BibleMesh, like Bible college, without Student Loans

by Sunny on June 24, 2010

An Antebellum era (pre-civil war) family Bible...
Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever wanted to go to seminary or take some time to seriously study the Bible?  Have you ever wished you had a grasp on Biblical events and their correlation with the timeline of history or understood how ancient geography matches up with the modern map?  I have had a chance to preview the beta version of the new online Bible study tool, BibleMesh, and I am really excited about it going live (available June 2010 according to the website).

This well organized tool offers the equipment for anyone to study on a Bible scholar level with everything from multi-media presentations (video, pictures, charts, graphs), to group discussions (you can create your own group or join an existing one), to testing for comprehension and  understanding of what you have studied.   All the benefits of a college level course without the student loans!

The program has the Bible divided into 7 major Eras from  Creation to the Church.  You can join groups based on Bible era, common interests (i.e. end times theology), IRL groups (i.e. sunday school, family Bible study).  So far, the majority of groups are open to anyone who wants to join.  I expect that when the program goes live there will be more closed or membership approval required groups showing up.  Within the groups, you can have discussions, share photos, share documents and resources, create your own courses, and generally relate with other members of the group.

Personally, I am most excited about studying how Biblical history interweaves with world history.  I was taught history in somewhat of a piecemeal fashion.  We studied the history of the different continents, but I don’t have a good grasp of how those histories overlap one another, and even less of a grasp of how history overlaps the Bible.  What was the Roman Empire doing during Jesus’ life? Trying to maintain peace and avoid war by agreeing not to expand its borders.  How did the Roman empire influence the Bible story? Persecution led to the martyrdom of the apostles and the scattering of Christian believers.  With the help of the Roman infrastructure of roads, Christians scattered across the known world to avoid persecution, taking the gospel wherever they went.

BibleMesh is going to be a great tool for digging deeper into God’s story and understanding it better.  To know God and make Him known.

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Matthew 22:37-38: Do I Really Love God?

by Sunny on June 10, 2010

" Without your love, a love I need, it’s ...
Image by Parvin ?( OFF for a while ) via Flickr

Jesus replied:  ”love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.

Matthew 22: 37-38

What does it mean to love the Lord this way?  How do I know I love God?

I have been married long enough to know that Love isn’t just the passionate romantic high that Hollywood likes to show as true love in the movies.  Lasting love is more about walking side-by-side day in and day out.  Doing the things that I know will make him (both God and my husband) happy.  When we see this kind of love and unselfishness in the movies, it is being mocked as outdated or unrealistic (e.g. The Stepford Wives).

From the beginning of creation, in the Garden of Eden, God didn’t obedience out of necessity.  He gave Adam and Eve the choice to love Him and trust Him and obey Him or to reject him and eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Bible defines loving God as obeying Him.

Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.

–John 14:21

This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome.

–1 John 5:3

This is probably what James was talking about in James 2:17 when he said, “Faith without action is dead.”

If loving God means obeying His commands, I know that I do not love God as well as I should, and I never can love God as well as He deserves. This is where God’s grace and Jesus’ sacrifice come into play.  Even though Jesus has paid the price, and I don’t have to earn eternal life, I obey God’s commands as best I know how because I love Him.  I study to learn and understand His commands because i want to become more and more like Jesus.

The more I love God, the more I obey God, the more I realize my own sinfulness, the more I long for the day when I can love Him perfectly.

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Character and the Prodigal

June 9, 2010

Image by tore_urnes via Flickr Each day that I walk with Christ, God is building my character for the next assignment.  Each small assignment is preparation for the next. After ~24 years as a Christian, I don’t feel like I have built the character that I should have by now.  I am sure that some [...]

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Every Knee Shall Bow

October 2, 2009

Therefore God also has highly exalted him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven , and those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the [...]

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The Door, the Gardener, and God.

September 29, 2009

In John 10:7-10 Jesus describes himself as “the door.”  I have been a Christian for over 22 years and I have never considered what it means for Jesus to be the door! I’ve read those verses and thought, “Oh that’s a nice little visual.  A wall and a door.” Before Jesus lived a sinless life [...]

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After God’s Heart

September 21, 2009

My life has been so full of changes of the past year.  There is nothing like becoming a Mama that will bring a woman to her knees in prayer.  As he is growing into a toddler I find mysel praying for patience and wisdom and a hundered other virtues that I thought I had in [...]

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It starts with the Bible

January 2, 2009

In a 2006 survey conducted by The Barna Research Group, 47% of professing Christians read the Bible during a typical week.   Since 1988, that number has varied between 31-47%. We say that we believe that the Bible is the word of God and a Christians guide to living right, but the vast majority of us forget to [...]

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Do you live like you say you believe

January 1, 2009

What if you really believed that what you say you believe was really real?  How would you change the way you live day to day? That’s the question I’ll be asking myself this year (and for the rest of my life).

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John 3:10-21 With much wisdom

June 19, 2008

With much wisdom comes much folly.  The Pharisees had taken their religious training and used it to identify who was not really a part of the “club.”  The thought that they understood what God was about and why YHWH would send a Messiah (to reward the faithful and condemn the unfaithful).  Jesus was doing His [...]

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John 3:1-10 Right actions are not enough

June 11, 2008

“Rabbi, We know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” When Nicodemus said this, was he speaking for all the Pharisees?  What if they recognized that Jesus was from God and still plotted against him?  They weren’t just angry [...]

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