DIGITAL PREACHER

Jots of stuff for future messages

[digitalpreacher]

My new book is out!

“After writing a book that affirmed science on a level that made many Christians uncomfortable, Pastor Bradley becomes an enigma by writing a book that affirms the supernatural on a level that makes many Christians uncomfortable. The Rush and the Rest is the product of a decade worth of studying and practicing the supernatural ways of the Holy Spirit. Bradley aims to take us deeper into the Scriptures than we have ever gone before with this one-part academic and one-part spiritual work. Regardless of where you are on the Christian journey, this book is bound to have something fresh for you.”

[digitalpreacher]

The Secret of a Videogame Sensation? Joy - The Wall Street Journal

[digitalpreacher]

In the US, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, study concludes - CNBC

[digitalpreacher]

Cheers Festering

Season 8 episode 12 where Sam makes stuff up in his head as to how he thinks someone will act and then they don’t be he still acts like they were in his head

[digitalpreacher]

Noise isn’t just annoying — it wrecks our hearing - Vox

[digitalpreacher]

How to Spot and Overcome Your Hidden Weaknesses - The New York Times

[digitalpreacher]

Indie Dev Spent $140,000 To Make New Game, Has Made $0 So Far - GameSpot

[digitalpreacher]

Every single aspect of our emotions and behavior that do not conform to the truth of who we are in Christ is due to a Matrix neurochip. Under the right triggers, we vividly experience as real things that are not real. With all five senses we mentally experience lies as though they were truth. The neurologically generated virtual world of our minds is out of sync with the real world. Hence our actual experience of ourselves—and of God and our world—is out of sync with truth. Consequently, our emotions and behaviors are out of sync with the emotions and behaviors that could and should characterize a healthy human being, let alone a Spirit-filled child of God.

To the extent that we have Matrix neurochips in our brains, we are robots in service to whomever and whatever programmed and installed the neurochips. Consciously, we think we are free, but to this degree we are not. For remember: whoever controls the neurons controls the life.

Greg Boyd

Escaping the Matrix

[digitalpreacher]

"We still “hide our faces” from the cross and “esteem it not.” It has always been difficult for the church to hold on to the cross at its center. For one thing, it was a serious insult to aesthetics. Martin Hengel writes that “the Roman world was largely unanimous that crucifixion was a horrific, disgusting business.… The relative scarcity of references to crucifixions in antiquity … are [sic] less a historical problem than an aesthetic one.… Crucifixion was widespread and frequent, above all in Roman times, but the cultured literary world wanted to have nothing to do with it, and as a rule kept quiet about it.” More seriously, the early church was threatened by far worse consequences than the contempt of the fastidious. During the first three centuries, the cross was not the sign in which the emperor conquered. It did not adorn medals and honors. It was not bejeweled, enameled, or worked in precious metal. It was a sign of contradiction and scandal, which quite often meant exile or death for those who adhered to the way of the crucified One."

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion

[digitalpreacher]

"As Joel Green describes it, “Executed publicly, situated at a major crossroads or on a well-trafficked artery, devoid of clothing, left to be eaten by birds and beasts, victims of crucifixion were subject to optimal, unmitigated, vicious ridicule.”"

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion

[digitalpreacher]

"Crucifixion was specifically designed to be the ultimate insult to personal dignity, the last word in humiliating and dehumanizing treatment. Degradation was the whole point"

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion

[digitalpreacher]

"Susan Sontag, who suffered for years from the cancer that eventually killed her, wrote this: “It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades"

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion

[digitalpreacher]

"however, the review board’s assessment offers us an opportunity to focus on the description of the cross as a “religious symbol.” Most people would not think twice about such a definition. It would not even occur to most Christians to question it. Yet at the most fundamental level—and this can’t be emphasized too strongly—the cross is in no way “religious.” The cross is by a very long way the most irreligious object ever to find its way into the heart of faith. J. Christiaan Beker refers to it as “this most nonreligious and horrendous feature of the Gospel.”"

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion

[digitalpreacher]

"the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance."

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion

[digitalpreacher]

"Do we meet the risen Lord in the Lord’s Supper? Absolutely. Is the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper a liturgy of the resurrection? Absolutely. But the resurrection did not occur independently of the crucifixion. The people who come forward to receive the sacrament are not a shining band of perfected saints—not yet. It is therefore of great importance, ethically as well as theologically, to recognize that there is no secure place of permanent rest in this world for the pilgrim people of God whose calling is to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26)."

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion

[digitalpreacher]

"The reason Paul insisted on the centrality of the cross in polemical terms was that the Corinthian Christians wanted to pass over it altogether. This tendency persists in the American church today. H. Richard Niebuhr put it unforgettably in The Kingdom of God in America: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” When this happens, we may have religiosity, we may have uplift, we may have spirituality, but we do not have Christianity."

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion

[digitalpreacher]

"An almost exclusive emphasis on the incarnation diminishes the cross as though it were a minor theme. On the contrary, the two stand or fall together. No Anglican has written more eloquently about this than Kenneth Leech, a radical incarnationalist. In his book The Eye of the Storm, Leech tells how he learned that “creation-centered, incarnational, sacramental religion” in and of itself was not only insufficient but downright dangerous, because it left no room for judgment, prophecy, struggle, or redemption. It was precisely such a religion that provided the spiritual soil for Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin, and provides it for the oppressive regimes of today. Another book by Leech, We Preach Christ Crucified, has a section aptly called “The Scandal of Incarnation and Passion,” in which he writes, “Bethlehem and Calvary, crib and cross, stand together.”"

Fleming Rutledge The Crucifixion