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As we come back to our study of fellowship tonight and wrap that particular muscle up, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, we're talking about the body of Christ. We're doing a series on the church as the body of Christ and as we know a body has muscles and muscles create the action of the body, they put the body in motion and so we're talking about the action of the church, what the church does. We're not talking about its theology so much, although it has certainly theological implications as to what to we do. We're not talking about spiritual attitudes precisely. We're talking about the function of the church, what the church does. What does a church do? I know that people see a church sitting on a corner, they see a building, they maybe see people coming and going. That doesn't really answer the question; what does a church do? Well first of all a church functions. It goes into action in fellowship. That word simply means companionship or partnership and has to do with a mutual ministry of people serving each other in love. That's what a church does. Fellowship means partnership. It means that we engage mutually in ministering to each other in love for the purpose of spiritual edification, a building each other up spiritually. Making each other more strong spiritually. Making each other more Christ like, that's fellowship. We talked about the basis of fellowship being salvation, that is everybody who's saved is in the fellowship and a part of the fellowship. We said the nature of fellowship was sharing, that is that we mutually share with one another on the level of spiritual need. Thirdly, the symbol of fellowship was the supper, the Lord's Supper. We talked about that and reaffirmed it again this morning. And then also this morning we came to a fourth point about the fellowship of the church and that is the danger to fellowship which is sin. And we talked about how sin devastates the fellowship. And remember that in Matthew chapter 18 we looked at how it is that we must be careful never to cause another believer to fall into sin, and we have to be careful according to 1 Corinthians 11 to examine our own lives and not allow our own lives to fall into sin because in so doing we misunderstand the body or we fail to discern the body or that is to say the impact of our sin on the lives of others. The danger to fellowship indeed is sin, and that behooves us to be very careful as to how we live our lives and deal with the sin in our lives in such a way as to set it apart and to confess it and to repent of it and to shun it.
And we ended up at that point, if you go back to Matthew chapter 18 let's sort of end that message again this morning with a comment or two. You remember that at the very end of our discussion this morning, we said the way you deal with sin is to treat it drastically and we used that proverb in verses eight and nine of Matthew 18, "If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off, throw it from you," and so forth. We have a principal operating here in verse five we receive one another as if we were receiving Christ. There is a peril involved if you cause another believer to stumble it would be better for you to be drowned in the depths of the sea than to be the source of the stumbling of another believer. Verse seven, "Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks." God is going to judge the people who put stumbling blocks in front of his children. So if it is so serious this matter of sin and if there is such a consequence, even the consequence of chastening and even chastening unto death as we saw, by God you much then drastically deal with your sin as in verse eight and nine, get rid of it. Cut it out, cast it from you, and pursue a holy life. So the basis of fellowship is salvation, the nature is sharing, the symbol is the supper, and the danger is sin. Now let's come to the responsibility. Stay in the same chapter for a little while, but let's come to the responsibility and the responsibility in a word is serving, is serving. We are all servants and we look not on our own things according to Philippians 2 but on the things of others and we consider others better than ourselves. In 2 Corinthians 8:4 you can write that down, the Bible says, "The fellowship of serving." The fellowship of serving and that's exactly what the nature or the responsibility I should say of fellowship is. It is serving. We are involved as we've been pointing out all along in a mutual commitment to one another for the sake of spiritual service. Now that falls into two broad categories and I want you to understand those though I'm not going to take the time to fully develop them. Perhaps down the line a little bit I might do that, we'll see. But the responsibility of fellowship which is serving falls into two categories. First of all, the use of spiritual gifts, the use of spiritual gifts. And as I said, that is really another study to be done on another occasion, but the Bible is very clear that every believer is given a spiritual gift. A spiritual gift for the use of the body. Now when you look at someone who has a very obvious gift you can see the gift in action. Maybe you know somebody who has got what the Bible calls the gift of giving and the Scripture talks about some having the gift of giving. People who are just generous, just beyond the normal kind of even spiritually mature people; they give in a manner that is magnanimous and beyond even the norm. Those people have the gift of giving, and there are those who have the gift of teaching and the gift of preaching and there are some who have the gifts of helps and some who have the gifts of administration and those gifts are basically outlined in Romans 12 starting in verse three and down from there and also in 1 Corinthians 12. If you read Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 you'll come across the various categories of spiritual gifts. They are also mentioned in general in 1 Peter 4. They are divided into two parts. 1 Peter 4 talks about the gifts that are speaking gifts and the gifts that are serving gifts. Some gifts like preaching, teaching, gifts of wisdom, knowledge, exhortation, and so forth are primarily speaking gifts. And then there are serving gifts like giving and helping and administrating and things like that. And so the gifts then are the means and this is just all I want to get to tonight, they are the means by which the Holy Spirit ministers through you to the body. Enough to say they're not really for you; they're for the body of Christ. Your gift is for me and my gift is for you. I use my gift to build you up, you use your gift to build me up, and that's how we mutually minister to one another.
And that's why the Scripture says to us, if you have the gift, use the gift. If you have the gift, the spirit of God has divided it to you, he's given it to you as a means by which you can minister mutually, a means by which you can serve and that's your responsibility in the body, and if you have that gift you are to use that gift. Now every one of us has a gift. I like to think of it as one gift because it's in the singular in 1 Peter 4, "As each man has received the gift." You say, "Well don't people have sort of multiple gifts?" Well they have one gift which is the combination of multiple categories, let's put it that way. You have a gift, I have a gift. My gift might be a combination of multiple things. I have to preach and I have to teach and I do some exhortation and I do some technical things that somebody might consider a word of knowledge in the sense of digging in and uncovering the knowledge of the Scripture and God has given me the oversight of the church and so there are certain administrative gifts; really what I call gifts of leadership rather than administration which usually means to people sort of moving papers around on a desk, more the area of leadership. But that package of gifts that God put together and dropped in me is the way the spirit of God ministers through me to the body of Christ. There are basically categories of giftedness, I like to think of them that way, like colors on a painting palette and the spirit of God takes the brush and dips into this color, that color, this color and paints you so that you really are in terms of your spiritual gift a combination of categories of giftedness all blended together and energized by the spirit of God for the ministry of the body of Christ. And some of you have gifts that are basically speaking gifts and some of you have gifts that are basically serving gifts and some even have a combination of those things and there is a marvelous uniqueness. Every one of us is sort of a spiritual snowflake; every one of us is different and distinct. Every one of us is a spiritual fingerprint and no two are alike so that the body of Christ is greatly dependent upon using your gifts. Through the years at Grace Church this is one of the things that we have emphasized most strongly. I have taught many series on the gifts. We have written a book in the past on spiritual gifts, we have gone through this kind of teaching repeatedly through the years because it's absolutely essential that we understand how God wants to use us with our gifts. But let me just suggest something to you lest you sort of walk away in wonder trying to sort out what your gift is. It's very hard to define and I think it can be an oversimplification if you try too hard to do that. I know that through the years people have developed the little tests and little computerized process that your punch all the right little holes or you check all the right little boxes and the computer will spit out what your gift is. That to me is a gross oversimplification. There is on way that you can sort of define your gift in some kind of categorical way. In fact the lists of gift in 1 Corinthians 12 and the lists of gifts in Romans 12 differ which is to suggest to us that they're just sort of general categories of giftedness and they're not fixed and they're not necessarily exact. And there's a wonderful flexibility in the spirit of God and when those categories are blended in you, they come out very very uniquely. It's important to remember that. The best to know what your gift is is simply to look and see what you do when you're filled with the Holy Spirit, obedient to the word of God and you get moving. What is it that you do best? What is it that you love to do? What is it that you do that people respond to? What is it that brings you the greatest amount of joy in the doing? That's how you can discern your gift. I guess maybe in a sense it's in retrospect. It isn't a question of somehow discovering your gift and saying, "Okay, now that I know what it is I'll use it." It's sort of a case of getting into motion as a Christian and doing what your heart tells you to do and what your desire is to do and see how people respond and saying in retrospect then that's my gift. I guess what I'm saying is if you don't get into action you're not going to ever find out what it is. And you may never really be ever to air tight define it. We're not a lot of rubber ducks who all came out of the same machine looking the same and quack in unison. We are distinct and spiritual gifts is one way in which we exercise our responsibility of serving the body. I have that responsibility and it's very obvious that I have it and I try to discharge that responsibility in my leadership and in my teaching and in my preaching. But my responsibility to be faithful to my gift is no greater than yours to be faithful to your gift. And you might say, "Well I don't have a very important gift." And we're back to 1 Corinthians 12 where somebody saying, "Well I'm only the little toe, so what? If I was the nose or the eyes or the face a more visible part I might get a little more excited about my role." But that's not how it works; every part of the body is designed by God to have a function so that the whole body can be everything it needs to be. In fact in 1 Corinthians 12 Paul points out that some of the less lovely parts are the most necessary part. Now I don't want to get personal, but the most important part of you is ugly, and you say what are you talking about? What I'm talking about is when somebody slits you open at the hospital for your surgery, what is revealed is not particularly beautiful. It's pretty ugly stuff in there, but I would venture to say it's much more important than your skin condition. It's much more important than the share of your nose. It's much more important than anything on the outside because that's the stuff that keeps you alive. While those more seemly parts of the body do have a role to play and we certainly thank God for those things that make us attractive to one another, and that's a wonderful gift of God, they are in some ways at least by Paul's analogy in 1 Corinthians 12, not nearly as important as to make sure your heart and your lungs and your kidneys and other things work. And so it is in the body of Christ. What may not even be visible as something on the outside, what may not be even seen by people, may in reality be the most important thing. You may think that your gift of prayer, the New Testament calls it the gift of faith but I really think the gift of faith is just another way to talk about the gift of prayer, people who are just consumed with intercession that to me is certainly vital to the life of the body of Christ and vital to my own ministry as well.
