Thankful Thursday

I’m thankful for the opportunities to help that I had during the past week. I’ve received some wonderful help from others in the past and I love when I can do a little bit of the same sort of service.

I’m thankful that I got the rest of the garden in on Tuesday when it was  still a pleasant job because it would not be nice to be out digging in the garden today.

I’m thankful for my new daughter-in-law. While I’m thanking, I’ll thank God for my regular old sons and daughters, too.

I’m thankful for the new fencing the sons put up across the back of the yard yesterday. It’ll make life with the pup easier if we can just let him out in the yard and know that he’s stuck there. (He had taken to sailing over the old fence whenever he wanted his freedom.) I’m thankful that the perfect fencing was 1/2 price when I went shopping for it yesterday.

I’m thankful that God provides for me in more ways than I can even think to ask for.

On Thursdays throughout this year, I plan to post a few thoughts of thanksgiving along with Kim at the Upward Call and others. Why don’t you participate by posting your thanksgiving each week, too? It’ll be an encouragement to you and to others, I promise.

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy 27

What do Christians mean when they say the Bible is inerrant? The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy tells us what leading inerrantist mean by inerrancy. I’ll be posting a section of this statement each week until I’ve posted the whole thing.

After a preface and a short statement, the Chicago Statement contains the Articles of Affirmation and Denial. (You can read previously posted sections of this statement in by clicking here.) The last section is the Exposition, which “gives an account of the outline of doctrine from which our summary statement and articles are drawn.” This is the very last section of this historic church document.

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Inerrancy and Authority

In our affirmation of the authority of Scripture as involving its total truth, we are consciously standing with Christ and His apostles, indeed with the whole Bible and with the main stream of Church history from the first days until very recently. We are concerned at the casual, inadvertent, and seemingly thoughtless way in which a belief of such far-reaching importance has been given up by so many in our day.

We are conscious too that great and grave confusion results from ceasing to maintain the total truth of the Bible whose authority one professes to acknowledge. The result of taking this step is that the Bible which God gave loses its authority, and what has authority instead is a Bible reduced in content according to the demands of one’s critical reasonings and in principle reducible still further once one has started. This means that at bottom independent reason now has authority, as opposed to Scriptural teaching. If this is not seen and if for the time being basic evangelical doctrines are still held, persons denying the full truth of Scripture may claim an evangelical identity while methodologically they have moved away from the evangelical principle of knowledge to an unstable subjectivism, and will find it hard not to move further.

We affirm that what Scripture says, God says. May He be glorified. Amen and Amen.

Round the Sphere Again: For Fall

Light in the Darkness
The fall equinox is officially at 8:09pm, my time. From then until the spring equinox, those in the northern hemisphere will have more darkness than light, although the change will be more dramatic the farther north you go.

All that darkness makes for good northern lights viewing, and there’s a new place to view them: The Canadian Space Agency’s new aurora webcam. Scroll over the upper right corner and click Connect and if it’s after dusk Yellowknife time, you can watch for the northern lights. Or you could just watch one of the featured videos of past northern lights.

Comfort Food in the Pot
I have harvested everything from the garden except for a little lettuce. I decided it was time to dig the rest of the potatoes and carrots and pick the last three heads of cabbage when I woke a few mornings ago to a thermometer that said -6.7C.

• I’m going to use some of those cabbage leaves in this recipe: Crock Pot Cabbage Rolls (Mennonite Girls Can Cook). Cabbage rolls are a favorite in this house and I can’t wait to try making them in my favorite fall kitchen appliance—the crock pot.
• After that, I’m trying Kim’s lentil soup (The Upward Call). I’m thinking I could make that in the crock pot, too. That it’d use up a little more of the three heads of cabbage crowding the vegie drawers in my fridge is a big bonus.
• I’ve mentioned last week that I’ve been making and canning applesauce. The orchard run MacIntosh were in the supermarket this week, so I’ve made more sauce from the Macs. Don’t know how to make applesauce? I do it like this, except that I usually don’t use cinnamon.

Poem for the Season
I suppose it’s really more about spring, but this seems appropriate for fall, too, don’t you think? (While We Sojourn)