Something I heard yesterday

Yesterday, while working, I listened to a message by Rob Bell on Philippians 2:1-2 called “One Mind” (click here to download the mp3 :: click here to view the past 12 sermons from Mars Hill Church).

The talk was very interesting and certainly kept my attention. Rob even played highlight films of Larry Bird (a great basketball player from when I was a kid).

At one point during the talk — and I think you could reasonably say that this is the thesis of the message — Rob makes this statement:

“What if the cross was God’s way of asking, ‘What do I have to do for you to get along?’ ?”

At first I thought, “Wow, that’s powerful.”

But then, the more I thought about it, the more my eye brows went up…

what do you think?

I love technology (and my parents)

Yesterday, at work, I downloaded the newest sermon from Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church. I got really excited when I read the title: “Trinity: God Is”. It turns out that they started a series on ‘Doctrine’! I love it!

But my work has been so intense that I haven’t been able to focus enough to listen to a sermon on the trinity and work simultaneously… so I dragged the mp3 file over to my new phone (thanks mom and dad!).

This morning, I listened to the sermon on the way to work, and I got here with my heart filled with worship.

I love technology.

I love Mark Driscoll.

I love my parents.

All of the above were God’s idea :0)

<end geekish rant>

“A person’s a person, no matter how small”

I was listening to NPR this morning, and heard an interesting story. Apparently, the Dr. Seus book “Horton Hears a Who” has always been associated with the abortion debate. The premise of the book is that an elephant discovers that a whole world of “who’s” live on a dust speck that he discovers, so he devotes himself to defending it, often repeating the mantra, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

According to NPR, at the preview of the movie recently, people began to yell when that line was spoken in the movie, and there were protesters outside. It looks like there’s going to be a lot of talk about the issue while the movie is popular.

I’m actually really excited about that. When I got married, Steph made me study up on birth control, and the differences in how they work. I learned that planned parenthood actually changed their definition of conception several years ago to make their agenda work. It was discovered that many forms of birth control affect the lining of the uterus and make it difficult for a fetus to attach to it and grow, so they changed the definition of conception to be the moment when a fetus attaches to the uterus, rather than the moment when an egg is fertilized to be come a fetus.  So Horton’s line, “A person’s a person, no matter how small” is pretty powerful.

I’m excited. This should make for some interesting dialog!

As a sidenote: I’ve had several conversations about this topic with friends at work recently, and it seems like many people are interested in this topic and are afraid to ask about it/talk about it. If you fall into that group, there’s a fantastic teaching about birth control by Mark Driscoll that you can download for free from iTunes here. You can also watch the video for free at MarsHillChurch.org. Click on the link for “Religion Saves, and 9 other misconceptions.”

Mark Driscoll is a fan of… Mark Driscoll?

I went to respond to some wall posts on facebook this morning, and this is what I saw in my little news feed thingy: “Mark Driscoll became a fan of Mark Driscoll.”

I actually listened to a very short podcast yesterday where he explained that facebook capped him at 5,000 friends, so now if you want to be associated with him on facebook, you have to ‘become a fan’.

I know how frustrating this is, because it happened to me one time.

Oh wait, no it didn’t…

And Stephen, what’s up with the whole Braves Fan thing? Ugh…..

(PS – To all the folks who are only going to see this because you search for ‘mark driscoll’ on wordpress or through your RSS feeds, I’m not knocking Mr. Driscoll at all. Feel free to poke around and you’ll see that he’s held in high esteem here :0)

Religion Saves (And 9 Other Misconceptions)

That’s what Mark Driscoll and the crew at Mars Hill are calling the new sermon series.

These are the responses to the top ten questions from the ‘Ask Anything’ survey (I asked these two questions), where everybody in the world had three months to ask and vote on questions that they would like Driscoll to preach on.

Part one is provocatively titled “Is Birth Control a Sin?” (audio here) (video here)

This is an exciting question for me, because Steph and I have spent a lot of time talking through this.

I’m about to give it a listen!