andrew dodson

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done some random blogging.  Too long.  Here goes:

• I can’t believe UK lost to South Carolina.  Again.  Same thing as last year.  They just didn’t play well at all.  Special teams gave up 14 points.  There’s your ballgame right there.  Sure, the offense didn’t play well, but how can you win giving up 14 points on special teams?
• The ESV Study Bible will be released on Wednesday.  I’m not sure there’s ever been as much hype over a Bible before.  I can’t imagine people getting all jacked up when the King James was released way-back-when, although it’s kind of funny to think about.  People lining up outside the Lifeway tent in the local village, waiting for them to open.  You get the picture.
• I rescanned all of my cable channels last night.  A friend told me that if you have an HD compatible TV and do that ever so often, you’ll pick up new channels.  The odd thing was that my TV found over 200 digital channels.  But, since I don’t have the DTV package, I can’t view them.  Oh well.  The good news is that I discovered I can get ESPNHD and ESPN2HD.  That will come in handy for upcoming UK football & basketball games.
• Admittedly, I grow a little more weary as Election Day gets closer.  There’s no chance I’d ever vote for Obama, but I’m not too enthused about McCain either.  Palin’s had some slip ups as of late, as well.  I will say this – neither candidate will fix all of America’s problems in four years’ time.  The question is, which one will fix some of our problems and not create more?

The Worship.com blog recommends the new Enfield album.  So do I.

Tomorrow, the Josh Martin Band begins the process of recording our next studio album.  On the eve of the recording weekend, I had a couple of thoughts.

Two years ago at this time, I was on my way to Minnesota for the Desiring God National Conference.  Head over to my photos section to see pictures from the trip.  It was my first conference and was a blast.  Aside from hearing some great speakers in person, there were a lot of little things that made the trip fun.  The bed at the hotel was insanely comfortable.  The Michigan Wolverines’ football team and the Chicago White Sox stayed in the hotel – I rode the elevator with Jermaine Dye and saw Paul Konerko in the lobby.  It was a great trip.

A little over two and half years ago, as the Josh Martin Band recorded our previous studio effort, The Point Community Church started.  I remember driving from Cedarmore on Sunday morning – after a full weekend of recording – to a skating rink to set up my equipment for our first service.  Since then, The Point has grown to 300+ members and 200-250 weekly attendance.  Sometimes, people ask me why I still live in Frankfort.  The Point is one of the reasons why.  I really love my church.

So, here we go.  Recording again.  The great part about this album is that we have no idea what will end up on the album.  We begin the process with only a handful of songs written.  Over the course of the fall, we’ll finish writing some more songs to finish out the album, but those songs remain a mystery.  Stay tuned for more updates from the studio.

The disclaimer in my last post said that I had yet to do any research on the subject of a female being a political leader. These types of questions fuel my study of the bible, so I started digging in.

In Judges 4, we see Deborah as the only female judge of Israel. In Isaiah 3:12, Judah is pretty jacked up, and God says women will rule over them. Most read into this to say it was because all the men were jacked up, so God punished Judah by appointing women to lead them. While that’s likely the case, based on the text, it also shows us that God did ordain for women to be political leaders. And, who’s to say that America isn’t pretty jacked up in its own right, so we might need a woman to set us straight (please don’t read too much into this statement).

Elsewhere throughout the Bible, we see plenty of queens being mentioned. Not to mention, women like Ruth and Esther who were influential in one way or another.

Am I too far off base here? I’m curious to know what other people think. I just disagree with Pastor Baucham on this issue.

Well-known pastor Voddie Baucham recently appeared on CNN to discuss the Biblical stance on whether or not Sarah Palin should be the Vice President. The discussion gets pretty interesting. I have to applaud Baucham on his passion for preaching truth and staying true to the Word. But, I also have to say I’m not sure I agree with him. He thinks Palin should not be the V.P.

I believe the Bible teaches women should not be pastors of a church. In fact, I think the Bible is very clear on that subject. Without doing much research on the matter (my disclaimer), I don’t believe this teaching carries over to government. Not because of separation of church and state, but because I don’t believe the Bible ever mentions that a woman should not be a political leader. It does, however, say that God ordains the leaders of our government and that we should submit to them.

And, for the record, I think Palin is great. I wish we could swap McCain and Palin on the ticket.

Check out the video for yourself:

So, I totally missed the boat on the release of the NLT Study Bible. I had absolutely no clue it was in the works. I checked it out tonight at the bookstore and it looks pretty good. Of course, its timely release is surely a ploy to compete with the October release of the ESV Study Bible. I was surprised at the sheer amount of study notes included. Nearly every verse has something.

