The Southern Baptist Convention began in Augusta, Georgia, 200 years ago. We are celebrating that bicentennial at this year’s Georgia Baptist Convention held in, appropriately and obviously, Augusta.
I always try to make it in time for the Preaching Conference on Monday afternoon. In a three hour meeting we heard four sermons with a little bit of praise & worship in between each speaker. The Preaching Conference featured three pastors from Georgia and one from Florida that I really enjoyed; Brad Whit, Jeff Crook, Dennis Watson and Zach Terry. Then in the evening session of the convention we heard a missional sermon from Josh Smith and a doctrinal sermon (on the doctrine of forgiveness) from Wayne Robertson. Jeff Crook and Zach Terry were my personal favorites from the preaching conference and Pastor Robertson “came to preach” to close out the day.
Welcome to the Satur-deja Vu for the week ending November 12th. I realized about three items in that I have an unusual number of food related bits so we’re just going to look at all of those and then see what’s left. Thanksgiving is coming up and Americans celebrate by eating too much, you know, just like every other day. So unfasten the button on your jeans and let’s get to it.
Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes Ice Cream – I realize this breaks my no Christmas until after Thanksgiving rule. In the case of Christmas Tree Cakes they are available for such a limited time that if you wait until December you might not get any. When I find them, and I haven’t yet by the way, I will buy three boxes and two will go in the freezer*. In the meantime I discovered Christmas Tree Cake ice cream might be a suitable replacement if worse comes to worse. It’s vanilla ice cream with red frosting swirls, green candy sprinkles and bit of yellow cake batter thrown in. It takes exactly like Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes. My wife described the flavor as “way too much sugar” which is exactly what Christmas is supposed to taste like.
Steven Curtis Chapman wins this meme. I don’t know the history of how and when this particular meme got started but I’ve seen dozen of variations in a short period of time. Props to Chapman for either being social media savvy or listening to the young whipper snappers that coached him.
Elon Musk has purchased Twitter. The on again, off again deal stayed on this time until it went through. Then hours later tweets like this began to appear, denouncing the platform and announcing departures like a commercial airlines flight. I don’t like cancel culture. I don’t like it when conservatives or liberals either one do it. The first time I ate at Chick-fil-A, in the fall of 1990, I didn’t know who owned it nor anything about their family. The politics of the founders had nothing to do with my decision going forward of which chicken restaurant to eat at. Marina Sirtis, Counselor Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation if you don’t know, says she cannot “be a part of anything owned by Elon Musk.” Twitter is a platform we use to reach followers. Leaving a social media platform silencing your own voice, not anyone else’s. Who buys and sells the company is or should be a non-issue, imho. The irony is the reversal that has taken place just in the past 20 or 30 years in our culture. In the late 80’s Clorox pulled their ads from the 30 minute sitcom Cheers. They didn’t want to support (and purchasing commercial time really is support) the attitudes and behaviors prevalent among characters of the show. Similar protests and boycotts happened when The Simpsons premiered. I had an 8th grade teacher that practically ground his teeth while telling us about a Bart Simpson t-shirt he saw that simply said “Underachiever.” We probably all remember the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney in the mid 90’s. Maybe now there is something worth avoiding but it was hard back then for families looking for kid friendly shows and movies to avoid all things Disney across the board. The irony is that today it’s liberals who seek to avoid or silence anyone that doesn’t think, act and speak like they do. The people who used to tell us if it feels good do it and the same people that claim to want the freedom of choice for everyone will turn around and limit your choices if you choose wrongly, by their double standards anyway. Alright, that’s my soapbox for the day. On to other stuff.
I saw a meme of John Piper in the pulpit, his hands are all over the place, and the caption said “God created coffee for the glory of Christ.” If you are familiar with Piper it kinda’ sounds like something he would say and since it’s about coffee you will probably see the meme first thing Monday morning. I thought I’d do about 10 seconds of research and see if maybe he really said it. The tweet above is real and he linked to this article not written by Piper himself but appearing on his Desiring God website.
The post Time and Eternity was my attempt at concisely putting together some ideas that kind of spiraled out of control when I preached them from the pulpit. I wanted to outline the main points, support with scripture, and come as immediately as I could to a conclusion. I am pleased with the way it turned out, except for later realizing I had left out what could be an important consideration.
The Master's Table 