New Music: I Cry Out based on Psalm 142

Here is a new song and composition. The music was created by the children's choir a few weeks back, but due to all that was going on I didn't have the time to work on arranging it into a singable melody and putting it to a song until today.

The Psalm appears to be from one of the times when David was pressured by trials and difficulties, where there seemed to be no escape from his enemies. The only thing he could do was to turn to God and cry out, "Help!" It's an apt song for our family at this time, and I'm sure for many others who are going through difficult times.

Bible Reading 2007, Week 15

This week's readings are in Joshua 1:1-13:7 and Psalms 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, and 13. This week starts a new theme, Joshua and Judges.

Sermon, Apr. 7: What Upsets God?

(Click on post title to listen to sermon audio.)

Today we looked into the story of Jesus cleansing the temple as recorded in John 2:12-22. This is a story of one of the few instances in Jesus' life where he visibly and audibly expresses anger and fury.

In this sermon I explore why Jesus got angry, and in turn explore the sorts of things that cause God to become angry. These are also the things for which Christians today rightly ought to become angry and upset over when they are encountered. These are probably not the typical things for which many Christians in recent years have been known to express their displeasure and anger.

Good Friday Service

We just returned from the Good Friday service at the Lutheran church. My assigned word was the sixth word of Jesus on the cross, "It is finished." The text of the message is at the end of this posting. The pastor immediately preceding me spoke on "I thirst" and talked about how Jesus was given vinegar in response.

The four girls in our little choir sang When I Survey the Wondrous Cross right after my message. The two younger girls may have been a little intimidated about singing in front of a crowd of perhaps 130 or 150. They sang well in any case, and they were the only ones to get an applause!

We've seen quite a bit of rain over the last couple of days. The sunny spring has gone the way of rainy spring. The temperatures this afternoon rose all the way up into the mid-50's.

I sat at my laptop PC for much of the day, working on this evening's message, tomorrow's sermon, and putting together the program for tomorrow. I still need to do some studying of the Sabbath School lesson as our only teacher is away in Florida right now, leaving me to pick it up.

Message Text John 19:29-30a (ESV) 29A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. 30When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished…” What was finished, and what does the sour wine, or vinegar, have anything to do with it? In John's Gospel, one of the themes is the timing of Jesus' mission. In chapter 2, at the wedding in Cana, Jesus tells his mother that his "hour has not yet come." In chapter 7, when Jesus' brothers try to get Jesus to do better PR for himself, Jesus replies, "My time has not yet come." Shortly thereafter when the Jewish authorities try to arrest Jesus, John records that Jesus could not be arrested because "his hour had not yet come." But as Jesus enters his final week, His message changes. John records that "Jesus knew that his hour had come." During this final week and final hours, Jesus himself says: "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified." "For this purpose I have come to this hour." “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you…" What was finished? According to John, Jesus' mission of glorifying his Father was completed at the cross. Jesus' work of revealing the true character of God to the world was finished. What is God's character, His glory? Moses asked to see God's glory on Mt. Sinai, and this is what he saw: "The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands [of generations], forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty…" Jesus came to reveal this truth about God to the world. Through the cross, Jesus revealed and offered God's grace, patience, mercy, love, and forgiveness for every man, woman, and child. Through the cross, Jesus also revealed that God is just, that he takes sin seriously. Paul records in 2 Cor. 5:21: 21For our sake he [God] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Through the cross Jesus became sin itself, the antithesis of love, to guarantee the destruction of sin itself, and to offer us His righteousness in its place. On the cross, God, in Jesus, finished the work of saving us from the clutches of sin. Right before Jesus declares, "It is finished", he asks for a drink and is given wine that had soured -- vinegar. At the wedding in Cana that opens Jesus' ministry in John's Gospel, Jesus gave a miraculous sign of changing water to wine, and offered it to the wedding guests. On the cross, Jesus chose to take upon himself all that had gone sour and bad in the world, and in its place offered us all the best that he has. Brothers and sisters, boys and girls, will you give to Jesus all that is sour and bad in your life? Will you accept from him his grace, forgiveness and salvation? The work of salvation was finished at the cross, will you accept it?

The NET Bible

I learned of a new online Bible translation this week at our Ministerial meeting. It's called the NET Bible and is available at www.bible.org. The main feature is the extensive footnotes that are provided by the worldwide, online community of experts in Bible translation and interpretation.

