The elements of preaching, as summed up by William Perkins in 1592:¹

Preaching involves:

1. Reading the text clearly from the canonical Scriptures.
2. Explaining the meaning of it, once it has been read, in the light of the Scriptures themselves.
3. Gathering a few profitable points of doctrine from the natural sense of the passage.
4. If the preacher is suitably gifted, applying the doctrines thus explained to the life and practice of the congregation in straightforward, plain speech.

The heart of the matter is this:

Here’s the idea.

1. You want to read your Bible in roughly a year. Or at least you want to make steady progress.
2. You don’t like being tied to a specific reading plan. You like the flexibility to pick what book to read next.
3. You want to make sure you actually do read through the whole Bible. Without a plan, it is easy to end up rotating through your favorite books and avoid others longer than you realize.

If that sounds like you, I have two strategies that may help. I’ve been using one of these for a couple years now, and the other is fairly recent.

Here’s a formula you can use to create a calculated field in Tableau for converting strings in the format of .NET TimeSpan values to a total number of seconds.

I’ve been studying through Zephaniah recently, prompted by the recently released ESV Expository Commentary (Volume 7): Daniel–Malachi. The commentary on Zephaniah is written by Jason DeRouchie who I’ve been following since his How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament, which is fantastic.

Aside: Andy Naselli’s companion volume, How to Understand and Apply the New Testament, is equally fantastic. I read it first and I’m still working through DeRouchie’s volume.

I recently discovered an excellent narration of the Greek New Testament. It is freely available for download and streaming; the links are below.

• Stream on YouTube with text that follows the audio
• Download the MP3s
• Read along at Biblia.com

Vincent van Gogh - The Letters is an amazing archive of documents. Searchable, with facsimiles, translations, and including even the original sketches. Van Gogh seems like a fascinating person and the letters contain some gems.

Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.

Justice has been a recurring theme that stands out to me as I read the Bible. This video from The Bible Project is really helpful to understand the biblical themes righteousness and justice.

Humans are set apart from all other creatures as the image of God… This identity is the bedrock of the Bible’s view of justice. All humans are equal before God and have the right to be treated with dignity and fairness, no matter who you are.

My desire is to think clearly about concepts and then communicate them intuitively to others. I am particularly interested in the ideas and advancements that affect our lives spiritually and emotionally.

—Jonathan Collins (co-founder of The Bible Project), http://www.jonpdx.com/

This post is as much for me as it is for you. I write a lot of PowerShell scripts and they tend to follow a certain pattern. This is my personal boilerplate for PowerShell scripts.

Hundreds of verses forgotten. Yep, that’s what happen to me. I joined up with our church’s Bible Quiz team as a teen and memorized hundreds of verses for competition. Looking back, it is one of my favorite things I did growing up. Unfortunately, that was many years ago and with little practice comes much forgetfulness.