Reading the Bible through in 2010 is going to be a long-haul project.  Here’s one thought before we launch into project 4:4 tomorrow:

We’re ready for this.

This isn’t an off-the-cuff resolution, made up on the spur of the moment.  It’s not an individual effort, something I can bail out of without consequence, or something that I’m going to do all on my own without any help.  It’s not a hair-brained idea that we’re not really committed to following through on.

We’ve been praying, talking, and thinking about this for the last two months.  It’s a community effort, something we’re tackling together, with a lot of support.  It’s something we’re prepared to do, a chance to change our relationship with the word not only for this year, but forever.  It’s a settled determination that this year we will search for the heart of God in the scriptures through which he has revealed himself to us.  We will receive the word, we will ingest the word, we will steadily listen to the word in our hearts.

I can’t wait to talk to you guys on Sunday, and hear how it’s beginning for you.

Tomorrow, we start project 4:4.  May God be with you.

5:11 pm  •  31 December 2009  •  view comments

I’ve been trying to keep the Sermons page of the site updated whenever I preach, but there are a couple of sermons lately that I wanted to note, but hadn’t had the chance to work into the site yet, and won’t until I’m back in Arkansas after the holiday.

One is the Project 4:4 launch sermon, which is pretty unique in that it’s purposes were both textual and programmatic.  It was important for us to have a preaching moment that formally announced and promoted the upcoming project, but at the same time I wanted that time to still function as a legit sermon, (which I think of as a word of Gospel from the scriptures, for the gathered church and her guests).  To that end, I saved the programmatic stuff for the near end, and front-loaded the sermon with some time in Ephesians 5.  I felt good about the way that mix worked out, but I’d be curious to hear what you thought about it as well.

Here’s the link for that sermon:

Project 4:4

The second sermon is more straightforward, and comes out of the transfiguration stories, which I think are so bizarre and compelling.  As a preacher, I’m still working out my preaching voice (not literally), and I think this sermon is pretty typical about my style of preaching right now.

Changed

I haven’t posted many thoughts here on the nature of preaching, because I don’t want it to be weird for Chuck, since he’s our primary preaching voice at PV.  I have been thinking a lot though about the idea of preaching voice, and also the thorny issue of sermon evaluation.  I’m going to think about it a bit more, and might post some thoughts in the near future.

10:42 am  •  21 December 2009  •  view comments

We are really excited to say that a lot of the notebooks for project 4:4  are going to start coming out this weekend!  Kandi (in the church office) has been working really hard to get these packaged for you, and I appreciate how much time she’s put into getting all these copies made.  Props, Kandi!

Here’s the deal.  There is a notebook for every family.  One!  If you feel like you need more than one, we’ll be happy to run off a copy for you, but we’re going to ask you to get your own notebook to put it in. (We’re really working to keep our costs down!)  Sounds pretty fair to me.

If you’d rather download a pdf version to print off yourself, click here.

Beginning this Sunday, the classes will be available in the Bible classes that meet between first and second services, at 9:30.  If you aren’t a part of one of those classes yet, this is a great time to join!  If that doesn’t work for you, or you are out of town on the weekends, you are welcome to drop by the office and pick up a notebook.

We’re going to release the notebooks in batches, so if your class doesn’t see the notebooks this Sunday (Dec 13), they should be there next Sunday. (Dec 20)  Be Patient!

For each week in 2010, there is an entry in the notebook that will give you a little insight into some of the things going on in that week’s readings.  It then has some questions to help you process the reading.  It’s only a question or so each day, so it shouldn’t be too overwhelming, but those questions are going to be the basis for the next Sunday’s classes, so I really hope you’ll put some thought into them.

As we get closer to the beginning of 2010, I am more and more excited about really diving into project 4:4 with you.  Let’s pray that as we take in the word of God, that it will be just the sort of daily bread that we need, that the Holy Spirit will use it to nourish every part of our hearts and souls, for the glory and honor of God the Father.

If you haven’t gotten a chance to pick up The Daily Bible yet, it’s time!  Go pick one up at some place like Mardel, or order one online here.

10:57 am  •  9 December 2009  •  view comments

If you have anything you want me to do that requires the usage of my arms, legs, or back, you had better ask tonight.  After today’s workout, I feel pretty sure all those elements of me are going to be on strike for the next few days.  I will still retain the usage of my mouth and quick wit.  (You all have choices to make now.)

I had lost my routine for working out and running back near the end of September.  Last week I got back in, and the nice folks who put together the CrossFit work-outs did a great job of leading me in last week by making the first week’s worth of exercise really doable.  My legs were sore for a couple of days, but at the end of each day’s routine, I didn’t feel just totally rocked.

Until today.  Today’s mashups of squats, presses, burpees, running, and pull-ups had me beggin’ for the puke bucket, ready for it to be over!  I’m pretty sure that it’s going to take me longer to roll out of bed in the morning, and if you’re strolling along with me and I suddenly tear-up, you’ll know there must be stairs ahead.

With any discipline, it’s tough to get started.  And if you stop, it’s really tough to get started again.

Do I really have to connect the dots in the spiritual metaphor?  Nah, you can do it.  I need a shower.  (And ointment.  Lots of ointment.)

