Articles « Balance Point

Balance Point Update

19 February 2012, 9:57 pm

It has been a while since I have I have made a text post. I wanted to let you know what has been going on. I have been doing audio posts on a more regular basis. The reception of the podcast has been amazing. God is really doing a work through the spoken word a t Balance Point.

Balance Point will be going live. Beginning March 9, we will be meeting live at 7 pm, each Friday. For those of you in the Los Angeles area, we meet at Light and Life Christian Fellowship, 5951 Downey Ave, Long Beach, 90805, in the school. We invite you to come join us!

This means some changes to Balance Point:

There will be more frequent updates to the site for both text and audio.
We will be adding an additional site admin to help with getting things posted.
At some point, we will be changing the theme of this site to accommodate the live aspect of the ministry.
We have added two new communication channels

Facebook Balance Point page: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Balance-Point-Bible-Studies/334727416572096
Twitter feed: @daniel_hoyte

About our current study

We are not abandoning the current study in Genesis. We are going to see the study through to thte end. There will be a period of time where there will be studies posted from Genesis and the Friday night meetings.

Once we have recording capability there will be once per month posting from the service that we do at one of our local outreach locations.

This is shaping up to be a great year for Balance Point. As we go forward, we pray that you will grow with us, and that this year, you will move closer to the person that God has designed for you to be.

Filed under Annoucements.

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Worship: It’s an Attitude

9 January 2012, 2:16 pm

Before we get started, please take a watch of this video:

Wrong Worship

Boiling it down, worship is an attitude.

Worship is not about singing songs. It is not about the place, it is about our hearts. It is how we choose to do to the small things each day.

True worship rings out when we recognize that all that we are and have comes from one who is greater than we are. True worship happens when we take that which has been given to us and co-operate with God in doing His command to tend His creation.

We show forth the worth of God when we use the skills and talents that he has given us, on the canvas of creation to extend the beauty that is in the creation.

It is strange and awe inspiring to consider that at a level, God expects us to continue the work that He started in bringing order to the universe. The greatest act of worship is to give back to God something that is greater than what He first gave us.

Let us worship today by leaving the world a better place than when we woke up this morning. Leave a smile. Do our job better, today than yesterday.

God expects us to be holy, but He knows that we are frail. Our act of worship, today, should be to take the strength that God offers us and combine it with what we have to create something that sings of the beauty of the Creator.

Let’s worship, today, in the small things.

Created to Worship (jonahzsong.wordpress.com)
Praise him (pastorayres.wordpress.com)

Filed under Daily Living. Tagged Christianity, God, HolySpirit, Jesus, Religion and Spirituality, worship

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Thank You!

27 August 2011, 1:09 pm

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Balance point has just passed a major milestone! We have just had our 100,000th page view. Thanks to all of the regular visitors and to all of our new visitors!

Stay tuned as we begin to ramp up the number of studies available.

Filed under Annoucements.

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Worship in Spirit and Truth

8 July 2011, 3:46 pm

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Once, the Devil was walking along with one of his cohorts. They saw a man ahead of them pick up something shiny. “What did he find?” asked the cohort.

“A piece of the truth,” the Devil replied.

“Doesn’t it bother you that he found a piece of the truth?” asked the cohort.

“No,” said the Devil, “I will see to it that he makes a religion out of it.”

Klyne Snodgrass, Between Two Truths – Living with Biblical Tensions, 1990, Zondervan Publishing House, p. 35.

The passage that we picked up from john 4 speaks of worshipping “in spirit and truth.” What does it mean to worship that way? The passage gives us some hints that I would like to dig out in this section.

The first thing that is mentioned is that God is spirit. This means that the substance that is God is not made of the same stuff that makes up the universe, as we can see it with our physical senses. The fact that he passage says that we are to worship in spirit implies that there is a part or facility within the human has the ability to touch the reality that is spirit and that we have willful control over that facility.

Now let’s focus on the truth aspect of this passage. There are many elements of truth that need to be considered for there to be true worship. We have briefly considered the spiritual aspect. Let us consider a few others.

Consider who God is: This is the question of what God are you ascribing worth to. At the end of the day, there is only one true God. Anything less is not God and probably was create by the one true God. The one true God existed before time was and will still be here after time is ended. He is self-sufficient. He needs nothing that we can offer. He is self-contained. He needs nothing of this universe. He is all powerful. There is nothing that He cannot do, if He so chooses.

Consider who we are: We are the created. Apart from God sustaining us, we would simple wink out of existence. We are flawed. Apart from the grace of God, we would be destroyed.

Consider our state of being: True worship is honest about where we are. When we slap a “Jesus smile” on and play church; that is not true worship. We rob ourselves of the chance for God to meet us where we are. We rob others of the opportunity of worshipping God with their gifts and skills of healing the hurt.

True spiritual worship requires that we know the truth in several areas and at many levels.

Next, we will begin to look at some different ways that we can worship.

Worship Part II: What is worship? (hologrambible.org)
Worship (hologrambible.org)
Worship Must Be In Spirit and In Truth (savoringscripture.wordpress.com)

Filed under Basics. Tagged Bible, Christianity, God, Jesus, Religion and Spirituality, worship

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Worship Part II: What is worship?

5 June 2011, 7:21 am

A modern Western worship team leading a contem...

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Jesus speaking to the woman at the well:

You worship what you do not know, we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such to worship Him. God is a spirit, and they who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. (Joh 4:22-24)

These verses indicate that worship of God has something to do with spirit and truth. This does not tell us what that worship is. It does give up a target to aim for. Let’s see what a dictionary can offer us.

OK. So now we need to work out a definition on what worship is. We need this to understand how we are to worship God.

Dictionary.com gives the following definitions:

–noun

1. reverent honor and homage paid to god or a sacred personage, or to any object regarded as sacred.

2. formal or ceremonious rendering of such honor and homage: They attended worship this morning.

3. adoring reverence or regard: excessive worship of business success.

4. the object of adoring reverence or regard.

5. ( initial capital letter ) British . a title of honor used in addressing or mentioning certain magistrates and others of high rank or station (usually preceded by Your, His, or Her ).

–verb (used with object)

6. to render religious reverence and homage to.

7. to feel an adoring reverence or regard for (any person or thing).

–verb (used without object)

8. to render religious reverence and homage, as to a deity.

9. to attend services of divine worship.

10. to feel an adoring reverence or regard.

worship. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/worship (accessed: June 04, 2011).

That is a lot to get our heads around. I think that we can simplify this. We can eliminate the fifth definition, for the purpose of today’s discussion. We will be covering forms of worship in later lesson. That means that we can set aside items two and nine. Most of the definitions that are left are variations on the theme. For our purposes, I believe that the third definition renders the idea of worship the best: “adoring reverence or regard”. Let’s use this as our basis to build up to our target of the passage in John.

Using this definition of worship, we can see that there are components needed for there to be worship:

1. Actor- worship is carried on by thinking, feeling beings. (ok, I know that creation declares God’s glory, and by the definition that I am using, that is worship. Give me a chance to finish and you will see where I am headed.)
2. Catalyst- Something will provoke the actor to the point of adoration or reverence toward the object of that reverence.
3. Target- this is the person, deity, thing that is being worshiped.

When these three elements come together, there will follow an activity that we can recognize as worship. What this means is worship is not so much what is happening on the outside, as what has happened on the inside.

All that being said, we can see that humans can form worship relationship toward many things, including themselves. We are, now in a better position to get at what is means to worship in spirit and truth. That will be for our next section.