"Stacey was trying to figure out a way to communicate something along the lines of 'my hero' without sounding too gooby. She like Keith about as much as Keith liked Mindy, and knew she was a little behind Mindy in a race that Mindy wasn't even in, and so she had to play it cool. So she was silent and just looked on admiringly" (Evangellyfish, p. 155).

"Jesus does not say that we are to rip out the chief seats in the synagogues, but rather how to relate to them. He does not teach us to get rid of seats of honor at banquets -- He teaches us how to get into them. He does not say that it is wrong to want to be great in the kingdom of heaven. He shows us how to become great in the kingdom of heaven. The glorious thing is that His method of doing this (becoming the servant of all) is a great way of removing the toxins of selfishness that will almost certainly be corrupting our ambition" (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 85).

"The preacher should by all means avoid ultraism . . . Not everything should be avoided which is often grossly abused . . . The world is full of great and dreadful evils, which may well excite both grief and indignation, and which call loudly for correction; but one evil is not to be cured by another" (Broadus, Preparation and Delivery, pp. 104-105).

My latest for Real Clear Religion is now up, which you can check out here. And when going there in the future (without linkage), you will want dot org, not dot com.

Introduction
This chapter marks the beginning of civil war in Israel. There had been strains and tensions before, but now it breaks out into open hostilities. As we will see, there are noble men on both sides, and scoundrels on both sides. Life is not always a simple white hats/black hats affair.
 
The Text:
“And it came to pass after this, that David inquired of the Lord, saying, Shall I go up into any of the cities of Judah? And the Lord said unto him, Go up. And David said, Whither shall I go up? And he said, Unto Hebron . . .” (2 Sam. 1:1-32).
 
Summary of the Text:
Saul had fallen because he would not obey the Lord, or in other instances, inquire of Him. With Saul out of the picture, David begins by humbly seeking the Lord’s will for his movements (v. 1). Go to Hebron, God tells him. So David moved there with his family (v. 2). All the men who had been with him in Ziklag, and their families, moved with him to Hebron (v. 3). The men of Judah, David’s tribe, came and anointed him king there (v. 4). Immediately after this, David reaches out to the courageous men of Jabesh-gilead (vv. 4b-7), the men who had buried Saul. In the meantime, Abner brought Ish-bosheth to a place east of the Jordan called Mahanaim, and made him king there (apparently gradually) over the northern tribes (vv. 8-9). We then have a comparison of the reign of Ish-bosheth and David (vv. 10-11).

Self-deception is hard to understand, and even harder to see. Think for a moment about what self-deception involves. You have to be cunning enough to tell yourself a lie, and you have to gullible enough to believe it. How can that happen? How can one part of you pull the wool over the eyes of another part of you?

When someone calls you on it, you have to make deaf the part of you that knows their rebuke to be true, and you have to make the gullible you blink uncomprehendingly, perhaps with tears in those eyes. You have to manage the whole enterprise most carefully, which means the managerial you has to be in on the secret, and yet allow the managerial you to be somewhat sincere when protesting your innocence. This is what self-deception involves. You have to lie to you, and you have to buy it, and then you have to walk away from that encounter grateful that you didn’t ask too many questions. This is self-deception.

Our corporate participation in this meal, together with all other saints in the world, is a corporate participation in one person, the Lord Jesus. This means, obviously, that He is no ordinary person, but rather is an Adam.

Adam was a public person—that is, we were in him when he sinned. His sin was ours, and was justly reckoned to us. But the last Adam is also a public person—we believers were in Him, and were justly represented in Him, when He refused sin. His obedience was ours, and was justly reckoned or imputed to us.

If I may, I would like to urge all Christians interested in the future of education reform to continue their hot pursuit of said reform, but not to do so like a kitten pursuing a laser pointer dot on the rug.

We live in exciting pedagogical times, and the arrival of many more options in distance learning via the Internet really is exciting -- and promising. At the same time, people are still the same as they always were, and one of the things that people have always done with new technologies is draw false inferences. Sometimes the next big thing isn't, as those with vintage 8-track collections might be able to tell you.

First adapters can be visionaries or idiots, and it is sometimes hard to tell. I say all this as a preface to some cautionary notes about our newest boom town in education. And please keep in mind that I am saying all this, not as a critic, but as a participant. Okay, if you want, you could make that a participating critic, or a critical participant.

In any case, in the middle of this start-up educational reformation, there is a lot of nonsense being spouted about the history of education, and we are unlikely to get the future right if we insist on getting the past all wrong. One of the ways to tell the visionaries from the chumps is to look carefully at how carefully connected to the past it all is.

Southwest Airlines burst onto the scene the way it did because it was not really competing with the established airlines. Their business model was to compete with the Greyhound bus -- to go after a clientele that had never flown before. The explosion of e-readers is turning out not to be the competitor of the book, but rather of the paperback. And . . . wait for it . . . distance learning of our modern, souped-up variety competes, not with genuine schools, but rather with libraries.

"This part of town had their crazy pastors too, but they mainly operated out of storefronts with names like Knee Deep in Glory Gospel Center. And some of their pastors had tattoos, but these were tattoos that said, 'I was in the Navy once, before I met Jesus,' instead of the uptown ecclesiastical version that said, 'I am desperate to accessorize my iPad'" (Evangellyfish, pp. 150-151).

"For about three centuries, we have been taught (by the devil, or someone very much like him) that grime is more 'authentic' than being clean, being disheveled is more real than being put together, and so on. Like most lies of this nature, the destructive impact of it falls most heavily on women . . . many young women have been robbed of their glory" (For a Glory and a Covering, pp. 84-85).