My article for this month’s CCMag is live.  You can read the HTML version here.

This month is a review of various iPhone Bible apps.  Go to the article and if you have comments leave one at the bottom.

I have created a new forum just for pastors and preachers.  This is a forum dedicated to helping the pastors and preachers who like to work together to study the Bible.  We will study passages, topics and theology together to challenge each other and help each other learn, understand and communicate God’s word.

If you want to join us, click the link above and start posting!

I received the following email from my cousin Lisa Gibson.  Her brother was a victim of the bombing of the flight over Lockerbie Scotland many years ago.  Since then she  has taken her grief and turned it into a positive thing starting a ministry that seeks to help people in the country of Libya and around the Arab world.  It was proven that Gadhafi was behind the bombing, supporting those involved.  He has been in the news recently since he spoke at the UN this week.  Lisa went to NY hoping to meet him.  And here is her account:

Several years ago, when I launched out on this journey to be an ambassador
of reconciliation with Libya, I had a dream.  It seemed like a ridiculous
dream at the time, but nonetheless very clear.  In the dream, had the
opportunity to meet and share the love of Jesus with Muammar Gaddafi.
For several years now, I have been doing missions work in Libya.  It is the
most tangible way I have known how to overcome the act of terror that my
brother was killed in for good.  It is the essence of the gospel, which
calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to love our enemies.
Now if you have been following the news in recent weeks, there has been all
kinds of controversy around Libya, especially about Muammar Gaddafi making
his first trip to the US and addressing the United Nations.
When I heard he was going to be at the United Nations, I asked Ambassador
Aujali, the Libyan Ambassador.  The Ambassador said he would do everything
in his power to make it happen. He is a controversial man and a true
revolutionary. You never really can predict what he will do or how he will
respond.  But one thing is true.  Few people can resist a gesture of
authentic goodwill motivated by love.
So, I arrived in New York on Tuesday, believing in faith that the dream God
gave me would become a reality.  That I would have the chance to meet
Gaddafi face-to-face and share the love of Jesus with him.  But after I
arrived, there was tons of controversy around him in the news.  It was
obvious that the general sentiment in New York was hate toward him.  He
couldn’t even find a place to stay.
On Wednesday morning, I went to the United Nations.  As I stood on the
street corner watching the leaders from countless nations arrive, I just
stood there and prayed for them silently.  It was a procession of many
different nations, several in the Muslim world that drove by, each with
their countries flags in their windows.
As I proceeded to the grounds of the United Nations, several groups were
protesting Gaddafi’s visit.  There were two Libyan opposition groups, one
led by the last King of Libya’s grandson.  He was ousted by Gaddafi during
his revolution 40 years ago.  The Pan Am 103 victims families were also
protesting.  There was a much larger group protesting Ahmadenijad from
Iran’s presence at the UN, but he didn¹t get nearly as much attention in the
media.  For some reason, the eyes were all on Gaddafi, and the comments were
not good.
There was one group of people that came out in support of Gaddafi.  This
group is the Nation of Islam.  It was a rather unexpected combination.  A
group of more than 500 african American men with dark suits and bow ties,
who are followers of Louis Farrakan and the nation of Islam. You may
remember during the election that Farrakhan called Obama the "messiah."
There were also Black Panthers in the group.  All standing, holding a rally
in honor of Muammar Gaddafi.  The speakers included Native Americans, Chuck
D former lead singer of the Public Enemy rap group and other Nation of Islam
members.  Among the crowd stood a few young Libyan students who have come to
the US to study and me.  A lone, white, Christian women in the Middle of the
crowd.  It could not have been a more political display, but at times it was
really unclear, what message they were trying to communicate.  We watched on
a big screen television as President Obama and then Muammar Gaddafi
addressed the United Nations. Even as members of the crowd held up signs
declaring Gaddafi the King of Kings, I couldn’t think of a better place to
pray.
After the rally, we (the group of Nation of Islam supporters, and myself)
were invited to go to the Libyan Mission headquarters to wait the Leader’s
arrival.  While we waited I made some new friends among several Libyan
students that were there.  One was a young women who is in the US studying
pharmacology and is due to have her first baby any day.
Well, after waiting for several hours we got word that he had been delayed.
So, I left.  At 5:30 pm, I received a call from the Libyan Ambassador who
invited me to come to the Libyan Mission to meet the leader at 7:30 pm.
So, myself and another young man who lost his father on the Lockerbie plane,
were invited to a one on one meeting Muammar Gaddafi.  He shook my hand and
we exchanged the general pleasantries. I shared with him about the fact that
I have been to Libya three times and have truly fallen in love with the
Libyan people.  I also talked about the projects we are engaged in there.
He was greatful.  I also gave him a gift.  A "Cross" brand pen and a card.
In the card I shared that I have been praying for him since my first trip in
2005, wished him the best for himself and the people of his country, and
blessed him.  Not the expected response to a known dictator and terrorist.
But, when he opened the gift, his countenance changed.  His previously stern
demeanor softened for a moment and a genuine boy-like smile came to his
face.
It was truly a historical day by many standards.  I have the t-shirt and
umbrella with a welcome for his first trip to America to prove it.  The
western media were not present, only a small delegation of Libyan reporters
when I met with Gaddafi.  They filmed and asked us questions, but the world
may never hear about it.  But as I walked out of the Libyan Mission and on
the way back to my home, I felt God’s peace.  I had fulfilled that
particular mission.  While the rest of the world was spewing hate and
rhetoric against him, one simple women welcomed him to America and shared
the love of Christ with him in the simplest ways I knew how.  I pray that it
will in someway make a difference.
Thank you so much for praying for me.
God bless,
Lisa

