Draft of something I've been working on

So in working with Young life, I've really wanted to give advice to new Christians who come to know Christ through that ministry. This is the product of those prayers and thoughts. Still in draft form, but it's coming along:

First, to those who are reading this: Welcome to the Christian family. I pray that your journey on this road may lead you closer to God and Jesus in the coming days, and that my words to you here may be of use to you to that end.

I hope this brings you encouragement and direction, so that you will not be led astray by the devil and those who would destroy your faith. I've focused on 4 things that I think are most necessary to the health of your spirit, and I hope that you will grow to have deep roots in Christ, so that when trials come (and they will), you will persevere and grow to love Christ our Savior more deeply.

1. Get yourself in the Word of God.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:16-17, ESV)

To put this simply, the Scriptures and study of them is the lifeblood of the Christian's walk with Jesus. They encourage us and convict us of our sins, but they always point us to Christ, who has saved us from the guilt and power of sin.

The Scriptures are the only rule of faith that God has given to us directly (through the use of men throughout history), and so they are the clearest picture of who God is, and of the work He has done in this world. One of God's purposes in saving you is to make you like Jesus and one of the ways He has done this is to show you who Jesus is.

So, get yourself a Bible, and begin to study this God who has saved you for Himself and has poured out His love on you. As God has graced us with many translations of the Bible into English, two of the most faithful translations we have today are the New King James Version and the English Standard Version, and I would recommend them to your reading. And when you read, do not be discouraged if there are things you don't understand, as there are many parts of Scripture that are hard to understand, and many things which Christian men and women have disagreed over the last 2000 years. But do not be afraid to study what you can, for the Holy Spirit will use it for your good.

2. Find a good Church.
One of the commands God has given us in the Bible is that we are to be in fellowship with other believers, and more particularly in the fellowship with believers in a local church body. Any person who refuses to fellowship with other Christians is someone who disobeys our Lord's command on this matter and must be called to repentance. The grace of God, which teaches us righteousness, also tells us that the older believers should mentor those who are younger in the faith (Titus 2). Such a statement should not only encourage you to, in time, be a mentor yourself (perhaps even a Young Life leader!), but to also seek out the wisdom of those who have fought the battles you have before. Satan, our enemy, would like nothing more than to make you believe that you are fighting this battle alone, and so destroy you. One of the greatest guards against this is to be in a Biblically faithful church and to become friends with mature Christians who are 10-20 years ahead of you the faith. While they too struggle with sin and the devil, they have also had that much more time to recognize his devices much more clearly, and may be a way God uses to keep you from falling. For those who like to read and study, I would also recommend reading the works of great men in the past. In part, this is because we are often times blind to things but previous generations would call us out on in a second. By exposing ourselves to where we are blind, we will see where we need to grow most, and can begin our repentance anew.
3. Pursue holiness.
One of the things that Christ taught clearly was that his disciple would be ones who were righteous. In saving, Christ gave us His righteousness to present to the Father, and in our walk with Him, He through the Holy Spirit, teaches us to walk as He walked. In
4. Pray. – Pray without ceasing.
In saving you, God adopted you, and as your heavenly Father, He loves it when you come to Him with your concerns and burdens. And He delights in giving you the good things that you need. And on top of this, He has given us His Spirit to pray for us when we ourselves don't know what to pray.

Weekly project -- code to the interface, not the implementation

Remember rule #1 of coding for good Object Oriented Programming: code to the Interface, not the implementation. (Though sometimes, the implementation can be a good basis for a first version interface, maybe?)

Weekly project -- Open Chess TD

  Whether it be the occasional work on Project Euler, or playing around on my ocarina, or just reading up on a subject I'm not familiar with, I've always liked having something outside my normal work routine to work on, whether it's simply to practice my skills or to expand the picture of the world I can see. However, one thing I've always been bad about is letting the side projects be either a burden to me, or to just keep them in my head, where they do no good because I never work on them.
   To that end, I'm going to start writing weekly on whatever side project I'm working on. It's mostly for the purpose of encouraging discipline, I need to work on my discipline, and Lord knows I need much more of that in my life.

So on to the star of this weeks post -- OpenChessTD.  The TD here stands for Tournament Director (similar to WinTD, a commercial software that does the same thing I aim for with my software).

So up to this point, I've broken down the coding into several modules based on feature and place within the MVC protocol. 

1. OpenChessTD-module
2. OpenChessTD-WebDriver
3. OpenChessTD-SwingView
4. OpenChessTD-Ear
5. OpenChessTD


So to break down the (eventual) function of each package:

OpenChessTD-module: This provides the data model functionality around which any front end (such as the SwingView) will have to send data through. It will also contain any function that is needed across all modules.

Completion --  ~90%

OpenChessTD-WebDriver: This takes the data passed from the user into the front end and launches a script that will automatically login to the USCF TD/Affiliate area and enter the tournament information, including time control, Player USCF ID, and match results. 

Completion -- ~10%

OpenChessTD--SwingView : Provides a front end written with Java's Swing library. 

Completion -- 0%

OpenChessTD : This modules is intended to eventually house an html/JSP frontend for the app.

Completion -- 0%

OpenChessTD-Ear: This is the EAR module needed to potentially run the app as a Java EE app. It also provides a central location for most dependencies.


Source code can be found here.

Xiphos: wielding the SWORD project for everyone

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a computer geek, particularly when it comes to software. At times, it is a distraction in my life, but one of the ways I've used to focus my studies in computer science is to study programming languages so I can help the SWORD project, and more specifically, the Xiphos project. Both are free to use and distribute, so feel free to download and use them (though the former may be of more interest to programmers).

The first project, SWORD, provides the foundation for many other projects, and because it is free to distribute and hack to work for you, this provides a way to bypass many barriers that physical media face when it comes to distribution in certain countries. While not the best solution, in conjunction with working to provide physical Bibles to people, it can one day help to reach many people.

The second project, Xiphos, is simply my favorite among the projects based off of SWORD. In the SWORD projects I've worked with, I've found Xiphos to be the most extensible and stable (though not without its own issues).

In the end, both of these provide ways for Christians to work towards proclaiming the name of Christ in all the world.

Praising God's justice and mercy

At that time Jesus declared, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

--Matthew 11:25-30 ESV

For a fuller context, please follow this link.

How often do we praise God's justice? Or is it something we lament, as if it is something to be ashamed of?

I am not saying that we should only preach God's justice, especially as this passage shows us God's awesome mercy. But we should remember that God's glory is demonstrated through His acts of justice, whether it be to leave a person in unbelief, or to open the eyes of that person to see salvation in Christ.

Yet Jesus praised God for hiding the truth of salvation from the wise. Why Jesus did so, I don't know, but as it comes on the heels of His condemnation of Bethsaida and Chorazin, I can't help but think that Jesus is reminding us that God is just and we are sinners who deserve judgement.

But thank God for Jesus' next statement, because Jesus then praised God for revealing the truth to the little children, "for such was your [God's] gracious will." (ESV Matthew 11:26). What a contrast, that the little children, the ones who are the least in the world, are the ones to be given the great mercy of God, whereas those who were wise had the great things of God hidden from them. What a warning for those who would seek to be wise in their own eyes.

Jesus speaks to His authority to reveal the Father to us. In our evangelistic zeal, let us not forget that it is the power of Christ, and Christ alone, to reveal the Father to us.

Jesus concludes this with a call to repentance. I am reminded of Jeremiah 9:5, which speaks of the people in Israel wearying themselves committing iniquity. How often that describes us, who spend so little time in the things of God, and yet pursue the vanities of the world, wearing out our bodies to the breaking point for things that don't last. Especially for those of us in the West, we have all this technology at our disposal, and yet look at how tired we've become, how we exhaust ourselves, and for what? A few minutes pleasure? An hour's worth of exhilaration? Yet despite our sin, Jesus will take us, as we are, and as we repent of our sins, giving Him the burden that sin comes with, and giving us His yoke of righteousness, which is so light. The exchange is so wondrous, and yet we so often try to bear the load ourselves.

