One of the WMA (Women's Missionary Auxiliary) groups I attend is about to study the Lord's model prayer found in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6). So I have been contemplating prayer.  

As is common with the Lord, at least in my life, if He is trying to teach us, the same topic arises repeatedly. I recently received an email from a Christian friend about prayer. He included this quote from J. Vernon McGee: "So many people get uptight in a prayer meeting or in a church service. They feel oppression in prayer-they want to say the right things and use the right words. Public prayer is alright, but let me suggest that you go aside and be alone with God."

Last week, my husband and I attended a meeting of several of our sister churches at a neighboring church, along with many of the brothers and sisters from those churches. One of the dear brothers recounted an incident that happened the last time he had been in that church building, and it reminded me of an incident that happened the last time I was there. I did not share with the entire group, but only my husband on the way home that evening.

I have now decided I'd like to share it with you.

As a youth, I enjoyed attending singing conventions and there was one almost every Sunday afternoon. This particular church was on the regular rotation schedule, and on the particular Sunday of this incident, I was in attendance. So, here is my recounting of the most beautiful prayer I've ever heard.

Most services held in church buildings, and many elsewhere, begin with prayer. This particular Sunday was no different. However, the president of the Sunday afternoon singing convention, the person who was about to call on the person in the congregation who would lead in corporate prayer, was unaware that his choice had a learning disability. You could almost hear the group gasp when he called the name. Everyone wondered what was going to happen. And what happened was amazing!

The person led out, speaking ever so carefully, and ever so slowly, "Lord, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Lord, I don't know how to put them all together the right way, but You do. Amen."

With not a dry eye in the church, and every heart melted, this was probably the most spirit-filled singing I've ever attended. And, this was by far the most beautiful prayer I've ever heard.

M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan - Day 2

Genesis 2:3 "So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy . . ."  I've sort of become obsessed with word studies of late.  What would it mean for God to make a day 'holy'?  One definition Merriam-Webster gives is, 'devoted entirely to the deity,' Strong's Concordance says, 'set apart' and HELPS Word-studies says, 'different.' The Word says that God did this "because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation."

The earth's rotation/orbit was also part of the work of creation, so now we have time - 365.242 days in a year, and every 7th day, we are to set apart a day, treating it differently, why?  Maybe because we are to 'rest in the Lord,' contemplating all the work He did in creation?  If we did this more often, would we be more 'in awe' of Him?  I believe I would.

Genesis 1:10 "A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers." When I read this, I am reminded that we are to 'abide in him (Jesus)' and then in John 7:38, Jesus told us that Scripture says, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'  But why did it divide and become four rivers?  Four corners of the earth? Four gospels, same story, different approach? Could it be to remind us that we, after receiving the 'Water of Life' are to branch out and share that Living Water with the world?  

Matthew 2.  Why did Herod have all the male children in and around Bethlehem under the age of two killed?  If the wise men saw his star when it rose, and have how come to worship him, why would it have taken two years?  Why hadn't everyone is Jerusalem seen it too?  If there was something in the 'stars' that the wise men saw, did they see it as Gabriel was making the announcement to Mary?  Did they wait for nine months only to see another confirmation in the eastern sky at His birth?  Then, did it take a few months to get everything together to form a caravan and undertake the journey?

In Ezra 2, the part that jumps out at me is found in verses 59-62. "The following were those who came up ..., though they could not prove their fathers' houses or their descent, whether they belonged to Israel ... These sought their registration ..., but they were not found there, and so they were excluded ..."  What an example of those whose names are not written in the Book of Life.

And in Acts 2:42-47, I find such an admonition for me. "And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles ... , they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved."

Lord, help me keep a day 'holy' to you so that I might devote myself to your Word, receiving your teachings with gladness and praise.  Develop in me a generous heart, sharing the Living Water you have given me, so that those I come in contact with will not be excluded from your kingdom. Keep me in awe of You.

M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan - Day 1

This is a first!  I have never used the M'Cheyne Bible reading plan (nor had I ever heard of it) until this fall when I purchased a new One Year Bible for my husband to use in 2015.  He'd wanted to try an ESV and this was the only one the store had in stock. So, I too, am using the M'Cheyne plan, but on Biblegateway.com.

In Genesis 1, we find the creation of the world, but specifically, in verse 1, it simply says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Logically (therefore, mathematically) there are implications here.  1) If there is a beginning, then there will be an end. 2) God was already in existence in the beginning, so will still be around after the end. 3) God took nothing, and 'created' something. 4) Since God is the 'Creator", He is also the owner/operator. 5) All creation is accountable to its originator, namely, God.