So, enough said about that. The first general category in which we discharge the responsibility of fellowship which is serving is through our spiritual gifts which is to say everybody is designed by God to have a ministry. Nobody is on the outside looking in on that one. You have a ministry and it is up to you to be faithful to discharge that ministry, to follow the desire of your heart, the longing of your heart, to do that thing which excites you and which is blessed by God and which generates a positive response from people, whatever that might be. Now secondly, there is another category in which you discharge your responsibility of serving and that is the one anothers of the New Testament, the one anothers of the New Testament. You have a responsibility to discharge to one another all of those injunctions and commands that are laid out in the Scripture and there are many of them. Many years ago I decided to do a study of this and I went into the New Testament and extracted all the one anothers and then I went through them and preached a series on them because they really are the life of the church as it exercises its responsibility for serving. Everywhere that you read in the New Testament the phrase one another, you need to stop and take note because it's very likely that there you're going to find a mandate for your spiritual responsibility. We are to be involved in caring for one another in all of the ways in which the Scripture outlines that and I'll say more about that tonight.
Let's go back to Matthew 18 now with that in mind. We've already learned that we have this very important responsibility toward other believers and that is not to lead them into sin because of the danger that it poses to the unity of the body. But I want to go beyond that a little bit and I want to add something else that I think fits wonderfully into this point of responsibility. We're not so much talking about sin here, but we're talking about mutual ministry to each other, serving one another. Look at verse ten, Matthew 18:10 "See that you do not despise one of these little ones that is another believer. Well I say to you that there are angels in heaven continually behold the face of my father who is in heaven." Now this simple little phrase says don't look down on another believer. That's a true commitment to fellowship. You're to care for every other believer. Every believer who comes across your path becomes an opportunity for you to exercise your spiritual gift for the one anothers or the New Testament. To despise means to hold in contempt, to treat with indifference. It can be everything from contempt to indifference, everything in between. All ranges of non-response, everything from outright disdain and contempt all the way over to just plain indifference, not treating them with any value at all. And here our Lord says in verse ten "You should not do that to one of these little ones." The little ones are those who believe in him. You are not to belittle another Christian. You are not to despise another Christian. The Greek verb means here to think down, to demean. That's not to be done.
This is a warning and before we get into the positives of the one anothers, we need to look at this warning for just a moment. Now why is it important? Because it says in verse ten that "There are angels in heaven continually behold the face of my father who is in heaven." And I'll get to that in a moment, but that puts a very serious note on this matter. You cannot treat other believers with indifference. You must minister to them. You cannot think so little of them or have so much disdain for them that you disregard your responsibility. Now there are a number of ways of doing this and I'll suggest a few of them that'll overlap a little with what we said this morning, but there are a number of ways in which you can despise another believer. It doesn't mean you hate them. It doesn't mean you feel anger or hostility or bitterness to them. Let me suggest some ways that you can belittle them or demean them or hold them in contempt or disdain or indifference: number one, by flaunting your liberty, by flaunting your liberty. Remember we saw this morning in Romans 14 and 15 that the Lord says, "You never use your liberty to be an occasion to cause somebody else to stumble." And we talked about that. We might be free to do a certain thing because it's not forbidden in Scripture, but if we were to do it, it would cause another Christian to stumble and there were for example a number of people in the early church, many who'd come out of Judaism and they were still holding to the Sabbath because they'd been raised, it was engrained in them, it was a part of the fabric of their life. It was so deeply embedded in their belief system that their conscience would be very very aggressive in accusing them if they ever violated the Sabbath. Well now they had become Christians and some Christians might tell them, "You don't need to keep the Sabbath." And those Christians might pay no attention to the Sabbath; they might be free to do anything and everything on the Sabbath. If they did that in the face of those other believers it would be a great offense. So you set your liberty aside so as not to offend them, not to grieve them, and not to cause them to stumble. The same we said was true of someone converted out of paganism who had eaten meat off of Jew idols. You don't serve a person meat off of Jew idols who's come out of that kind of background because that will be an offense and that will send them right back into all the horrors of that kind of life. And sometimes, you know, when we find somebody who's legalistic or sort of still bound by the past we push too hard with our liberties and we cause them to stumble and be grieved and their conscience gets activated and they get accused by their conscience and they become guilty, and when they become guilty about the things that are not really biblical issues it tends to push them back into the former patterns. And so you don't want to flaunt your liberty.
James gives us a second way that we can despise one another and it's a pretty clear one. James in chapter two of his epistle says, "My brethren do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism." In other words in the fellowship you have to treat everybody the same, treat everybody better than you, not worse than you, don't look down on anyone. If a man comes into your assembly with a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes and there also come in a poor man in dirty clothes and you pay special attention to the one who is wearing the fine clothes and say, "You sit here in a good place." And you say to the poor man, "You stand over there, sit down by my footstool." Just basically get out of the draft, you know? Get out of the way. If you do that, verse four says, "Have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil motives?" Listen my beloved brethren did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs to the kingdom which he promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into courts?" He says more about that in chapter five of course. "Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called?" And the down in verse nine, "But if you show partiality you're committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors." If you look down on poor people, you look down on people who aren't quite up at your economic level, you are despising them. We have a responsibility within the fellowship not to flaunt our liberty in the face of those who are weak and we have responsibility as believers not to look down on those who are poor.
Thirdly, you can despise a brother or sister within the fellowship by withholding from the what they need, by withholding from them what they need. You remember in 1 John 3 John says, "If you know that your brother has need and you don't give what he needs to meet that need how dwells the love of God in you?" How can you possibly think so little of your brother as not to meet his great need, and then in 1 Corinthians 11:21, "In your eating each one takes his own supper first and one is hungry and another is drunk." It's an unbelievable thing; they came together for a love supper, a love feast, a love meal which was basically pot luck. The problem was everybody ate their own pot and the people who showed up and didn't have anything, never got anything. Can you imagine that kind of a deal? Everybody ate his own and nobody who was hungry got anything and they not only ate their own, they indulged themselves to the point of drunkenness. "What?" he says, "Do you not have houses in which to eat and drink? Do you despise the church of God? Do you think so little of other believer's needs that you would come and sit opposite them at the same table and feed your face and give them nothing? What shall I say to you?" he says. "Shall I praise you? In this I will not praise you. You belittle another believer when you have no regard for their needs."
And fourthly, you can belittle another believer by ridiculing their physical features. In 2 Corinthians 1 I think of the cruelest things that were said against the Apostle Paul was in 2 Corinthians 10:10, they say his letters are weighty and strong but his personal presence is unimpressive and his speech contemptible. They said he lacks charm, he lacks charisma, he's homely, he's nothing to look at, and he's a terrible speaker. They just assaulted him as a person, ridiculing him.
