Four Mistakes John Piper Hopes You Don't Make

From the audio of a talk by John Piper to college students on mistakes to avoid:

Mistake #1: Big is better than small.

Mistake #2: New is better than old.

Mistake #3: Having is better than being.

Mistake #4: Visible is better than invisible.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Technorati Tags: john piper

Movies

Open Season
We have seen a couple of movies while on vacation.  The first was "Open Season".  It was a fun movie with many voices from the "Emperor's New Groove".  It wasn't as good a movie as "Emperor" but it was, as I said fun.  Not great fun, but fun.  There is one scene as the bear is in back of a curtain ready to perform before an audience.  The one antlered dear pops in and a struggle occurs.   What the audience thinks it is seeing as a silhouette and what is actually happening behind the curtain - is hilarious!

   Wait to Rent


One Night With The King
We haven't read the book yet so this is just a review of the movie itself.  We enjoyed the story for the most part.  It was very choppy and hard to follow.  We kept asking each other "what's going on now" or "why did they do that" or "what's that got to do with the plot".  Some accents where hard to understand especially King Xerxes.  I kept asking Colleen, "what did he say"?  She didn't know either. 

The special effects were spectacular at times (shots of Babylon), and silly at others.  The silly shots included one scene where she is dancing by herself in a courtyard among falling soap flakes.  I guess it was supposed to be snow but it sure didn't look like it.  Snow usually melts on your face, not stick to it like... soap flakes.  Another bad sf was the pendant-flame effect.  A good special effect does not draw attention to it's faults.  These did. 

Peter O'toole fans rejoice.  He gets top billing (along with Omar Sharif and Tiffany Dupont) for 30 seconds worth of acting.. (ok maybe 45 seconds).  So why bother.

We were impressed with actors John Noble (Stargate SG-1 episode Camelot), Omar Sharif, John Rhys-Davies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sliders), Tommy 'Tiny' Lister (the first Klingon humans encountered on Star Trek Enterprise), and of course James Callis (Battlestar Galactica's Dr. Gaius Baltar).

It took a while to jump the belief factor with Tiffany Dupont as Esther.  Mostly at the beginning it seemed as if a 21st century southern California girl was transported back in time.  But as the movie progressed, she improved so much that you actually started to believe that she was indeed Queen Esther.

1/2  Wait to Rent


Flicka
A very enjoyable family movie.  It kept our interest all the way through.  A visually appealing movie with many shots featuring the grandeur of the Wyoming territory.  This movie has all the elements that make seeing a family movie worth seeing.  Humor, emotional hooks, and character development where we see growth and lessons learned from the suffering and tension of family life.  Alison Lohman will capture your heart as she plays Katy the daughter of a ranch owner and who befriends a wild horse named Flicka. 

Pay Full Price to See





Technorati Tags: flicka, movie-review, open-season, One night with the king,

Opening This Friday...

Rich or poor, it's righteousness that really matters

Pastor Mark Driscoll has written a piece in the Seattle Times that is worthy of a read.

"The problem with both these theologies is that they make money the
issue. The real issue is not money but righteousness. There are not two
kinds of people — rich and poor — but four kinds of people:
the righteous rich, the unrighteous rich, the righteous poor and the
unrighteous poor."

"When the issue of money is framed as rich and poor instead of righteous
and unrighteous, we are allowing politics and economics rather than
spiritual wisdom to dominate our thinking."

The Gospel

We should remember that the Gospel is not good advice, but good news.
It does not tell us what we are to do to earn salvation, but proclaims to us what Christ has done to save us.

(The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination - L. Boettner p. 173)

FYI

It's TV-Turnoff Week (April 24-30th)










The logo looks nice, but their site is pretty ugly !!
Turn off the TV and get into God's Word.

Here are some interesting facts:

Television cuts into family time, harms our
children’s ability to read and succeed in school, and contributes
to unhealthy lifestyles and obesity. Here are just a few of the facts:

• On average, children in the US will spend more time in front of
  the television (1,023 hours) than in school this year (900 hours).
• Forty percent of Americans frequently or always watch television during dinner.
• As US Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher said at the Kick Off of
  TV-Turnoff Week 2001, “We are raising the most overweight
  generation of youngsters in American history…This week is about
  saving lives.”

From Reformation 21 » Two Points on the Arts: "First, even if it is the case that the Bible doesn't tell us which music, for example, is better than other music (and in this sense Carl is right to say that this is a non-biblical judgment), I believe that the stuff of creation itself -- the inherent capabilities of sound, and the human ability to create sound and listen to sound -- does discriminate between the good, the bad, and the ugly. To put it another way, even if special revelation cannot resolve matters of artistic taste (it does give us some principles, though), general revelation does address these issues. So the question of artistic taste retains its spiritual significance; it is not a matter of neutrality.

Second, when it comes to thinking about Christians and the arts -- as well as non-Christians and the arts -- it is always helpful to remember that God has not given all his gifts to Christians. This is one aspect of common grace, and it reminds us to expect to find the good, the true, and the beautiful beyond the boundaries of the church."