In Matthew 1, we find the genealogy of Jesus, through Joseph, the husband of Mary.  I find it interesting that there are 42 generations from Abraham to the Christ - three sets of fourteen generations. 42 = 3 x 14, 42 = 6 x 7, 42 = 2 x 21 , 42 = 2 x 3 x 7.  Wonder where else we will find 42 in scripture?  I know we'll see it again.

Ezra 1:1-2 "In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah." Jeremiah 29:10, (the verse preceding the one we all know) says, "For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place." and Cyrus had obviously been shown Isaiah 44:28, written three centuries before he was born, "who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose’; saying of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be built,’and of the temple, ‘Your foundation shall be laid.’"

And finally in Acts 1, we find the promise of the Holy Spirit and the ascension, and in verses 7-8, Jesus tells his disciples, "He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

What does all this mean for me?  
1) I am a creation of God, and God has 'created' in me a clean heart (Psalm 51:10 - same word as in Genesis 1:1).  
2) He has made something ( a heart that longs for Him) from nothing. 
3) Just like God planned the birth of Jesus, His Son, the Christ, through a certain lineage, and in His perfect timing, He planned mine.
4) God uses people to accomplish His purpose, just as he used Cyrus.
5) God has fixed 'times and seasons', and it is not for me to know when they are.
6) Since God has created a new heart in me, He is my owner/operator and I am accountable to Him. 
7) He provides the power to accomplish His will in my life.

What am I accountable for?  
All that I am, all that He has blessed me with, all that do/don't do for Him.

Types of Statements

Genesis 13-15 and Matthew 5:1-26 were the BibleGateway passages of scripture for Sunday, and while reading the Beatitudes my math topic was confirmed.  I noticed a verse while reading earlier that got me thinking about using if-then statements in logic.  Let me explain using an example.

     If you climb onto the kitchen counter then it is possible to fall off the counter.

The "if" part (you climb onto the kitchen counter) is called the hypotheses, and the "then" part (it is possible to fall off the counter) is called the conclusion. Written this way, it is called a conditional statement. If we rearrange or change the wording, the statement is called a related conditional.  For example, if we switch the hypotheses and conclusion it is called a converse statement.

     If it is possible to fall off the counter then you climbed onto the kitchen counter.

If you negate each part of the original conditional it is called an inverse statement.

     If you do not climb onto the kitchen counter then it is not possible to fall off the counter.

And finally, if you negate both parts of the converse statement, it will be called a contrapositive statement.

     If it is not possible to fall off the counter then you did not climb onto the kitchen counter.

I may only be five days into God's Word this year, but I am amazed at how many conditional statements I've already read.  The first was in Genesis 2:17.  In essence God says, "If you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil then you will die." I continued to find conditional statements in the reading, but when I read the fifth chapter of Matthew, I knew this was my topic - even before I fell off the kitchen counter!

While speaking to his disciples, Jesus gave them conditional statements. Read each verse as an if-then statement. If you are poor in spirit then yours is the kingdom of heaven.  If you mourn then you will be comforted.  If you are meek then you will inherit the earth. If you hunger and thirst after righteousness then you will be satisfied.  If you are merciful then you will obtain mercy.  If you are pure in heart then you will see God.  If you seek peace, you will be called a child of God.  If you are persecuted for righteousness' sake then yours is the kingdom of heaven.  If men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account then rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven.

Remember, Jesus is speaking to his disciples. Now, read the next two verses.  They are NOT conditional statements.  These are simply facts.  You are the salt of the earth . . . You are the light of the world . . . Why?

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."  Matthew 5:16

The Tower of Babel

While reading Genesis 10-12 and Matthew 4, we find the statement, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth." Immediately, I began to think about how man seems to thrive on being disobedient to God. Like people today, they had plans to make a name for themselves, and apparently these folks didn't want to follow God's directive to spread out and fill the earth.

These are the people who began what is labeled as the sexagesimal, positional numeration system or a base-60 numeration.  They only had two mathematical symbols, one a narrow wedge (resembling Y) and a wider wedge (resembling <) and could represent any numbers they needed and calculate very accurately.  They were able to calculate the square root of two correct to seven decimal places. These are the people who gave the world sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour.  Why base-60 instead of base-10 (fingers) or base-20 (fingers and toes)?

The people of this city needed a tower to study the stars.  They gained much worldly wisdom, studying the earth, the moon, and the stars (and, of course, developing gods associated with many aspects of creation to worship instead of the Creator).  They were accustomed to a 360 day year. (You can do some research here, but I personally believe that there was originally a 360 day, twelve month, thirty days a month year that was disrupted when the flood occurred.)  These city-dwellers assigned 360 degrees to a full circle (one revolution of the earth - yes, they knew it was round), and so angular measurement developed into what we still use today. 360 conveniently divides by ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty and sixty. Sixty conveniently divides by one, two, three, four, five and six.