Fifthly, you could belittle someone, think little of them, demean them, ignore them, disdain them by looking with indifference on a Christian, who has fallen, by looking with indifference on a Christian who has fallen. I worry about this particularly in a church like ours where we have the doctrine so clearly articulated and where we understand the standard to be what it is and what God has ordained it to be; standard of holiness and godly living, and it's easy for us in holding that standard high to become judgmental of the people who fail to meet it rather than compassionate. In Galatians 6, "Brethren even if a man is caught in any trespass," pretty broad, "if he's caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness or meekness each one looking to yourself lest you too be tempted." That really puts it in perspective doesn't it? "Recognize that except for the grace of God you could be there and don't look with indifference on a Christian who has fallen. When someone falls into sin you are spiritual restore him in a spirit of meekness or gentleness and look in your own heart and realize that it could be you, and you bear one another's burdens", it says in verse two. You help that man pick himself up under the load of that sin and thus you'll fulfill the law of Christ. What's the law of Christ? The royal law, the law of liberty; James called it the law of love. The law of loving your neighbor as yourself. So when we talk about not belittling or disdaining or treating with indifference another believer, we're talking about not flaunting our liberty in front of the weak, not looking down on the poor, not withholding from those in need, not ridiculing someone for some physical problem and not looking with indifference on one who has fallen. Here's another one: you can belittle another Christian, you can disdain another Christian by rejecting those who confront your sinfulness, by rejecting those who confront your sinfulness. When some Christian comes to you or to me to point out some failure in our life, to point out some sin or some iniquity, we need to respond to that. We need to respond to that openly and honestly and gratefully. Paul in 1 Corinthians 4 says this, "We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise. We are weak, but you are strong. You are distinguished, but we are without honor." Paul is so humble and so meek and though there are certain sarcasm there he acknowledges his own weakness, his own foolishness, his own lack of distinction. Verse 11 he says, "To this present hour we are both hungry and thirsty, poorly clothed, roughly treated, homeless. We labor working with our homes. When we are reviled, we bless. When we are persecuted, we endure. When we are slandered, we try to conciliate. We have become the scum of the world." The scum, we have become the dregs of all things. Now a man who has that kind of an attitude is a man who could be confronted. A man humble enough to take some very strong medicine about his own weakness and his own failure. Later on to the Corinthians in chapter 16 verse ten of 1 Corinthians Paul says to them, "If Timothy comes, see that he's with you without cause to be afraid for he's doing the Lord's work as I also am. Don't frighten him. Let no one therefore despise him." Now why does he say that? Because Timothy was going to come into that congregation and what was he going to do? He was going to confront what? Their sin, because there just was blatant sin on so many categories as are indicated in 1 Corinthians and Paul sends the letter he says, "When Timothy comes, you listen to what he says and don't despise him." And so it is that you can despise another believer by rejecting him or her when they come to confront a weakness, a failure, sin in your life. Don't do that. Don't despise that one who comes as Christ comes.
And then one final thought and perhaps there will be more, but for now, you can despise another, disdain another by taking advantage of another, by taking advantage of another. 1 Thessalonians 4:6 Paul says, he's talking here about sexual sin, and he says, "No man should transgress and defraud his brother in the matter." Knowing that sexual sin is a partnering thing, it takes two, Paul says, "Don't ever treat another believer with such disdain as to compromise them in some sexual way." And in general don't ever take advantage of another brother. So when we talk about this whole matter of fellowship and we talk about not, first of all on the negative side, what you don't do and according to Matthew 18 you don't despise any of these little ones who bear my name. We're saying then don't flaunt your liberty in front of the weak so as to cause them to stumble and be offended and further weakened. Don't look down on the poor. Don't withhold from those in those need. Don't ridicule people. Don't look with indifference on a Christian who has fallen. Don't reject those who confront your sin and don't ever take advantage of another brother or sister. This is serious. Why is it serious? Back again to Matthew 18, it's serious because of what is says in the rest of that verse because their angels, verse ten, their angels in heaven, that is the angels who have the responsibility of the guardianship of believers as Hebrews 1:14 says, "Angels are sent to serve believers, to care for believers." So their angels in heaven continually behold the face of my father who's in heaven. This is a very wonderful statement. What it's saying is the angels are concerned about them. Be careful how you treat another believer because the angels are extremely concerned and why are the angels so concerned, because God is so concerned. And the angels are watching the face of God and they pick up his concern and he's concerned about how his children are treated. And so are they. And if we had the time to go through the Scriptures, I could unfold to you what the angels are involved in, but let me just give you a little list: they watch believers. They guide believers, that's amazing to think about. They provide, God has them dispatched to do what must be done and sometimes that's to make provisions. They protect, remember Psalm 91, "As you give us angels charge over there, lest thou dash thy foot against the stone." They deliver. They rescue, such as Peter out of prison in Acts 5. They dispatch answers to prayer such as Daniel 9 and Acts 12. So the angels are very involved in watching, guiding, providing, protecting, delivering and dispatching answers to prayer on behalf of believers and they're concerned about believers and they're watching the face of God who is concerned and they pick up his concern and they hear his orders as to how they're to go and to care for those believers. Bottom line you better be careful how you treat them, right? God is very concerned and so are the holy angels. They're very precious to God. In fact in verse 12 we are reminded if a man has 100 sheep and one of them has gone astray doesn't he leave the 99 on the mountains and go and search for that one that is stray and it turns out that if he finds it truly I say to you he rejoices it more than over the 99 which have not gone astray. Thus it is not the will of your father who is in heaven that one of the little ones literally go astray. God cares for his own. He doesn't want any of them wandering away. So we have a responsibility then persistent care, persistent care, forgiving care, rejoicing care. No contempt, only love. Archbishop Trench long ago wrote, "It is as when the mother concentrates for the moment all her affection on her sick child seeming to a bystander to love none but that only and actually rejoicing at the recovery of that more than at the uninterrupted health of all the others." And so God looks at his beloved children and he cares and the angels thus care and Christ cares and you much care. You must care. You can't lead them into sin and you can't treat them with disdain or indifference without activating a response from God and the holy angels and likely a response of chastening. Well so much for the negative side, not leading them into sin and not treating them with disdain. Let's go to the positive side and to wrap up our talk tonight, to talk about the positive side I'm just going to give you some samples of the one anothers, some samples. Turn to James 5:16, James 5:16, this is not exhaustive by any means, but it is representative. James 5:16 "Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed." Literally confess your hamartia, your sin, your faults to one another. That's so important to make things right. The final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur because though they have fellowship with one another as believers and devout people, they do not have fellowship as sinners. So the final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur until there is purity and so dealing with sin is at the heart of it. True fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. Now what does that do? Well, when you know that you tend to conceal your sin. If you know you can't participate in the fellowship, if you know that the final breakthrough to real fellowship is based upon purity and the absence of sin and there's sin in your life that you're holding onto, then you're going to conceal it. You're going to conceal your sin from the fellowship and maybe even deceive yourself. We then are in a very serious situation because when you remain alone with your own sin living in lies and hypocrisy, that is deadly stuff. Listen to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about that. "Sin demands to have a person by himself. It withdraws him from the fellowship, the more isolated a person the more destructive will be the power of sin over him and the more deeply he becomes involved in it the more disastrous is his isolation." Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person. This can happen even in the midst of a pious fellowship. In confession, however, the light of the Gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart and the sin is brought into the light. The unexpressed is openly spoken and acknowledged and all that is secret and hidden is made manifest. It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted and then God breaks gates of brass and bars of iron. Great wisdom in it; sin wants you alone. Sin wants you in the secret place. Sin wants to isolate you and the more successful it is, the more you spin spiraling down in isolation. I've said this through the years and I continue to say it even recently that when somebody begins to isolate themselves from the fellowship of the church, no matter what they are saying on the surface is the reason, the real reason is they seek to be alone because sin has them held there. And when confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian friend or Christian brother, the last stronghold of self justification is abandoned. And when you confess your sin you surrender, you give up your evil, you give your heart to God, and you find the forgiveness of sin that comes from Him and also the forgiveness that comes from your brother or sister. And then what happens? The sin has lost its power. The expressed and acknowledged sin has no power, it has been revealed and judged, it can no longer tear your heart, it can no longer tear the fellowship. Now the fellowship bears the sin with the brother. He's no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession, he's handed it over to God. It's been taken away from him and now he stand in the fellowship, he lives by the grace of God that has touched everybody else in the fellowship. The sin that once concealed him, the sin that once separated him from the fellowship and made his apparent fellowship a sham and a disguise has been confessed and now he has true fellowship. Confess your sin. Don't isolate yourself. We have to deal with each other in the matters of sin and sometimes that causes confrontation to happen so that that confession is forthcoming. That's just one of the two in that verse. We could talk about pray for one another, but let's go to Colossians 3:13. Here is another mandate, another of the one anothers. In fact there are a couple of them here and we'll look at just one. "Bearing with one another", that's a wonderful, wonderful virtue, that means enduring people no matter how difficult it might be, "and forgiving one another," literally. "Whoever has a complaint against anyone just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you?" Confess your sins to one another, pray for one another, endure one another, and now forgive one another. And we talked at great length about forgiveness so I'm not going to belabor the point, let's suffice it to say that we are called to forgive and we are called to forgive here in this verse because the Lord forgave us. Remember the parable in Matthew 18 if we were to go back there about the man who was forgiven the unpayable debt and wouldn't forgive his friend a small debt and how he was brought before the king and he was chastened because of that lack of forgiveness. And that's a picture of the Christian who has been forgiven everything by Christ and must forgive others the small debts they have incurred against him. And so we are called to forgive one another as God for Christ's sake has forgiven us. Ephesians 4:32 says basically the very same thing. As we said earlier in Galatians 6:1 "When we know a believer is taken into fault we restore such a one in love considering ourselves and at that moment we freely forgive them." Matthew 18:21-22 Peter said, "If my brother sins how many times do I forgive him by seven times? And Jesus said '70 times seven; this must be a fellowship of forgiveness. Don't get so pious. Don't get so self-righteous that you can't forgive somebody else who desperately need forgiveness yourself. None of us is perfect.'"
