Greek practice

so I've been doing a bit of studying for my final greek exam and i thought people might like to get a small taste of what I've been studying. So here are a bunch of greek words in both greek and english.... see if you can guess what they mean!

1. αγγελος -angelos
2. ανθρωπος- anthropos
3. αποστολος-apostolos
4. ζωη-zoe
5. θεος-theos
6. κοσμος-kosmos
7. λογος-logos
8. αδελφος-adelphos
9. μητηρ-mehter
10. πατηρ-pahter
11. δαιμονιον-daimonion
12. χρονος-chronos
13. μεγας-megas
14. πολις-polis
15. νεκρος-nekros

and the bonus.....

αμαρτια= hamartia

1. angels 2. man 3. apostles 4. life 5. God 6. world 7. word 8. brother 9. mother 10. father 11. demon 12. time 13. large, great (from where we get the prefix mega) 14. city (metropolis= mother city) 15. dead, dead body (necrophobia = fear of death) Bonus= sin (hamartiology is the study of sin)


If you got that bonus one, give yourself a big pat on the back. You're pretty good if you knew that one.

On a less serious note:
Did you know that αμαρτια, the word for sin, is a feminine word? Reminds me of that mathematical proof we use to joke about back in the day...





























Looks like we have some biblical proof to that now, don't we?



*For a more detailed explanation, the word for sin actually is feminine, but it doesn't mean that sin is just for women. To be fair, the word for sinner αμαρτωλος is masculine. So gender in greek doesn't always apply to man and women gender (although it can with pronouns).

Thanksgiving

So for thanksgiving, the family went to NYC and for church on sunday, we went to the Brooklyn Tabernacle led by Jim Cymbala and it was really awesome. I really loved his straight forwardness in preaching. I also loved the choir and the worship... especially where we sang "Oh come let us adore him," which is my favorite Christmas song. It was really touching and while we were singing the words, the image that was running through my mind was of Jesus's 2nd return. Jesus was standing there, and while everyone was there, it was as if it was just me and Jesus. And while we were singing the 2nd verse, I could see all the things that we value (houses, cars, ipods, bf/gfs, etc), being left behind as He alone was (and is) worthy of our worship. It was truly a sight of heaven, where we will not only be freed from all our sinful desires, but where we'd see Christ in all his glory!


Oh come let us adore Him
Oh come let us adore Him
Oh come let us adore Him
Christ the Lord

For you alone are worthy
For you alone are worthy
For you alone are worthy
Christ the Lord

We'll give you all the glory
We'll give you all the glory
We'll give you all the glory
Christ the Lord


Here's some other things that I've learned at CIU's chapels:

-It is easier to become a Christian than it is to become a disciple
-tough times don't last, but tough people do.
-ministry is long and ministry is hard
-one of the evidences of a calling is when the church recognizes it
-we equate calling with fruit nowadays, but that's not calling... no matter if there's fruit or not, its a calling and we go for God's glory!

Seminarians are humans too

Whew, its hard to imagine that its been a little more than a month since I've last updated. So many things have happened since then.

Some things I've learned:
-Seminarians are humans too. Prior to coming to seminary, I always had a high view of seminary students. To me, they seemed like super Christians... probably didn't struggle in their christian walk, knew everything there was to know about God...etc. But since coming here and getting to know some people (esp in my spiritual developement class), its encouraging to know that we all struggle in one way or another in our walks... that none of us are perfect, that we're all in the process of sanctification!

-seminary can humble you as well. Here, everyone knows something and everyone has had some sort of ministry experience in one way or another. If you come in proud, you're going to get cut short (not on purpose...just by learning from other people). The good thing is that it forces us to find our worth in Christ!

-ethnic worship service are always encouraging and uplifting to the soul. Today for grad chapel, we had a worship service where we were singing American worship songs in other languages and learning worship songs from other parts of the world. I think learning songs from other nations and singing in other languages helps us take God out of the box that sometimes put him in... it helps us understand that God is the God of the nations. I think it gets us out of our ethnocentrism in thinking that the way we worship is the way that everyone should worship. And lastly, I think in the end, all of this is encouraging and uplifting because it unifies us with our brothers and sisters from other nations and ethnic groups. To be singing in different languages, in different styles, from different nations, all under one God is indeed glorifying to God!


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-As I've gotten older, I feel like God has revealed more of his will for my life. In October, while lifting weights, I felt God hit me on the head and reveal more of himself to me... that I was to be a missionary. Here's an except of what I wrote in my journal concerning that...

"I need to go abroad. I am called to missions. It's a necessity. It's unevitable. Its a calling. The main thought that led to that revelation was this: as a pastor, I know my emphasis will be missions, but how can I preach missions when I have not gone already?"

It was also pretty interesting to see the little things that God had put in my life in the past that led me to and have supported this revelation.