If you are interested in alternate translations and interpretations that can be made for Bible texts, this is a place to look.

"As pressure and stress bear down on me..." Psalm 119:143

Last week was comparatively a resful week. It seems as if the dam holding back stress and pressure broke this week, and it feels as if I might drown...

Just now I came across the verse quoted in the article title while reading part of today's Bible passage (Psalm 119:137-144). "As pressure and stress bear down on me, I find joy in your commands." (v. 143).

That is an interesting thought -- that when pressure and stress of life come upon me, I should go back to God's commands, that I should find joy in them.

What does that mean? Does it mean that when life seems to be falling apart, I should examine my life and make sure it is still in alignment with God's principles? Perhaps in light of some of the principles given by Jesus in the New Testament, I should take to heart commands to trust in Him, to not worry about life, to find rest in Him.

Turns out the motherboard and/or CPU is bad

I brought back a known good power supply unit today, but discovered that the problem with my PC still exists. The PSU tester that I have is apparently not good either. Sigh...

So it's down to either the motherboard or the CPU that is bad (and perhaps both...). I found a supplier that sells Dell motherboards, so I ordered one. I first started looking around for a complete replacement barebones system that I could plug in my current hard drive and other parts into, but it soon added up to $500 and so I decided to look a little harder for an OEM replacement motherboard (the reason I can't use any motherboard is that the Dell front panel connector and the Dell heatsink attachment are proprietary). The vendor doesn't ship to PO Boxes, so I'm having to have it shipped to the Lower 48, and then relayed up here.

That pretty much sums up my day -- not a whole lot of progress and plenty of frustration.

Oh, by the way, the PSU that I ordered hadn't shipped yet, so I successfully cancelled that order -- at least one sort of positive thing in an otherwise mediocre day.

Quick update before I have to dash off

This week is quite busy with a multitude of events and activities going on. That's the reason why I haven't posted much in the way of updates the last few days.

The weather here is finally spring-like. We've had clear skies since Sunday. I've even seen a few kids about town in shorts (in low-40 degrees). The Narrows outside our window, which has for most of the winter looked rather gray, is now a deep blue as it reflects the blue sky overhead.

A few of the leaders from the Alaska Conference are in town for a couple of days. According to the Conference calendar, Petersburg was only listed for them to be here one day, but upon their arrival, I discovered that they were here for two days. We had planned on them being here Tuesday, and then we would hold and Agape Supper and Communion on Thursday. But with them here tonight also, I decided to move the Agape Supper to tonight. That meant calling around to make sure people were aware of the change in plans.

Last night we had our children's choir sing a few songs. The two non-Adventist families came with a number of their other children, so our supper and the singing portion of the program was quite well attended. Because it was getting late in the evening, they had to return after our song service portion. The choir sounded great, despite our 4-strong size, and alleviated some of the concern I had about them performing for the (virtually) whole town at the Good Friday service. I had a video of the singing made, so once I find a bit of breathing room, I may be able to get it uploaded for your viewing.

I've been on the bicycle regulary this week going back and forth between home, church, and post office. The roads are now dry, but dusty.

The power supply unit (PSU) for my Dell desktop PC went out last night. I had just installed one of Microsoft's infamous security updates, I told it to restart, but it seemed to get stuck shutting down. So I forced the power off, and then when I turned it back on it wouldn't start up properly. Rather, the case fan near the CPU went into hyperdrive, as if the temperature sensor had gone bad. Since the last major change I made was the security update, I thought that perhaps it had somehow corrupted the BIOS settings. I shorted the CMOS, and tried all sorts of combinations with cards and such, but it simply would not come on.

In hindsight, I should have suspected that when the POST beep didn't happen, that it was something way early on in the power-up cycle -- say the power supply. I dug out the PSU tester that I purchased in my previous life and after I plugged it in, discovered that the -5 volt line was dead.

After spending a sleepless night (yes, I still worry about these little things that go wrong), I went out this morning to see if I could find a PSU in this town. As I was afraid of and suspected, it is another of those "not stocked here" items. I ordered a new unit which will be arriving hopefully sometime next week.

