Feed Your Soul Blog

Treasure Christ

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Thanks to Ant Adam's blog for this link to a YouTube video animation of part of John Piper's sermon on treasuring Christ above everything else.

Top 10 Bible resources: 1 - bestcommentaries.com

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The web is definitely defining our generation. Communication has improved through web email (gmail etc) and VOIP (Skype). Social networks are now a central part of life too. But how has the web changed things for Christians? As a Christian I think the web has opened up access to Bible teaching no other generation has had access to. In my opinion it's as revolutionary as the Gutenberg press. So, I thought I'd start a new blog series looking at the best Bible resources available on the web. It's a top 10 but not in the 'top of the pops' sense - just 10 really useful websites and web applications that Christians might find useful.

1. Best Commentaries.com

First up is bestcommentaries.com - a comprehensive resource for anyone wanting to buy a Bible commentary. The clever stuff for me is that it pulls in all of main the reviews from amazon.com. So rather use it's own reviewing system and wait for a critical mass of reviews before the site becomes useful, best commentaries just leverages the reviews already there from the most used book website in the world. The interface is easy to use and books are easy to find even although the web 2.0 effects can sometime get in the way and slow you down a bit. As well as browse you can also become a member and post your own reviews and see other peoples and one really nice touch is that a number of respected Bible teachers (Don Carson, Tremper Longman, John Piper etc) have their best commentary lists on the site.

As commentaries are expensive, Pastors (and lay preachers) who are working within a budget will find this site invaluable.

Preacher's problems - sermon illustrations!

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If you've been doing talks for a while, you'll realise that once you find a good quote or a great illustration, rather than re-invent the wheel, you use it again in other talks. The only problem I have is that they're scattered all over the place - I have highlights in books, newspaper clippings, quotes in folders. Basically I have lots of good stuff built up but no way of finding it.

As I'm a computer programmer I've toyed with the idea of writing my own web app to try and solve this, but with life pressures that's just way too time consuming. The other day though, when I was browsing the web I came across a wonderful bit of software that might just fix my problem. It's called Evernote and it's a web tool for saving anything online - photos, files, notes, web articles etc. It has an app that you can download for Windows and the Mac and the app then syncs with your account on the website.

The clever thing about this tool is that it has a brilliant search facility, it allows you to tag your notes and just to be really clever it can recognise text inside images and it can read handwriting. But best of all, it's free to use for the basic package - you only pay when you upload lots of data.

Evernote even lets you share your notes online, so if you used it to store sermon illustrations and quotes you could share them with a friend. Never will I lose a good illustration again.

Tim Keller preaching resources

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As many of you know, I'm a bit of a Tim Keller addict. We even managed to get a personal letter from him on our wedding day (thanks Ed). In many ways I think he's a prophet for our generation. If you don't know who he is, he's currently the Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. If you want to listen to his talks, you normally have to buy them from their church website (the money goes to their ministry in New York and towards their efforts to church plant across the world), but there are lots of his talks available for free if you know where to look. To save you the effort of looking around, a guy called Steve McCoy has setup a web page devoted to listing as many free Tim Keller resources as he can find.

One of the best resources on there if you're a speaker is his series of talks given at the Reformed Theological Seiminary in the US with the now late Ed Clowney. His insights are brilliant. The series is entitled 'Preaching Christ in a postmodern world'. The are Tim's notes but aren't from the same year so don't follow eactly with te audio talks but they're not far off.

Here's the preaching notes (189 pages in all)
Here's the talks (only available if you have iTunes installed on your computer)

There are 18 talks in total with various Q&A sessions dotted throughout. This series is a must for anyone who wants to grow in their ability to teach the Bible to others. Here's a full list of the talks:

Introduction to the Christ-Centered Model and an Introduction to the Christ-Centered Exposition (Tim Keller)
Expounding Christ: Structure of Redemptive History Part One (Ed Clowney)
Expounding Christ: Structure of Redemptive History Part Two (Ed Clowney)
Applying Christ: Introduction Into Christ-Centered Application (Tim Keller)
Applying Christ: Getting to Christ (Tim Keller)
Expounding Christ: Structure of Redemptive History Part Three (Ed Clowney)
Expounding Christ: Telling God's Story, Narrative Analysis (Ed Clowney)
Applying Christ: Getting Down to Earth Part One (Tim Keller)
Applying Christ: Getting Down to Earth Part Two (Tim Keller)
Expounding Christ: The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Tim Keller)
Applying Christ: Getting Inside Their World Part One (Tim Keller)
Expounding Christ: Christ and the Law (Ed Clowney)
Expounding Christ: Christ in the Psalms (Ed Clowney)
Adoring Christ: Getting Inside Their World Part Two (Tim Keller)
Adoring Christ: Spiritual Reality (Tim Keller)
Expounding Christ: Christ in Wisdom Literature (Ed Clowney)
Expounding Christ: Asking Questions, Discourse Analysis (Ed Clowney)
Adoring Christ: Communion With God (Tim Keller)

If you're keen on getting hold of more talks like this but not neccessarily by Tim Keller, the RTS provide all of their M.Div courses for free on iTunes. There's a massive choice ranging from biblical studies to practical theology, by some of the best Bible teachers in the US.

STOP PRESS!

Just discovered another very useful page full of links to Tim Keller sermons on the monergism website.

Derby is on Google Street View

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I know this has nothing to do with our church, Christianity or anything else that this blog is about, but I've just seen today that Derby, along with lots of other UK cities have gone live onto Google Street View. You can read about it on the BBC website. Just to annoy our East Midlands neighbours, Derby and Nottingham get on but sadly Leicester don't just yet. Ahhh!

To use it, go to the Google maps site and type in a postcode or street in Derby that you want to see, then drag the little orange man above the navigation icon onto the part of the map you'd like to see in Street View and you can explore the streets of Derby. If you get stuck, Google provide help.

Just for fun, here's our church on Google Street View. Click to enlarge the image, or even better take a look for yourself. I've added Google Street view to the our 'moving to Derby' page or you can click here to go straight to the church location on Google Street View.

Feed Your Soul hits iTunes

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Hot on the tail of our new podcasts launch, we're now live in iTunes. All of the podcasted talks available from the podcasts section of the website are also available here. Click this link: Feed Your Soul iTunes Podcast to see our podcast. You'll need to install iTunes which is completely free to download for PC or Mac in order to see it, but once you do you'll be impressed. We've given the podcast the same name as the website.

As well as going directly to the podcast from here, you can also search for it in iTunes. If you search for 'Feed Your Soul' in iTunes, our podcast comes up. In order to find podcasts in iTunes you need to go to the iTunes store. You don't have to pay for podcasts so this is an odd name for the place where podcasts live, but this is also where Apple sell music. Here are a few screenshots to show you what you'll see when you search for our podcast. This also doubles as a tutorial. Click on any of the images to see an enlarged version.

First, when you install iTunes and select the 'iTunes store' you'll see a screen like this.

Entering 'Feed Your Soul' in the search window in the top right finds our podcast. It's the one with the FYS logo.

Click the link next to the icon to see the 'Feed Your Soul Podcasts'. You can now subscribe to the podcast (obviously for free).

Subscribing puts the podcast in your list of Podcasts and automatically downloads the first episode.

And that's all you need to do. From now on, whenever there's a new episode of the podcast posted, it will automatically download when you open iTunes. Once an episode has downloaded, just double click it in order to play it on your computer, or buy an ipod (or any other mp3 player) and drag the episode onto that in order to listen on the move.