a drop of water

This Friday night at friends group we listened to a message by Jamie Wilson who is the pastor at Coast Vineyard, titled “Why not ask?” His message had three sections, which I will attempt to summarize in the following three paragraphs.

First he addressed why we do not pray to God. 1. We are insecure and doubt God’s answers. How can we trust God with our needs? 2. We have an cultural (American) commitment to self-sufficiency. We have a perspective where asking for help is weak, where we would rather be isolated instead of vulnerable. 3. We have a deep pain or are tried of trusting God. We asked for something and didn’t get what we wanted.

Second, Pastor Jamie went over Luke 11:5-13 and draws out three points. 1. “Request are at the heart of community.” – Dallas Willard. Until we are vulnerable with each other, we will never have true community. People wioll come into our lives with needs that only God has the resources to meet. 2. Culturally, the story’s circumstances of a Jewish man refusing to give bread to his neighbor was ludicrous. Luke is making the arguement about how much more ludicrous it is to think God will not answer a prayer. He may not answer it in the way you hope it will be answered, but he will answer it. 3. We often turn prayer into a polite conversation or chat with God, but Jesus says to ask, to knock. This is like Jacobe wrestling in the Old Testament. Pastor Jamie drew out some crazy stuff about the greek here, in verse 10, where is says “Ask and you will receive, knock and the door will be opened.” Apparently the greek is such that it more accurately should read, ask and keep on asking, knock and keep on knocking, and through the process of persistence, answers will come. Wow.

Thirdly, the closing points were as follows: 1. Be specific. 2. Prepare for a journey. 3. Don’t be afraid to pray hard (there is a difference between knocking when you think someone is home or when you know they are not). 4. Understanding the character of God is key to prayer. 5. Holy spirit is what we need most from God. Pastor Jamie left us with this challenge, what is one God-sized prayer that you are going to wrestle through that only God can meet?

Miles was at the Marriage Couples Retreat this past weekend. So we had a Pastor Ricky Page (sp) come and speak. He spoke on 2 Corinthians 5:11-15, with a focus on verse 14: “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all…”  His point was that whatever we do, we should be driven my love, Christ’s love for us and Christ’s love for the people around us.  We get our idea of love from our ipod’s and we should learn about love from the Bible.  The verse that comes to my mind is John 5:13: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”  And God took it a step further that while we were enemies of God (sinners), Christ died for us (Romans 5:6).  We weren’t even friends, we were enemies.  How crazy would we live if we really sat down and thought on this kind of love?  Here is a random quote from Pastor Ricky, “My patience is your salvation. -God”

Command Prompt – Copy and Paste

I often need to copy text from a command prompt window. Sometimes the settings are preset to allow one to select text with the mouse, but often they are not. This is the option that needs to be selected from (right click->properties) on a command prompt window that allows you to select text (error messages, commands, debug messages, etc) to copy to somewhere else.

PS1 and command line formatting in unix shells

export|set (depending on shell) PS1=”$(print ‘<–> $(UNAME)../${PWD#/} <–> ‘)

There are a lot more options that I’ve only recently discovered, but it is really helpful to avoid needless typing of ‘ls.’

This message was brought to you by alias4life.

This Sunday Miles gave an inspiring message on the first chapters of Numbers in his series titled Road Trip. He broke it down such that God gave assignments and had roles for 3 categories of people: the leaders, the levites and the soldiers. God has a plan for each of us to fulfill in the Kingdom of God. It is up to us to embrace it or not. Miles pointed to the fact that when you draw a diagram of how God instructed the 2 million Israelites to camp around the Tabernacle (portable temple of the time), there is a clear picture of a cross.

This is crazy because crucifixion / cross had not and would not even be invented for another few thousand years. God had the Israelites walking around the desert for 40 years in a shape that points to Jesus Christ, dying on the cross for mankind’s sins and they probably were never aware of it. That is so much like us, we walk around looking at only what is infront of us, from our perspective instead of trying to see it from God’s perspective, the bigger picture. We waste time wandering around (40 years in Israel’s case) when we could be in God’s will faster and sooner (11 days in Israel’s case to get to the where God had intended them to be).

On a side note, God was working mightily that morning. Joe’s brother (inlaw) who decided to tag along with Joe for the first time to the Rock answered Mile’s altar call!

As a friends group we listened to a sermon from Lighthouse Bible Church by Pastor John Kim. Though I am still wrestling with some of the points and convictions that we spoke on, there were a number of good points:

1. “We like to minimize ourservice of others and maximize others service to us.” {my comments}: This is especially true when we go to church and ask questions or make statements like, why didn’t anyone greet me? or the pastor’s message didn’t really address my needs…

2. “Our reference point for sound judgement in seeing ourselves should be God and not man.” {my comments}: When looking out our self-worth, it must be from God’s point of view and it must affect the way we live for his glory. There are two lines of thought that I see: 1. God is perfect, I am a sinful human, I need God to save me, to equip me and to use me to do good. 2. God is savior, I am saved by his grace and all that is good within me is of God, therefore I must be a good steward of his gift. Both affect the way you live and your perspective before God.

3. “Unity does not equal uniformity and difference in function does not equal difference in value–we can not put value on function by human standards but instead put value on necessity.”

p.s. The graphic for the ‘friends’ category is not meant to be inclusive or exclusive, but more of a symbolic representation.  All of you are invited to come out.  I echo Joe’s and Chris’ sentiment in that they look forward to this evening of the week because I can find like minded people (perhaps not specific view alignment) but like minded in that they want to know God more.