In the meantime, I realized that the PSU in the computer I use at church is a newer unit that would work in the Dell. But the compuer at church is also needed. So I spent part of this morning going through a number of boxes in order to locate an extra PSU that originally came with the kit that was used to build the church PC. Hopefully after swapping the extra PSU into the church PC, and the PSU from the church PC into the Dell, all two PCs will work. If not, I will have a much more serious problem on my hands.

I'll still want a new, spare PSU around for the next time one of them goes out.

I guess the "good" to come out of all this is that I might be able to build a whole sermon around the issue of bad PSUs, replacing them, etc. That was another reason why I had difficulties getting to and remaining asleep last night -- I was trying to work out the different angles, as well as see if there was something in the event that could be tied to this Easter weekend. We'll see.

Tomorrow I really must settle on the topic as well as most of the outline for this Sabbath's sermon. I also need to craft my 3-minute message for the Good Friday service.

I also need to get things started with a Stop Smoking series that we would like to hold later this month. Again, after I get past this week, I should have the time needed to organize the materials that I purchased.

I meant this to be a quick update, but it looks like it ended up being a complete update.

Saving Video Files from Difficult Sites

The web has lots of videos, but some of the sites make it difficult to download and save the video files on your local PC. The web page at http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php can help you there. The page has a field where you can enter the video URL and it will give you a button to press to allow you to download and save. If you use Mozilla Firefox, there is an extension available from the same page that will let you do the same thing.

Recording Hope Channel Internet Broadcasts

Hope Channel is the Adventist church's global television network. It offers its programs over satellite and also as streamed video on the Internet.

Given where we live, it doesn't make sense right now for us to purchase satellite equipment. But there are occasional programs on the Hope Channel that are of interest to us. The other problem is the time difference. Alaska is simply not a large enough market for convenient broadcast times for major programs, so we have to accommodate our schedule, or have to record it first.

Therein lies the problem. The regular PC media players don't include features to record, let alone schedule, Internet streamed videos. So that began my search for some other program to allow me to record the stream as a file, and hopefully to schedule recordings so they would get recorded without me having to start and stop it.

I found a free one that did allow recording to file, but it was complicated and did not do well with Akamai caching and load-balanced media servers. It also did not include scheduling capabilities.

So I continued my search and found WM Recorder, a $49.95 program that does everything I need. It's actually an ingenious little program in that it uses existing media players to actually play the media, then sniffs the network packets and stores the data as it arrives. That means it doesn't need its own codecs to decode or encode the video and audio. All this program needs to know is to recognize media streams, and then repackage the data as a local file that looks good to a media player application.

I've used WM Recorder a few times now, and it's done what I needed. I'd eventually like to get a satellite dish installed (I'll be trading static for dropped frames, I guess), but for now this solution will be sufficient.

Bible Reading 2007, Week 14

In our readings this week we conclude the Exodus stories. Our readings are in Deuteronomy 31-34; Jude; and Psalm 119:81-176.

Sermon, March 31: Old vs. New

(Click on above title link for sermon audio.)

This is the third and final look into the story of the wedding at Cana recorded in John 2:1-11. This sermon examines more closely how Jesus came to get rid of all the old, bad stuff and replace them with new and better things.

Book: So You Don't Want to Go to Church Anymore

I was perusing another blog earlier this week and came across an entry about an interesting book. I downloaded the book (you can purchase a regular printed book, or download it as free PDFs) at the time, but didn't get to reading it until yesterday and I finished it this evening.

This is from the book's web site:

What would you do if you met someone you thought just might be one of Jesus’ original disciples still living in the 21st Century? That’s Jake’s dilemma as he meets a man who talks of Jesus as if he had known him, and whose way of living challenges everything Jake had previously known. So You Don’t Want to Go To Church Anymore is Jake’s compelling journal that chronicles thirteen conversations with his newfound friend over a four-year period and how those exchanges turn Jake’s world upside-down. With his help, Jake faces his darkest fears, struggles through brutal circumstances and comes out on the other side in the joy and freedom he always dreamed was possible. If you’re tired of just going through the motions of Christianity and want to mine the depths of what it really means to live deeply in Christ, you’ll find Jake’s story will give you hope for your own. This book probes the difficult questions and offers some far-reaching answers. It just might turn your world upside-down as well!

As I read the story, I couldn't help but identify with Jake, the main character. The spiritual journey, the struggles, and the faith and wisdom that he learns, is in so many ways the journey that I am presently on. I would place myself around the middle of the book -- the rest of the story is still to be written.