My cousin is the Executive Director of the Peace and Prosperity Alliance. They seek to bring together leaders from many areas to help bridge the gap between the developed and developing world.  You can read Lisa’s story in her new book, Life and Death: A Journey from Terrorism to Triumph.

I love to use notes in my Bible Study applications.  On my desktop I mostly use   Bibleworks 8 for that.  But in my iPhone I have not yet settled on it.  I might just do that soon if the Tweets I’ve been reading from one member of the OliveTree team.  Stephen Johnson is a developer with OliveTree.  Look at the Tweets he just sent out today about notes and OliveTree’s iPhone App.

RT @StephenLJohnson Humm, I wonder what Olive Tree is working on for note sync http://digitalpericope.net/(this is @dtrotzjrblog)

Then he posted:

Wow, just saw BibleReader post a note to evernote. Cool stuff!!

Now until I see it for myself, it’s just vaporware.  He could be sitting at a Dairy Queen and playing with  the iPhone Bible study community.  But I doubt that. So if this is the direction of things to come, the others will have some catching up to do.

If you are not familiar with Evernote, then check it out. Apparantly they are allowing people to use their API to embed Evernote functionality in their apps.

I am currently watching the You Version Live demonstration (http://www.youversion.com/live).  Or I should say I am listening.  Sadly the demonstration video failed.  Which leads me to say that no matter how cool this might be, I don’t think I would ever put much trust in it if the big demonstration they heralded for days and really weeks fails.  Good try. Call me when it works.

Now, my annoyance aside, they have something that looks pretty cool.  It is a live, interactive experience using the iPhone app or mobile browser version of  You Version. YouVersion is an interactive Bible study platform.  I’ve never been a big fan since I only have Edge for my iPhone.  3GS is really needed for a decent experience.

The capabilities claim to be able to custom design an interface for you and your congregation to use together on an iPhone or mobile web browser.  They can see your outline, notes, verses, interactive polls, and question/answer area.  Also they will even let you use PayPal to give electronically and Twitter to share whatever you want with the cloud.

To set things up you can use a “drag and drop” interface to work it out.  And they say it will be useful for weekend worship, conferences, and other study events where more than one person wants to interact with others using their service.  I hope it works much better than the demo, which totally failed as I was typing this.  Fortunately they posted the slides that were not seen in the demo on Slideshare.

