Stay The Course ('Mentor' Series)

(My notes from 1/29/12 message from Dr. Chris, fbc ruston)

1 Timothy 1:1-11
1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope,
2 To Timothy my true son in the faith:
Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.
3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer 4 or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work—which is by faith. 5 The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. 6 Some have departed from these and have turned to meaningless talk. 7 They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.

1. Hang In There
v. 3 "urge you to stay in Ephesus"

With fatherly compassion (defines 'urge') .. Paul asks Timothy to "take up residence" -- to stay.
Paul testifies later that he himself stayed: "I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith..."

2. Any Of Us Can Get Derailed ...

* By what we take in, such as...

a. False doctrine -- a lot of bad teaching was going on in Ephesus (v 3). Doctrine = truths of the faith, fundamentals. v 8-11 reminds us there is no 'new' doctrine "We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. 9 We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.

* Silly, trivial things (v 4 and 6) -- idle talk, minor and non-external issues

* all truth is based on God's objective, principaled truth (v 7) ... not on 'good' speakers; sincerity does not mean truth, as people can be sincerely wrong and, like concerete, mixed up thoroughly and firmly in place.

v 11 -- make sure what you hear conforms to God's truth ... is it moving God's kingdom forward? (v 4) .. people were taking in 'bad' teaching

* Good treaching causes you to love god and people more (v 5) ... the bible's bad teachers are arrogant and puffed up

b. By our lifestyle (v 19-20 -- 19 holding on to faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and so have suffered shipwreck with regard to the faith. 20 Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme. )

Guys loosened their grip with Christ; Paul warns what happens when we start to slide and get off course a bit.

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It's Only Make-Believe --- FOR REAL!!!

Got several notes this week about Bill Joyce and his band of merry men and women earning an Oscar, which he received right there on national television a week ago tonight, his smile a cartoon-like super-sized.
One of my favorites, from the appropriately named “Rose,” read: “Hot diggity dawg for a nice Shreveport boy!”
Amen sister.
Shreveport’s Joyce and Moonbot Studios co-founder Brandon Oldenburg co-produced “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. This spawned several beautiful things:
1. I grew up in a town where people stopped what they were doing and pointed toward the sky whenever a plane few over, way up there. So I am still just enough of a hick to get a funny little tingle when I see someone I actually know on a television set. The Oscar statue weighs 8-and-a-half pounds, or about a half-pound for every year, give or take, I’ve known Elizabeth and Bill Joyce. Not well, but well enough that I could not stop laughing when they called Bill’s and Brandon’s names and they walked right up there, so animated themselves with this sheer unrehearsed joy that you felt as if someone had just drawn THEM. Brandon even said as much to the newspaper in Sarasota, Fla., where he went to Ringling College of Art and Design, about what it’s like when they call your name on Oscar Night: “It’s like they dropped an anvil on your head. Stars spin around, birds are chirping and you have a goofy grin that won’t go away.” Classic!;
2. Most Oscar winners thank “the little people who made this possible.” When Joyce says it, he means it literally. This work is for children young and old. He and his friends capture the good, the hope, in reality, the parts that can easily get shut out when the rent’s due and the baby’s sick. Many franchises – “Mission: Impossible,” “Die Hard” -- take fantasy and make it seem like reality; in Joyce’s books and art and storytelling, he takes reality and expresses it in fantasy, in a story you’ve lived or felt;
3. The props for home. Check out these quotes from backstage at the Oscars:
Oldenburg: “The whole point (of the film) was to just try to get the world to recognize what we're capable of in Shreveport, Louisiana, and that there's a level of quality they can come to expect …”
Joyce: “…from the swampy lands of Louisiana, we have crawled forth with this, and it's lovely to be recognized.”
Joyce could have left for Hollywood long ago. He didn’t. He stayed home and helped bring home what part of Hollywood we needed;
4. Also backstage, the pair thanked their wives and co-workers and teachers and families, but also “The Wizard of Oz” and “King Kong” and other wonderful “make-believe” movies. You know, real ones.
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Happy Birthday to Sweeter!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

It Takes The Spirit ('From Corinth' Series)

(My notes from Sunday pm, Jan 29, 2012, fbc ruston, message from Dr Chris)

1 Corinthians 2: 6-16

6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 However, as it is written:
“What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him—
10 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. 15 The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, 16 for,
“Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?”


But we have the mind of Christ.

What's it take ot have spiritual discernment?

1. The Spirit -- to understand the gospel (v 6-8, 10)

Eph 1:9-10 -- "He made known to us ...Jesus" the sacred secret

The 'mystery' of the gospel was not laid out entirely until Jesus appeared

v 10 -- 'God has revealed it to us through the spirit'

It takes a work of the spirit for one to fully understand the Gospel

2. It Is The Spirit Who Ultimately Brings Others To Christ,

who brings conviction and does the winning .. (John 16:8 -- 'When HE comes, he will convict..'
* Pray for the spirit to convict...

3. It Takes The Spirit To Understand The Ways of God
v 11-12 -- "who knows thuoght of man ...we've received the spirit to understand.."
* Understanding begins in my prayer closet

4. it Takes The Spirit To Grasp Scripture
13-14 -- for the saved, scripture is no longer 'foolishness'

5. It Takes The Spirit To Understand God's Leading
v 14 -- Lost people won't understand, and lukewarm Christians not filled with the spirit won't understand either
* It takes spiritual people to make spiritual decisions

6. Spirit-filled People Can Understand How God Is Working In The World
v 15-16 -- The lost can't understand tithing, going to church, serving etc...

a. Do you have the spirit
b. Are you attuned and filled with the spirit
Don't WASTE the mind of Christ (v. 16)
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Hurts Me ... Davy Jones

Davy Jones, 1945-2012

(CNN) -- Davy Jones, whose charming grin and British accent won the hearts of millions of fans on the 1960s television series "The Monkees," died Wednesday, according to the Martin County, Florida, sheriff's office. He was 66.