It's very easy, as I said earlier, to become very very judgmental, but remember what it says in Matthew 6:14-15, "If you don't forgive one another the Lord's not going to forgive you." In other words, you'll be held under temporal chastening for your unforgiving heart. Well we are eager, yes, to confront sin and to rebuke and to exhort and to reprove and instruct and teach and do all of those things. We're also eager to seek a confession of sin and to hear that confession and just as eager to forgive the sin. Thirdly go to Galatians 6 and I'm kind of circling back to where we've been here Galatians 6:2 just take this one little phrase, "Bear one another's burdens." Bear one another's burdens. Very simple statement; carry somebody else's weight. Get under somebody else's load. Be around long enough to hear their heart. Be around long enough to help them carry the load. If it's an emotional load, help them carry that. If it's a physical need that they have, help them meet that need. Whatever it is, this is simply spiritual sympathy. Caring. This is the law of the royal law, the law of Christ as I said from James. This is the law that Jesus outlined John 13:34-35, "Love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples?" And how had Jesus just loved them? By washing their feet. Share a burden and bear a burden. Help somebody carry their load. Help them to understand the dark things that they don't understand. Help them in the struggle in their temptation to understand the way of escape. Get under their burden of prayer and come alongside and interceded with them.
Number four takes us back again to something I commented on a moment ago; reprove and rebuke sin. Look at Titus 1:13, again these are samples. It says in Titus 1:13 "For this cause reprove them severely that they may be sound in the faith." And over in 2:15, "These things speak and exhort and approve with all authority, let no one disregard you." Here is another category of responsibility to those of us who are in the church and regard the fellowship and that is to reprove and to rebuke. To reprove means to point out an error and to speak of its inevitable consequence because it is a violation of God's law. It's the same as rebuke, reprove rebuke really basically are the same thing. We are to confront sin; we are to point it out honestly and openly.
And then just central to everything, look at 1 Peter 1:22, 1 Peter 1:22 "Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls," that's salvation, "Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren fervently love one another from the heart." I think some people from time to time think they can't love, it's sort of something that happens or doesn't happen emotionally, but here you not only are to love someone in some deed, but you're to love them fervently or passionately, the term here ectanase means to stretch to the limit; you're to love them to the max and you're to love them from the heart, from deep within, from down deep inside. Some manuscripts read from a clean heart, a pure heart. Love one another from a pure heart passionately, fervently, and of course that section over arching and compelling one another, I mean, that sweeps over how we do everything else. We do everything we do driven by that heart of love. In Romans 12:10 is says it another way, "Be devoted to one another in brotherly love." This is a compassionate love. Peter further later on in his epistle talks about it being a compassionate love, chapter three he says it is a love that shows hospitality to strangers, it is a love that that shows submission to God and to leadership, it is physically manifest; that is to say it expresses itself outwardly. Look at the end of the epistle, 5:14, "Greet one another with a kiss of love." Paul said a lot about loving one another; he said it should be a compassionate, hospitable, submissive, demonstrative love as well. He said it should provide service to each other, it should be patient, it should be long suffering, it should result in kindness, soft heartedness, and forgiveness. That is of course at the heart of everything we do. So these are just samples of how we engage ourselves with each other in ministry.
Number six, another one that's very important is found in Hebrews three and I mentioned it just in passing a moment ago, it's to exhort one another. Chapter three of Hebrews verse 13, "But encourage or exhort one another day after day." In other words continually you're exhorting and exhort means to encourage, it's the same as the verb to come alongside and assist building someone up, encouraging them, speaking wise council and exhortation to them and in Hebrews 10:25 right back to where we were this morning, "Not forsaking our own assembling together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another." We come together to do just that. We come together to speak encouragement to each other, to build each other up. To bring encouraging words of truth, encouraging words of hope, encouraging words of comfort, encouraging words of exhortation; such a wonderful, wonderful ministry. Whether it is encouraging one another or loving one another or reproving one another or bearing one another's burdens or forgiving one another or confessing faults to one another, all of those are responsibilities of fellowship. I'm just going to mention a couple more. Edify one another, edify one another. Romans 14:19 and 1 Thessalonians 5:11 both say that, edify one another. What it basically means is to impart truth because truth alone builds you up. According to Acts 20 it's the truth, the word that is able to build you up. Verse 32 Paul says, "I commit you to the word which is able to build you up." And so as we dispense the word of God to people we build them up. We edify them. In fact in Romans 14:19 I'll read it to you; it says "Pursue the things which make for peace and the edifying of one another or the building up of one another."
Now what do we mean by that? Say things that build people up, that doesn't mean appeal to their ego. That doesn't mean that you create a false sense of security. That doesn't mean that try to elevate their sense of psychological self-esteem. You say things that encourage them. You say things that give them hope. You say things that teach the truth to them. You say things to them for example in the midst of their terror and distress and fear, you remind them that God is absolutely sovereign and is working all things according to his purpose, that's encouraging, that's an encouraging word in a time of stress. Well one more, pray for one another and we go back to James 5:16, I've eliminated a few, but it's a good place to end. Pray for one another. James says in this wonderful, wonderful section of his epistle, "If you're weak, go find somebody strong. Go to the elders who are strong. Let them hold you up. Let them pray in faith." He's not talking about physical disease here; he's talking about spiritual weakness. "Let the spiritually strong pray for you. Confess your sins. If there are sins that have come out of your spiritual weakness, confess your sins and pray for one another so that you may be healed." And then this great statement, "The effectual or effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much." So many times we get caught up in trying to figure out the theology of prayer, don't do that. I don't know how it all works. I don't know how it sorts itself out with God's absolute sovereignty and his predetermined purposes, but I do know this verse says the effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much, and simply to say that if you want to accomplish much pray. If you want to accomplish much, a righteous man needs to pray. And I think that again emphasizes the flow of the text here. You had people who were spiritually weak, they had been hammered by persecution and in their spiritual weakness they had fallen into sin, they were so spiritually weak they couldn't muster up enough strength to pray. They stumbled in as a word of the elders, the elders got around them, the elders sort of massaged them a little bit and then the elders took up their case before the Lord and the spiritually strong prayed for the spiritually weak and they were the righteous men whose prayers accomplished much.
Now beloved I've tried to summarize in just the brief time that we've had the essence of fellowship and as you can tell tonight has been a fast track and I've just kind of hit the highlights and nothing very deep or innovative, but just to touch these things I trust is to put them before you so that the spirit of God can apply them to your heart. I'm not trying to be clever, I'm not trying to be unique; I'm just want to tell you how it is from the word of God and let the spirit bring to bear his force on your heart to implement these things. The basis of fellowship is salvation, the nature is sharing, the symbol the supper, the danger sin, the responsibility serving, and we need to get into that ministry of serving for which God has gifted us and to which he has commanded us in the one anothers of the New Testament. I want to conclude with a passage of Scripture that we'll get to one of these Sundays, 2 Corinthians 13, this is a good place to sum it up. Verse 11, "Finally brethren, rejoice, be made complete, be comforted, be like minded, live in peace and the God of love and peace shall be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you," and then this wonderful benediction, "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." Join me in prayer. Father we so long to experience the fullness of the fellowship. We're so grateful that you have brought us into the fellowship and that you have caused us to participate in the supernatural partnership and companionship of the redeemed, the family, your family. And that our partnership, our companionship, our fellowship is with you and with Jesus Christ and with each other. May be enjoy the fullness of the fellowship. May we take the responsibility of serving seriously and use our gifts and apply the one anothers that you may be honored, your body built up and we enjoy the fullness of your blessing. And we ask these things really for the glory of Christ who is the one to be lifted up in the faithfulness of his church. Amen.
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text:
Find Your Perfect Home.
Homer Real Estate
Homer is located in Michigan. Homer, Michigan has a population of 1,630. Homer is more family-centric than the surrounding county with 27.96% of the households containing married families with children. The county average for households married with children is 25.86%.
The median household income in Homer, Michigan is $38,000. The median household income for the surrounding county is $43,199 compared to the national median of $53,482. The median age of people living in Homer is 32.6 years.
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Homer Map
Real Estate Near Homer
Nearby Cities
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
HOLLAND -- Holland Municipal Stadium, home of Hope College football since it opened in 1979 and recently purchased from the City of Holland, will have a new name when the Flying Dutchmen open their 2013 season.
College officials have announced the stadium will be named in honor of longtime former coach Ray Smith and his wife Sue.
