BibleScribbler

Coffee, a Bible, and a Napkin to Scribble On

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.

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.

Advent 2020 – How God Has Presented Himself

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God Has Been Reaching Out to Us

Since He created the world and everything in it, God has been reaching out to us in all different ways. In these four sermons, I talk about the Father’s rich love for us, and His eternal efforts to win us over so that we can have all that He created for us.