Author: Dale Sackrider

Tonight I started a 10 week class at my church called “The Measure of a Man”. It’s a small class of about 10 men and I decided to take it so that I could get to know a few of the men of the church in a more intimate setting. I’m not sure what I expected exactly but I quickly noticed that it was different than my undefined expectations. Now some may assume when I say ‘different’ that I intend some negative connotation, however I assure you I mean no such thing.

I spent the evening with this small group of men learning about Spiritual Maturity. The course work itself seems to be sufficient to accomplish the task, and the teacher did a wonderful job facilitating conversation, interaction, and participation. We learned about “Paul’s Maturity Profile”, taken from 1 Tim 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-10.

From those text, the course extrapolates twenty points to which a mature Christian would adhere. These maturity traits range from Not Given to Wine and Husband of One Wife to Prudent and Not contentious. Of the list of twenty, I found that I match exactly three traits – I am not given to wine, I am a husband of one wife, and I am not a new convert. I should like to take some bit of pride in having three of these traits however in doing so I violate several others, not to mention the fact that although I am not given to wine, I consider myself a gluten and by not being a new convert, I would think I should have by now obtained more than simply three traits from this list, leaving me with only the one left to be proud – I am still the husband of one wife. My wife considers this a virtue to her credit and not mine.
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Ok, Zander is growing up everyday but I haven’t put anything up here in a while. Here are a couple of the latest cute Zander stories:

The Drive Through

After church recently, Stephanie and I stopped at a drive through to pick up a quick dinner. Usually when we are going out to eat, we order Zander something too, but since we were headed back to the house, we figured we would save the money and just feed him from what he had at home – he gets more groceries than Stephanie and I combined.

Anyway, as I was ordering, Zander started to tell me he wanted a milk but I quickly hushed him up so that I could finish my order and we pulled around to the window. As the girl handed out our drinks, saying “This is the diet … and here is the regular”, Zander rolled down his window and very clearly and politely says, “And I’ll take a milk, please”.

The girl must have thought this was cute, because she promptly brought him a milk.

Bedtime

We have a bedtime routine with Zander where we let him know he only has so many minutes left before bedtime, then we take him ‘potty’, then to bed where I read him a story, sometimes two before lights out. On days where we relax his bedtime a little and he is up much later than he should be, we sometimes skip the bed time stories.This particular night, we were watching TV and let it get later than we should have. Stephanie and I paused whatever show we were watching and took Zander to bed. It was so late, that I almost forgot to take him ‘potty’, which you just cannot do unless you want to wake up at 3am with a screaming kid that doesn’t understand why his belly hurts until you tell him to get up and go to the bathroom (at least he doesn’t wet the bed).

So, he was already in his bed, when Stephanie reminded me to send him ‘potty’. On the way to the restroom, he asks, “Can you read me two stories?” and I wasn’t paying attention and said, “yes”. Stephanie knowing that I wasn’t paying attention and that it was late enough that Zander would go to sleep without a story (and perhaps motivated by the fact that we would not be able to finish watching whatever the show we were watching was until I finished) looked at me and said, “you just agreed to S – T – O – R – Y!”

My son stopped walking toward the bathroom, turns and says, “S – T – O – R – Y is in my room!” While my first thought was, “I have the smartest three year old in the world!” – my wife wisely asks Zander, “what is S – T – O – R – Y?” to which he replied, “my doggie!”

Ok – many of you may not have a clue as to what the AG or the Foursquare are. I grew up in a Foursquare church (it’s a denomination) but I spent many years in the Assemblies of God (The AG) – another denomination. The core beliefs of both denominations are very close.

As the name implies, the Foursquare denomination (http://www.foursquare.org) is based on the four fold ministry of Jesus – The Savior, The Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, The Healer, and The Soon-Coming King.

The Assemblies of God has 16 “Statements of Fundamental Truth” (found here). Now they may have always valued a subset of those fundamental truths over the others as ‘core beliefs’, but I have only recently noticed a prominence given on the AG website to four of those 16 statements. What four you might ask? Salvation Through Jesus Christ, Divine Healing, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, and The Second Coming of Christ. Hmmm… I’m noticing a similarity to the Foursquare.

The Foursquare has a long standing logo to represent the four fold ministry. The AG recently added a new logo to there site. What do you think of the two?

I’m sure it’s only coincidence…

Many of you know that I have been a Bible Reading advocate for many year.  I believe if we would spend more time reading the Bible and less time reading Harry Potter (or worse, watching TV and not reading at all), our lives would be better.  Many of you share my belief that the Bible is the great collection of writings available today, but like me you have found times in your life where you just don’t read the Bible.  I joined an online reading group hosted at http://godfidence.org that read through the Bible twice a year for a couple of years.  I found it difficult to get others to read through at that seven chapters a day pace.

