verses read: Jeremiah 45
prayer: 5 minutes
I had a very peaceful sleep last night. No dreams, and though it was only a short one, like just over 4 hours, I woke up feeling very refreshed, like a great load had been lifted from my chest. It really felt good.
My Bahasa Oral exam was pretty okay, for the first two minutes at least! I wished I was as fluent as my partner but I wasn’t. Felt like I let her down a little, but well, at least she had two chances. Another thing to add, engineering girls, no matter how pretty they are, they are just geeks at heart! (To me, that’s a very good compliment!)
So I came home, plonked into bed and wanted to sleep the night away, but at the back of my mind, God was telling me to go to church. I told God that He would have to ruse me from my sleep, no sooner had I said that, my phone rang. Oh well, disobeyed God too many times already, so I made my way to church.
I’m glad I did, the new Chapel is nice. Acoustics are good, I won’t say they are professional level, but they are good. So when someone was speaking through the house system, it sounded like he was just speaking loudly rather than being amplified. Doesn’t have the reverb of the sanctuary; just the normal reverb that a room of that size should have. Good. But then, yesterday was without a full band, once the Youth are in, I think it might be a different story.
The sermon was about Judas, I wonder if it was that nicely timed to fit the “Gospel of Judas” issue that NGC has been pushing. But when I went home to watch the NGC documentary, I was actually quite appalled by it. Very biased towards the Gospel of Judas itself and the Gnostics; who were painted as the good guys.
I’m sad that the documentary missed out mentioning even earlier Christian texts that are actually canon. The books of First, Second and Third John. You only need to own a study Bible to know what these books are about, and even in my 10 year old Study Bible, way before Dan Brown or this NGC documentary, it already mentioned the Gnostics and why they were heretical. But that’s another issue altogether.
Interestingly, or perhaps sadly, Gnosticism does resemble a current phenomena; post-modernism. Sad but true. “There are no absolutes”, right! Problem is, I am a mathematician, and to me, I deal with almost nothing but absolutes. So the idea is foreign to me. But well, after that discussion last year at council, I have begun to see how it has affected the church, and the Youth Ministry in particular.
I’m surprised that so many are intrigued by this “Gospel of Judas” and because of that, are a little shaken as to how the Bible came about. Good thing we will be addressing this issue at YM soon.
