Broken Bells will be playing in the NPR showcase at Stubbs on Wed, March 17 at 11pm.

This Monday we discussed the Sovereignty of God & Prayer at City Seminary. We defined the sovereignty of God as: “The pleasure of the triune God in ruling over all things.” We then applied this doctrine to anxiety in our lives, which is often manifested in: controlling fear, constant busyness, or distracting habits.

Detecting Anxiety Idolatry

How do you discern where anxiety is festering in your life? Try to find where your feelings are out of control, and you’ll find your idol (paraphrase of TK). For instance, controlling fear may paralyze you in parenting, air travel, or solitude. Our feelings can mislead us. As Thom Yorke says, “Just because you feel it doesn’t mean its there.” Just because you fear failure doesn’t mean its there or to be trusted. Anxiety offers us a false promise: “Be anxious and you’ll have control or peace.”

Moving Beyond Anxiety into Sovereignty

In order to move beyond anxiety, we need a true promise to rely on. Phillipians 4:6-7 promises us “peace that surpasses comprehension” if we will bring our anxieties to God in prayer. Now, this promise can only be true and trustworthy if God is sovereign. If he isn’t, he can’t promise incomprehensible peace in all circumstances. However, there’s a condition on this promise. We must give up self-sovereignty before we can trust in God’s sovereignty. Where are your emotions out of control? What is sovereign in your life? God or fear or busyness?

Prayer Works with a Sovereign God

The way forward from paralyzing anxiety is to trust in God’s sovereignty. This doesn’t happen through mental resignation; it requires genuine prayer and trust in God. Repentance from trusting in false promises and new faith in true promises. This gift of prayer brings us into sweet communion with God.

But if God is sovereign, doesn’t he already know what I will ask? Yes, he does (Matt 6:8) but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pray. He’s ordained our prayers to sovereignly accomplish our good and keep his promises of peace. Tim Chester puts it well:

God offers us prayer as a possibility and commands us to pray because he is a relational God who purposes to have a relationship with his people. It is not that God receives new data through our prayers, but that through our prayers information is clothed in love making it communication. God has ordained that he will be affected by our loving communication to him.

In prayer, anxious humans meet a joyfully sovereign God. He calls us to deep dependence on him and promises to replace our anxiety with peace.

Books on Prayer

• The Message of Prayer (Tim Chester)
• The Praying Life (Paul Miller)
• Prayer & the Knowledge of God (Graeme Goldsworthy)
• E.M. Bounds on Prayer
• The Valley of Vision (Puritan Prayers)

Articles

• Learning to Pray in the Spirit & the Word
• Prayer & Sovereignty of God
• Resurgence Series on Prayer
• Three Types of Prayer

I’ve used the Pillar commentaries for the past six years. They strike a balance between academic and accessibility. WTS Bookstore is selling the much anticipated Peter O’ Brien’s new Hebrews commentary at 45% off. Plus you can get an additional 10% off other Pillar commentaries. Other commentaries I recommend in this series:

• Letter to the Colossians (Moo)
• Letter to Ephesians (O’Brien)
• Acts of the Apostles (Peterson)

Emailing without thinking. We do it all the time. We fire off communication, without considering whether or not email is an appropriate form of communication. Email has become an extension of thinking instead of an expression of thoughtfulness. Without hesitation we type it out, send it, and wait for a response.

Whoops!

Some things are meant for personal communication. We’ve all had that misinterprerted email, the one that forced us toclarify, apologize, or heaven forbid, talk to the person in the flesh! Avoiding email can be wise. It can be an exercise in discernment and love. Not avoiding email can be foolish. It can be an exercise in selfishness and carelessness. Then there’e the de-civilizing nature of email. The same could be said of Blogging, Texting and Tweeting.

