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Our Daily Thread 10-27-14

Good Morning!

On this day in 1659 William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson became the first Quakers to be executed in America.

In 1787 the first of the Federalist Papers were published in the New York Independent. The series of 85 essays, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, were published under the pen name “Publius.” 

In 1858 Roland Macy opened Macy’s Department Store in New York City.

And in 1938 Du Pont announced “nylon” as the new name for its new synthetic yarn. 

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Quote of the Day

“Do just once what others say you can’t do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.”

James Cook

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 Today is Rex Carroll’s birthday. Rex, with Larry Howard.

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Anyone have a QoD?

54 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-27-14”

  5. Aj just barely made it first today rather than last from yesterday.
    But you can’t beat midnight for first.
    And it gives the westerners a chance. It wasn’t even bedtime for Nancyjill.

    🙂

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  6. I just go tan e-mail about AWANA. AWANA is a Bible course for children, as you all likely know. At the end, it says, “All children left after 7:30 will be given a double expresso and a puppy.”

    I’m sure those of you who have been through it have heard that before. But it is a first for me.

    🙂

    Liked by 4 people

  7. so nice that Aj posted at midnight. It means that we are on the same day for 7 hours longer. However, there did not seem to be much of a conversation going on…..
    Morning Chas.

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  11. Good Morning Everyone. Hope you have a great day. Yesterday rather than the regular sermon the priest had our Music Director, Artist in Residence give his testimony. He said he hummed Jesus Loves Me before he could talk, but the last thing he every wanted to do was try to make his living as a musician. God laughed and here he is. I remember during the search and hiring process he said his goal was to get the congregation to sing. He has done that.
    Because of things that are going on in our church we will be having a series of sermons on tithing, stewardship, and our gifts. Our church and facilities are used 7 days a week by various groups in the community from our Sunday worship to Young Life to Bible Studies, Family Promise, etc. We are looking for a name for this season. One of the vestry members handed me a note yesterday on Restoration, Renewal, and Building Communities. I have turned the words over and over and come up with Building Community Through Restoration and Renewal. We are the Church and our calling is the community.

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  12. Why were the Quakers executed?

    Kim, sounds good 🙂 I’m glad your church is looking outwards after looking to Christ.

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  14. Received this in an email. What are your thoughts on the following:

    Faith is believing in things you have not seen.
    – If you have a vision mixed with faith you will go farther than anyone would of thought you can go.

    – Faith isn’t a belief it is an action. You have to display.

    – A belief with action is a delusion. ( I am not sure if he meant to type without instead of with-Kim)

    – Pray that your desires are in line with God’s desires.

    – Pray on credit – thank him before you got it.

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  15. Kare, short version, heresy. It’s when the Puritan zeal went bad. 😦

    From Wikipedia:

    The Boston martyrs is the name given in Quaker tradition to the three English members of the Society of Friends, Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson and Mary Dyer, and to the Friend William Leddra of Barbados, who were condemned to death and executed by public hanging for their religious beliefs under the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1659, 1660 and 1661. Several other Friends lay under sentence of death at Boston in the same period, but had their punishments commuted to that of being whipped out of the colony from town to town.

    “The hanging of Mary Dyer on the Boston gallows in 1660 marked the beginning of the end of the Puritan theocracy and New England independence from English rule. In 1661 King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism. In 1684 England revoked the Massachusetts charter, sent over a royal governor to enforce English laws in 1686, and in 1689 passed a broad Toleration act.”

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  16. I saw the Monday Daily Thread go up last night, it was only 10:30 p.m. here — but FOUR of you already had claimed “First” so I refrained for fear of being knocked over. 🙂

    We ordained 3 new elders (one didn’t need to be ordained as he was already an ordained elder in the PCA, a similar denomination to ours) at yesterday’s service so the sermon focused on the role of the elders (1 Peter 5:1-5), “Shepherd the Flock.”

    The ordination ceremony includes all of the elders coming forward to lay hands on the incoming members, who kneel in front of the congregation, which is always quite moving. “It is the corporate conscience of Spirit-filled, Christian men — nominated and elected by a Spirit-filled congregation — that Christ has determined to rule in His church (1 Timothy 5:17).”

    We’ve been attracting more African Americans and inter-racial couples & families to our congregation in recent years and months. We meet in a rather “white” area near the beach cities, but LA in general is very diverse, of course. The one middle-aged African American couple I talked to yesterday come from Santa Monica which is a bit of a drive.

    We also have quite a few young Asian Americans.

    I’d love to see our churches more integrated, but that seems to be hard to achieve, in part for cultural differences I suspect.

    Are your churches integrated?

