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Dan Sullivan is an SEO specialist, full-stack WordPress web marketer, and pastor.

About Dan Sullivan

Dan Sullivan is an SEO specialist, full-stack WordPress web marketer, and pastor.

Half-Beards, Honor, and Retaliation

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4 So Hanun took David’s servants and shaved off half the beard of each and cut off their garments in the middle, at their hips, and sent them away. 5 When it was told David, he sent to meet them, for the men were greatly ashamed. And the king said, “Remain at Jericho until your beards have grown and then return.”

2 Samuel 10:4–5 (ESV)

This half-beard stuff. Men would swear by their beards. The only clean-shaven men were slaves and little girls! Some criminals would also be shaved like being flogged or branded.

They, of course, didn’t just trim their beards to be shorter, they cut off half. So you’d look like this silly lop-sided freak. In your own humiliation, you’d have to shave off the other half of your beard yourself for it all to grow back and look right sooner.

There are several instances in the bible where a new, young king is shown kindness and his old advisors are untrusting and start a war! [[look these up for examples]]

David didn’t use these guys as marketing or propaganda. He helped them hide their shame. Everywhere they ran, their butts were exposed, and the fact that they were circumcised Jews would be shown off too. They would be outcasts among any other foreign people until somebody showed them mercy or they made it home.

Talk about feeling weak and vulnerable! 

These are David’s servants, so he’s going to take care of them wherever they go. Putting them up in a distant town until their beards grow back is a big deal. Let’s just say, they needed 4 weeks to grow a beard. It doesn’t look like David retaliated or went to war over this.

2  It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.

Proverbs 25:2 (ESV)

As far as we know, David was going to let it be. Sure, he probably wouldn’t make any peace with the Ammonites, but no aggression comes up until they attack him. 

There are a lot of places where David shows that he really did have a heart after God. This whole thing started with him wanting to honor that old king and become allies with his son. David proves for a lot of his kingship that he is quite sovereign but retaliates hard. 

Reflections from the Asbury Revival

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  • I looked around at such a huge crowd of people, and God loves them so much. I was moved at the thought of what a great number of people God has saved!
  • Romans 14 stuff. I don’t have to fix everyone or judge how everyone is doing. I had a hard time for a bit judging people that were there. This wasn’t about that at all. It was about attention on worshipping the Lord.
  • We were waiting out on the lawn, looking at the 4 hour line, and I said we should just start praying and worshipping right there. My daughter said “yeah, what are we waiting for?” and we all started singing. There were about 100 people on the lawn and many of them had hands raised and were singing or praying. But there were hundreds to thousands in the line waiting. Some of them were singing or praying, but nowhere close to the majority. The majority were just standing around and talking like they were in line for a movie. I don’t want to be too critical of them, but I am a little bit. If that whole crowd would have just gathered together instead of spreading out in a line on the sidewalk for a half mile, the whole place would have transformed! At one point I shouted “The louder you sing, the warmer you get!” because it was 21 degrees out there. One guy shouted “Hallelujah” from the lawn, but the line didn’t start singing.
  • If all of the men would have grouped together outside and worshipped and let the women and children inside, that would have changed everything. I saw old women waiting in line outside while young studs stood with their cell phones videoing inside the main room. C’mon guys!
  • It was really really good to have a dedicated 3-hour prayer and worship time. When you have a long time to do that, you pray and worship in a completely different way. You sing choruses more times over and over again if you aren’t rushing through a setlist. I bet we sang some choruses 15 times, and it was good. You got to a point where you really got to pray the words as you sang them.
  • Since the event was not time-specific, there was a very free come-and-go feel to it. We showed up and joined in on whatever song we wanted. You could stop and sit down and pray or use the bathroom or eat a snack and then join right back in. There was no sermon to get to or schedule. I’m curious how much this is critical to a revival type of event like this. Everyone knew it was just going to be an ongoing thing. Nobody was anxious to get to anything (except maybe the people freezing in line for the main room. I’m still curious about how cutting works in that line.)
  • I talked to a guy at the overflow church where we were. He said “Yeah, we’re not going to do this tomorrow, we’re going to have church. So we’ll have to block off parking so our people can come and we can have our church service.” That struck me as so weird. There is this amazing thing happening 5 blocks away, that 10,000 people are coming to (we met some from Atlanta!) and you’re going to kick them out so you can have your weekly church service? In a city of 6,000 people, with 13 churches (I counted), you are going to turn away pilgrims coming for this event so your congregation can do their weekly thing? I mean, I guess it is the Sunday before Lent, so that’s a big deal, right?
  • It was so good to have so many different songs and types of songs. The Body of Christ is diverse and we’re all coming from different cultures. I loved to sing some of those songs and I was able to participate and engage in a lot. Another group got up and led worship for a while and that wasn’t my style. BUT I could tell that they were certainly worshiping Jesus in the style most comfortable to them. That gave me a great opportunity to appreciate some other people pray differently for a while, and join in when I wanted. All worship music is about preference. It really is. Otherwise we’d all be singing only 1000 BC hebraic songs in Hebrew. I don’t think that’s necessary. It was great to sing different styles of worship songs.
  • Don’t let the spectators get you down. While we were in the overflow church, singing and praying, I could hear a murmur in the room. I stopped and looked around, and there were a lot of people just sitting and chatting. It was like they were watching a baseball game. At one point I did some instruction on intercessory prayer with my kids, so I was talking too, so I shouldn’t be quick to put down everyone in the room, but I doubt they were doing that. It didn’t seem like it. If you go to a place where people are doing a lot of praying and praising God, don’t get the popcorn and sit around and talk about it. Respect the place. Respect the tone in the room.
  • My kids commented that we’re really glad we went to this after watching the Chosen scenes with the crowds. It’s cool to see hundreds and hundreds of people displaced to go draw close to Jesus. It definitely had a feed the 5,000 feel to it. We were too cold, away from home, wanting to worship Jesus. That was awesome.

