Freedom: Lessons from 2 Years of Being Debt Free
- on May 17, 2013
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My wife and I are celebrating two years of being debt free. It has been an incredible journey of ups and downs, but I want to share with you some of the ways we went about it as well as the lessons we[...]
A breath of fresh air……
Dictionaries are wonderful tools and we would be the poorer without them, but in Gospel matters they are among the lesser helps. The reason is that everything in the Gospel is personal, relational, and embodied in particulars. There are no generalities. Every word is embedded in the Story and, in the most comprehensive sense, incarnate in Jesus, “the word made flesh.” Isolated in a dictionary a word has no context and therefore no relationship, no “flesh.” For those of us who are interested in living the truth and not just acquiring information, it is necessary to discover the meaning of a word by looking it up in the Story, not the dictionary.
Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (pp.271)
Like my Greek professors were always reminding me. “Stop translating a Greek word apart from the text.”
The blurb from Eugene Peterson reminds me a lot of the central argument in Donald Miller's _Searching for God Knows What_, that is, that God is relational rather than formulaic. To add to what you said, His Word doesn't operate within the confines of dictionaries or even human language, but rather lives, moves, and breathes in and through both our relationship with Him and our relationship with the world that He has commanded us to love.
Good quote...oh yeah, and you're a great guy, all this blogging stuff aside. :)