Friends Collection

THE BEST COLLEGE OF THEOLOGY…

“He wakeneth morning by morning, He wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned” (Isa 50:4).

Before we can learn to speak we need to learn to hear or listen. “He wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.” It is strange to find that while learned people are willing to hear and learn more, unlearned people are often unwilling to learn or listen.

“My sheep hear My voice… and they follow Me,” says Jesus (Jn 10:27). Let us ask the Master to open our ears to hear His tender voice, for only then we can follow Him in His footsteps.

“He wakeneth morning by morning.” It is early in the morning that the Lord speaks to us, giving us instructions and orders for the day’s activities, and warning us of dangers that lie ahead. “I spake unto you rising up early and speaking,” the Lord repeatedly told the Israelites.

It was not once in a way that Jesus woke up in the morning. It was His constant practice to rise up” a great while before day,” and go out and pray (Mk 1:35). No pupil in the school of God’s wisdom comes out as a true saint without learning the discipline of RISING UP EARLY IN THE MORNING. After a whole day’s long and tiresome journeying on foot and its hectic activities, it must have been very difficult for Jesus to rise up very early in the morning, but our Lord “was not rebellious, neither turned away back” (Isa 50:5).

Let us retrace the footsteps of our Master in the BEST COLLEGE OF THEOLOGY to become a blessing to millions!

PLANS TO PROSPER

Dear Friend! Our loving God says, “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). It is God’s desire to grant you His divine peace and make you happy (John 14:27). He has unconditional love for you and wants your soul to be prosperous always (3 John 2).

A certain sister met me in person and shared with me all her experiences. Once it so happened that suddenly both her legs were swollen. When she sought medical help, the doctor remarked, “There is fluid in your legs. It has to be sucked out by a needle”. Following this, she visited the hospital everyday for treatment. There was none to help her. She had two small children. She had to get her children ready for school, drop them at school, bring them back and also cook for them. On account of the problem in her legs she could neither stand nor walk. Somehow she dragged herself inside the house and did all the work.

Although her children wanted to help their mother they could not do anything as they were very small. Her condition became worse. One day they were watching the Jesus Calls TV program. That day while I offered prayers in that program I said, “Oh Lord, please heal those who are suffering with swelling in their legs”. She felt as if that prayer was meant only for her. When I prayed she was in her bed unable to move or lift her legs.

After the prayer the Holy Spirit descended on her and lifted her up from the bed. Realizing the change that has come into her body she tried to stand on her legs. At that moment a new strength surged into her. Immediately after that prayer she began to walk and started doing all the household work cheerfully with divine joy and peace enveloping her heart.

The Bible says, “From the west, men will fear the name of the Lord, and from the rising of the sun, they will revere his glory” (Isaiah 59:19). “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you” (Romans 16:20). Therefore, be of good cheer! The Lord shall certainly perform a miracle for you. Are you troubled by your own family members? Today the Holy Spirit shall descend upon them also. They may be your children or your spouse, whoever they may be, the Lord of peace shall descend upon them. The plan of God which He has for you is a plan of peace to prosper your soul. On this wonderful day, my friend, please place your trust on Him without any reservation.

Prayer:

Amen.

HE KEEPS OUR FEET..

“He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: He that keepeth thee will not slumber” (Psa 121:3).

What privileged people we are! Our God has promised that He will not allow our feet which have been set on the Rock of Ages (Psa 40:2), to be moved or shaken.

“He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways” (Psa 91:11,12). “He will keep the feet of His saints” (I Sam 2:9). Is it not amazing that not only are the holy angels holding us in their mighty hands that our feet may not dash against a stone, but the Lord also is Himself watching over our feet night and day – He doesn’t ever slumber or sleep!

However, if the Lord is to keep our feet, we have a part to play. “I have refrained my feet from every evil way” (Psa 119:101). Here ‘feet’ means ‘walk of life’. When our walk of life is free from all known evil, the Lord will preserve our feet from being shaken and also from falling. “Thou hast delivered… my feet from falling” (Psa 116:8).

If God is caring for and keeping our feet, the lowest part of the body, how much more willing He must be to care for our head – to keep it from evil thoughts, imaginations, etc! And if God cares so much for our body, how much more He must care for our soul!

How To Twitter The Bible

Here’s a piece of trivia that I discovered while writing this post which every Christian Tweep will enjoy. The average Bible verse is 25 words in length and the average number of characters needed to Tweet a Bible verse properly is 140.

There is a huge and growing Christian presence on Twitter and it has become a great place to publish God’s truth. It’s an awesome platform for Christians around the world to speak God’s Word to each other, building each other up and encouraging one other. However, the 140 character limit means that there are many verses in the Bible that cannot be tweeted easily. If we want to leave room for retweeting and a small amount of personal commentary, we are left with even fewer verses that can be tweeted. Therefore, certain shortcuts are being taken to reduce the number of characters needed to tweet a verse.

Which brings me to the primary reason for writing this article. As more and more Christians get on Twitter and join the wonderful and unprecedented global Christian conversation, it would be valuable for us to have some guidelines for tweeting Bible verses. As most of you know, the Bible wasn’t written with chapters and verses, they were added later to help facilitate the reading, studying, referencing and sharing of God’s Word. In other words, they facilitate our conversation over the Bible. Social networking is enhancing that conversation, but with its preference to brevity, it is also changing the conversation’s format and structure. With these changes come the need for new shared guidelines.

For that we need to talk about several things; shortening the text of Bible verses without compromising them, shortening the Bible references (and the importance of tweeting the reference), dealing with Bible versions and their copyright requirements and also how to add helpful commentary while making it clear which words have been added.

