Moments in Time

Interesting Stuff from Scott Anderson

A Bible reading plan for those who don't like Bible Reading Plans.

[Note: This post is not a comprehensive unpacking of the spiritual discipline of Bible reading. Nor does it assume that Bible reading is the sum total of one's devotional experience. This post simply addresses one aspect of the not-sacrosanct-but-helpful goal of reading through the Bible in a year.]

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I'm thankful for the free access I have to God's word. And I'm also thankful for the many helps that people have developed to encourage us to read the Bible. I've used these repeatedly through the years and highly recommend them.

However, in my own life, I have sometimes become prisoner to [insert the name of your favorite Bible Reading Plan here]. Invariably, I find myself "getting behind" in my reading, and as the empty check-boxes begin to pile-up, they begin to wield a strange, demotivating, guilt-inducing power.

Maybe you've felt something similar? Maybe you've had conversations in which you find yourself explaining that, "I'm reading through the Bible this year. I use the [insert the name of your favorite Bible Reading Plan here], but I'm really behind right now. I hope to catch-up this weekend when I have more time."

Of course, the weekend arrives and you find eight, empty check-boxes staring at you for Saturday and Sunday which are compounded in their weird ability to demotivate you because of the smattering of other unchecked boxes on your chart from previous weeks. (Who would have thought that little white boxes held such power!)

We often end-up "skipping" days by checking-off boxes we didn't read, just to stop the little voices inside our heads. We eventually come to the end of a year with a deflated sense that we . . . well . . . sort-of-maybe-kind-of-almost read through the entire Bible in a year.

Sometimes, we just need a change. Yet, we don't want to give up on the idea of having a plan. So here's a thought: this year, plan to focus on time instead of quantity of content.

Consider this:

I'm told that the ESV translation of the Bible contains a little over 757,000 words (about 788,000 in the KJV).

Assuming that you read an average of 200 words per minute for comprehension (which is below national averages), it would take you 3785 minutes (63 hours) to read the Bible from cover-to-cover.

So, if your New Year's resolution is to read the Bible once this year from cover-to-cover (Genesis through Revelation), that means you would need to read your Bible a mere 10 minutes and 37 seconds per day. You can do this!
 
You can also do the rest of the math:

- Want to read through the Bible twice this year? You can! Just spend about 20 minutes per day reading your Bible.

- Want to read through the Bible three time this year? You can! Just spend about 30 minutes per day reading your Bible.

- How about six times this year? You can! Just spend about an hour a per day reading your Bible.

One of the practical benefits of approaching your Bible reading this way is this: when you near the end of the year, you'll know exactly how much you haven't yet read. (Hint: It'll be everything to the right of your bookmark!)

This, in turn, provides positive motivation for doing what it takes to get through to the back cover. ("I can do this! I want to do this. God-helping me, I'm going to do this. I'm going to read XX minutes longer today in order to help reach the goal.")

So for some of you, maybe it's worth trying something different this year.

Got a Bible? Got a bookmark? Got 10 minutes? Then you, too, can read-through-the-Bible this year.

Heartening update on my wife's health.

Pun intended!   The cardiologist called with test results and explained that she will NOT have to have surgery next week! She has seen a (miraculous?) drop in one metric that the doctors consider "highly unusual" such that they don't want to risk surgery, but instead want to observe things for awhile longer. This is really great news for our family and is timely, too: tomorrow it will have been two years to the day that she had heart failure. Jenn is not out-of-the-woods yet, but the Lord seems to be slowly providing the healing we have so often prayed and longed for. Please rejoice with us, offering thanks to the Father and continued prayer for Jenn. Thank you! Scott

The Hardest Prayer to Pray

Whatever the issue, in whatever area we need to be “wisdom-stretched,” we should be confessing our blind spots, and asking God to have mercy on us.

We should be eager for God to tell us to do something which, for us, is radical.

If we are praying, “Lord, anything but that . . .” we need to pray for the courage to drop the last two words.

We need to pray, simply, directly, and honestly . . . “Lord, anything.”

- Douglas Wilson

Super Encouraging Update on My Wife

Jennifer and I just got back from the surgeon's office, and we're still kind of blown away by the news: Her Ejection Fraction has improved and the PVCs (irregular beats) have decreased!

This is a huge (and unexpected!) step in the right direction. While my wife is not "well" or "cured" (the doctor was careful not to use those words), she is manifesting encouraging signs that the Lord is providing healing.