All who fit into the stereotypical "good Christian" mold needs to read this, because it will raise very uncomfortable questions about what it really means to be a follower of Christ, and questions about motivations behind "doing church."

All who don't fit into that mold, who at times may feel marginalized, can find a loving heavenly Father within these pages. For any who have ever wondered if they are really Christians if they don't carefully follow church-prescribed patterns of what a Christian looks like and acts like, the answer within these pages is a reassuring, "Yes."

For me, the big question that it raises is this: As a leader of a group of believers in Petersburg, am I helping those under my care to draw closer to and look more closely at Jesus, or am I just helping them fulfill what are believed to be religious obligations? Am I simply being a part of their religious To-Do list, or am I helping them to experience and know Jesus for themselves?

As I plan and run activities, as I prepare and deliver sermons, as I interact with church members, these are the questions I believe I need to ask myself. If something I'm thinking about doing or saying isn't bringing people closer to Jesus and to experience Jesus for themselves, then perhaps it really isn't that necessary.

Is it finally Spring?

Is it Spring?

Even the gulls are being lovey-dovey...

Is it Spring in the air?

On my walk past Eagle's Roost Park,

I saw dozens of Bald Eagles,

Perched in trees

And crusing through the air.

The sun is shining,

the air feels warmer...

Is Spring finally here?

by Mark Kubo

March Sunset

After all that snow today, the skies cleared up with plenty of clouds left for a colorful sunset this evening. We had just finished playing a game of Clue when I went out to the windows to take a look and saw colors that we hadn't seen in some weeks. Grabbing the camera, I rushed out to the Narrows, now at low tide, and the rocks had just enough snow left on them to create interesting patterns going out towards the water.

What Spring...?

The snow's been coming down fairly steady and sometimes quite heavy for much of the day today. Cell phone service has been completely out since around midnight. Anyway, I went out for the weekly minister's coffee at Helse's this morning and grabbed a few photos, and a few more this afternoon.

It looks like Narnia's endless winter...

Anyone familiar with C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe has read about the endless winter of Narnia, thanks (or no thanks?) to the White Witch, where it's always winter but never Christmas. Well, our winter is beginning to feel a bit like that. Although the forecast office no longer has any advisories out for our area, we are seeing large quantities of huge, wet chunks of snow falling. Winter is not giving up without a huge fight, and I'm beginning to wonder where the White Witch of Alaska resides... Now some may say, "But you're in Alaska!" But this is Southeast Alaska, where we're supposed to be getting mostly liquid, not solid, precipitation.

Winter makes a comeback

Since Saturday, the skies have been showing off its blueness, the sun has been peeking through the clouds. The temperatures have warmed up, the snow is thawing, and edges of lawns can be seen where the snow has retreated.

Believing that spring is here and not expecting much more in the way of ice and snow, I swapped out my bicycle wheels yesterday from ones with studded tires to the ones with cyclocross type tires. I went out for a nice ride out and back for about 45 minutes under light showers.

This morning was similar. I rode out to the church to take the trash bin to the street for emptying today. Later on, in early afternoon, I rode out to the Post Office to retrieve today's mail. There was a package for Amy containing shoes and boots. I was afraid I was going to have to call Elise to come pick up the package, but I managed to cram the box with the other pieces of mail into my backpack and return home.

It was only short time after returning that I looked out the window and saw ice pellets raining down. After a few minutes of that, snow started to fall. It started out light, then got heavier and heavier until it was no longer possible to see across the Narrows.

And then just a few minutes later the snow tapered and the sun peeked through the clouds, and the far shore became visible again...


And soon enough, the skies began to clear and show some blue...


This evening, the snow is falling like it was in the first photo -- heavy and blown about by gusty winds. The far shore is nearly hidden again. The Juneau forecast office has issued a snow advisory for much of tomorrow, with 2 to 5 inches possible by the evening tomorrow.

It looks like Winter is giving her one last "hurrah!" before leaving the stage for spring's solo act.

Bible Reading 2007, Week 13

This week's readings comes from Deuteronomy 27-30 and the letter to the Galatians.

After quite a number of weeks in the books of the Law of the Old Testament, we are treated to Galatians where Paul gives his treatise on the proper place of law in a person's spiritual experience and journey. Chapter 5 is the summary of the proper relationships between peoples, God, grace, and law.

Is It Spring Yet?