Father-Son Campout
While not a Deep Water event, Chic-Fil-A in Camden is sponsoring a Father-Son campout from 7pm Saturday, June 8 to 7am Sunday, June 9. There will be a rock wall, laser tag, games, a movie and a Sundae Bar.
The event is FREE except the cost of your dinner, but space is limited and reservations are required. If you’re interested, click here and RSVP.
God Myths
Have you ever heard someone use a Bible verse in a way that didn’t seem quite right? Ever hear someone use one that seemed to contradict other things you’ve heard? In planning for our summer schedule, we’ll be looking at some of these.
I’m working on finalizing the topics in the next week. So, if you have one and want to hear me speak on it, share it here as a comment, post it on our Facebook, contact us–or type it in the form below. (If the form below doesn’t show up in your browser, click here.)
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Got skills?
One of the exciting things about being a new church is that there are plenty of things being worked on for the future. (By the way, these aren’t secret plans, feel free to ask us about some of them!) If you want to be a part of what God is doing here, we can always use more help.
We always need more musicians, volunteers to promote Deep Water at upcoming events, help serving the community, people to bake the snacks we enjoy on Sundays, people to come in and clean a little, nursery volunteers, graphic design, artists to help with a big art project coming up soon, people who can do construction, etc. With all the endless opportunities to serve here, we’d love to help you find the place where you can use the gifts and talents God has given you to help Deep Water move forward. So, from time to time we may highlight some opportunities to serve, but if you don’t want to wait for that perfect opportunity to get posted, feel free to contact us and we’ll help you get plugged in!
And, of course, you can also fill out the skills section of your online profile after you login to our website.
Parent Cue for Sunday, May 19
Each week we supply a weekly Parent Cue and Kids God Time sheet. The Parent Cue is meant to be a resource for you to discuss and reinforce the lesson with your kids. The Kids God Time is inteded to help kids learn to spend some quiet time with God on their own. (Of course, you’re welcome to help them and model it for them as they learn!)
We’re posting the upcoming week’s material for the lesson used this Sunday. Additionally, we will provide a hardcopy of these on Sunday for those who may not prefer the digital versions. We’re still in the experimental stage trying to figure out what is best for everyone. So, if we find people do not take and use the hardcopies, we’ll go back to entirely digital to save some trees.
Our goal as a church is provide you with resources to help your children grow spiritually. We’re doing our best to make things simple and easy. Please feel free to give us feedback on this!
Parent Cue
for the lesson this coming week: Sunday, May 19
Haven’t gotten to this week’s yet? Check out the one for Sunday, May 12
Devotional Sheet
for the lesson this coming week: Sunday, May 19
Haven’t gotten to this week’s yet? Check out the one for Sunday, May 12
As always, instructions are here.
How to Study the Bible–Part 5
Things have been a bit hectic with deadlines and the flu, but we’re going to continue the series on how to study the Bible.
We left off with an assignment:
Previous Assignment: Using your previous observations, find out more about the things you observed.
One of my observations was that Mary was “at the Lord’s feet”. The Holman Christian Standard Bible and Faithlife Study Bible both comment that “at the Lord’s feet” was the posture of a committed disciple.
Interpretation: Remember, we don’t want to become Bible scholars just to be good at trivia questions like on Jeopardy. We want to be able to understand and apply the Scriptures to our lives.
While I had always thought that Mary was doing what was better–learning from Jesus–I had never considered the thought that she wasn’t just listening attentively, but acting like a disciple. Upon a little more digging in some books I own (I have a lot because I love to read and study the Bible.), I found this quote from the Mishnah (an ancient Jewish source that teaches us a lot about Jewish thought a century before and two centuries after Jesus), “Let thy house be a meeting-house for the Sages and sit amidst the dust of their feet and drink in their words with thirst.” In general, it’s a good idea to find some agreement with scholars before suggesting an interpretation that is very different–but here I found agreement among several sources that Mary was taking the stance of a disciple.
For a 1st century Jewish woman to take the posture of a disciple would have been shocking. Was this why Martha was upset? Martha was “distracted” (v. 40) with the other details. If she were alive today, I could picture her stressing over all of the details to make sure the party preparations were going well and checking Pinterest to make sure everything looked great. (By the way, check out this article on the stress Pinterest causes many people!) But when Martha asks Jesus to get Mary to help, Jesus commends Mary–not Martha!
Then I began to look at the context of the verse. Luke places this right after the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan is commended for doing the the right thing–that is, loving his neighbor by serving the injured man. But Jesus had just taught that we are to love God AND our neighbor (Luke 10:27). The story of Mary and Martha illustrates the first part–loving God.
Assignment: Take one of your previous observations. Use the extra information and determine why that detail might be important. What can we learn from it?
(By the way, I have often studied something at length and not found anything significant. So, don’t be discouraged if some of your observations don’t lead you to a better understanding of the passage you are studying.)
Want to catch up? Check out the previous posts :
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4