"Ray Smith has left a winning-with-integrity legacy in intercollegiate sport at Hope, in the MIAA, and nationally at the Division III level of the NCAA," said Hope College President Dr. James E. Bultman. "As a coach and athletic director he inspired an exemplary athletics program and he did it the right way – with humility, fair play and wholesome balance within the spiritual, academic and social aspects of college life. He transformed intercollegiate sport at Hope while continuing the finest traditions of the college in athletics."
Smith coached Hope football for a quarter of a century (1970-94). He is the winningest football coach in the history of the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MIAA) and his 25-year tenure remains the longest of any football coach in America's oldest college athletic conference.
"It is most appropriate that the stadium be named in honor of Ray and his wife Sue. No coach achieves success to this degree without an understanding and supportive spouse. Sue Smith has been this for Ray throughout his long illustrious career in sport," added Bultman. "Together they have made a difference at Hope and in the Holland community."
Smith was a football All-American at UCLA, playing at both fullback and defensive back. He was captain and most valuable player of the Bruins his senior year.
"While at UCLA he was once asked by legendary coach John Wooden to be a member of
the basketball team," said Bultman. "When Ray responded that he wasn't as talented
as the othermembers of the basketball team, coach Wooden responded by saying, 'I want
you on the team because of your leadership and character.' Though Ray declined the
opportunity, his friendship with Wooden and his wife Nell continued thru their
When informed of the Board of Trustees decision, current head football coach Dean Kreps, who was Smith's assistant for nine years, said, "this recognition is well deserved and I'm happy for both Ray and Sue. Ray's achievements in football and his commitment to the development of the whole person through intercollegiate sport at Hope are legendary."
A member of the Hope faculty until 2009, Smith mentored hundreds of Hope students through his work both in the classroom and on the athletic field. His football teams earned an overall record of 148-69-9, including nine MIAA championships. In 1984 he was named the NCAA Division III Co-Coach of the Year. At the time of his retirement as football coach in 1994 he was the eighth-winningest coach in NCAA Division III history. During his tenure he also served as golf coach, wrestling coach and assistant baseball coach. He was the director of athletics from 1980-2009. During that time, Hope won 24 MIAA All-Sports awards.
In 1999 he received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" at the West Michigan Sports Awards banquet, and in 2006 his hometown of Riverside, Calif., inducted him into its Sports Hall of Fame. Honors from Hope have included the 2002 "Vanderbush-Weller Development Fund" award in recognition of his personal integrity and the modeling of the Christian faith in his work with students, and having the weight room in the DeVos Fieldhouse named for him and his wife Sue in 2005.
Ray and Sue have been married for 51 years. Their family consists of a son, Randy, and his wife, Chris, and their children, Brianna and Chandler; a son, Jeff; and a daughter, Jennifer, and her husband, Brian, and their children, Hezekiah, Rebecca and Abigail.
"Please know both Sue and I feel honored and humbled to have this magnificent football stadium named for us. Without a doubt, this athletic field is already one of the best in Division III and is a tribute to all the student-athletes and coaches who have represented Hope on the gridiron," said Ray Smith. "Therefore, it is with utmost gratitude for all those who have gone before and who will continue in the years ahead that we receive this recognition."
A formal recognition is tentatively planned for Saturday, Sept. 14, 2013 in conjunction with the traditional Community Day home football opening game.


text:
Staff writer
After more than 35 years of banking, Don Noller has been promoted to the position of executive vice president and cashier at Marion National Bank in Marion.
"In a small bank like this, my duties don't change too much," Noller said in a phone interview. "I guess they thought that I had been here long enough that I deserved to be promoted, hopefully that will include a pay raise."
Noller started working in the banking industry part-time during his years in high school and college.
His first job post-graduation was at Chisholm Trail State Bank in Wichita. He worked there for six years before moving to Emporia, where he worked another 20 years. Then, on Sept. 1, 2003, he started working at the Marion National Bank. He has held several positions, and has enjoyed the banking in a small community since his start date almost 10 years ago.
Noller said he looks forward to serving the Marion community as long as he is able.


text:
Microbiology and Immunology
UNC-Chapel Hill
Area of interest
Our laboratory has broad interest in the application of cutting edge ideas and technology to the study of disease-relevant issues. Major directions include inflammation, oxidative-stress, signal transduction, gene discovery, functional genomics and proteomics, gene regulation, molecular immunology, cancer research and neuro-inflammation. These divergent studies are incorporated into four major directions relying heavily on gene profiling, 2D gel-mass spectroscopy and proteome analysis, gene-ablation in mice and RNA interference. These new approaches are integrated with traditional approaches employed to study signal transduction, transcription, protein-interaction and modification, coupled with biologic studies to understand innate and adaptive immunity in diseases such as infection, inflammation and cancer. Trainees typically are exposed to an enormous repertoire of expertise and approaches, and they are highly competitive after graduation.


text:
Plugging the RSS Usability HoleNovember 05, 2003
It's been said before, but it's worth repeating: direct links to syndication feeds, be they buttons or text, present a problem for end users:
I am not a technically proficient user. I don't know what XML, RSS, or even HTML stand for. I think the internet is the web, and the web is the internet. I still haven't figured out that I can dial up without having to click on the blue 'E' first.
When I see an orange button, I wonder what it does. I push it. A bunch of garbage text fills my screen, so I assume the button is broken. I don't push the useless button again, and resent it being there.
This is 90% of your viewing audience. Even if you have a core of more educated, technically-inclined users, you're still creating confusion. My first (and second, and many subsequent) exposures to the links caused momentary doubt. Why would I be seeing raw XML? What broke here, me or them? What is this XML good for, anyway? It took a long while before I managed to put the pieces together, and realize that it symbolizes something called RSS (which is inexplicably labelled 'XML', about as useful as labelling a desklamp 'Wires and Glass').
The worst part is how avoidable this confusion is. A simple page explaining the feeds is all it takes. This site has been using an explanatory page that lists associated feeds for ages. Simple, but necessary.
Still, in the interest of pushing the bar, I've taken to some further experimentation. Others like Sam and Anne have been playing around with CSS and various syndication formats. While I'm completely out of my element here, I've managed to take Anne's lead and use a touch of XSL mixed with CSS to actually do something useful with an experimental feed.
Since I believe the XSL must be parsed client-side (so that the RSS can actually be used as RSS, rather than XHTML), this will most likely only work in Gecko-based browsers for the time being. The layout is a simpler version of this site's current layout; it could go further, and using XSL I could theoretically duplicate everything from the sidebar to the fancy new CSS-based menus. But that's a lot of work just to create what already exists.
The key to the whole thing is a text explanation in the sidebar:
This is an RSS feed.
So what's RSS, you may ask? It's a technology that notifies you when a site is updated, and allows you to read the updated content without viewing the site itself. Think of it like a mailing list for web sites. More reading is available on this site's RSS resource page.
By styling and providing a reason for this page's existence, hopefully users will be provided an answer before the question is asked.
Most browsers won't be able to render this, so it's not much more than a theoretical glimpse at what could be. The main point in this exercise is the information page, which does help solve the problem now instead of later. But with better browser support, it should be possible to go even further and do something about the raw code dump as well.
Reader Comments
Works like a charm in IE6, so your audience may be wider than you think.
excellent, BTW.
Wouldnt something like the following be simpler and suitable:
[em]The button below is a link to an RSS feed.[/em]
So what's RSS, you may ask? It's a technology that notifies you when a site is updated, and allows you to read the updated content without viewing the site itself. Think of it like a mailing list for web sites. [rss button image]
Assuming you can actually get all that text to fit into an existing design…
Josh - wow! I didn't even think to check it in IE, I just assumed it would fall down since it definitely didn't work in Safari. Very cool.
Mike - that works too, but you'd have to do a good job associating the text with the link. Even then, I'd be surprised if everyone read the text before hitting the link.
It works in Mozilla as well (after something like 1.2 or something. I forget what release incorporated XSLT support).
Nice one Dave, good ideas all round :)
I've been struggling with the same question/concept – not for my personal site so much as for my work.
We've been using Blogger for a number of things, plus I've written some things that will eventually produce RSS (nothing outside the firewall yet), and I *think* the feeds are a good resource, but I haven't been sure how to describe them to our audiences.
This is what I've done so far: http://www.pierce.ctc.edu/news/feeds.php3 – and I'm not really happy with what that says.
I like what you've got on your RSS resource page; it isn't quite right for my purposes, but it has a certain conceptual touch that I may look to when I get around to revising our feeds page. (I like your links too. why isn't there a good FAQ for people who aren't creating RSS, but trying to figure out what the h*ll to do with it?!)
What's cool about this is that I was doing some exploratory reading about XSLT today at work and – while understanding the concept – was left wondering how it all ties together for the user at the end. Now I have a nice tight example.
Nice work.