As I conclude today's thoughts, I realize I've been meditating on Biblegateway's verse of the day from Micah 6:8 which is in direct conflict (disobedience) to the beginning verse from Genesis 11:4.  "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" 

Statistics

Genesis 7-9 and Matthew 3 are today's passages from Biblegateway.com, and the math I notice is a very basic, foundational, introduction to statistics.  Statistics is the science of learning from data, and of measuring, controlling, and communicating uncertainty; and it thereby provides the navigation essential for controlling the course of scientific and societal advances (Davidian, M. and Louis, T. A., 10.1126/science.1218685). Statistical thinking and methods are applied daily to a wide variety of scientific, social, and business endeavors in areas like astronomy, biology, education, economics, genetics, and so on.

There are four terms used to describe types of data: nominal (name only), ordinal (a natural ordering), interval (like ordinal, except with measurable values) and ratio (interval with an actual zero). In the scripture text we can find all these types of data.  For instance animals taken on the ark were classified as clean or not clean.  This is a nominal classification. When God gave Noah the 'go ahead' to leave the ark, and He promised Noah that as long as the earth remained there would be "seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night." This information is ordinal.  The events of the flood (building the ark, the loading, the waiting, the deluge, the waiting, etc.) are actually interval.  If you give dates to Noah's call and all the individual events after his entering into the ark and until leaving the ark, this information becomes ratio.

As I read through these scriptures to the departure from the ark, Genesis 8:19 tells me that everything "went forth by families out of the ark."  As I continued reading into the next day's passages, I found that in chapter 10, the descriptions of Noah's sons were given by "their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations."  This made me consider sampling techniques in statistics.  There are five main ways to sample a population.  They are random, cluster, convenience, stratified and systematic.  I might simply observe here that nothing God plans or executes is random or done for convenience.  God is methodical and orderly, so His labels are stratified, and His methods are systematic.

Paul said in Ephesians 3, "To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places."  Although I feel it is the responsibility of all believers to 'preach' the unsearchable riches of Christ, I must admit that my chosen method is through proclaiming the beauty of mathematics that God mysteriously hid in His Word.

Generations

The scriptures for today were Genesis 4-6 and Matthew 2.  Genesis 2:4 states "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. Genesis 5 begins, "This is the book of the generations of Adam."  Matthew 1 (reading for 1/1/14) discusses the generations from Abraham to Christ. Mathematically speaking, sequences are much like generations. A sequence is an ordered list (order matters) and are useful in a number of mathematical disciplines.  Sequences are also of interest in their own right and can be studied as patterns or puzzles, such as the prime numbers or the Fibonacci numbers.  It contains members and can be finite (countable) or infinite. 

Did my brief definition of sequences resemble your understanding of generations?  Then quite possibly a math lesson over even numbers, odd numbers, primes, or multiples (Use Genesis 4:15 as a reason to learn the multiples of 7.), could be taught beginning with a discussion of the generations that exist within your own family.  This discussion would transition very easily into several different educational activities.

I think my favorite activities would be to use the data from Genesis 5 to teach

• how to create a bar chart/graph depicting either the age at which each person died or became the father of the indicated son (or both).
• how to create a stacked bar chart/graph using the combined data. (You could use this for an Excel lesson.)
• a family lesson by either drawing on butcher paper (Can you still get that?) or using Excel to highlight/shade columns creating a vertical 'timeline' depicting Creation to the flood - or even to Joseph if you want to extend this lesson.

I will tag some 'extra' math lessons from these scriptures after this post, but now, I want to get into the 'family lesson' I mentioned above.

At one time, there were nine living generations.  Adam was still alive when Enoch was born and died only a 'short' fifty-seven years before 'Enoch was not.'  Wonder how many times Adam took Enoch for a walk by the Garden of Eden and possibly said, " Enoch, my dear great, great, great, great, great, great grandson, I really messed up.  You see those cherubim with the flaming sword?  I can't take you in there to show you what you're missing, but you really NEED to walk with God.  A relationship with Him is what you need to seek. Don't ever forget that!"

What do our children hear from us each day?  What should we be telling them?  Are we?  Do our children or the generations following us learn from us, from our experiences?  As far as math (or everything else) goes, what kind of impression to we give those watching us?  Do we indicate that math is too difficult to understand?  Are we like the people in Matthew 13 whose "heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart," both mathematically and spiritually?

Just some questions for you to ponder today, as I've been pondering the Verse of the Day from biblegateway.com found in Psalm 90:12. "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom."