On Saturday, my friend Chris and I hiked Horn Peak. We are both still recovering. . . Here are some pictures from the top.
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Greetings all, we are back in Colorado now, beginning my last year of seminary. It has been awhile since I have posted (about 3 months actually!) . I am going to try and be better about posting to our blog. For those of you who didn’t know, Sarah, Abby and I spent the winter in Springfield, IL. We made some wonderful friends while there and were able to spend some time with Sarah’s parents who have been home from the mission field.
Last week was the first week of classes here at the seminary and we completed our first class, The Doctrine of God. Dr. Lewis Hill, President of Reformed Discipleship Ministries was our lecturer. It was an excellent study of our Scriptural understanding of who God is, and his plan of redemption.
This week’s course is Pastoral Counselling, led by Dr. Andrew Zeller. Primarily we will be reading through Instruments in the Redeemers Hands, by Paul David Tripp. From what I have read thus far, this is an excellent book that is not only helpful for those who “professionally” counsel, but to any Christian, who takes relationships and discipleship seriously. I have only read the first 3 chapters so far (I should be finished by the end of the week), but already I can see that Dr. Tripp is laying a foundation of who we are in Christ Jesus instead of presenting a “system” on how to counsel people. One of the neat things with this course and this book is that the women at the seminary are also going to go through this book as part of their study this summer.
Well, I think that is all for now, we would love to hear from you.
-Paul
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Some of you might know that I do some small scale web design. Mostly churches and non-profit organizations. My goal is to be able to do more of these kinds of jobs in order to support our family while I am at seminary. If you know of anyone needing a simple website or blog, please contact me and I will see what I can do. Below are some examples of some of the sites that I have worked on:
This website was set up for Grace OPC in Springfield, IL. This is a small congregation that is devoted to the preaching of God’s Word. This is my latest website and it is still a work in progress. More links and pages will probably be added in the near future.
RMPC is a good sized PCA congregation in Tucson, AZ. This church is family oriented and committed to the preaching of God’s Word. This site uses flash for a rotating banner. Also includes drop-down menus and the sermon brower plugin for easy sorting of the mp3 sermon files.
Sangre de Cristo is a small reformed seminary neslted in the mountains of Colorado. The seminary focuses on the original languages an exegesis and preaching of God’s Word. The website design here is actually their blog that was designed to match the existing website.
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It has been a while since I last posted. I have been busy lately with working on my Jonah Project and now working. I started work earlier this month, doing receiving at a hardware superstore, and I have to say that it is a little weird being back in the working in the world again. I had become so accustomed to being around Christians all the time, that being surrounded by non-Christians all day is . . . well. . . different. The thing is, that is where I am called to be right now, as most believers are. We can not isolate ourselves from the world and live like monks. My prayer is that I can show the love of Christ to those around me.
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Our daughter Abby seems to change more and more everyday. Here is a video of Abby starting to “talk.” I guess she really had a lot to say! Her facial expressions are the funniest thing! I think she was listening to everyone talk around here and decided that she needed to also join in.
Enjoy!
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I recently read Eric Redmond’s post on Justin Taylor’s Blog and I commend it to you to read, it really puts things in perspective.
As Christians our response to any election (whether our candidate won or not) is to pray. We need to pray for our President, and the rest of our government. Obama may be the most liberal president that we have had in a long time. He is one of the biggest proponents of abortion that have come to power. Our national sin and shame of abortion will continue under this new administration. We must pray. 1 Timothy 2:1-6, 8 says; “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth . . . I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling” (ESV).
We must pray for President-elect Obama, not that he would come up with policies that we agree with, but ultimately that he would trust in Jesus Christ for his eternal security, because his trusting in Christ is what will have the affect of also changing his heart.
Romans 13 tells us that all authority comes from God. We must remember also that God was not surprised by the outcome of this election. Let us give the government the honor that it is due from God and pray for the leadership in our land.
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The election is just 3 days away. I have been thinking a lot these past few weeks about the implications of this upcoming election. What does this mean for our country, our economy, etc.? The conclusion I have come to is that it does not matter one way or the other what happens. What I mean by that is that God is sovereign over all things and that of course includes our upcoming election. “Our God is in heaven! He does whatever he pleases!” (Psalm 115:3) Our duty then is to vote, but we need to keep in mind that God himself is deciding the outcome. All government is ordained by God. “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” (Romans 13:1). What that means is that we need to be concerned about our country, but we don’t need to be anxious over it. We might disagree with our government, we might not like their policies or the direction they go, but they are still God’s ordained. Our focus instead needs to be on the Kingdom of God and our Lord Jesus Christ, our affections need to be there, not be here in this world. We should not be interested in advocating for political parties, we should be interested in advocating for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who is our true king.
John Piper recently wrote a blog on Desiring God that I think hits it on the head, here is an excerpt (click here for the full article):
“Christians should deal with the world. This world is here to be used. Dealt with. There is no avoiding it. Not to deal with it is to deal with it that way. Not to weed your garden is to cultivate a weedy garden. Not to wear a coat in Minnesota is to freeze—to deal with the cold that way. Not to stop when the light is red is to spend your money on fines or hospital bills and deal with the world that way. We must deal with the world.
But as we deal with it, we don’t give it our fullest attention. We don’t ascribe to the world the greatest status. There are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. We use the world without offering it our whole soul. We may work with all our might when dealing with the world, but the full passions of our heart will be attached to something higher—Godward purposes. We use the world, but not as an end in itself. It is a means. We deal with the world in order to make much of Christ.
So it is with voting. We deal with the system. We deal with the news. We deal with the candidates. We deal with the issues. But we deal with it all as if not dealing with it. It does not have our fullest attention. It is not the great thing in our lives. Christ is. And Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls. So we vote as though not voting.
By all means vote. But remember: “The world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17).”
Let’s vote, but not be anxious about the outcome. Vote as if we are not voting.
As a side note: As we think about the sovereignty of God over the government, we should have an Old Testament perspective. There were good kings in the Old Testament and bad kings, but God is still sovereign and ultimately, our King is Jesus, not matter who is elected on Tuesday.
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This is a nifty guitar tuner that Sarah and I found online. Sarah’s guitar broke a couple of years ago and we were able to fix it. So now it’s back in business. We needed to tune it and found this online. Pretty helpful.
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Greetings all. As a student at Sangre de Cristo Seminary, I am taking Biblical Hebrew this semester. We are using Page H. Kelley’s Biblical Hebrew An Introductory Grammar as our textbook. I use BibleWorks 7, I like to use the vocabulary module that is built into the program (I used it, and still use it for Greek). I could not find anyone else that had created a Hebrew vocabulary module for this textbook, so I created my own and I would like to share it with anyone who is interested in it. Click here to download the file. I created the file for BibleWorks 7, so I don’t know if it will work for earlier versions or not. Please let me know if you find any mistakes.
Blessings,
Paul
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Greetings all, sorry it has been so long since my last entry, it has been crazy busy around here. Abby is 
getting HUGE. It’s amazing how quickly she is growing. She is nearly 4 months old. She has started smiling and laughing, as well as recognizing people. Every stage is really neat! Also, we have had a lot of visitors this summer. Sarah’s mom came out for a month, my parents came out, and some of our friends from Tucson, Jeff, Beth, and Mary also came to visit! This is the last week of class for the semester. We had some really interesting classes, and lots of reading! This week is Biblical Ethics. I have been fully engrossed in The Ten Commandments by J. Douma (A Dutch Reformed author), Principles of Conduct by John Murray (excellent book), and An Introduction to Biblical Ethics by Robertson McQuilkin (a good introduction to the subject). This semester, I would have to say that my favorite class was Church History. I enjoyed this class not only because I love history, and the professor was very good, but also because I love learning about those of faith that came before us. This was the 3rd section of the class, so it covered the from Reformation to the present day.
Additionally, we are planning to go to Springfield, IL for the spring this year. In preparation for this, we bought a trailer. . .The plan is to take some of our furniture with us to Springfield, but also be able to use it to move when I graduate and not have to rent anything. It’s a pretty sweet trailer (as cargo trailer’s go). We got a really good deal on it, and will be able to haul a lot of stuff.
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Monday, Mar 15
Partly Cloudy
Currently: 48˚F
Feels Like: 46˚ F
Hi: N/A˚, Lo: 22˚
weather feed courtesy of weather.com - thanks!