Elaine - excellent question. The proponents of RSS might be wise to put together a non-technical resource for end users instead of developers. Selling the technology on its merits might be difficult since it's one of those 'you have to use it to understand it' things, but it sure couldn't hurt to have a place to point to when the inevitable 'Why?' pops up.
I'm a RSS newbie myself. I've seen it mentioned over and over, and I even get the basic concept. But one thing that's mystifying me is: where do I get a news aggregator for the Mac??
I probably could Google it but at this point I'm not sold enough on the benefits to make the effort. If there were a few Mac recommendations on those RSS resource pages though, I wouldn't mind giving it a look-see.
Alicia - NetNewsWire rules, and NNWLite is free. OS X only.
At work I have to use Windows, and I'm left wondering where I find an aggregator that's as good as NNW.
NetNewsWire is what everyone swears by for OS X - http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
I don't personally use one myself though. I operate on three primary computers, and not being able to synchronize which items I've read and which I haven't breaks the system for me.
It's funny I just wrote a detailed entry about RSS this morning…
I wanted something that the average computer user would understand. My entry is non-technical, yet informative.
I realize I forgot to go into another issue I wanted to bring up while on the topic.
I'm not sure where everyone is at on the 'human-readability of the code' issue, but I'd think all this argues in favour of something human-readable. If it's left solely to software, people like me will never bother figuring it out and experimenting like this.
We all know why HTML caught on. This is a good example of why RSS/Atom/etc. should continue in the same manner. (I don't even understand how it could be otherwise, if the format is XML-based…)
But I'm probably overstepping my bounds here.
Mike, Dave, thanks for the OS X recommendations. Guess what? I'm stuck on OS 9 here at work. So, OS 9 recommendations anyone? :)
Mike - give FeedDemon a shot. If I didn't have the synchronization headache, I'd be using it myself. The only little problem I found with it was that the internal browser is IE. http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp
Thanks Dave – I needed this. I've not actually seen any user interaction with RSS feeds or syndication, but your observations make sense.
Down at my day job we're trying the push the usefulness of RSS to our stakeholders and content contributers and these issues are very good ones to know about. What's even better is you've pointed out solutions. Thanks.
Client side XSL has been around for ages. I did a whole site in it about 2 and a half years ago only to find that Microsoft's XML handling code was buggy and could crash IE, and sometimes even crash Windows. The site was abandoned because I was certainly not going to release the first website to ever kill someone's computer outright. Also the Mozilla builds at the time would show the XML for a half-second before repainting the processed document, even when it was cached.
I revisited it about a year ago and found some of the problems still existed (mainly in loops and deep recursion). It's an absolutely fantastic thing, like CSS on a grand scale, but it won't catch on until its guaranteed to at least not crash the browser and OS.
Why client side XSLT? I suppose it's easy, and you're probably not loosing anything in the case that the browser doesn't understand XSLT but, on the other hand, the browser has always seemed like the wrong level to implement XSLT. If you have content that needs to be transformed, transform it on the server and send the transformed content over the wire. Browsers are hard enough to write without full XSLT support being an additional requirement.
In this case, the 'right' solution seems to be checking the browser Accept header (I think that's the right name), to see which content types it likes. If it prefers (X)HTML, send that, if it prefers RSS, send that.
It's a really smart application of XSLT, Dave. Bravo. However, I have to agree with James – I think the better place to do it is on the server.
Server-side would be preferable, I'm sure of that. I just don't have the coding chops to build a negotiation script. I didn't even think of it, actually – I just figured you transform server side, you break newsreaders, so avoiding it was easier.
I haven't tried XSL yet for my feed but I use PHP to generate
the feed in a file named: rss.php It works fine in newsreader like Feedreader and FeedDemon. So server side feeds are supossed to work even with extensions like .php or .asp
good stuff…implemented a very simple version of it on http://www.salford.ac.uk/news/news.xml for our current RDF and it works a treat (although i still need to delve into xslt a bit more to make it a tad more exciting)
Personally, I don't believe it is an issue at all; most aggregators nowadays have auto-discovery for RSS feeds - the cute little orange XML buttons shouldn't even be linked, since it's only there to signify the existance of an RSS feed. No?
I actually despise the popularity of the little orange buttons, because it's not just XML, it's RSS built on XML. I also don't like that it's generally accepted to use .xml for RSS filenames, but I follow suite because aggregators sometimes choke on .rss, which is kind of weird. We never use .xml on our XHTML files, so why for RSS?
That was somewhat off-topic, sorry for the rant. Anyways, great demonstration of XSLT. For various reasons, I think XSLT is actually better on the client side (web standards should never be dependent on server-side preprocessing), but each to his own.
Now, I may be wrong, but I think I remember there being way of attaching a CSS file to any generic XML document. I believe it's done with , which would make sense. I think that might be a better option than transforming the document itself. You could style the RSS elements without any transformation. Makes sense to me. I think CSS is supposed to be a universal styling syntax, not just for one particular strain of XML. Unfortunately, support for this is probably at about the same level as XSLT.
Anyways, cool example; XSLT is going to be great once in full implementation.
Oh, by the way… All the articles in the RSS feed that have images are for some reason showing two iterations of the images in NetNewsWire… See Fog Creek Software, Bzzzzt, and Dangling Carrots.
Dris - adding CSS to an arbitrary XML file is a piece of cake. Use the xml-stylesheet linking syntax, and away you go. Give it a shot; I thought of providing an alternate CSS file as a backup for Safari with this RSS feed, but I haven't gotten it working properly yet.
A problem I've run into doing that in the past is that the data really could use a cleaning up in advance sometimes, which makes XSLT ideal. Although I'm sure creative PHP could handle it just fine.
"I still haven't figured out that I can dial up without having to click on the blue 'E' first."
Auugghh. I get ten or so Blaster.D/Nachi pings every minute. This is why.
I'm glad someone else doesn't like the orange XML buttons (where did those come from anyway?). I had used RSS feeds with a news aggregator (NetNewsWire 8-) long before I ever encountered one of those cryptic orange buttons. I knew what XML was, but didn't know what the button was. So I clicked it. It took me to a page which had a few lines of pretty meaningless text. I viewed the source, and realized it was an RSS feed (RDF). Why did the button say XML instead of RSS which would have been a gabillion times more useful? I don't know, but the button seems to have caught on (does some blog software use it? I think a lot of Radio blogs have them).
Anyway, I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't like them, at least without any explaination.
PS: Hi Dave, I've visited your site before, but this is my first comment. None of the comment form fields have labels, so I just guessed where to put my name and email – I'm using Camino, and am probably reporting a known problem which you can't do anything about. Anyway thanks for the read!
OK, I am a RSS no-bie (not newbie), so please don't laugh :)
So if I want to get "RSS notification" of some sort as when Dave S updates this blog, what do I need to do?
I heard that RSS 0.9 and 1.0 is RDF, but RDF is not RSS, and RSS 2.0 is not RDF. Grrrrrrr! Confusion!!
And whenever I try to view an RSS in Opera, it just shows me plaintext (XML?) document. Why? Maybe it Opera figures there is a dumb soul sitting at the terminal and decides to send in "garbage".
To answer the question of "why client side":
1. XSL is VERY expensive to run. Most big sites could never use live XSL transformation of dynamic content.*
2. Just as you have different CSS files, you can have different XSL files for different view/uses of the site (as the RSS feed illustrates). You can also set up offsite/third-party stylesheets.
3. Sending just the data is a heck of a lot faster than the fully processed document, especially when you set up linked stylesheets that are cached in the browser and pulled in as needed.
4. It's a big step in the direction of delivering semantically rich information. Although I don't agree, people often complain that (X)HTML isn't very semantic, with a well-defined schema no such complaints can be said about an XML document.
*XTP from Caucho actually makes this possible but this isn't the right place to discuss that type of stuff.
Alicia, try bloglines.com… you can use it on internet. no software needed.
On my weblogs (e.g. the one linked to from my name), I use a javascript popup window to respond when the user clicks on it in a friendly way, explaining what it's for. The button is still a valid link that you can copy or drag to your favorite news reader like NetNewsWire, but it doesn't fill up your screen with junk. (AOL Journals does something similar, I believe.)
Javascript is probably a more useful, available-now way of addressing the problem. The pop-up window would turn some off of the idea, but I'd rather use that than XSL in a real-world situation.
Re: Mike's query about opening links in FeedDemon in the system's default browser
Go to Tools > Options… > Browsing [tab]
and check the box for "Open links in default browser instead of inside FeedDemon"
Hope that helps.
Thanks Elaine, Ronan, Alicia, Steve, I'm going to see if I can't get an FOF install running on this end. Looks to be exactly what I need.
This is pretty off topic but I gotta ask.
I notice that in everyones comments the first time an acronym is used your site has it correctly tagged as an acronym, with the correct text expansion for it in the tag.
