Message to Laodicea

I read an interesting example in my Hermaneutics textbook this afternoon. In Revelation 3:14-22, John records a message to the church at Laodicea. He writes:

¹⁴"To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God, says this:
¹⁵'I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot.
¹⁶'So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.

This Laodicean church is useless; it is not like hot water (for taking a bath) or like cold water (for a refreshing drink). We must interpret the "hot" and "cold" water in light of the archaeological background. Laodicea was located close to the hot springs by Hierapolis and a cold stream by Colossae. Both hot water and cold water are desirable and useful. But the spiritual condition of Laodicea is neither. It is tepid and lukewarm. We have to guard against quick misinterpretations: Jesus is not saying that active opposition to him is better than being a lukewarm Christian.

Culby vs Dryer

Thursday night a rumor floated around that a bunch of Culby guys were going to storm our floor with snow. A lot of Dryer 2 guys prepared to counter the attack by filling up tons of trash cans with water. After several false alarms, a number of Culby guys did rush up to the building. They stayed outside and threw snowballs at the lounge windows. Eventually people from all three Dryer floors went outside for a snowfight. Both sides had trashcans for heaving snow and several people got a lot of water and snow in the face!

This morning right after chapel started in Torrey-Gray Auditorium, some Dryer 3 guys hiding in the choir loft quickly pulled back a curtain to reveal a banner they had made. It had the names of all three Dryer floors and read:

"The next day, when Dryer searched the battlefield, they found Culby dead on Dryer Lawn. They cut off Culby's head and stripped off his armor. Then they spread the good news all through MBI country and among the Moodies. They displayed his armor in the shrine of Torrey. They nailed his corpse to the wall of Gray. 1 Samuel 31:8, Dryer Abridged Version"

Whoever made the banner had also collected a bunch of clothes which the Culby guys had dropped during the fight, and fashioned them into a headless dummy which hung from a rope next to the banner in front of the whole school during the whole of chapel!

What Happens After You Die

I preach at a retirement home for my PCM, and when I get back from Spring Break, I'm going to be preaching a series on "What Happens After You Die." I'm pretty excited about it. I'm planning to read over Spurgeon's sermons on the subject, and if you can think of any other good sources good information, please reply :)

Back in business

Audrey and I had a great time last Saturday. We went out to the Grand Lux Cafe on Michigan Avenue for dinner. It was nice to sit and talk with her. This week we are busy walking back and forth to Moody Church for MBI's Founder's Week. The weather is bitterly cold and we got about 4 inches of snow today. In these single-digit temperatures, I'm very thankful for the new scarf mom sent in the mail.

I finally got Cisco's Linux VPN client to connect and route the traffic appropriately. The firewall admin here at Moody had to open TCP port 3322 (and fix some kind of routing/subnet issue). Also, I got an 80GB IDE hard drive from a friend to put into ethne, and I'm backing up my home folder from kappa onto it. The ethernet jack has been flaky, but hopefully that wireless firmware holds out long enough to transfer everything over. I'm just excited to have everything more or less back in order. I'm thankful to God that I had another computer to use when kappa died!

ethne with FC6

I've wiped ethne and installed Fedora Core 6 and Xfce 4.4. After a long hassle, I'm basically back to where I was with kappa, desktop environment-wise. Setting up my HP 1020 wasn't hard with foo2zjs drivers. The biggest challenge was the Cisco VPN client.

After installing kernel-devel, I downloaded vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz and ran the vpn_install bash script. The script complained about some problems with the kernel source. After hunting around online I found a blog describing the necessary fixes to make the client compile with Fedora Core 6. After the client compiled and installed correctly, I started the service. The script in /etc/init.d complained that the kernel module wasn't valid. After more hunting around I read on FedoraForum.org that this was a result of the infamous FC6 kernel bug (FC6's anaconda installs the kernel for i586 when it should install i686). Once I replaced the kernel with the correct architecture I was good to go. I set up the profile to get into the VPN server in Reston, and... "Connection timed out". At that moment I remember noticing that Moody's network had gone down and all the dhcp leases were wiped out. This means ethne now has a new IP address, but Moody's firewall rule is presumably still using the old one. I rushed over to Crowell to see if someone in IS could change it, but the main engineers had already left for the weekend. What a bummer. But God is good to me. And hopefully this will be resolved soon so I can get back to work! :)

Oh, and it's Audrey's birthday today. We're going out to celebrate Saturday night :)