Yes, I know I promised more sermon transcripts months ago… but it takes time to translate and type them. Anyway, here’s one I gave last year about one of my favorite teachings:
Someone said a while ago that it’s a bit weird how many christian authors and preachers apparently do nothing much but travelling by plane and having all sorts of interesting experiences and inspirations on those flights, which they manage to masterfully include in their messages. Today, it’s going to be a bit more down to earth. So when I was travelling on the high speed train to Hamburg the other week, I had to think of how often there are storm tides in Hamburg. I don’t know why that’s what came to my mind, I guess I’ve been influenced by the media and all the thunderstorms and hurricanes that I’ve read and heard about recently. And I thought that such a regular storm tide doesn’t really matter much to the people of Hamburg. They’ve been wise enough to not build any vitally important buildings in places that usually get flooded during these tides. We all know from the news that it doesn’t always work that way because we all remember what happened in New Orleans a few weeks ago, when it more or less completely sunk into the water during a hurricane, a lot of things were destroyed and even now they are still busy pumping the water out of the city again.
Maybe you already noticed: today I just keep going on about tides and floods and storms and of course there’s a reason for that. I want us to look together at a story that Jesus told of two men who each built a house. Matthew tells us this story in chapter 7, verses 24 – 27.
(more…)
September 30th, 2006
Earlier this month a court in Germany ruled in favor of gpl-violations.org that D-Link had violated the GPL by including GPLed code in a hardware device without adhering to the terms of the GPL. Specifically, D-Link did not include a copy of the license with the device and did not make the parts of the source code that were GPL licensed available.
The full text of the decision is now available here for those of you that can read German and it is an interesting read. The court clarifies that licensing source code under the GPL does not mean the author of the code is waiving all his rights under copyright law. §4 of the GPL, that specifically prohibits distribution of the software in violation of the conditions set forth by the GPL, is fully valid under german law and D-Link thus had no right to distribute the device in question. D-Link had argued that the provisions of the GPL violate competition laws and cannot be enforced. The court stated that even if that was true (and it didn’t have to decide on that claim), then D-Link would have had no right at all to use the source code because an invalid license would also have voided the right to use it under its terms.
D-Link, in a statement that I find rather funny, said they are not going to appeal the ruling and praised themselves for not settling the case, so that now the GPL has been properly tested in court and can be relied on. They are certainly putting a good spin on their stubbornness 
.
Technorati : D-Link, GPL, Germany, copyright, court, license
September 22nd, 2006
Every couple of years, OM (the organization I work with) invites its longterm workers to a gathering, where we can have a few days of fellowship and teaching and are brought up to speed on the latest developments in the various ministries and so on. So I spent the last week at OM’s “International Forum” in a holiday park in the west of Germany, together with about 900 others who came together from all the ends of the earth. It was a great time and a truly international meeting – I really enjoyed seeing people again that I met in places like India and the US and of course a number of my colleagues from our office in the UK that I’m officially working with.
We had some great teaching by Dr. Steve Brady from the UK, who took us on a three part journey through Nehemiah 1 – 6 and did so in a remarkably funny and at the same time very profound way. There was also teaching on the first day by our founder and former director, George Verwer, and on the last day by our current director, Peter Maiden. I think Peter’s message was really good, but I had a headache and some difficulty following what he was saying… I guess I’ll have to listen to the recording to find out more.
After the teaching, we also had “business sessions”, in which the OM leadership presented the most pressing issues in the future of OM. I cannot go into detail here, so let me just say that we talked about the transformation of communities, the transformation of our marketing and the transformation of OM. I had expected the business part to be rather boring, but in fact it was very exciting and informative and I went back home with a much better understanding of where we are headed in the future.
The afternoons usually offered a choice of different sessions that I often didn’t go to… I instead used the time to read two books and relax a bit before we had another session in the evening in which we focused on various groups that OM works with. We talked about unreached majority groups, the marginalized, secular Europe, the next generation… there was more, but that’s what I can think of right now. Those sessions were very encouraging with lots of presentations by people actually involved in the work sharing their experience with us.
What else happened… well, the most significant thing probably was that we got hit by lightning on Sunday afternoon. Our internet bus (an internet cafe in a bus) was hit and suffered some damage, the most damage was to our TV truck, though, where quite a bit of expensive equipment was severely damaged. But at least nobody was injured and there was enough spare equipment to keep the conference going, even though the A/V team certainly had a busy afternoon replacing the sound desk and loads of cabling.
Now I’m back home, working from my living room office and already looking forward to meeting people again at the System Administrator training in Belgium in October… always one of the highlights of the year.
Technorati : International Forum, OM, christian, missions, people groups
August 26th, 2006
Last week, when I launched ccmlyrics.com, I told you that CD reviews etc. would now be appearing there, instead of on this site. Since a lot has happened on the new site in the last week and not all of you may have had a look yet, let me just give you a quick update on what’s been going on.
There has been one CD review, looking at Vicky Beeching’s “Yesterday, Today & Forever”, her first full length solo album. In addition to that, two articles are looking at the lyrics of two of my favorite songs. The first one is “Lonely Nation” by Switchfoot, the other one is “I wanna sing” by Scott Krippayne. If you haven’t been to the new site yet, maybe now is the time…
Technorati : Scott Krippayne, Switchfoot, Vicky Beeching, ccm, ccmlyrics, christian, lyrics, music, reviews
August 6th, 2006
It’s taken a lot longer than I had initially hoped, but today I was finally able to launch ccmlyrics.com, with an initial article looking at the lyrics to “What if His people prayed?” by the Casting Crowns.
Originally, CCMLyrics had been planned as a lyrics search engine and a friend and I actually spent a lot of time developing a rather sophisticated search technology that worked really well. That was about four years ago… we then realized that there was no way for us to legally make these lyrics available from our site and as Christians we felt that we should be setting an example and not breaking the law. So the domain(s) lay dormant for a long time, until earlier this year I decided to transform it into a blog on lyrics instead. It’s still loosely based on the original design, but updated to work with modern blogging software (running WordPress like this site). I’m very happy that it’s finally online and so I hope that many of the regular visitors here will also visit ccmlyrics.com frequently – maybe add it to your RSS feeds now.
I guess this means that in the future, you will find christian music reviews over on the new site, although I may still link to them from here as well for your convenience.
Technorati : ccm, christian, launch, lyrics, music, search
July 26th, 2006
Next Posts
Previous Posts