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My father, known to his grandchildren as “Poppop”, was known for his fairly quick and somewhat acerbic wit. He was also a pragmatist (wonder who inherited some of those characteristics!)

An example of his somewhat unusual humour was when he bought a mobile phone at around age 80 and then proceeded to try to understand the instructions as they related to the phone in front of him. He annotated one page of the instructions with various questions as to “where?”, “what?” and “which?” because the physical phone button titles didn’t correspond to the titles in the instructions:

This is the second post looking at some of the detail of studying God’s Word edited by John B Job. The original post is here, and the first more detailed post is here.

This chapter is written by Jean Rutherford who, early in the chapter writes:

It is our minds, as well as spirit and will, which are needed in analysis of any Biblical passage. Lack of spiritual life leads to dry academic discussion; lack of mental discipline and hard thinking leads to ‘beautiful thoughts’ floating in a void and to an unbalanced view of God’s truth; lack of will makes the whole operation sterile, since the object of Bible study is to help us to discern God’s will and His purpose for us, and then to obey Him.

We were informed this evening that at approximately 3:30 this afternoon our first grandchild, Micah Theodore, arrived.

Well done Emma and Ben, and thank you Lord for the safe arrival.

This is the first post looking at some of the detail of studying God’s Word edited by John B Job that I first mentioned a couple of posts ago.

The chapter (written by Laurence Porter) by way of introduction, compares devotional Bible reading with Bible study and states the following:

• Studying the Bible is complementary with and not an alternative to devotional reading.
• Thorough Bible study can enrich and inform devotional reading.
• The corollary is equally true - devotional reading can extend and reinforce the benefits of Bible study.

Regarding book study Laurence makes the following observations:

Shod Feet – Ephesians 6:15

Spiritual Armour

Around a month ago we commenced a series looking at the Holy Spirit. In between there were some special services for NAIDOC week and Mark resumed this series two weeks ago. At that time he began looking at the armour of God from Ephesians 6.

The path we’ve come down is that the Holy Spirit is within us to teach and equip and counsel and remind and empower and gift. A deal of that equipping and empowering is because we are in a war, a spiritual war. To be honest there are battles that we are often oblivious to and ill-prepared for.

A month-or-so ago I came across a book at a second hand bookshop called studying God’s Word edited by John B Job.

It was published by IVP over 45 years ago¹ and so the style is a little dated. Despite that, the content is helpful. It covers different ways or methods of, not surprisingly, studying God’s Word. Some of these methods include analysing a book of the Bible; analysing a passage or chapter; character and background studies; word studies and theme studies.

[The following is the text of a sermon preached in our church on Sunday 30th June 2019]

Holy Spirit: A Pencil Sketch Biography

Studies and Masterpieces

Good morning and welcome to our class in Australian Art 1943-1944.

For our first slide ¹ I’d refer you to this controversial work from 1943.

What can you tell me about the title of the work, the name of the artist, the size of the work, what media was used, the style of the work, the nature of the controversy surrounding it or indeed something about the subject?

As I’ve written about previously, I’ve maintained¹ a number of websites or blogs over the years. After some fiddling over the past few days I have finally copied/migrated posts from two previous blogs “adventures in suburbia” (2006-2008) and “inelegant sufficiency” (2010-2011) to this site. They have been set up with their own categories (Adventures in Suburbia and Inelegant Sufficiency) but their old tags or categories have been combined with the tags of the more recent content.

This blog began a little over two years ago. In that time it has been created/managed/manifested firstly by Hugo, then by Wordpress, then by HTMLy, and now back to Hugo.

I worked out that my first round with Hugo was 9 months (May 2017 to Feb 2018), then 7 months on Wordpress (Mar to Sep 2018) and 8 months in HTMLy (Oct 2018 to May 2019).

Why change? I have different thoughts about ease of use, aesthetics, flat file vs database and ease of access/update. I would prefer some flat file/text based system. I value ease of use. I want the blog to be pleasing to look at. I want the information I choose to be front and centre of the site. Each of those platforms has offered different measures of that criteria.

Over recent weeks I’ve been fiddling to install Debian running Openbox on a few computers. The reason is that I have three notebooks including a 32-bit machine that is probably 10+ years old, a 64-bit machine that would be around the same and even my everyday machine is closing in on 7 years.

I had been running Manjaro on these machines but Manjaro dropped official support for 32 bit machines a number of months ago. I wanted to opt for a new distro for all machines that offers 32 bit support, a solid pedigree and some stability. I opted for Debian.