1) As a leader, my mantra has been to not ask someone to do something that I myself am not willing to do, or have not done before.

2)Preaching from the heart. I love to preach passionately and for me, that comes from having experience. On the one hand, I don't need to steal in order to preach that stealing is wrong. But, on the other hand, while I could preach about marriage, I feel like I'd be more passionate about it and would be more justified in preaching about it if I am already married! Also, one of the ways I know God has been preparing me and my heart for missions was that the 2 times I had the opportunity to speak at AACF (my college fellowship group), I spoke on missions.

3) Church. Growing up at Calvary church, I feel like we were surrounded by an atmosphere of missions.... so much so that it has seeped into our hearts and minds. I remember learning as a little kid at the church mission's conference that "we are blessed to be a blessing." Our church youth group motto was "Drink & Flow: to drink deep of Christ and flow to others, from campuses to continents."

4)Influential Men. A couple of men in my life have really influenced me in the past and have been an example to me. My recently retired senior pastor, Pastor Johnny Miller, was a missionary to Sweden and was involved with church planting before he was president of CIU, and then senior pastor of Calvary. Dr. George Murray, current Chancellor and former president of CIU, was a church planter for 10 years in Italy and then 10 years as the general director of a missions agency. Their godliness and their examples have always caused me to admire them and look up to them. Pastor Miller was especially influential in that he showed that God sometimes calls us to more than career. He was a missionary, a seminary president and a pastor. For me, I think I'll be a pastor and a missionary. The questions is, in what order? Will I be a pastor first after I graduate and then a missionary? Or a missionary first? Perhaps pastor, missionary and then pastor? I really don't know...

George Murray spoke at our chapel about a month ago and he told us his story of how he was a student at CIU. He talked about how that changed his life and his view on missions. He originally came to be an english teacher so that he could be a good witness to his students. Instead, God changed him and his life course and he went on to work in Italy as a church planter. He said that originally, he was "planning to stay, willing to go," but afterward, he was "planning on going, willing to stay."

I feel like that describes me perfectly.

Rectification

So I realized that I have not written in this blog for over a whole month. I have decided to hunker down and rectify that!

So, a lot of things have happened since my last post. The graduate school and seminary went to a retreat, I've gotten to know more of the students here and I've been starting to get into a routine with the classes.

The retreat was a good experience in that it was a great time of relaxation. It was also at the retreat that I got to know many of the people who are in the graduate school and the seminary, including Lonn, my roommate and other guys that I've been starting grow closer to. We learned about suffering and how its related to the Christian life. One quote from the speaker that I love was that "we are not masochists in seeking out suffering, but we are realist in recognizing that it'll happen."

As mentioned before, I've been getting to know some of the guys much deeper as the month has gone on. We've bonded over lunch, basketball, classes, and even through playing Settlers of Catan! Its great because they come from all walks of life. Some are married, others are single. Some are much older than me, some are closer to my age. Some are Chinese, others are not. Some have been to the missions field, while others have done ministry in the US. So if I have a question about dating, I can ask them. If I have a question about the missions field, I can ask them. If I have a question about masculinity, I can ask them. I'm really grateful to have developed friendships with such a great group of guys through whom I can learn from and talk with. PTL

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My classes have started to pick up in intensity from my last post. Thus far, I've had 2 exams, and a couple of papers in the last two weeks or so. Its not too bad compared to other people, but the weeks to come should be tougher. I've done pretty well overall with the assignments and the exams. However, one thing that I'm trying to guard against here is to be complacent in my classes and to take them for granted. I remember at Penn State that I would sometimes just go to the classes because I had to be there and it was part of my weekly routine. Yes, I was hearing things from the professor, but I wasn't listening. I was passively learning, instead of actively learning. I've noticed that a little bit with some of my easier classes that I don't actively listen. So I'm trying to get myself out of that rut.

Here are the classes that I'm taking and a summary of what we're learning:

Foundations of Spiritual Development
This is essentially a sanctification class where we go over the basics of maturing as Christians. I liken it to being in a very big small group. Although we like to joke sometimes that all we do is talk about our feelings, it is a good class to take because it forces us to examine our spiritual lives. For example, we've talked about how we like to wear masks, to keep others from seeing the real us. How the main motivations as Christians is either to please God or to trust in God and how going the route of pleasing God can lead to an endless cycle of performances, while trusting God, while counter-intuitive, ultimately leads to us growing in Christ, in a healthy way.

Mission of God
This class talks about how missions isn't just something we honor one sunday out of the whole year, or something we do in the summer when we don't have school. Rather, missions is and has been God's main theme throughout the bible. People think that missions started when Jesus gave the Great Commission in Matthew 27, when in reality, it started in Genesis 12:1-3, where God promises to bless Abraham and that the peoples of the world will be blessed through him! Bringing people back to Him, redeeming lost people... MISSIONS, is THE theme of the bible and can be seen through out the bible and through out all the bible stories!