Her Ejection Fraction, which dropped to 20% right after she originally experienced heart failure, had previously plateaued at about 40%. Today, it is in the low-range of 'normal' at 55-60%!

Even more surprising: her PVCs have dramatically reduced--from 45,000 per day down to about 4000 per day. Though PVCs can fluctuate day-to-day, this is a significant reduction and would seem to indicate that the ablation surgery back in January may have been more successful than our surgeon originally thought.

We rejoice in all of this good news. It is some of the most significant improvement we've seen since heart failure hit in October 2009. And the roadmap ahead is now much clearer. The doctor wants Jenn to dial-back on her medications to "see what happens." We'll have more testing in April and May in order to get a new benchmark.

Throughout this entire ordeal we have found tremendous comfort in the reality of God's sovereignty: Jennifer's heart will continue to beat if God ordains it so--just like your heart and my heart. We are all under his gracious, wise, sovereign care. And we live before his face each moment of our lives.

Thank you for your prayers. We continue to be strengthened by them. And please do continue to pray--for complete healing and for increased faith.

With deep thankfulness,

Scott & Jennifer

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Dads Don't Look for Excuses to Say No.

From Doug Wilson (@douglaswils), "Fatherhood Gruel" 

What are fathers called to?

  • Fathers give. 
  • Fathers protect.
  • Fathers bestow.
  • Fathers yearn and long for the good of their children.
  • Fathers delight.
  • Fathers sacrifice.
  • Fathers are jovial and open-handed.
  • Fathers create abundance, and if lean times come they take the leanest portion themselves and create a sense of gratitude and abundance for the rest.
  • Fathers love birthdays and Christmas because it provides them with yet another excuse to give some more to the kids.

When fathers say no, as good fathers do from time to time, it is only because they are giving a more subtle gift, one that is a bit more complicated than a cookie. They must include among their gifts things like self-control and discipline and a work ethic, but they are giving these things, not taking something else away just for the sake of taking.

Fathers are not looking for excuses to say no. Their default mode is not no.

When Everything You Hear Is Right, but It Comes Out All Wrong

From Fred Sanders (@FredFredSanders)

The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything 

"When evangelicalism wanes into an anemic condition, as it sadly has in recent decades, it happens in this way: the points of emphasis (Bible, cross, conversion, heaven) are isolated from the main body of Christian truth and handled as if they are the whole story rather than the key points. Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its own point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! The cross! The cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist. The rest of the matrix matters: the death of Jesus is salvation partly because of the life he lived before it, and certainly because of the new life he lived after it, and above all because of the eternal background in which he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. You do not need to say all of those things at all times, but you need to have a felt sense of their force behind the things you do say. When that felt sense is not present, or is not somehow communicated to the next generation, emphatic evangelicalism becomes reductionist evangelicalism.

 

People who grow up under the influence of reductionist evangelicalism suffer, understandably, from some pretty perplexing disorientation. They are raised on “Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven” as the whole Christian message, and they sense that there must be more than that. They catch a glimpse of this ‘more’ in Scripture but aren’t sure where it belongs. They hear it in hymns, but it is drowned out by the repetition of the familiar. They find extended discussions of it in older authors, but those very authors also reinforce what they’ve been surrounded by all along: that the most important things in the Christian message are Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven. Inside of reductionist evangelicalism, everything you hear is right, but somehow it comes out all wrong.

 

That is because when emphatic evangelicalism degenerates into reductionist evangelicalism, it still has the emphasis right, but has been reduced to nothing but emphasis. When a message is all emphasis, everything is equally important and you are always shouting."

 

A Song Text by John Piper (with music)

Today, the guys over at the Of First Importance blog reproduced a song text that John Piper wrote back in 2004. It was based on a passage of Scripture that John was preaching through at the time: Romans 12:7-8.

Piper's poem is a powerful exhortation to become, in all of our service toward others, Christ-cherishing lovers of mercy.

I'm not sure how I came by the audio file below. Someone must have sent it to me. All I know is that it's by Kevin Potherican (and friends?), and, in my opinion, it weds a nice melody to Piper's lyrics.

"With Mercy Make Me Free"
(download)

O Jesus, take my bent away
For thinking much of me,
And kill my pride, and from this day
With mercy make me free.

O Jesus, grant the gift to see
The treasure that you are,
And as the night eclipses me,
O be my Morning Star.

