was very interested in a book by A.J. Jacobs called “The Year of Living Biblically”. I wrote a post
about it last week and it seemed like everywhere I turned this book was mentioned (NPR, Relevant Magazine), so I bought it. I finished it up last night anticipating the return of my family and I have to say that the book was funny, entertaining, reverent, challenging, enlightening, and just a tiny bit disappointing. The disappointing part is by far outweighed by the overall quality of this book. I would definitely recommend it.

A.J. Jacobs was inspired (in part by his Jewish heritage, and in part by his very interesting ex-uncle Gil) to live for one year following all the commandments of the Bible to the best of his ability. He spent the first 9 months focusing of the Old Testament and the last 3 months concentrating on the New.

The book is written in a sort of journal form chronicling the project from preparation to debriefing. The thing I love about his book is that Jacobs goes into the project wanting to find the good in religion. And although he has been cynical about organized religion most of his life (he is an agnostic), he makes a sincere and calculated attempt to give it a fair shake. Just that fact alone is inspiring and challenging.

For example, Jacobs personally does not believe that creationism is a plausible explanation for existence, yet he visits the Creation Museum in Kentucky with an open mind and leaves with his mind unchanged, but graceful and understanding. I heard him interviewed on NPR (I can’t remember the name of the show) and the interviewer asked him about visiting the museum. “You mean they’re not all idots?” the interviewer jabbed. It is precisely the attitude that has caused so much division and hatred. Jacobs doesn’t have it. Far from it. In fact, in the book, Jacobs spends a lot of time taking up for the religious.

However, as note-worthy as it is, Jacobs’ friendliness towards the subject matter isn’t the best thing. For me, it was amazing to see Jacobs openly and honestly struggling with the existence of a personal God. It is an intensely intimate and transparent view into the human soul, Jacobs’ to be exact. He wants to believe. He wants to experience it. But there are so many things in the way (science, practicality, faith, worldview). I think it’s something that most people can relate to, whether they claim to be religious or not.

As I read most of this book at San Francisco Bread Co., I was constantly having to stifle my laughter (I didn’t want to make anyone feel weird). The commandment-induced quandaries that Jacobs got himself into were hilarious. For example, he realized that he had to be honest to fulfill the commands of the Bible. Even white lies were no good. In one instance Jacobs and his wife and son are eating at a restaurant. His wife, Julie, runs into a friend from college (she also is with her husband and child). Julie’s college friend says,

“We should get together and have a playdate sometime.”

“Absolutely.” Julie responds.

But then Jacobs says “Uh, I don’t know.” Julie’s friend begins to laugh nervously. Julie glares at her husband.

“You guys seem nice, but I don’t really want new friend right now. So I think I’ll take a pass. It’s just that I don’t have enough time to see our old friends, so I don’t want to overcommitt. Just being honest.”

Towards the end of the year Julie figures out a fun game to play. At random times during the day she would ask her husband this terrifying question: “What are you thinking about?” That’s a pretty common question for a wife to ask a husband. But, when you have a husband that has to tell the 100%, whole truth, it can get very interesting and quite comical to say the least.

Now for the disappointing part. The center of the Old Testament is the Law. It’s what God put in place to protect and consecrate his people. It was the manner in which his people could relate to him. Jacobs did an incredible job of entering into the center of the Old Testament. He truly lived and experienced it. However, the center of the New Testament is not the Law or really any commandments. The center of the NT is Jesus Christ. And to truly enter into the essence of the New Testament Jacobs would have had to live as though Jesus were who he said he was. In my opinion, this is where the book falls short. The last three months of Jacobs project, in which he focussed on the New Testament were certainly entertaining and helpful in understanding different strains of protestantism, but it didn’t get to the heart of what the New Testament is.

I really don’t want to discourage anyone from reading this book, because it is excellent. I give it two thumbs up, a 9.5 out of 10.

Jacobs said in the book that he has a problem with googling himself, so chances are that he’ll read this. Mr. Jacobs, congratulations on a job well done.

Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic in his home and learned Hebrew in the temple. He probably heard Greek in the marketplace some, but most likely did not speak it or understand it.

That means that Jesus would not have been able to read the New Testament in it’s original form. That also means that when Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote down what they heard, they had to translate from the language Jesus was using to Greek.

That’s crazy! I never knew that.

One of our highlights each week is the translator Bible Study. Amanda leads the study and I bring my guitar and shakers to lead worship.

We are ‘storying’ through the old and new testaments.

We just finished Abraham and are moving to Joseph next, I think.