Episodes are released each Wednesday (aka “Hump Day” aka Midweek).
Have you ever had a “pang of awesome” in your chest when you did a good thing? That’s the feeling you get when you help here.
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For the ancients, the heart was not the seat of emotions (like we tend to see it now).
The heart was seen like we might see the mind today. Or a combination of the mind, heart, and will–the core of a person. For the ancients, the emotions resided in the bowels.
The language of the wisdom literature and choosing the right path.
Life As Prayer: Revive Spirituality Inspired by Ancient Piety
Learn about 16th century Brother Lawrence and how his understanding of God’s presence continues to affect lives today.
It’s a fact: the plants that produce wine grapes don’t come from seeds. You can’t “sow grapes”. More on that soon.
And later, Student of Jesus blogger and disciple-maker Ray Hollenbach and I talk about the fruit of the spirit (debunking the most common myth about it), and a little bit about the Vineyard church he is a part of, and what his “Deeper” seminars and workshops are all about.
Wine segment:
Wine grape plants don’t come from seeds, so how are vineyards created?
There are two main ways commercial growers get their fields ready for a grape harvest:
The first way is to plant seedlings taken from healthy and mature grape vines. This means that a harvest of good grapes for wine is 4-5 years away. Booo.
The second way is to use an older and mature vineyard and graft in (attach) new plants into the vine.
They prune down the top of the plant. They chop it nearly down to the ground, and expose some of the top to the vine stem. Then, they graft living plants into it. The grafting process means that whole new varieties of grapes in just one year, using the original root system to obtain all the necessary nutrients. Grafted in plants can also inoculate older vines against certain diseases with disease resistant pants (usually hybrid seedlings) that make the whole system healthier.
It can cost $150, per plant, to graft in new vines and it’s done in a precise sort of way with notching the root stem, adding in plants and sealing them together so they merge.
(how to graft plants and trees)
Grafting plants has been done for thousands of years. In the bible, the church is compared, by the apostle Paul, to a wild olive plant grafted into an olive tree. The first audience hearing Paul’s words would understand this word picture: the church is an introduction of something very new. Something able to impart a whole new vitality into the current understanding of religion and closeness with God.
22 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
Ed Cyzewski has struck gold. In a brilliant merge of technology and the Holy Bible, this succinct new paraphrase of God’s Word becomes a perfect solution for our short-attnetion span culture! Now, inspired reading is just 140 characters away!
Eugene Peterson, eat your heart out…in Christian love, that is.
A. Do you have the guts?
B. Put your heart into it.
C. Make up your heart.
What is the heart? The answer might surprise you.
In modern times, the “heart” has been called, “the feeling mind”. That sounds pretty good to me. What do you think?
A recent visitor responded to my postIs Chocolate Filling my God-shaped Hole? with the comment below (edited down). I think it would help to respond through a post, also. Now we can open up the whole thing to dialogue a bit more. Thanks for your contribution on this topic.
Visitor Response to Post–Submitted: on 2010/12/03 at 3:10 pm The way I look at it, viewing the heart and mind as separate is extrabiblical; thus, in fact, “that thing that ‘falls in love’ or gets sentimental” *is* the mind. So the modern “follow your heart” does not connote the *opposite* of the biblical “heart,” but rather only *part* of it. Bottom line, I can’t trust my mind or my heart, or even my own spirit completely… only God is 100% trustworthy. As for filling our “voids” with things “besides” God, I try to remember that God gets the credit for all good things anyway…
My response:
I should have also pointed out [within that post] that the Hebrew equivalent of the emotions or passions (what many now consider the “heart”) were also referred to differently than the mind (i.e. set a different category, if you will–the bowels or “guts”). The “guts” implied connection with those qualities of emotion, and so forth.
To sum up: In the Bible, (most especially in the Old Testament)…
1. What is translated as “heart” (in the KJV and others) is closer to what we now term as “the mind”. More specifically, the individual’s command center, or the place where decisions are made– which includes the will.
2. What we may think of as “the heart” that is, passions, desires, emotions, in the Hebrew language is connected with “the guts” or “bowels” of a person. For instance, “In his guts he loved her”. Yes, it sounds awkward, at best.
Even more controversy: THE SOUL
There is a big dissimilarity in the Hebrew vs. English renditions of the word often translated in English as “soul”. In Hebrew, it refers to the whole being. The whole person (So, no. It does not mean a ghosty thing that floats to the clouds like in Warner Brother cartoons). We can understand it in our context more this way when we say, “30 souls were lost [died] in the shipwreck.”
Hey, everyone, please, weigh in.
This post is open to opinions, thoughts, comments, or if you’re of the particular stripe…exegesis.
(Yes. That’s the BIG word of the day.)
Exegesis (EGGs -eh- Jesus) is this definition here. It’s not a variant, or French spelling of “Eggs and Cheeses” which we may be tempted to think at first blush, right?"Eggs and Cheeses" (Not Exegesis)(click photo to find its source)
Tomorrow’s post–
“Does your Breakfast (and your deity) make you AWESOME?”
Everybody knows you eat babies at Easter, not Thanksgiving... oh wait.
Here’s a reason to become vegetarian! You never really know what kind of meat is on the menu. In China, this is referred to a “girl meat.” It’s quite common. “Boy meat” is quite rare, and for that reason considered a delicacy, though it is stinky, and chewier.