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  18. I have heard it said that the most segregated place in America is a church on Sunday morning.
    We do not have a lot of diversity in our congregation. ( Although our Music Director mentioned above shared that he learned more about worship music in an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Maryland.)
    The men’s ministry at church supports the Waterfront Rescue Mission which is headed up but a black minister. Several times he and his wife have brought the “residents” to our church and he has even preached the sermon in our church.

    BTW Yesterday in church a lot of focus was on praying for the Persecuted Christians around the world.

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  19. Kim, I think next Sunday (?) is a day set aside for the persecuted Christians around the world, we’re devoting our adult SS hour to corporate prayer for that purpose next week.

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  20. Here’s a website about it.

    And the numbers of persecuted Christians now appear to be growing.

    http://www.onewiththem.com/idop/

    “The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (IDOP) is a global day of intercession for persecuted Christians worldwide. Its primary focus is the work of intercessory prayer and citizen action on behalf of persecuted communities of the Christian faith. We also encourage prayer for the souls of the oppressors, the nations that promote persecution, and those who ignore it.

    “This year IDOP is Sunday, November 2, 2014, or whenever you, your church, family, school or small group can honor this important call to prayer.”

    Liked by 1 person

  21. I believe next Sunday is officially Reformat6ion Sunday for those churches that observe it. Baptists usually don’t.
    We have several black members in our church. One is a deacon. Some blacks in our SS department.
    But Main Street BC is primarily a black congregation.
    In Virginia, we deliberately attempted to integrate our church. But the black members didn’t stay long.
    We also had a Korean church meet in our facility on Sunday afternoon, but it didn’t last over a couple of years. Too much cultural conflict.

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  23. We had our regional Reformation Day service yesterday but I did not attend (it’s in the afternoon at one of our sister churches — always wonderful, but I’ve found it hard to make it over there in recent years).

    On Friday night, our church hosts a Reformation Day ‘party’ — it used to be geared more for families & people of all ages (one year they showed the Martin Luther film, for example), but recently it’s been geared more for the kids (and we have a lot of them in our church right now).

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  24. AJ, I was watching for the unidentified bird. Is that it? It’s a great blue heron with its neck folded up. Or do you have another photo to post later?

    Donna, our church is not integrated, though we did have a black family once (a woman visiting her grandchildren, and bringing them to church with her) and she loved the church. But Indiana, or my part of it at least, is almost 100% white. My church in Chicago was extremely well integrated (60% black, with some of the 40% being a handful of Asians and Hispanics, and some of the black people being from Africa–Liberia and Nigeria–and quite a few mixed-race couples and families, including cross-cultural adoptions) and my church in Nashville tried to be, with limited success (we had black people coming and going, but rarely more than one or two at a time, and most of those ex-cons that one of our pastors ministered to, and also some Asians).

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  25. Oh, wait a minute – guess I should have read the bulletin yesterday.

    We actually are showing “Luther” again this year, but it’s on Thursday night … Friday night will be the regular annual celebration with a German potluck, a message from the pulpit, a hymn, costume parade and craft activity (making stained glass and coat of arms crafts).

    And Reformation Pictionary, which must be some kind of game — maybe it’s the game we played a few years ago where they posted pictures of the various reformers on the walls and we had to match them to their names.

    My friend and I cheated and used our smart phones last time as I recall, but just for our own edification. 🙂

    It’s amazing how many of those bearded reformers all looked alike.

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  26. Cheryl, that’s one of the things that always struck me about Iowa in later years when I visited and I had become more aware of such things — it was all so WHITE. 🙂

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  27. There’s a large black family that sits usually in the row behind us and the matriarch often says “amen” throughout the sermon, which I love. 🙂 You don’t often hear Presbyterians saying audible “amens.” But it’s kind of nice.

    Liked by 1 person

  28. Donna, in my Chicago church we had a very large black man, an ex-con who had come to the Lord in prison and was a sweet teddy bear of a man when I knew him, but apparently something quite different before Christ got hold of him. From time to time during testimony/prayer request time, he would speak for a few minutes, and one of his “lines” was “the devil is an ugly piece of work” or something like that. (It has been several years since I heard it, since he left for a closer church before I left to marry three years ago.) It was so non-Presbyeterian, but no less orthodox for that.

    One of my dear friends from Chicago (the mother of seven with whom I spent Thanksgiving one year) came to visit me for a week in Nashville, and I introduced her at church as “my Chicago mama.” My pastor was quite tickled by that, but the church loved her and she felt welcome. (Though she did comment that the church “needed more chocolate.” I agreed with her, and told her that my first Sunday at the church I had cried through practically the whole service. Half of the tears were the beauty of worship in a church that was actually Reformed, and half of it was that the church was so white that I couldn’t help but miss the beauty of my Chicago church.)