A witness told authorities he was with Jones in Indiantown, Florida, when Jones "began to complain of not feeling well and having trouble breathing," the sheriff's office said in a statement.

Jones was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, authorities said.

A Martin County law enforcement source with knowledge of the case said Jones apparently suffered a heart attack.

Laurie Jacobson, whose company Living Legends LTD often booked Jones for Hollywood nostalgia shows, spoke with him two days ago about several new bookings.

"He was a vegetarian, and there was not an ounce of fat on the guy," Jacobson said. "He lived on the beach in Florida and ran miles every morning. This is the last person I expected this to happen to. He couldn't have been in better shape."

The diminutive vocalist and actor sang lead on the musical group's hits such as "Daydream Believer" and "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You."

Besides Jones, The Monkees included band members Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith. The pop group was created to star in an NBC sitcom and capitalize on the Beatles' teenybopper popularity. "The Monkees" TV series premiered in the fall of 1966.

In terms of musical popularity, the project succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, with the group notching a handful of No. 1 songs (including "I'm a Believer," Billboard's top song of 1967) and four No. 1 albums.

The group, which was dubbed the "prefab four" by critics, rebelled against its management in an effort to take control of its musical career.

The move worked to an extent -- band members, who had generally been replaced by session men on Monkees recordings, were allowed to play their own instruments and contribute songs -- but coincided with a decline in the Monkees' popularity. NBC canceled the TV series "The Monkees" after just two seasons, and the band lasted for only one more year after that.

Though the TV show was never a huge ratings hit, its knockabout, Marx Brothers-style comedy -- inspired, to an extent, by the loopier sequences in the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" -- gained fans and followers, reigniting the band's popularity when MTV reran the show in the mid-'80s.

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American Baptist Gothic

As part of a church workday, these men raked leaves and cut trees and gathered trash and whatnot Saturday. Surely this photo makes you wish to be a part of our Sunday School class, even if you aren't a male in the 9th or 10th grade, as these gentlemen are. We meet in Ruston at 945ish on Sunday mornings. We don't rake on Sundays.

With Apologies to Petula Clark, Things Will Be Great When You're 'Downton'

(From today's Times and News-Star)

Until last week I thought a footman was a podiatrist and a valet would fetch your car after the big party, if you tipped.

But that was my pre-Downton Abbey life. PDA. If you live in a world unfamiliar with this British TV series, please listen and you will send me crumpets and roses after you meet Lord Grantham and Anna the Head Housemaid and Mr. Bates (who I like but who is starting to get on my nerves for some reason) and the matchless Maggie Smith as Violet, Countess of Grantham, a one-woman comedy team who throws verbal haymakers without reserve. One writer has said that the purpose of the whole series might be nothing more than the creation of a specific world in which Maggie Smith can wield barbs “like an aristocratic ninja.”

I love her so!

Years ago, at long last unhooked from the long arm of the law in the form of the infernal NYPD Nude, I vowed to not watch a TV series again. Took too much time. I strayed into “The Wire” a few years back – what a memorable outing -- but have been clean since.

But that was before Downton Abbey. I am attached as by television Velcro. A slave to the series.

Like many of you, I was unwashed, is all, to the things of your European aristocracy. But I know now that there is a world where men wear bowties at supper, where women are daily corseted like an NBA tenny shoe and where both would rather die than have the neighbors find out there’s Bama preserves in the icebox and Little Debbies on the kitchen counter.

Downton Abbey (does this sound like a London streetwalker's stage name to just me?) is all the rage in the television world, something I didn’t know about until my friend Lil’ Tone told me. He’s a man about town and knows these sorts of things. He explained that it was on PBS, had just completed its second season, was winning awards hither and yon for “Best Series” and things like that, and was “drawing a huge share” of the TV viewing audience.

Lil’ Tone called it a “British television period drama,” a near soap opera actually, set in a “big, huge castle.”

“Is it like Monty Python?” was my question. “I love Monty Python. Do they sing? Will they do skits? Does John Clee…”

“You are a stupid and largely unromantic person,” Lil’ Tone said.

I ordered Season One for $19.95 and gave it to my spousal unit for Valentine’s Day because nothing says romance quite like seven hours of unknown television, unless it’s maybe an unrehearsed trip to O’Charley’s. Or perhaps Olive Garden.

Ignorant and unromantic my foot.

Proving that a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then, the gift was a cinematic homer! We knocked out Season One in three nights – I have not watched this much TV in one sitting since the football bowl games – and are counting the minutes until the mailman shows up with the hastily ordered Season Two. (Plus, I got out of Valentine’s Day for under 50 bucks/pounds, give or take. Ha ha! Hahahahaha! I am so The Man!)

The problem now is that Season 3 won’t even shoot until spring. (Lazy Brits!) I cannot make my Season 2 DVDs – if they’ll ever get here! -- last longer than a week, even if I summon all of the tiny bit of willpower I possess. What ever will I…?

Thank goodness baseball’s spring training started this week.
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