Good luck, YouVersion.  Hope it works!

I have long been a fan of Logos Bible software and of some of Zondervan’s titles like The Expositor’s Bible Commentary and the NIV Application Commentary series. To quote an old candy commercial, now there are two great tastes that taste great together.  Zondervan products are coming to Logos.

The announced wedding of the big Z and Logos will no doubt be a big benefit to both companies.  Zondervan gets access to a powerhouse in Bible software with Logos, one of the best selling programs out there.  Logos gets some very popular books for their system.

I have some questions though.  What about the people who stuck with Zondervan and their Pradis software; will they be able to continue getting support and updates to the product?  Will they be forced to repurchase their titles from Logos if the old Pradis software becomes orphaned and they have trouble.  Newer versions of Windows often make old software unusable.  Will this happen to Zondervan books in Pradis format sometime in the future.  I have an old version of Expositor’s in Pradis and would hate to have to buy it again for Logos.  But I would love to have it in Logos.  Is there any chance I might get a crossgrade discount?  All questions I am asking the powers to be at the two companies and when I find out, I will let you know.

UPDATE: Just got this response from Carrie Colter of Zondervan.

Zondervan today announced that it is moving away from the Pradis software it created and will license other search engines, including the leader Logos Bible Software. Thirty one Zondervan titles, representing 87 individual volumes, will become available for use with Logos Bible Software in early 2010.

I have asked two different officials from Zondervan if there will be any credit given to former Pradis users. But I have not yet gotten a response.

UPDATE 2: Notice the comment below for info on the question about credit for those who already have Pradis and Zondervan books.  Good news. Now lets hope it makes the cost of these resources in Logos worth the crossgrade.  Personally, I think they should be free if you already own license to them in Pradis.  What do you think?

A while back I posted that I had the privilege of testing Laridian’s new iPhone app, PocketBible Free.  I have been a longtime fan of their Windows Mobile app and have used their desktop app too.  But when I switched to the iPhone awhile ago, I needed a good app.  In this month’s Christian Computing Magazine article I will be sharing my review of many of the iPhone Bible apps available including this one.

But before then I wanted to give you a taste of what I found about this newest app.  Soon OliveTree will be releasing a new version and when it does I will be posting about it too. I’ve enjoying testing it as well.

PocketBible has as its strength, simplicity.  As you can see from the screenshot, it is very simple and clean.  The program also is very solid; for a 1.0 release it has not crashed once.  As I went through the beta testing process the Laridian programmers were very detailed and stamped out all the bugs.  It may have some still as most code does, but I haven’t experienced it after a lot of use.

Notice also the inline notes.  When you click on a footnote asterisk it just opens inline instead of taking you to another screen or popping up a window as some others do.  I like this because again it is simple.

The navigation is a little unique for book reading software.  It seems that most book readers scroll as you swipe up or down.  But PocketBible has a tic-tac-toe style interface.  As you can see from the screenshot, it has an overlay that will appear when you tap the center of the screen.  Each of the outer squares moves forward or back in the book or takes you to the other open books.  You can either tap in that square or swipe from the square to the center.

I have to be honest, using the other Bible apps on iPhone makes me think twice about this.  They all scroll either within a chapter or through the entire Bible.  I sort of hope that Laridian changes this in the future.  I’d rather have the program scroll in that chapter and then when it gets to the end of the chapter swipe to the next chapter instead of the next page.

I like the choice you have between either the bingo screen Book, Chapter, Verse chooser or the Spinning Wheel style chooser.

I personally use the bingo chooser on the left. It seems faster to me.

If you like to read your daily Bible reading on the iPhone, then you will like that opening a reading plan and tapping the link takes you to your Bible and temporarily highlights the reading. See below.

Notice above that the left screenshot is the highlighted reading.  The right is the highlighting that comes from choosing to highlight an individual verse.  You can do this by tapping and holding the verse number.  You can even search the highlighted verses.