If God is working in our lives, He will teach us to come to Christ and give Him that burden of sin, and to take the true rest that Christ gives. Let us praise God for the mercy that comes to us through Christ.

Lessons from a dying grandfather

While watching my grandfather slowly die from lung cancer, it is becoming clear to me how important it is to recover a something is that we have lost: the sinfulness of sin. We so often treat deceit and selfishness as small things, when our Lord calls deceit one of the things He abhors (Prov 6: 17, 19). We treat lightly the grace of God, and love Him little, because we are so often blind to how much we have been forgiven. One way to put it is that while we have been forgiven of a debt of trillions of dollars, we instead think we have only been forgiven a debt of a couple hundred dollars.

May our hearts be broken before God so that we come in repentance to His throne of grace, where that amazing mercy flows in the blood of Christ, and our sins are washed away.

While my grandfather, who is an unbeliever, is alive, I take comfort in God's sovereignty, because I know that there is still time for my grandfather to repent and believe in Christ. God still sits on His throne and can open up his heart at any time. Yet I know that it could be that God will not do that because of a lifetime of rebellion against him that my grandfather has led. In either case, God is still just and good. While I certainly hope that my grandfather comes to know Christ, I know that God has a purpose in allowing him to die an unbeliever (which will greatly increase my grief), though I may not see it. God is good, that's enough for me.

I am daily reminded of the necessity of the Spirit in the work of conversion, as I try to sing songs of God's goodness (which may be a detriment, given I can't sing too well), and try to react to my grandfather in a godly manner. That his heart remains unchanged is evident in his behavior. When he first came to live my family, he was extremely nice, to the point that most of us were shocked (he even complimented my mother, which left me dumbfounded considering his usual attitude towards her was less than friendly), but after a couple months reverted to his usual bitter self.

This brings me to the second thing, which is especially needful for Christians, and that is how to die a holy death. As we go along that steady march towards death, we so often act like the world, who flee death, instead of the children of God that we are. Death is not the end of our joy, as it is for unbelievers, but is instead the end of our miseries, as we go to be with our Triune God and see Him face to face.

"Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His godly ones," (Psalm 116:15 NASB) we are told, yet how often we flee from our dying loved one's side because we fear death, which has no power over us if we are in Christ. We as Christians, who suffer the hatred of the world for our message, should be able to stand by our loved ones as they die, for we know the One they will meet at their death. How can we, who died with Christ, be fearful of death, which means true and eternal union with the true lover of our souls? I think that in the West, it's because we've become too insulated by the creature comforts we've become accustomed to. Too often we unconsciously substitute eternal joy in God for fleeting, worldly pleasures.


It seems we have forgotten the advice of Solomon: "It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, because that is the end of every man, and the living takes it to heart" (Ecc. 7:12 NASB). How often do we now hear "I don't know what to say to them," when we learn of someone's loss? Our fear of death has rendered us weak when it comes to comforting those who mourn, and so often that weakness causes our brothers and sisters to stumble. Grieving is a difficult process as it is, don't make it any harder by isolating your brother or sister in Christ because you don't know what to say. In truth, there are times when saying nothing is the best thing to do. Comforting those who mourn is sometimes just letting them know that they are not alone in their mourning, for you are there with them to help, and that the Lord of all things, Jesus Christ, is with them as well.

Let us find strength in Christ, who wept at Lazarus' tomb, even though He knew what would transpire there. Let us find in Him the love and wisdom to comfort our mourning brothers, sisters, and friends.

Quick note on ogg files

To play the songs I posted, you'll need either vlc or another linux media player (most use xine or gstreamer, both of which have ogg support built into them).