Send

In Send: the essential guide to email in the office and home, Dave Shipley of New York Times addresses various aspects of emailing. He talks about:

• Sending emails when we shouldn’t
• The pitfalls of blind carbon copies (bcc)
• Emotion and emails

Shipley suggests we should ask ourselves “Do I really need to send this email?” He exhorts us: “Think before you send.” Do you think before you send or have you had too many post-sending grimaces? Proverbs tells us we should be “Slow to speak and quick to listen.” We need to apply that wisdom to our social media interactions. Next time you consider sending something of importance or highly personal, pause and think it through. Maybe you should just pick up the phone or meet up in person. Be wise. Be thoughtful. Re-civilize!

The Associated Press is carrying an article on a recent biblical manuscript discovery. It appears to be the second half of the Ashkar manuscript, which dates to the 7th century. These 1300 year old manuscript halves have been reunited in Jerusalem. The significance of this discovery are at least two-fold.

Significance of the Find

1. It completes an early form of the “Song of the Sea” from Exodus (13:19-16:1).
2. It confirms a remarkable level of quality in bible translation throughout the ages.

The text includes a song of victory over the Egyptians when the Jews were liberated from slavery to make their way to Canaan, the Promised Land. Despite modern protests of the miraculous event of the Red Sea crossing, extant manuscripts continue to confirm this redemptive event, without protest from other documents from the same time period.

An excerpt: “The Lord is my strength and my song and he as become my salvation…You blew with your wind, the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters. Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods…”

What People Are Saying About It

The Song of the Sea manuscript demonstrates the tremendous fidelity with which the tremendous fidelity with which the Masoretic version of the Bible was transmitted over the centuries. – Dr. Adolfo Roitman

The reunification of the two pieces adds an important link in the chain, showing how the writing of the Hebrew Bible evolved through the so-called “silent” period — between the third and 10th centuries — from which nearly no Biblical texts survived. While in the Dead Sea Scrolls the song is arranged like prose, for example, in the newly reunited manuscript it is written like a poem, the same way it appears in the Hebrew Bible today. – AP article

The GCM Collective (Gospel Communities on Mission) will be launching a live, interactive resource website on March 1st! The vision of GCM is to equip churches and leaders to plant, lead, and transition churches in gospel, community and mission. The GCM site will host discussions forums on important topics such as:

• Developing Missional Leaders
• Everyday Mission
• City Renewal
• Contextualization
• Missional Theology
• Culture Creation

In addition, you’ll have access to the writings, resources, and interaction of the following missional leaders and their respective churches:

• Jeff Vanderstelt & Caesar Kalinowski (Soma Communities)
• Tim Chester & Steve Timmis (The Crowded House)
• David Fairchild & Drew Goodmanson (Kaleo Church)
• Jonathan Dodson (Austin City Life)

Sign-up for updates on the site launch and the GCM Collective National Conference, which will be held later this year!

HT: Resurgence

The short answer is yes, with a gospel center. The long answer is the book I am writing right now. Here’s an excerpt from the book that addresses this question:

Contextualization and “City Groups”

Missional communities are also referred to as: Clusters, Gospel communities, or even Trash Groups. Missional community, however, is the term has become most common in Missional Church literature. If this is the case, why invent yet another name? The primary reason we chose to call them City Groups was due to a principle of missional community called contextualization. Contextualization is the intentional process of communicating the historic gospel and teachings of Jesus Christ in contemporary cultural forms.

In order to best communicate the gospel in our urban, post-modern, creative class context, we discerned that the term “missional community” would be a hindrance not a help to mission. The population of Austin, Texas is highly “unchurched” and, in some sectors, resistant to the gospel. Therefore, new and technical church terminology is unfamiliar at best and off-putting at worst. As a result, we decided to select a term that could preserve the meaning of missional community, but articulate it in contemporary cultural language.

The use of “city” communicates an outward, urban focus while “group” communicates the gathering of people who share this focus. In short, the particularly urban context of our mission (and the name of our church, Austin City Life) lent itself to the name City Groups. They are groups that are for the city, communities that are on an urban mission.

I’ve always wanted to go to this marriage conference with my wife. If you can make it, I highly recommend it!

One of my favorite Austin bands, Tacks Boy Disaster is back after a hiatus with a pre-SXSW show this Sunday at The Ghost Room. Here’s a video for you to enjoy