Rabbi Yeshuah of Nazareth

This week in Elder Benson’s email home to us he related an interesting account he had with an Assistant Minister of a church in Houston.

Forever ago the Elders who were in our area before us helped a woman who had locked her keys in her car. We switched companions for a day and the District Leader, who was one of those Elders, and I went out to talk with people on the street. We bumped into the woman with the car keys problem. We asked if we could visit her. She said yes. Later my companion and I arrived at the appointed time and she wasn’t there, but her husband David was.  He said if I could answer his question correctly he would listen to us. The question was, “If Jesus had wanted to be a priest could he have become one?” I answered, “no, because Jesus was not a Levite”. He let us in.

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How to Give a Great Sacrament Meeting Talk – Part 1.5 of 5: Invention to Arrangement

Part One here. Part Zero here.

This section became longer than I expected. So, I’m breaking it in half. Instead of discussing arrangement this time, I will bridge the gap between invention and arrangement by discussing what sources could and should be used when creating your talk.

So, now you have a topic for your talk. Now, you need to fill up 10 – 20 minutes. The standard practice is to find appropriate scriptures, General Authority quotes, and a few personal (or otherwise) anecdotes. As far as it goes, that’s not a bad place to start.

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What is “Daily Bread”? Are you sure?

An old friend of mine is now a youth pastor. On his blog, he requested some help with a Greek translation issue in the New Testament. He read in a book (Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book) that “daily” could be translated “fresh” – as in, “give us this day some fresh bread.” He wondered about that, and asked if anyone knew anything else about that translation.

This is actually quite a contentious issue. You’d think that “give us this day our daily bread” is a rather straight forward phrase, but it’s not and it’s likely that any understanding we have may be wrong. I’m going to post my original comment here (with some changes) and then add some additional comments to (hopefully) initiate some discussion:

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