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Resources

  • Romans overview (video): Part 1, Part 2
  • What is Romans?
    • Romans contains letters from Paul to the churches of Rome.
    • The church of Rome had existed for a long time and was made up of Jews and Gentiles.  Emperor Claudius had banished the Jews from the church for 5 years.  When the Jews returned there was a split between Gentiles and Jews in how they should follow Jesus and practice their faiths. Paul’s letters were an attempt to explain his faith and unite the Jews and the Gentiles into one faith worshiping Jesus. Paul hoped the Roman churches could become a staging ground to enable Paul to expand the church into Spain and beyond.
    • Romans is structured as follows:
      • Books 1-4: Revealing God’s Righteousness
      • Books 5-8: Creating a New Humanity
      • Books 9-11: Fulfilling God’s Promise to Israel
      • Books 12-16: Unifying the Church

Romans 4

Your righteousness is not because of anything you can earn through good deeds. You are saved only because you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as you’re savior and God forgives your sin because of it.

This blessing is for both the Jews and gentiles. The old Jewish laws such as circumcision are no longer required to be saved.

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I love the privacy of the Brave browser but a couple of things made me decide to switch back to Firefox:

  1. More and more sites seem to be dropping support for Brave. That seems very odd because Brave is based on chromium and Google Chrome is one of the most popular browsers out there. This means that site developers are proactively detecting Brave and blocking its use. The reason is probably because Brave is one of the most effective browsers for blocking user tracking.
  2. Brave is based on Chromium which Google controls. Google is using its Chromium code to treat users like children, monopolize browser behavior, and break the web.

I still plan to use Brave Search since it’s the most private search engine and doesn’t censor its results.

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Source: DSHR’s Blog

Fascinating post explaining how decentralized systems frequently aren’t.  The post raises several thought-provoking questions:

  • What is a viable business model for participation that has decreasing returns to scale?
  • How can Sybil attacks be prevented other than by imposing massive costs?
  • How can collusion between supposedly independent nodes be prevented?
  • What software development and deployment model prevents a monoculture emerging?
  • Does federation provide the upsides of decentralization without the downsides?

I love that last question – it remains to be proven.

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  • Intermission:
    • Gospels are biographies and we can learn from them
    • Spritual Disciplines (“practies of Jesus”) – how we follow Jesus
      • Bible Reading
      • Prayer
      • Sabbath
    • Disciplne: any activity that enables me to eventually do something that I cannot yet do.
    • Jesus doesn’t command us to do any of His practices, He just does them and says “follow me”.
  • Part 3: 4 Practices to Unhurry Your Life
    • Boredom doesn’t exist anymore
      • We have access to everything but lost opportunitiies to pray or be aware.
      • Is it really necessary to check the news, watch a video, or do something else at this moment? When are we ever alone wewith our thoughts?
      • We’re losing our abiilty to be present – it’s an epidemic of distraction
      • The noise of the modern world drowns out God. We are disctracting ourselves into spiritual obivion.
    • Silence and Solitude
      • Jesus was led into the widerness becausde it was a place of strength.
      • Jesus frequently went to His quiet place to pray. It was His source of strength. His quiest place was His top priority.
      • Jesus frequently stayed up all night praying since it was the only time He could have time alone with His father – it was more important than sleep.
      • THe busier and more in demand Jesus became, the more He withdrew to His quiest places to pray – this is the opposite of what we usually do.
      • If Jesus needed time in a quiet place why wouldn’t we?
      • Why do we always need the radio on or podcasts/music? Are we using external noise to drown out internal noise? Some of us are trapped in the unhealthy patterns of our own minds.
      • Silence is silencing external and internal noise.
      • Solitude is enagegment, isolation is escape
      • Solituide is setting aside time to feed, water, and nuture your sould.
      • Silence & Solitude are the most important – we must set aside for our relationship with God
      • Take an hour a day to enjoy God.
      • Be careful not to priritize the urgent over the important.
      • When we spend time in silence and solitude with God our failures fail to take us over
    • Sabbath
      • “In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that ultimately in this world there is no finished symphony” – Karl Rahner, 20th century Catholic theologian
      • Desire is infiite but we are finaite – result is restlessness. We liove with chronically unsatisifed desires.
        • the “God-shaped hole”problem
        • We are made to live with God – nothing less will ever satisfy us
        • “Öur heart is restless until it rests in You”
        • “Twin Gods os accumulation and accomplishment”
        • Social media exasperates the issue (meme: apple in a mirror with a bite taken out of it)
      • Sabbath is the mitigation – it means “to stop”
        • Most marketing focuses on rest or Sabbath – take a day of your week to slow down and breathe
      • Work hard to rest well
      • “People who keep the Sabbath live all seven days differently”
      • The Sabbath was made for man, man wasn’t made for the Sabbath.
      • When God created the earth the 7th day was His Sabbath.
      • “if you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters”
      • “The Sabbath is an invitation to enter delight. The Sabbath is the best day of our lives. A full day of delight and joy is more than most people can bear in a lifetime, let alone a week”

