An interesting article on animal rights here.

A friend of mine, Kirby Holmes, has started a new company called Tribal Screens. These screens are for home theaters and are quite impressive. The reason Kirby named them Tribal Screens is because he wants them to catalyze community not deconstruct it.

He envisions families and neighbors gathering to watch special events together, creating opportunities for great entertainment and opportunity for personal connection.

Dave Herring has been helping us get an introductory website off the ground for our church plant, Austin City Life. We hope to significantly develop this site in the weeks and months to come, so be sure to check it out regularly. Also, let us know if you’d like to see something up, that isn’t currently there.

As I prepare to deliver a sermon on 2 Kings 5 (Healing of Naaman, the leper) for this Sunday at Travis Oaks, I have read portions of Kaiser’s Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament. The section on preaching from OT narrative is particularly helpful. Kaiser traces the importance of understanding the role of various elements in a narrative (setting, plot, characterization, point-of-view, structure, dialog, key-words, etc.).

When preaching a narrative, it is easy to get lost in the characters and plot, losing the overall God-centered perspective. Elisha or David can easily become our focus, our moral examples, without any sense of God being the central character and Christ being a part of the larger story. Kaiser notes:

The central character of the Bible is God…all efforts to concentrate on the human character in a story while failing to locate God’s actions in the narrative are wrong. It leads to divorcing the character from God’s larger redemptive plan, bypassing the point that the author was making. Accordingly, one of our key questions in determining the characterization of a narrative is: What is God doing in this scene?