Teaching at a Valentine’s Dinner

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These are some of the scripture notes from Notion. I’ll fill in some of my points afterward.

Basically, I’m making the case that we were put here to build something together, and the thing we’re building is the Body of Christ!

Here’s the recording, in case you want to hear what I said. I talked about how God created us to build up the Garden of Eden.

Failing that, we got an even better task, to build up one another, which is the Church. Scriptures after the recording.

Genesis 2:5 (ESV): When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground,

Genesis 2:15 (ESV): The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Genesis 2:18 (ESV): Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” ‭‭1 Thessalonians‬ ‭5‬:‭11‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” ‭‭Romans‬ ‭15‬:‭1‬-‭2‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” ‭‭Romans‬ ‭15‬:‭4‬-‭7‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“So with yourselves, since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in building up the church.” ‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭14‬:‭12‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Go Find Me Outside the Camp

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13Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. 

14For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.

Hebrews 13:13–14 (ESV)

If we aren’t going to follow the law (which we know has now been made completely unnecessary from Romans 10:4 and a lot of previous chapters of Hebrews), we go where all of the lawbreakers go, outside the camp.

The wild part is, there is a tent of meeting out there where anybody can go meet with God whenever they want — without a sacrifice!

7Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp.

Exodus 33:7 (ESV)

So even if you are clean, if you ‘sought the Lord’ you would go outside the camp, among all of the other people that were outside of the camp, and meet Him there.

My sermon from Hebrews 9

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Here is my sermon from New Year’s Day on Hebrews 9. I think my favorite thing about this section is the hope it instills. This world and everything in it is passing away, and the old ways of Torah and the Law are part of that. The temple, tabernacle, priestly order — the whole bit — were just a shadow of all of the life Jesus would bring to us. Enjoy.

Craig Groschel Opening Talk at GLS 2022

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Here are my notes from the opening of the Global Leadership Summit 2022. It was a good talk and a lot of the things he mentioned came up from other speakers throughout the next 2 days. Particularly the paradoxes. There were other speakers that either exemplified or talked about things like being confident and humble, direct and kind, or empowering and controlling.