Intentions for Silence/solitude and Sabbath:

  • Lawrence: intentionally talk to God more. Ask others to pray to ask God to reveal things to him. Will also go to church once a month. If Joy’s not going he’ll go with Angela.
  • Kelly: will spend more time daily with himself and God in silence with no distractions.
  • Joy: be intentional about the Sabbath. Set boundaries to not do things.
  • Angie: interested in Shabbat (to stop). Stop and take time to slow down and see what. God has for her in that moment on a daily basis and take joy in it.
  • Kim: spend more time to intentionally honor the Sabbath by stopping her activities and enjoying the silence and solitude on a weekly basis.
  • John: stop constantly listening to music and podcasts so much to spend more time in silence, enjoy the silence and spend more time praying in that silence. Prioritize my Bible studies to be the first thing I do when I get out of bed.  Try to spend more time with an analog Bible than doing everything on my phone.

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Notes for my weekly Bible Study group.
Resources

Summary

  • NOTE: There is a lot of confusion around when Saul becomes Paul. Paul was on a mission to spread the gospel among the Gentiles who spoke Latin anf Greek. Paul adopted his Roman name (Paul) because the name Saul had a ludicrous meaning in Greek (roughly translated it means “little fellow”).
  • In Acts 13, the focus shifts to Paul. Acts 28:30–31 tells us once Paul was taken to Rome, he spent two years in his own rented house, welcoming all who visited him, and boldly teaching them about Jesus Christ. This was how Paul lived throughout his years of ministry. A quick review of Acts 13 reveals Paul preached in Antioch in Syria, where he and Barnabas were commissioned for this first missionary journey. They visited Paphos on the island of Cypress. Paul and Barnabas continued on to Perga, where John Mark left them. They traveled to Antioch in Pisidia, where Paul gave his first sermon.
  • Acts 14 covers the conclusion of Paul’s first missionary journey.
  • Paul and Barnabas moved on to Iconium. Iconium was a “cultural melting pot” of the native communities: Phrygians, Greeks, Jews, and Roman colonists.  Paul and Barnabas followed the pattern of speaking first in the synagogue, where many Jews and Greeks believed. The Jews who refused to believe turned the Gentiles against Paul and Barnabas. When someone doesn’t like what you do or who you are, they just start stirring the pot. But Paul and Barnabas spoke boldly about Christ, who granted that signs and wonders be performed through them.
  • The people in the city were divided; some sided with the Jews, others with the apostles. Because the division was so bad, people wanted to stone Paul and Barnabas. But Paul and his companions found out and fled to Lystra and Derbe where they kept evangelizing.
  • As they evangelized in Lystra, they encountered more resistance. Paul saw a man who was lame from birth but had faith, Paul tells the man to stand up, healing him. The crowds thought Paul and Barnabas were the gods Hermes and Zeus and feared that their town would be wiped out. According to ancient folklore, Zeus and Hermes visited Lystra asking for food and lodging but were refused. In response, Zeus and Hermes caused a flood to drown everyone who had been unwilling to help them.
  • Barnabas and Paul tore their robes and told the the men of Lystra who they were and why they were there. Barnabas and Paul urged them to turn away from their “worthless things to the living God”.  Paul and Barnabas barely escape the crowd trying to kill them.
  • The Jews from Iconium chase and catch them in Lystra. They stone Paul and drag him outside the city, thinking they had killed him. Paul was probably killed when they stoned him because stoning usually involved throwing someone into a pit and dropping large rocks upon them.
  • When the disciples find Paul, he gets up and walks into town (this implies to me that the Lord ressurected Paul so he could continue his work).
  • The next day they leave for Derbe – Paul continues his work despite being persecuted for it.
  • They evangelized in Derbe, then returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch. Paul and Barnabas report on everything that happened and explained how God “had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles”.