5:08 pm  •  7 December 2009  •  view comments

Tonight, I think we’ve okayed the final version of the notebook for project 4:4, so we move closer and closer to being ready for this 2010 initiative.  As I was thinking about that tonight, I was thinking that as we begin to finalize a lot of the administrative decisions on our end, all the individuals in our church are going to have to make choices about how they participate in the project.  So I wanted to take a couple of minutes tonight and write about one of the choices facing you and me as we think about diving into this daily reading scheme.  Namely, “How will we handle days that we miss?”

One of the easiest ways to fall out of a plan like this is to get behind.  What is manageable on a daily level quickly becomes very difficult if you’re trying to do a week’s worth of reading on Saturday night.  If you have many Saturday’s like that, it gets tough to make it through the year!

I think there are at least a couple of options.  One option is to just decide that if you miss a day, well, you miss a day, and to resolve to just pick up on the next day and stay on the schedule.  The negative is that if you do this a lot, you miss out on some of the benefit of reading scripture as a whole.  It may not be the worst thing in the world if that happened once or twice a month, but if it starts to happen a couple or three times a week, then the continuity is lost, and you’re really missing out.

You might also just decide that if you miss days, you’ll make it up, but never read more than two days worth on any given night.  That actually makes making up days more manageable, because you don’t have to pick it up and think “man, 15 days worth? I’ll never catch up!”, but instead just make up a little at a time.

Of course, the best thing would be to work hard at building a habit, so that you don’t miss many days.  (Perhaps you can build such a habit that you won’t want to stop at the end of the year!)   One of the best techniques for doing that is to start keeping up with how many days in a row you’ve done it.  Build streaks, and after a while, you’ll start building up longer streaks and have a little extra motivation to keep your streaks alive!  It’s a bit silly, but I think pretty effective.

As I mentioned before, I’m going to continue to post the link for the Bible we’re using for the study.  Here it is:  The Daily Bible on Amazon Pick one up, or tell your grandma that’s what you want for Christmas.  Or get your grandma one for Christmas.  You know she wants one.

11:31 pm  •  23 November 2009  •  view comments

As a disciple of Jesus, I want to be someone who learns from Jesus what my life is supposed to look like.  I learn from Jesus how to see the world like it really is, and to see the world like it could be.  Becoming a disciple is like signing up for a crash course in reality.  When we join Jesus, we submit not just to what he wants us to do, but to what he wants us to see as well.

What is 2010 going to be about?

There are so many answers to that question, many of which are unknowable to us on the front end.  The coming year could bring surprising success, new opportunities and relationships.  It might be a year where we are confronted by grief and disaster, or changes that challenge our ability to keep our chin up.

We can’t anticipate everything in our path.  But you know, I want to make sure that whatever comes my way, I will be prepared for it by soaking my heart in the word of God.  The word has the power to prepare me to meet success and failure, joy and sorrow.  The word sustains.

Project 4:4 is what we’re calling our initiative to actively seek out the food of God’s word, by daily reading through his word so that we read the entire canon by the end of next year.  There will be times when that’s easy, and times when it is more difficult, but I’m convinced that, as a whole, it will be an extremely useful project for our church this next year.

I enjoyed preaching today about the word, and was really excited to see everyone react so positively to project 4:4.  I hope that the time our community spends in the word together will help us all be better disciples.  That’s ultimately what I hope 2010 is about for me, and for all of us.  I hope it’s about our community of faith being drawn closer to each other and to Jesus, as he cares for us and feeds us through his word.

Here is a link to the Bible that we’re going to use in 2010.  Pick one up, and join us in this adventure!

3:01 pm  •  22 November 2009  •  view comments

This Sunday, as part of the sermon, I’m going to be working to cast a vision for how our church community can engage in scripture this year.  You’ll hear more about that on this blog over the coming weeks, and then again as it starts up in January.  I’m thinking about taking Monday’s blog and even exploring some of the flaws in our approach.  (I think the positives far outweigh the negatives, but I want to be up front about the weaknesses as well.)

The sermon really functions as the front end of that discussion though, so I hope you find it useful for that purpose.  For those of you that aren’t at PV or won’t make it this weekend and might be curious, I’ll post a link to the sermon next week.

Here’s the deal though.  I want to strongly encourage you to spend some time between now and Sunday thinking about the role that scripture really plays in your life.  How does it concretely affect your life in the present.  If you come Sunday having done some of that thinking, we’ll all be better prepared to think about what the next year could look like.

I’m going to be regularly posting a link to the Bible that we’re using for the study. Here it is:  The Daily Bible ($15 on Amazon).  This Bible is a little bit unusual, being edited to place the material in a chronological order and to minimize redundancies.  In other words, if a story occurs in Matthew, Mark and Luke, it’ll only be in here once.  That mans the sequence will be very difficult to follow if you just use another Bible, so I highly recommend you pick one of these up before the beginning of the year.  Reading the text in this format has some great advantages for those of us who really have to work to put things in their proper context.

For full disclosure’s sake, this link is through my amazon referral account, so they credit me for fifty cents or so for each one bought through this link.  If you’d rather buy it elsewhere, Keith is going to be putting up links at pvcc.org this weekend for other sites. (Alas, the church doesn’t have an amazon associate account yet.)

4:13 pm  •  20 November 2009  •  view comments