That leads me to one of the best features in PocketBible. It has a very powerful search engine.  It has all the Boolean searching features you would expect in a powerful desktop Bible program.  The resulting list has a grey bar along the right side.  This is a nice feature that lets you quickly move from the top to the bottom of the list. Touch the grey bar and slide your finger up or down and it will move to the verse in the list under your finger.  You would think that with the list font being so small that it would be hard to use.  But it is amazingly easy.

Finally, notice that you can also rotate the screen to landscape mode, which makes reading text very easy.

I like Laridian’s app and you will too.  It is free and comes with a large selection of free books. Of course these are public domain books for the most part.  But it makes trying it out very easy. You risk only some time and a very small amount of space on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

I know, it is a pretty glowing review.  So what’s wrong.  Well, there are a couple of features that I think it needs to make it the perfect Bible app and to compete head to head with the other power houses from OliveTree and Mantis Bible.  One is the ability to split the screen so you can have two books open at once. This was so nice to be able to do on the Windows Mobile version of Laridian’s PocketBible.  But the developers wanted to make the app more solid first and then add the little extras later. So I would wager that it will be in an update in the near future. A couple of other missing features is note taking and tracking your daily reading progress. But again, these should be part of an update.

Since the app is free, there is really no reason not to give it a try.  There are some books that Laridian offers that are not available in the other programs.  So click on over to iTunes app store and happy downloading. When my review is available in Christian Computing Magazine, I will post a link here and on Twitter.

In a recent Tweet, John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN, quoted G. K. Chersterton who said:

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

I of course, liking the quote retweeted it and then added the following:

Many have tried the Christian religion. But have they really tried a Christ relationship?

After reading these you might say, “I tried Christianity and it did not work.”  But the question I have is this: are you sure?  Many people are born into the faith in a sociological way.  Their parents were Christians; maybe just one parent was a Christian.  They went to church, were baptized either as an infant, a small child or teenager.  They did the whole Sunday school thing and went to the youth group activities.  Maybe you even gave money and told people that if they prayed for forgiveness they could be a Christian too.

But while all of that is fine, is it really a relationship with someone.  Let me use the illustration that both Christ and Paul used for the Christian relationship – marriage.  I met my wife and thought she was great.  I proposed and about 19 months and five days later we were married.  I know that’s not an about.  But on our marriage day we made a vow to “forsake all others” and be committed “till death do us part.”  I was serious and so was she.  Since then we spend part of every single day talking. I cannot remember a single day when we didn’t say at least something to one another either face to face or by phone if one of us were away.  We support each other, get mad at each other, and give to one another – usually with her giving more than me.  But we are in a relationship.

Sadly, many couples drift apart and eventually end their marriage.  What happens is one or both become more committed to something else and stop investing personally in the commitment.  The relationship starts to suffer and becomes more of a chore than a joy.  As that happens less and less effort is put into maintaining it.  The result is an eventual break, either emotionally but usually legally.

When that happens you have ask what went wrong?  Were they sincere in their vows to stay married till death, in sickness an in health, for richer, for poor, etc.?  Well obviously not totally because they ended it.  What the meant at that time (often unknowingly) is that they were committed until …  Until what?  Until something better came along or until it got too hard or until the other one quit fulfilling my every need and desire.  My point is that if you make a real life-long commitment it will last for your entire life.  One party in that relationship might have made that commitment, but the other didn’t.  Sometimes neither do.

When a person makes a commitment to Christ, they are not just accepting the forgiveness part of the relationship.  They are committing themselves to Christ from now on. And this is not a commitment until death. It is a commitment long past death.  So you have to ask yourself something.  If you make a real commitment to Christ can that commitment ever end.  Paul said, “Love never ends” in 1 Corinthians 13:8 (Holman CSB).  Too many people are accepting the benefits of the Christian religion without accepting the commitment to Christ.

So, if you tried Christianity and it came up lacking, then ask yourself if you tried a Christian commitment.  God knows the difference. Do you?

Sure would like to see the person who needs this manicure set…

Especially like the fish on the piece on the right!!