At the end he asked people to stand to show which one of the 3 we wanted to work on the most. I felt stupid standing up in a room of 540 people to say I wanted to work on being humble. I stood during the 3rd choice because that was the one that resonated with me the least. If I get the Confident and Humble points, and the Driven and Healthy sounds relatable, maybe the Focused and Flexible is the one I need to improve in.

My nametag listed “Various” as my organization, so some FOCUS would be good!

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All of my sermons on Galatians in one place

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Here are my sermons through Galatians from Winter 2022.

I was going through The Acts of the Apostles and at the end of chapter 15 it seemed appropriate to take a detour through the book of Galatians. That is roughly when the letter was written as Paul prepared to go back to the churches he started with Barnabas on their first trip.

You can listen to each of them below, or via the Biblescribbler podcast.

Sermon on Galatians 1

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This is part 1 of my sermon on Galatians. I was preaching through Acts in Fall of 2021 and in January of 2022 we were in Acts 14. The letter of Galatians was written somewhere around here, so it seemed appropriate to take a detour for a month or so into Galatians.

The main conflict of Acts 15 is exactly what Paul addresses and even narrates in Galatians, so you can’t read one without the other.

World Vision Guy Notes from GLS 2021

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This was an intro short before a session at the 2021 Global Leadership Summit. There were 2 little nuggets in here that were helpful:

Leaders Need to Be Decisive and Stand Behind Their Decisions

Isn’t this the worst? Either because of ignorance or lack of confidence, the worst is to have a leader that isn’t clear about their decisions and then won’t take responsibility for what their team guessed that they decided.

I see this in myself and my kids when they aren’t sure about what we’re doing tonight, or when we’re trying to solve a problem. The uncertainty causes stress, but passivity is worse. Even when we don’t do anything or we wait, we do it on purpose.

My wife even made up a a song about “Wait and see, wait and see, wait wait wait wait and see” do deal with some of this patient uncertainty.

Once I got chewed out after a record-breaking event for leaving coffee mugs in the office sink. We had hundreds of people come through and most of our team worked from dawn to midnight. The opening of the debrief meeting the next day (afternoon!) was “there were coffee mugs left in the staff kitchen and that is inexcusable.”

Leaders need to be clear and decisive about the goals. If the whole team things that the goal was passing out hundreds of free meals for thanksgiving, they are going to focus on that. If the team thinks that the goal is to keep the staff kitchen clean, they’ll focus on that. They’ll probably do a great job.

In Your Rush to Ship, Ship the Right Thing

If you are in Akimbo or other Seth Godin circles, you know that shipping your work is the ultimate goal. It doesn’t count until it ships. Startup weekend also promotes the idea of the MVP (minimum viable product).

This speaker did a great job of warning us. If you ship a horse with plans to improve it later, you aren’t going to get to a Ferrari. Be patient and keep working on what you are working on so that you actually ship a real version of the thing that you are going to end up with.

The MVP mentality is good because it helps you get your idea out there, but it can radically affect your end product or service. You need to be open to that. Once we shipped a ready-made website in a box. It was meant to be low cost and put a lot of the work on the customer. Our team wouldn’t have to do much except train the buyer and they would be off and building their website.

The problem, we learned as we were shipping our very first version, is that Wix and WordPress.com had much better cheap solutions for small businesses that wanted to build their own websites. We should have dumped it right then and gone after the people that wanted to pay developers to build their websites. We were skilled designers and developers and that was the service we should have sold.

In our rush to ship a cheap thing that we would improve over time, we shipped something that wasn’t worth us standing behind. It always turned into a custom build and hourly billing anyway, which wasn’t what we sold the customer in the first place. We lost money, but if we hoped to make money, it would have been off of the fine print, not the sales features.

And making money off of the fine print is the worst business model in the world.

My Sermon on 1 Samuel 20

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I love preaching through 1 Samuel. The way God worked in the hearts of evil and good people to bring about His king — then tried and did it all over again!

This is where Jonathan and David make a covenant with one another. This is hesed at it’s finest. Jonathan puts loyalty to his father and his own rise to the throne aside to accomplish what God wants. David has the choice to run off on his own, or to receive that hesed from Jonathan.

David enters into the covenant and they would stick up for each other and defend each other even after the death of Jonathan.