I might have to rethink my previous plan of the ESV Study Bible being the last bible I purchase for a while. I feel like I’m in the minority of people who are both ESV and NLT fans. To be clear, I’m a fan of the second edition of the NLT. The first edition was quite bad. The second edition puts it well in line with the NIV in terms of readability and accuracy for a paraphrase translation. I really like its style and how it reads.

Go check out the official site.

(by “smart” I don’t mean just knowing a bunch of stuff. I mean knowing a bunch of stuff and then applying it)

1. Go read this blog post by Mark Driscoll and bookmark every link he mentions.
2. Read and listen to everything from every link you bookmarked.
3. Commence getting smart.
4. Conclude getting smart.
5. Start applying smart-ness.

This has been a good weekend. Saturday, the Josh Martin Band was back on stage in Cynthiana. We played an outreach concert with LaFollette and had a great time. We’ve been trying to play with them for about two years, and it finally worked out. I’m hoping we play with them again soon. The bands closed out the night by joining forces to play Jeremy Camp’s “Walk By Faith.” It was a cool experience to have full bands on stage playing.

Today, I got a break from playing drums at The Point. Other than recording, it was pretty relaxing to be able to enjoy worship with the congregation. John Martin did a great job filling in. There is a LOT going on at The Point right now, so it’s pretty exciting. We’re planning all sorts of things for the fall that will begin in the next couple of weeks.

I’m in the process of overhauling The Point’s media site audio library. I found an awesome Wordpress plugin this weekend that gives us a ton of flexibility in filtering our audio by speaker, series, tags and more. It’s going to take me a while to get all the information transferred over to the new library, but it will be very good. I’m hoping to lauch it sometime in the next couple of weeks.

BADmedia is fairly busy right now. I’ve started another partnership with a local business that needs some web help. There’s plenty to keep me busy for the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, I can keep lining up work!

The Josh Martin Band was back in action this past weekend – finally. For the past year, it seems like we played a gig, took three months off, played a gig and repeated the process. For the next several weeks, it’ll feel like we’re a “real” band again with several gigs coming up.

We played at Cedarmore this past weekend (our home-away-from-home) for Memorial Baptist’s men’s retreat. The weekend started for us with a rehearsal on Thursday night. Since we led worship for the retreat, we stayed away from our originals and played some new (to us) worship songs. A modern version of “Come Ye Sinners” seems to be a new favorite for the band. We also played “My Hope Is You” (Third Day), “By His Wounds” and “Days of Elijah” for the first time. It amazes me that we can spend twenty minutes learning a song and play it an hour later (in this case, “Days of Elijah”). We also broke out “Open the Eyes of My Heart” for the first time in about two years – with no rehearsal. Sometimes, we like to fly by the seat of our pants.

Josh broke out his electric guitar for the weekend. Since Bert left the band, some of our songs need a little more body to them, so Josh has decided to play his electric on a few songs. I thought it sounded great on “My Hope Is You.”

The only other real news from the weekend is that we will begin recording our next album this fall! I wasn’t expecting us to start recording so soon, but it’s coming together pretty quickly. Bert is gracious enough to let us use the facilities at Cedarmore for recording, but we have to use them before they shut them down for the winter. This means we have to get rolling, and that’s just fine by me. As of right now, this is how the album breaks down:

• Christ Is Our Life
• Clumsy Believer
• Exposed
• Good Enough
• Come Thou Fount (maybe)
• Come Ye Sinners (maybe)

We’ve worked on at least three other new songs that still need some work (and titles that I forget right now). One song in particular has come together very quickly over the last couple of weeks, and we still have more material in the works. Looks like we’ll be shooting for a release date sometime early next year!

Most people that read this blog know that I have a (not-so-small) collection of Bibles.  The good news is that I haven’t bought a new one in a long while.  And, hopefully, when the ESV Study Bible comes out in October, that will be my last Bible purchase for a long, long while.

So, I’ve turned my attention to commentaries.  I’ve been reading up on some of the better collections.  The debate is whether to buy a complete collection from a series, or purchase individual volumes from different collections.  Challies had a good post on this a few weeks ago, and he seemed to like the option of buying individual volumes from different collections.

I’ve decided to go the way of a complete collection from a series.  My choice is the Crossway Classic Commentaries.  They are a set of commentaries by historic reformed writers & pastors, edited by modern reformed theologians.  Right up my alley.

The next question became, “where to start?”  Romans is always a good start.  Maybe one of the gospels.  I’m doing a study of David right now, so I thought about starting with the 1 & 2 Samuel volumes – but they’re seemingly not available (yet).  So, I went with probably my favorite book of the Bible – Psalms.  It is split into two volumes, and is essentially an edited version of Spurgeon’s Treasury of David.  I bought the first volume this past weekend.  It’s been great digging in so far to some of my favorite psalms.

My plan is to buy one volume per month until I have the entire set.  Next up will be the second volume of Psalms.