Now, maybe I'm wrong but I can't believe everyone here is tagging their comments for you - and I doubt you are editing everyones comments by hand - so how do you do it? Is there a plugin to your comment system that does it?
Regardless I think it is pretty cool to see.
Dave: a fantastic idea. We shall follow it!
You can do a similar thing using just CSS (no XSLT) like this: http://www.pmbrowser.info/hublog/index.xml
If an rss feed only contains plain text (no embedded markup), it is easy to get it to show in any decent browser by linking to a CSS stylesheet.
An example of a a blog that is directly readable in browsers: http://www.softwolves.pp.se/blog/wolfblog .
I've set a local copy of http://home.no.net/polynar/styles/rss.css, a general rdf/rss style sheet, as my user style sheet in Opera to show me RSS and RDF in a readable way.
Hi Eric!
1) Agreed that XSL can be very expensive. But it is wrong to say that big websites can't handle XSL on the server; they can, and they do. eBay is just *one* example among many. (Actually, eBay's backend presentation layer is much more sophisticated than one might think, given their ugly output markup.)
2) The server side can handle as many stylesheets as you like, and there's nothing stopping you from pulling them from remote/3rd-party servers at any point during the process.
3) and 4) – no argument here. :)
Rijk - you'll notice the sample weblog you linked to doesn't actually have any links, anywhere. Obviously it'll work fine in the newsreader, but skipping the links in the browser kind of defeats the purpose of truncated-entry RSS, doesn't it? That's a good demonstration of why a little transformation is nice.
Actually, I take that last part back about #4. I agree with you about (X)HTML and its semantic potential. It is a bad idea to serve up some other XML format to end-users just for philosophical reasons, i.e. because XHTML "isn't semantic enough." There has to be a solid technological reason.
Dave, IIRC you're now on a server that can handle PHP? I have the same issue that you do as far as being on several computers and wanting to synchronise my reading, and now I swear by Feed on Feeds ( http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/ ).
If I had the time, I'd customize the heck out of it because I don't like the default layout, but as far as keeping track of what I'm reading, it rocks.
Matt, thanks for the explanation. It'll be good to see these kinds of descriptions for the "no-bie" emerge over time.
I would also swear by 'Feed on Feeds' as I don't have access NetNewsWire (yet).
I have been using it for the last 6 months with no problems and customising it is a breeze.
It should sort all your synchronisation problems too Dave.
NetNewsWire is, as has been said, very nice and works well with Safari.
However, I hesitate to say this as I really do love OS X, but the best piece of software I ever bought for it was Alsoft Diskwarrior.
Over time, even OS X needs de-fragging. And if you need to press control+command+the power button, inevitably there will be some damage that needs repairing.
… sorry, I've got a bit OT. It was a good idea to have RSS: as you say, it functions in some ways like a replacement for mailing-lists - and as email is pretty much broken (owing to spam) RSS can only get more popular.
Paul: thanks for the bloglines.com tip. Great service! And Dave, you mentioned having an issue with news aggregators not being sync'd among your primary computers as far as what you've already read. Perhaps bloglines.com would be to your liking since it's web-based?
Way cool idea. I've had that idea in my head but don't know why I never voiced it to someone who has the chops to make it work. :)
As for a resource to point people to, I think something like rss.lockergnome.com would be a good non-techie place to point people. Of course, it would be even better if there was a blogosphere community resource that described it even better than that, and also explained the technical terms for the would-be techies and the real geeks … but then, well, I'm probably dreaming in thinking that everyone would get along. :)
Thanks for posting this Dave, since the last site I built was in xhtml 1.1, and I've been looking at Atom test feeds, I couldn't help but notice that syndication feeds are getting easier to read while HTML is looking more like XML everyday, and why have two files instead of just one?
I remember playing with XSL and IE 5 back in early 2000, the support was hit and miss and you couldn't do much but simple loops with XSL at the time. Since none of it seemed to work in the then-new IE5 for mac, I had to drop it for intranet use. I hadn't thought to try it again on rss or atom feeds.
Also worth noting: Sam Ruby showed off some simple Atom XML+CSS templates a copule weeks back, but XSLT offers a lot more http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1629.html
When I first saw this technique on Anne's site, I was impressed. The XSL certainly makes the feed look a lot better. But it still seems confusing to present another version of the same content. Users will still wonder what the point is. I'm still not satisfied with what we have here. But then again, I probably won't be happy until the only RSS links are those embedded in <LINK> tags.
I agree. A server side aggregator, like Bloglines (if you want ready to go, works right away) or Feed on Feeds (if you want free, Free, and customizability) is a must, if you read feeds on more than one machine.
Ack. FeedDemon is OK – certainly feature "rich" – but why oh why can I not use my preferred and default browser for the links?
This seems to be endemic to Windows software in general – overload with features to the detriment of simple usability.
As you can see, I'm not real happy about using Windows at work. ;)
Here is a little something that I whipped up in relation to my previuos note about stylesheets transforming themselves. Still a work in progress but it's getting there.
Hmm. I've just had thought that for sites using client side xsl files (which if IE 6 can handle them may become more prevelant). For each system stylesheet, include a link to a stylesheet that renders it in a similar fashion to you RSS style sheet. If that makes sense, I'm a bit brain melted right now.
The way I see it though is you look at a page, do view source and go "ooo let's look at the style sheet" and when you do that you get another nice looking page displaying the stylesheet. And the stylesheet that does this also can display itself in a nice fashion.
Ok it's only really useful on a page that is being used for teaching type of stuff (like here for instance) but it might be worth a thought. I've done a few tests on it and will do some more when I get home.
Hi Dave,
I like the idea of actually explaining what a syndication feed is. Thank you for the (general) recommendation! I added an explanation to my feed.
Have to disagree about XSL not being useful for larger sites. We've just built a corporate intranet for a large (100,000+ employees) company and we use XSL to create all the navigational elements. The site's navigation is stored in an XML skeleton, allowing the client to make major modifications to the site's architecture and have the site immediately update all pages to prevent broken links. We use separate XSL sheets to pull each level of navigation plus the DHTML menus and it works nicely.
About Server Side XSL:
Isn't it impossible to use user server side XSL with an RSS feed? If you run the RSS file through a server side XSL parser then it will just return an HTML file, and it will no longer be an RSS feed.
You would need two links, one to the un processes RSS, and one to the XSL processed one. That kind of defeats the purpose of this technique.
What makes Dave's method so cool is that you can take the same URL and stick it into a RSS news reader, or a browser and it will work in both.
CodeMonkeyX: No, that's not the case. It is quite possible to have one file served up as different content types to different user agents. Facilitating this is the purpose of the Accept header that the browser sends.
Using Apache, it ought to be quite simple to do what is required for serving RSS to RSS readers and HTML to web browsers using the MultiViews option (this allows you to send distinct files with the requested filename but difdferent extensions in response to different Accept headers). In fact, I tried this, and it worked; but only when I specified the headers sent by the UA. Using a small sample of RSS readers, they couldn't detect a feed at my test location, suggesting they were being sent the html instead. I don't know if there's any standard in the accept header for RSS readers? If not, there really should be, for this reason alone.
Notice that the logical conclusion of this approach is to have no feed link at all, anywhere on the site. Instead, you could point a browser at the homepage and get (X)HTML, and point a feed reader at the page and get sent atom or RSS, as it prefered. But to do this, feed readers need to send consistent and useful headers.
Common practice seems to be to include the RSS feed as a link in a META tag, while also providing an orange XML button to make your readers aware of the feed. Other sites have a Feeds page that lists a variety of feeds available (eg: the latest comments, latest news etc.)
The W3C homepage has a nice feed (link below) that gets styled by a simple stylesheet so the browser shows it in boxes and various fonts. Unfortunately, unlike Dave's example, the links aren't clickable (there's no embedded HTML there - unless there's a CSS command to make an element become a link you could add? Like you can make anything a table or table cell (so lists can be styled as cells)).
Dris: "I actually despise the popularity of the little orange buttons, because it's not just XML, it's RSS built on XML."
Ahem. Someone else forgetting what XML stands for. It's a framework on which to build whatever you like (eg: XAML). So RSS built with XML is perfectly sane. And since the RSS *is* XML, why not use an XML button? Or better still, one that reads "RSS (XML)" or "RSS/XML". I've seen some sites with buttons for every variation of RSS as a feed!
A great page for explaining all the versions of RSS comes from Mark Pilgrim at XML.com:
As usual his writing style is clear and easy to understand, while detailed enough to warrant reading.
With todays browser there is a simple solution for linking your rss content: reformat it via css. Anybody knowing what to do with rss can use it in his favourite news aggregator, and the guys just clicking away will see a page showing the rss content, but reformatted in a nice and viewable way.