Anyway, Jason Fisher and I have started a new Bible reading initiative that we hope will bring more people on board with their own devotional plans – whether that is one chapter a day, or one book a day.  We hope to connect people with the resources they need to be successful in Bible reading with Advice Articles, Study Notes, Links to online Bibles, and the like.  You will notice a new tab on my site that links to http://WeReadTheBible.com.  I hope you take a moment to check it out, send your feedback, and start reading!

Here is the site:

http://WeReadTheBible.com 

Just so you know, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. My brother-in-law and his wife and two daughters have been in town and staying with us for the last two weeks. Its been great having them and we have spent many nights talking about the Bible, ministry, great movies, and life (not in that order). Well, tonight is their last night with us and I will miss having them around. There are challenges to having an entire additional family living in the same house,

but Stephanie and I both want large families, so the benefits far out way the challenges. I will miss those long debates. I will miss watching Zander play with his cousins. We really enjoyed having them as our guests. Anyway – I haven’t posted in a while and I wanted to drop a line saying I’m still here… consider this line dro…….

I’m working on changing the site a bit – the changes will most likely be rolling out a little at a time, but the biggest change you will see is already here with the new template. If you like it, please let me know — if you don’t… 🙂

My first reaction when I saw a preview for the fourth movie in the Die Hard franchise was “No they didn’t!!!”  After seeing the movie tonight, I have to say – Oh, Yes they did!!!  If you are looking to see the movie – don’t worry, there are no spoilers here, you can keep reading.

The Bad – there is a lot of language in this movie.  It carries a PG-13 rating but most everything but the “F-Word” was used many times.

The Rest -  If you took the first three movies, put them in a blender and added some adrenalin – this is what you would get!  It was over the top with the action scenes – most of them are so over the top that they go a step beyond unrealistic and move right in to ‘who-cares-that-this-could-never-happen-that-was-freakin-awesome!’  They had just enough references to the earlier movies to satisfy the Die Hard fan’s pallet, leaving no great line unsaid.  The visual affects were great, and the comedy was dead on for the Die Hard genre.

If you didn’t enjoy the first Die Hard (what’s wrong with you?), then don’t bother with this one.  If you loved the first movie, liked the second, and didn’t bother with the third – you should go see this movie.  If you already own the box set for the first three, you should stop reading this and head to your closest theater now!

Two thumbs up, five stars, would (and might) see it again.

The main character, John Spartan (played by Stallone) in the 1993 film Demolition Man, is cryogenically frozen in 1996 and thawed sometime in the 21st century. Shortly after he is thawed, nature calls and he is confronted with the fact that in this future world there is no toilet paper. Instead there are seashells in the bathroom where a roll would normally be. Spartan asks about it and is taunted that he ‘doesn’t know how to use the seashells’. On a regular basis in the bathrooms at work, the toilet paper rolls conspire against me. You know what I’m talking about – you are done with nature’s call and reach for the paper only to tear off a half a square. No matter how slow you pull the roll, you just keep making confetti! When you finally do manage to pull enough off in a single connected string, you pull hard to tear it off and instead of tearing, it rolls out enough paper to clog the Colorado River. This is almost a daily occurrence at my job — I know I’m not the only one because I see the confetti left from the last occupant of the stall. I’M READY FOR THE SEA SHELLS…

We were eating sandwiches at a small store front in Scottsdale when he walked right past us – the real batman! Ok, maybe he was just some forty year old pedophile dressed in the Adam West version of batman from head to toe in 100 degree June heat. He smiled at Zander as he walked by. (more…)

Ok – It’s been a while since I’ve pushed any of my friends to read through the Bible with me.  The wait is over!  I got a lot of feed back that reading the Bible cover to cover in six months was just too much (don’t get me started – 7 chapters a day = 30 mins of reading, ANYWAY…), so for those of you that said you just couldn’t study the bible ‘that fast’ – we are slowing it down.

Starting July, we are reading the New Testament in six months – that’s right, a mere 1.5 chapters a day if you wanted to read straight through.  You won’t get a better deal than that!  Ok – I’m making light of the situation, however we are going to ‘study’ the word and not just read it, so there may not be a set ‘reading’ schedule per se, but its all still being worked out.  One suggestion was that we group the books together and pick blocks of time to cover a group – for instance, July and August we could dedicate to reading the four gospels, but not have a rigid chapters per day set.  You could read the gospels in parallel and compare them, or read quickly past the ‘begets’ and spend days on the beatitudes.

As always, we are going to log our thoughts, questions, revelations online with my good friend Jason Fisher’s website: http://www.blog.godfidence.org/bible/

If you have thoughts or questions on a reading schedule, study pattern, or just how to get started, please visit http://www.blog.godfidence.org/bible/, sign up and post!  I look forward to reading with you!