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  30. Should be interesting to see how this is portrayed ….

    ” … Louie’s life story is not about the innate human power to forgive …He had realized the greatest enemy was not without but within. Although no longer a prisoner of war, he had remained a slave to sin (John 8:34). … In short, the story of Louie Zamperini is that of a man unbroken by war but broken by grace. And as David reminds us, a broken and contrite heart God does not despise (Ps. 51:17).”

    http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/broken-louie-zamperini

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  31. Cheryl,

    No, that’s not it. I’ll post it Thursday after we’re back. It’s all still in my ginormous memory card in the camera. I’ve been using my daughters laptop while we’re away and don’t want to download it on that. I’ll wait until I’m home and put it on the PC since I’ve taken close to a thousand pics already. 😯

    They’re not all birds though, but probably a couple hundred are 🙂

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  33. From Kim’s 10:39, with my commentary interspersed:

    Faith is believing in things you have not seen.

    This reminds me of Hebrews 11:1. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” There are, of course, many other things the Bible has to say about faith, so I think that first statement is pretty limited, simplistic. Don’t we sometimes have “faith” that things which we’ve witnessed will continue on as we expect? What kind of faith is being referred to here?

    – If you have a vision mixed with faith you will go farther than anyone would of thought you can go.

    Sounds nice, but is it true? I don’t think so. How far other people think we can go doesn’t determine how far we do go, whether or not our vision is “mixed with faith.”

    And what exactly does “mixed with faith” mean, anyway? Faith in ourselves and our abilities? Faith in God, that He will take our vision and lead us to greater heights than the distance a person without faith in God travels beyond his/her own vision?

    I just don’t see that as a scriptural given. We can work to the best of our ability in any area of our choosing, but the Lord can and does choose to bless us with any level of achievement, according to His will.

    – Faith isn’t a belief it is an action. You have to display.

    Well, we know from James 2:17 that faith without works is dead. Saving faith WILL display itself in good works. I do have a little trouble with that statement, “You *have* to display”, though, if whoever made that statement was thinking of the James passage. Through God’s grace, we do display it. It is not through our own efforts.

    I do think, too, that to say that faith isn’t a belief is incorrect. The thief on the cross, for example, to whom Jesus said, “Today you will be with me in paradise” had demonstrated belief when he said, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

    – A belief with action is a delusion. ( I am not sure if he meant to type without instead of with-Kim)

    I’m guessing, also, that he meant to type “without.” In any case, I don’t think action or inaction shows a belief to be true or false, other than in the context of James 2:17, as I mentioned above, regarding saving faith expressing itself through action.

    – Pray that your desires are in line with God’s desires.

    Jesus prayed, “Thy will be done.” He submitted to the Father, and it is good that we also be mindful of praying according to God’s will when we present our petitions to Him, knowing that He is sovereign.

    Yet, I also recall instances in the Old Testament where God repented of [relented from] “the evil which he thought to do unto his people.” (Exodus 32:14.) God, in His wrath at His people building the golden calf, vowed to “consume them” from the face of the earth. Moses pleaded with God to remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and to turn from His fierce wrath.

    This is a case where God revealed His will, and a mere human begged Him to change His mind. Moses’ desires were not God’s desires, as revealed at that moment, yet Moses petitioned God anyway.

    True, God doesn’t speak His will out loud to us anymore, but can we pray fervently about things which do not appear to be God’s will? I think there are instances we can, if we’re praying with right motives. I can’t think of any particular examples, but given that we see in the Word that God does change His mind at times, I don’t think it’s entirely out of line to pray for an outcome that might not look like God’s present desire.

    Not sure if that makes sense. 😉 Anyway, on to the last one…

    – Pray on credit – thank him before you got it.

    It seems to me I may have been picking apart these statements a bit much. I agree with this last statement in the sense that we should always be praying with an attitude of thankfulness. Thankfulness for Who God is, what He has done for us, with gratitude that He delights in hearing the prayers of His people. So, yes, it is good to be thankful before we even receive an answer to prayer.

    However, we know that God does not always grant us exactly what we ask for. so we can’t necessarily thank Him for “it”, since we might not get the “it” we are requesting.

    In that sense, maybe the word “credit”, as in “Pray on credit”, is a little misleading. We might not be credited the thing we ask for, but we do receive many other benefits through prayer, for which we can and should thank God, even before we realize those benefits.

    End of commentary. 😉 I would say that was a thought-provoking email, though.

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  34. The results are in! And the winner is…<a href=https://wanderersviews.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/peters-pack-of-pickled-pigskin-picks-week-9/comment-page-1/#comment-79944click here to find out.

