The Beauty of Podcasting

Listening to Rob Bell's Advent sermons yesterday while being a dancer's parent. You know...you have to drive, and there's nothing you can do while they're dancing and the studio has enough background noise to keep you from reading. I wrote down a couple of thoughts he mentioned:

Quoting Cornell West (a Princeton professor/writer) in his discussion of joy: "The categories of optimism & pessimism don't exist for me. I am a prisoner of hope. I am going to die full of hope."

He also made an interesting point in discussing the contrast of fear & joy...that they can't co-exist. He said that fear focuses on future unknowns, while joy is about the known in the now.

In the second sermon I listened to (dance parents who drive that far stay 3 hours) he pointed out that the word "glory" is one that most Christians use all the time but can't define it. He used an excellent teaching technique to talk about how the Hebrew Scriptures (specifically Psalm 19--the heavens and earth declare His glory--and Exodus 33) use the word kavode in reference to God's glory. It means "heavy, weighted, significant." The idea is that significant people in their culture would be weighted down with heavy gold.

Then he talked about how Luke 2, in the Greek, used the word doksa...which means "consider, thought, opinion." In other words, the New Testament writer chose that word ("Glory to God in the highest...") as a way of saying that God's opinion/thought is the right way of seeing the way things are because of his significance.

In other words, giving glory to God is simply a reminder of our own smallness and His significance. It's keeping both Him and us in our proper place.

I'm telling you, if you're not getting Mars Hill Bible Church's podcasts off iTunes, you're missing out.