1. Using Twitter Shorthand To Tweet The Bible

The acronym-style abbreviations used in texting are obviously not very useful for condensing Bible verses. The words that 143, lol, rofl, btw, etc shorten, do not occur very often in the Bible’s text.

What we can use is the language of Twitter. Twitter language incorporates simple devices that reduce the number of characters needed without compromising readability. Here are the basics:

• When possible replace words with a single number. (one = 1, to, two and too = 2, four and for = 4 etc.)
• When possible replace words with a single letter. (be = B, see = c, are and our = r, you = u, why = y)
• Of course there are combinations of the above. (before = B4 etc.)
• Hybrid words using the above work as well. (4tune, 4got, 4get, gr8)
• Don’t forget to use the symbols when you can. (and = &, at = @ etc.
• As long as it’s still immediately obvious what the word is, feel free to leave out letters. (the = th, that = tht, work = wrk etc.)
• Spell phonetically when it allows you to save characters. (luv, giv, sry, thx, thru) We need to use this sparingly on only the obvious and secondary words or the reading becomes laborious.

The great thing about Twitter language is that you don’t have to learn or memorize it. Once you understand the concepts, they’re easy to apply; use numbers, symbols and single letters when you can and shorten words by eliminating letters and/or spelling phonetically when possible.

These rules don’t compromise the scriptures integrity or readability and since just the words to, for and be occur in the Bible a total of more than 35,000 times, these shortcuts really help.

2. Twittering Bible Verse References in a Compact Way

Including the reference for the Bible verses that you tweet is important. If a person is encouraged by the verse, they may want to look it up and benefit from the context and a deeper reading. If the person reading it is not familiar with the verse and you’ve left off the reference, then the tweet no longer carries the authority of scripture because the reader doesn’t know where it came from.

Traditionally, if you wanted to quote the first verse from Ecclesiastes 3, you’d need to follow the verse with (Ecclesiastes 3:1) That’s 18 characters. Fortunately you can use the abbreviation (Eccles. 3:1) or the even shorter one (Eccl 3:1). We have these shortened versions because in the past an ever increasing need for brevity has called for their creation. Now a new need calls for even shorter abbreviations.

If we remove the parenthesis, which aren’t necessary, and eliminate the spaces, we save characters without losing clarity. Further, most Bible book abbreviations can be reduced down to two or three letters. That would reduce our example reference to Ec3:1, down from 18 characters to five.

Here’s my table of Twitterized Bible book abbreviations:

If you’d like to see a table that shows all of the Bible books and all of their abbreviations (as they’ve got progressively shorter over the years) you can find it here.

Another very obvious way to Twitter Bible verses and keep the character count down is to only tweet part of the verse. Many verses contain more than one sentence and it’s alright to just tweet the one that you’d like to share. (Remember the verse divisions were added later.) Galatians 5:6 has two sentences and the second one is short and can stand alone as an inspirational tweet, “What is important is faith expressing itself in love.” When we chop up a verse some feel it’s necessary to add a letter to the reference to let people know that you are not quoting the whole verse. To do this (if you feel so inclined) identify the first sentence with the letter ‘a’ the second with a ‘b’ etc. So the above verse would be referenced Gl5:6b.

If we chop a verse up in the middle of a sentence we shouldn’t add an arbitrary period. Some use three periods (…) to show that the sentence continues but since that uses 3 characters, I suggest an underscore (_).

3. Bible Versions & Copyrights

The copyright holders of all modern Bible translations allow us to quote from their version without using a full copyright notice as long as we publish their logo acronym with the verse (NIV, NLT etc). However, Tweeps are not including the required copyright notation merely because it uses up an additional 3 or 4 characters. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest a compromise. The key word, the one that makes the version’s name unique is often represented by the middle initial(s). If we use only these one or two letters, it is still clear which version we are quoting from and I’m thinking that the copyright holders would rather have that than nothing.

Here are my suggested new logo abbreviations for some of the most popular Bible versions:

4. Bible Commentary (Twittertary)

I find that adding personal Bible commentary helps make your Bible tweets more relevant to Twitter. They don’t get scan-read as quickly, they can be made relevant to the current trending topics and they start conversations more readily. For us to ensure that the readers know which words are ours, we should use this order; verse, reference, twittertary. This order clearly separates the Bible’s words from yours. Here are a few examples:

What is important is faith expressing itself in love. Gl5:6bL When R love is showing so is R Faith. : )

As iron sharpens iron as a friend sharpens a friend. Pr27:17L _or as a follower sharpens a follower. : )

If Bible Twittertary is all we are tweeting, we should still include the reference that supports the comment. In this case we can simply use the letter ‘C’ for ’see.’

When we R not acting in love we R not expressing & living R Faith. : ) C Ga5:6

Just for fun I did an online search of over 25 versions of the Bible and found the word ‘twitter’ twice; once in the NASB and once in The Message. In both verses the authors (David and Hezekiah) were praying and they compared the noises they made while praying to God for help to the twitter of a bird.

Like a swallow, {like} a crane, so I twitter; I moan like a dove; My eyes look wistfully to the heights; O Lord, I am oppressed, be my security. Isa 38:14 NASB

Insomniac, I twitter away, mournful as a sparrow in the gutter. Ps 102:7 The Message

David and Hezekiah twittered before the Lord and now we all benefit from reading about it. Likewise, our tweets should benefit and minister God’s truth to our readers. This new system for brevity can help us all do that well in 140 characters.

Two last tweets:

Let everything U say B good & helpful, so tht your wrds will B an encouragement 2 those who hear them. Ep4:29b Words & tweets. : )

Insomniac, I twitter away, mournful as a sparrow in the gutter. Ps102:7M Apparently twittering kept David up as well. : )