    Liked by 1 person

  40. Donna, thanks for the Gospel Coalition link about the Zamperini film. Yesterday in Bible study, someone mentioned that she had read “Unbroken”, and we got to wondering whether there would be any mention of his conversion in the movie. It does sound hopeful that there were a few hints of Christianity apparent in the trailer.

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  43. What in the world? I invite a stranger into our midst and get nudged out of first place so easily? And slammed to the bottom of the pile? Good thing he is in charge of the kitchen….

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  44. This is interesting, and I think a step in the right direction.

    http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/10/25/new-degrees-challenge-time-served-model/

    “The University of Michigan is now on course to become one of the first public higher education institutions to offer a degree that can be achieved not through credit hours but on demonstrated proficiency in the subjects studied. According to Inside Higher Ed, Michigan’s regional accreditor has just approved a competency-based Master’s of Health Professions Education. The program is designed to give health professionals training in “carry[ing] out the full range of responsibilities of a scholarly educator-leader.”…

    This kind of approach shifts higher education from what we at the AI have called a “time served” to a “stuff learned” model, allowing students to learn what they need to learn and then graduate without spending unnecessary time in a program or racking up unnecessary debt. According to NPR, the DoE attempt to “loosen the rules” means that as many as 350 schools nationwide can now try out competency-based degrees without risking their eligibility for federal financial aid. Read the whole thing for an overview of the current status of those programs and their prospects for success. The more schools have the freedom to grant degrees on the basis of proficiency rather than “time served,” the more relevant to the demands of today’s economy higher education will become.” (Emphasis mine.)

    Liked by 1 person

  45. Here’s a good essay from Christianity Today. (I don’t get the magazine, but I get an email each day with links to online articles.)

    “Blessed Are the Broke”

    http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/october/blessed-are-broke-personal-finances.html?utm_source=ctdirect-html&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=9474712&utm_content=310794667&utm_campaign=2013

    6 Arrows – I think you’ll like this essay. Check out a certain phrase in the next-to-last paragraph. 🙂

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  46. Karen — 🙂

    And also in that paragraph, the partial reference to Isaiah 43:1-2. That is underlined in my Bible, and I read it often.

    I liked this, too, from the second page:

    The easy and comfortable seasons don’t push us to our knees, seeking respite in his might and mercy. They don’t lift our hands in praise of his provision and wonder.

    We were just talking about that yesterday in the Bible study a close friend of mine is leading on Psalm 119, how it would be so easy to neglect our relationship with Jesus, and not lean fully into Him, if life was always smooth-sailing, free of the trials that draw us into closer communion with Him, learning to trust in His provision. That really is a blessing, to experience God’s tender mercies from the depths of despair, but we don’t always view the challenges that way when in the midst of them.

    Thanks for sharing that article!

    Liked by 1 person

  47. I missed Donna’s question from this morning about are our churches integrated.

    We are a mostly white congregation, which is a big percentage since we have over a thousand members. There is a lovely couple in the church — she is white, and he is black — and their three daughters, now adults, are just beautiful. They’re both so nice to talk to, and have been members of our congregation for many years now. Though his skin is very dark, I hardly even notice that anymore, even in a sea of white faces.

    There are a few families, too, who have adopted children from overseas, and it just seems so natural to see those children among the many white children. They don’t stand out to me.

    In our extended families (both my husband’s side and mine) there are several adopted children from different countries — Ukraine, South Korea, China, and India. My nieces from India have both had children themselves now, and another niece (Caucasian) married a man of Iranian descent and they have a child, too. So we’ve got a beautiful blend of different skin colors in our families.

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  48. We have some of our synod’s missionaries from Zambia coming to speak between the services on Sunday, which I am looking forward to.

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  49. Unexpected OT, had to cover a charter school board meeting with probably 300+ unhappy parents, students and teachers all in a state of loud disruption and eruption.

    Had to write that one fast, though, and without as much background as I wished I’d had (our education reporter slot is open and we still haven’t hired anyone for that position).

    And I apparently turned in an exciting video … of my hand. 😦 Or so my editor says.

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  50. “…unhappy parents, students and teachers all in a state of loud disruption and eruption.”

    Sounds like some detention slips should be handed out. 😉

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  51. My church congregation is probably 75 percent white and 25 percent black and other. We have two church plants in our building, one Indian and the other Bhutanese and Nepali. I think there is a small group of Koreans who meet in our church, too. We get various nationalities who are with us for a few years while they go to school at Emory usually for advanced medical training.

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  52. Hey, I see a new header photo! Does that mean the Tuesday posts are about to go up?

    Too bad for me I can’t stick around and get first if they do — hubby’s home from work now, and it’s his turn for the computer.

    Good night, wanderers.

    Like

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