Saturday, September 13, 2008

Ray Boltz has come out of the closet. Sad reality of the world we live in and how little we know about the artists we listen to, or in this case, hear every once and a while in church.

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2008/09/ray_boltz_comes.html

This story illustrates the miserable state of much of the American church. You can seem like everything is good, everything is fine, when it is not. We all struggle with sin, but this man who performed in front of thousands of people at a time could not admit it to anyone. Nobody knew the struggle he had inside.

“I was so good at pretending/like an actor on a stage/but in the end nobody knew me/only the roles that I portrayed/and I would rather have you hate me/knowing who I really am/than to try and make you love me/being something that I can’t” (from “God Knows I Tried”).

He was acting. This speaks greatly for the need of fellowship and accountability in the local church. There is nothing like confession of sins one to another, "16Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working."

This strikes a chord with me because of the failure of the local church, in teaching, in fellowship, in accountability, and in exhortation. This isn't to say that no local church could have provided him with this, or that he necessarily avoided it, but some churches encourage such a sinful lifestyle. While some encourage, some completely ostracize and don't reach out. Though the church must not embrace sin, people must reach out in love.

Finally, everyone is a theologian, we all have thoughts and views about God. Don't forget this.
“I don’t want to be a spokesperson, I don’t want to be a poster boy for gay Christians, I don’t want to be in a little box on TV with three other people in little boxes screaming about what the Bible says, I don’t want to be some kind of teacher or theologian — I’m just an artist and I’m just going to sing about what I feel and write about what I feel and see where it goes.”

Thursday, September 11, 2008

So, Wordles are fun, and interesting when you think about them. The more a word is used, the larger that specific word is. It gets cool thinking how the repeated words may actually illustrate the theme of the book quite well.
Here is one using the ESV text for the book of Hebrews.



Some of the themes of the book come out in the repeated words that are larger, but it is also a nice picture.
[from wordle.net]