Just check out http://developer.apple.com/internet/css/xmltransformations.html
Using Mozillas capabilities you can also add xlinks to your rss content.
I've just set up my own RSS 2.0 XML feed. Anyone care to test it for me? Have I got the code right?
I've also added a stylesheet so it doesn't look too bad if you click on the big red button. (Sorry, no orange.)
I'm also having problems styling non-standard tags. Can anyone help? Or will I have to use XSL?
All is explained in the post on my site:
This is a great blog post - very insightful and the comments have opened my eyes to many viewpoints. The only thing I can add that might be interesting is this:
So the big revelation here is that you can transform eXtensible Markup Language with eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations? Thank you captain obvious ;-)
[DS - Considering the post is titled 'Plugging the RSS *Usability Hole*', that's just an ignorant comment.]
I've seen styleheets that do this knocking around for a while now. Actually I hadn't considered the usability problems, what I had considered was scripting a page that let the user add feeds of there choice, all translated using xslt/css, an online aggregator if you will. This has been on my todo list for at least a year, if people are going to start inlining stylesheets I'll have to remember to parse those out.
A bit late to the party here, I know, but I'd like to point out that I am fairly certain it's not just IE 6 that can handle client-side XSLT. 5.5 and possibly 5.0 can do it as well, and IE generally does it quite well – the msxml core code is fairly well regarded I think.
There are some things Microsoft has done right.
I've replaced the XML button on my weblog with two things:
1) A Subscription form from bloglet.com, that lets users supscribe to my blog via email
and 2) A link to the "Subscription Options" page that Localfeeds.com creates for any site in it's database:
(disclosure, I created Localfeeds)
Thanks for keeping it an open discussion Dave!
It took me browsing this site with my handheld to find the essentials section (yes, I'm new around here).
Great idea about the RSS feed information page, much better than the button. It pretty much followed the plain-jane W3C XHTML Strict buttons and company right out the door.
Not so sure that once you get to the information page you still should be nervous about the user clicking the RSS feed, but either way XSL could surely help.
My disagreeability comes with the lack of enthusiasm for server-side XSL transforms.
Any server-side processing alleviates all worries about "does it look correct on the client-side?", that alone is worth it's weight in gold. Want to keep your XSL logic under lock and key? Solved with server-side processing, nobody can find it without an HREF.
Transforming XML to XHTML is here now, it is widely used and extremely useful. I try to keep my content in XML form (or database), then translate it to whatever medium need be. This is where XSL comes in and my appreciation for ASP.NET. I know the majority of folks here are not Windows fans, hence the lack of mention of ASP.NET and it's excellent support of XSL Transforms. I'm not familiar with PHP's XSLT support, but I'd hazard a guess that it's still in the beginning stages.
What about efficiency? Server-side caching is not ground-breaking and solves the problem by abstracting from the programmer. If the XML or XSL hasn't changed, then show (send to client) the already parsed XHTML (from the XML/XSLT), the web server takes care of all this for us (if configured to do so). Very quick response and doesn't leave the XSL parsing to client.
What if you want the raw XML? Integrate a link (perhaps the orange RSS button) into your XSL document that links to the raw RSS feed (raw XML).
OK, enough with the banter and on with some real-life examples…
A raw XML document (albeit very outdated):
The same document, with an XSLT applied on the server:
(notice the link at the bottom to the raw XML)
This XSLT works flawlessly in every browser I can think of, even Netscape 4.x. What's not to like?


text:
Lutz Flute Lessons
How to Choose a Music Teacher
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Grand Opening in Lutz
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text: This charming hotel lies directly beside the River Seine and by making use of the metro service (Line 14), numerous tourist attractions such as Notre Dame are only 10 minutes from the hotel. There are many bars, restaurants and nightclubs to be found in the vicinity and Orly airport is about a 20-minute drive from the hotel.This hotel consists of 6 floors with a total of 40 rooms and features various facilities including a vast foyer with a 24-hour reception desk, a cosy bar, a conference room and a public Internet terminal (for an additional fee). There is a laundry service that can be taken advantage of as well as car parking facilities that may be used on payment of an additional fee.Each of the welcoming room comes with an en suite bathroom with a hairdryer as well as a direct dial telephone, a TV, free wifi Internet access, a minibar, a hire safe and individually controllable air conditioning/ heating.Breakfast is on offer each morning.By Bus: 27 - 62 - 83. By Metro: M° 14 Olympiades. And by RER C: Bibliothèque François Mitterrand. From airports: Orly Sud take the shuttle to the RER line C. In RER C, leave the train at Bibliothèque François Mitterrand station. Charles de Gaulle take the RER line B direction Châtelet, and change there for metro line M° 14 up to Olympiades station.


text:
Download Tarzan Game
by Hiroshi on April 10th, 2009
Tarzan is an action game developed by Eurocom for the PlayStation. Tarzan game was later ported to the PC. In Tarzan pc game, Tarzan has to save his home which is the jungle, from Clayton who is a hunter for gorillas. Tarzan starts up as a child learning the skills of the apes. Tarzan pc game has three difficulty levels: easy, medium and hard. In the easy and medium difficulty levels, little Tarzan gets tips from his friend Turk. Tarzan's enemies are monkeys, baboons, eagles and different animals, including some humans and Clayton. Tarzan pc game was adapted from Disney's Tarzan. Download 'The Tarzan'. Tarzan is 3D game with amazing graphics and sound from Disney Interactive Studios. Download tarzan free game for pc.


text:
Poppy Company 200-2001 Seadoo Sportster 1800 Cover
Sea-Doo Boat Model
cLICK color FOR PRICE / ORDER
High Quality Boat Covers that will last!
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Cover Features


text:
Pittsburg State University now offers three online options for Tuition, Fees, and Housing payments. All options can be accessed via the student portal at go.pittstate.edu (logging into GUS).
Credit Card Policy
What is CASHNet?
Informed Decisions Corporation, dba CASHNet, is the third party vendor with whom Pittsburg State University has contracted to provide secure online payments.
Why are we using a third party vendor?
PSU has been absorbing the credit card processing fees charged by credit card processors. These fees have been increasing at an alarming rate. Although some colleges and universities have chosen to no longer accept credit or debit cards, we determined it would be a disservice to our University communities if we eliminated them altogether. The vendor, CASHNet, has the expertise in online payment systems to meet all security and privacy issues and meets the banking and credit card industry compliance requirements (PCI-DSS). Our contract with them ensures that the processes are compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB) Act.
How was the 2.9% rate determined?
That rate is determined by our vendor, Informed Decisions Corporation/CASHNet. The convenience fee is charged and collected by Informed Decisions Corporation. (PSU does not control the rate charged or receive any additional proceeds from this service.)
Are other colleges and universities making similar changes?
Yes. Kansas State University, the University of Kansas, Wichita State University and Emporia State University have all implemented similar changes.
Can I pay my tuition, fees and housing with a credit card?
American Express, Discover, MasterCard, and VISA can be used to pay student charges online. If you use a credit card to pay your bill, a 2.9% convenience fee will be charged by and payable to Informed Decision Corporation. You will not be charged a fee if you pay online using the eCheck option.
How can I pay my bill?
Can I use any type of check as an eCheck?
Almost; only checks from U.S. banks, savings and loan and credit union checking accounts will be accepted. If you wish to pay by paper check, please include your PSU ID number on the bottom of the check to insure the amount is posted to your account.
What if I use my debit card and I don't have paper checks?
You can avoid paying the 2.9% convenience fee by opting for the FREE eCheck (ACH) option. Simply input your bank account and routing numbers to CASHNet's secure online system by going to the student portal (logging into GUS) and signing in with your PSU ID and password. All debit cards utilize a checking or savings bank account. If you do not know your bank account and routing numbers, contact your bank for this information.
How can I pay my account online?
You can pay online from any computer that you feel has secure internet access, for example from home. The PSU cashiers will not be able to process your online credit card payments in Horace Mann; however, the cashier will be able to direct you to a computer for you to use to process your payment securely online.
What if I am unable to pay my tuition in full? Does PSU offer a Tuition payment plan?
Yes. PSU offers a tuition payment plan. The cost of the plan is $25 per semester. By signing up for the plan by August 5th for the Fall semester or by January 5th for the Spring semester, you may make four (4) installment payments. Enrollment after these dates may require a larger initial payment.
I do not feel comfortable making payments online. How should I pay my bill?
If you wish to pay by paper check, please include your PSU ID number on the bottom of the check to insure the amount is posted to your account. Mail your payment to Pittsburg State University, Office of Cashiers & Student Accounts, 1701 S. Broadway, Pittsburg, KS 66762-7536. We cannot accept or process credit card information through the mail or by phone. We hope that you will try the online eCheck (ACH) payment feature. It is quick, convenient, secure, and you will not have to pay postage or check fees.