Resolved!
The top New Year’s resolution for 2015 is apparently this: Lose Weight. Others include: Volunteer to Help Others; Quit Smoking/Drinking; Manage Stress; Eliminate Debt; etc.
Most of these noble resolutions will be abandoned within the first two weeks of January.
But this Lose Weight resolution is looking more and more tempting. What with a recent article in the Journal of Neurophysiology: “The Power of the Mind: The Cortex as a Critical Determinant of Muscle
Skin!
Prosthetics has come a long way. You have prostheses for the face both inside and outside the mouth, prostheses of the neck including substitutes for the larynx, prostheses for limbs both upper and lower and to fit a variety of limb losses or amputations, and prostheses for other body parts.
And some have been around for a long time. Herodotus, the 5th-century BC Greek historian, mentions a guy named Hegesistratus who had a prosthetic foot. Of course, there’s the Olympic
Ray Pritchard: How I Preach
Ray Pritchard: And this is How I Preach …
[Ray Pritchard is a fellow-preacher who has been in the ministry for well over three decades. Author and reputed pulpiteer, Ray is great to listen to, whether on radio, in Dallas Seminary’s chapels, at Bible conferences, and in venues all around the globe. One of his three sons goes to the same church I do, and another was a student of mine. Let me tell you, Ray and his wife, Marlene, have left a grand legacy, both pastoral
Smarter!
While I’m fast losing brain function as I get “wiser”—what a paradox!—I’m glad to report that I’m smarter than a mouse. So there!
Scientists from the University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, have declared it so in a paper published last year, and in a recent companion study, “A Competitive Advantage by Neonatally Engrafted Human Glial Progenitors Yields Mice Whose Brains Are Chimeric for Human Glia” (The Journal of Neuroscience).
Let me attempt
Stillness!
Pico Iyer, the British writer of Indian origin, recently wrote a book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere.
He bemoans our degree of busyness, the intensity of our distractions, the inability to be still.
We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off— our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently
Genesis 5:1−6:8
Loss of godliness is an ever-present danger that has consequences, yet for those who “walk with God” there is the reward of intimacy with him.
So far in Genesis, sin has been on the increase. That momentum does not abate here; indeed, this passage culminates in God’s intent to destroy all mankind, except for Noah and his family—the consequence of human wickedness.
The ten paragraphs dealing with ten patriarchs in 5:1–32 follow a formulaic structure providing the
Temptation!
News flash: Conquer temptation by avoiding temptation!
Yup, that’s made the news.
Appropriate, perhaps, for this season, when the temptation to engorge, consume, imbibe, and devour is considerable.
I stand condemned! Rather than having a membership to a gym, I possess one to several bakeries and chocolatiers in town. (And if you haven’t had dulce de leche cheesecake, you’ve missed out on one of the singular pleasures of life!).
Anyhow, back to temptation …
Michael Ent
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.