And now if I should serve, or lead,
Or give, or mercy show,
O Jesus, let my love be freed,
And like a river flow.

O Jesus, be the treasure of
My heart and all I do,
And may the river of my love
Alone make much of you.

Words by John Piper
© 2004 John Piper

 

Post-surgery Update on My Wife

Friends,

(Please feel free to share this with others as you see fit).

Jenn is out of surgery and in Recovery resting. She said she is not in much pain, just sore and stiff from being on her back all day. She is a bit groggy from some of the sedatives that they gave her near the end of the surgery. (For most of the surgery she was under minimal sedation, and not anesthetic, because they wanted her heart to "misbehave" so that they could clearly see the areas that needed treatment.) The Lord gave her much grace during the whole procedure. The doctor noted specifically that she did great.

In terms of the results of the surgery, after five hours of working on Jenn, the doctor explained that the results are not what he had hoped; "mixed" is the word he used. Apparently some of the places that needed treatment were in an area of the heart which was very difficult to reach. He noted that her situation is extremely rare: maybe three out of 100 people who have this condition have PVCs in the area of the heart that she does. Additionally, it appears that some of the PVCs are actually running along the outside of the heart (which requires a different type of procedure). Even in the time he was briefing me after the surgery, they were seeing irregular electrical behavior almost comparable to her pre-surgery levels.

While this is pretty discouraging (even for our doctor, "I did my best. 97% of the time this would have cured you."), we have only thanks to the Lord for sustaining Jenn and for giving our cardiologist tremendous wisdom in how he approached this whole procedure, doing what he could to eliminate the problem areas while not risking permanent heart-tissue damage or worse. This is the kindness of God, on both Jenn and the doctor. And we give thanks.

Jenn and I prayed Psalm 116 together last night. Verse seven of that chapter rings powerfully true in our hearts.

Thank you for all your prayers and encouragement. Please keep praying for Jennifer, for a good recovery with no complications. And please keep praying for a miraculous, complete healing. The Lord is able!

Scott Anderson

Please Pray for My Wife's Surgery

Friends,

As many of you know, my wife, Jennifer, will undergo a surgical procedure on Monday, January 23 that we hope will reduce (or eliminate!) the irregular heartbeats that she has experienced since suffering heart failure in October 2009. She will be in pre-op from 6-8am, then in surgery until 1 or 2pm, and then she'll be under 3-4 hours of observation. If all goes well, she will come home later that night.

The procedure is called an ablation (you can learn more about it here and here). They tell us it is more on the 'minor' side of the spectrum when it comes to heart-related surgeries. However, there are significant risks--risks which are increased due to Jenn's existing cardio myopathy (her heart functions remains at only 40%).

So, we would very much covet your prayers:

- For more faith and deeper confidence in God.
- For peace and a quiet heart. 
- For wisdom and skill for the doctors and nurses who will work on Jenn.
- For an effective surgery and quick recovery for Jenn.
- For complete healing of the underlying heart problem that is causing her cardio myopathy.
- For the Lord to sanctify us through this gift of suffering.

Thanks to the many of you who've shared scriptures and other encouragement with us. We are greatly heartened by this. It's a tremendous means of grace to us.

Trusting in the One who said, I am the Resurrection and the Life,

Scott Anderson

"You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock." (Is. 26:3-4)

Prayer Request for My Wife

As most of you know, the situation** with my wife's heart is such that we will be pursuing a surgical option to try to correct the 45K+ irregular heart beats that she is having each day (in addition to her cardiomyopathy). The big prayer request now is simply that space would open up on the hospital's calendar. Both the electrophysiologist and my wife's cardiologist feel like getting this surgery done sooner than later is important. But right now, the hospital (specifically the room inside the hospital where they do this procedure) is all booked up.

The doctors are hopeful about this procedure. The surgery might not fix everything (though it should take care of the PVCs), but the doctors have told us flat-out that she will not get better (barring a miracle) without this surgery. 

So pray with us, both for the miracle of healing for Jenn's heart as well as the minor miracle of an open slot for surgery. And pray that we would find joy amidst this continued trial during this Christmas season.

Thank you.

** For those unfamiliar with my wife's situation, simply scroll back through my blog entries (I don't have very many!) and you can read about what's been going on. Each blog entry about her heart is clearly titled that way. (You can start here.) The short version? Just over a year ago, Jennifer suffered catastrophic heart failure. We've been dealing with it ever since. All by grace.