Old Testament Bible Survey
Basically, we go through the books of the Old Testament and learn about them. We usually learn the general themes of the book, and then go more in depth for each chapter. We've also learned how we got the books of the bible (textual transmission), the different schools of thought on who wrote the Pentateuch, the first 5 books, etc. We've gone over some controversial topics, like how a Mesopotamian creation story sounds similar to the biblical creation story, how a Babylonian flood story sounds similar to the story of Noah and the ark, about the population of Israel during the exodus (was it really 2 million people?) and other topics. Its pretty interesting all in all.

Greek
This is my favorite class so far, even though it is the one that I do the most work for. The teacher reminds me of Bo Miller's father, so that's pretty interesting in itself. We have a good time in class, especially because we joke that in order to learn Greek, we have to learn English. We've been tossing around words like nominative, predicate nominative, accusative, mood of the verb, substantival adjective, lexical form, declensions, genitive and dative case endings for nouns, etc. And those are the words that we've learned and now understand. I feel like every class the professor uses a grammar term that makes us snap our heads up and give each other confusing looks!

But, one of the reasons that I really love learning greek is because it gets down to the original language! Our professor made it clear and we're starting to see that as we learn Greek, our knowledge of Greek helps to clarify many confusing passages, but it also confuses many previously clear passages.

I'll leave you with this example: Romans 3:22 says," This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference." The greek phrase for faith in Jesus is "pistis Iesous Cristou." Christ is in the genitive, which can be used when showing possession. Pistis is the verb form of pisteuo (I believe, have faith).

So the question that the teacher brought up today was, is this a subjective genitive or an objective genitive? A subjective genitive has the action done by the noun and would be translated as "comes through the faithfulness demonstrated by Christ" while the objective genitive has the action received by the noun and would be translated as "comes through having faith in Christ." Each one is extraordinarily different. The subject would mean that our righteous came when Jesus showed his faithfulness in going to the cross, while the objective would mean that our righteousness comes from our faith in Christ. Totally different! And the kicker is, there's no grammatical distinction or marks to indicate if its subjective or objective! This (and a lot of other things in greek) has to be determined from the context! Like my student ministries pastor from high school, Greg Despres, use to say... "Context is King!"

And that's why I love greek class.

This is the Day!

So yesterday, to start my OT bible survey class, we sang "This is the Day" ... and then we sang it in hebrew, and THEN in arabic! haha, that was pretty awesome.


Then in class we were talking about the ancient scribes and how they didn't put vowels in the Hebrew text. The example our professor gave was this: (t's nt s hrd t rd f y knw th lngg. Y cn rd ths wtht mch trbl, rght? N prbml!).

Then, one of the older students in the class asked, "So that was like texting then?" haha


The classes here are great. Thursday, I had class from 8-10:30, then chapel from 10:40-12ish, class from 1:25-4:05 and then class from 4:15-5:30. Normally, if that was my class schedule at Penn State, I think I would fall asleep or find it hard to concentrate, but here, I had no problems staying awake, focusing or paying attention. Everything was so interesting, its hard to not pay attention.

I think I'm going to have a love-hate relationship with this seminary. I'm going to love the classes and the books that I'll get to read and the talks that I'll have with the professors.... but then I'm going to hate the amount of reading that I'll have to do, and the number and lengths of papers that I'll have to write.

All in all, I think I'll love it here.... good times

Realizing a long time dream

Back at PSU, I'd always thought, "wouldn't it be nice if we could start class with prayer?" I mean, I know it was a secular institution, but as part of the body of Christ, bringing everything before God in prayer at the beginning of anything and everything felt natural and needed. Except you can't do that at a secular school... but then I got to CIU.

At CIU, not only did we start our very first class with prayer (YES!), but we also worshipped in the beginning by singing the old school song, "Knowing You!"

I think that was the highlight of my day. Then we started classes and everything went down hill, haha.

Some quick notes:
-I love the professors here. I remember thinking at orientation when the professors where introducing themselves and talking about themselves," Man, I think I had that guy as my advisor!" And then the next professor would stand up and start talking and I'd think,"No wait, I want this guy as my advisor now!" And then I got a chance to meet my advisor personally afterwards to talk about my classes and before coming to CIU, I wasn't too sure about him. All I had to base my impression was his picture online and he looked elderly. But after meeting with him, I'm really glad that he's my advisor. He's really nice and knows a lot and is godly and etc. Honestly, if i could split myself up and each individual "me" could take one of the professors as my advisor, that would be awesome!

-It was pretty cool to hear that many of the professors still know or remember my pastors from Calvary, like Johnny Miller, Brad Mullen, Beau Eckert Greg Despres, etc.

-My greek teacher reminds me of Bo Miller's father in the way that he speaks, acts and etc. That should be fun class!

And so begins the first class of the first semester of my seminary years....