Pronunciation:
muh–lif-loo-uhs
Definition:
sweet-sounding.
As used in a sentence:
The singer with the mellifluous voice will win the talent contest.
Hymn: For the Beauty of the Earth
Hymn: His Grace Aboundeth More
Hymn: Speak to My Heart: Music score
Presentation: The Lord is My Shepherd, Howard Goodall
Soren Kierkegaard: There's only one Christian in the world, and that is Jesus Christ.
Paul Washer mentioned. That Tong learned about him from Michael Liu. American theology/reformed preachers criticized. Mentioned Paul Washer realized after 13 years of marriage his wife wasn't clear about the Gospel and thus took time to preach to her until her repentance in tears. Tong said they did invite Paul Washer, but he was sick.
v.23 Therefore they are not Christians.
My question after Tong mentioned Peter denied Christ until the cock crowed twice. What are chickens doing in ancient Israel? Cock fight? Food? or just eggs?
On Augustine, Tong mentioned the question asked of Augustine, a preacher who's fallen, would you receive him back as the preacher? Augustine said yes. He sits on Moses' seating, listen to him, but don't follow him. His baptism is still valid. This is from Jesus' lesson.
My take: one would ask, can the demons pretend to be cast out? Tong calls it sandiwara (theatrical) Since Jesus said (Matt 12:26) How can Satan drive out Satan. Ultimately, the question is who is it that is driving out demons? Is it truly Christian? or Satan? Character is the proof. Therefore, Tong: It works regardless of who's using God's name, it's because God's name is great, not the one using God's name.
Hymn: Just As I Am, Without One Plea
My take: alternating male female voicing during singing is not only beautiful, but a wise way against the current transgenderism society.
Hymn: Mulia dan Menang
On Music:
To play like that or high end restaurant pianists, lots of practice and memorizing songs:
On Evangelism:
As I was beginning to think Byrd's email updates from the church is getting spam-like annoying, I learned this time that our prayers for the GFL thru ESL (Gospel as First Language through English as Second Language) has come to fruition. I love the updates. This is what a church's mission is all about. I wish I will one day be able to participate.
On Sports:
It's been a couple of weeks since I joined LA Fitness Club just for the sake of using the pool. I clocked my 25m Freestyle at around 20 seconds. Since by extrapolation the world record would be around 10 secs, I think I have room for improvement. I wonder how I did back in high school, there must be a record somewhere. Anyway, a twice/week swimming routine would cost me roughly $5 per entry for my membership (with Nadia as my plus one). We worked out a way so that Nadia uses her phone's app while I use my phone number for entry, not that she's ever going to use it. I've followed the at least 2 times a week routine until we got snowed in this past Monday. So perhaps I can go today.
On Economics:
Starbucks climbed up, I dump my 10 shares right away making roughly $20s. With their changes in management and the bearish drop earlier, better wait and see. Bought CCL instead, I figure with the vaccinations and Spring coming, people are wanting to go back to cruising. Though I may have to sit on this for a while. So my stocks so far are: 50 in CCL, 5 in MSFT and 2 in ZGNA (given free by Webull). I think I should raise my shares in MSFT as well at some point. DISNEY also has a pattern, perhaps a buy in Aprils, rather than waiting until Octobers. I should also consider moving my mom's account from Robinhood to another platform perhaps Moomoo, after the distrust Robinhood displayed after the GME short squeeze.
On the other hand, with cryptocurrencies, I am also sitting on Ripple's XRP. Putting in $1k, got raised to $2k and it did peaked twice higher for a short time last Sunday. I think I'll stay put, let's see how this SEC lawsuit plays out. Squeezed out about $40 from Stellar Lumens with $1k, placed $1k in OX instead. I have $20s possible growing profit in Ethereum now, I'm just going to wait it out.
Pull from my old notes in smartphone, 2016-12-05
App that can compute average of time used for certain frequent events: Start/End time buttons, etc.
We didn't do all of these, but here's a sketch of my plan pulled from 2018 smartphone notes:
Check out tripping.com/shapiro
Venice:
-Eat skiz(shrimp&octopus mix on streets)
-Murano, Rick Steve, glass work shop
-Burano, Rick Steve, early evening no tourist, waterside dinner.
- avoid crowd, Rick Steve, San Giorgio Majaro church by 5 min Vaporato boat, best view from bell tower.
- academia, Rick Steve, best Venetian art museum
- Cafe Florian, Rick Steve, local impression
-Rezonicco family museum witness fall of Venice due to discovery of America. Rick Steve, party culture (may not visit)
-musika apalazo, Rick Steve
Rome:
-book tix early for colosseum & Vatican museum (try walks of Italy tour)
- get right shoes(shoes in Europe by jocelyn)
- eat 3-5 blocks away from major sites
- aurelian walls
-sunset view of pantheon
-victor emmanuel monument back elevator to roof - rick steves
- reservation for gallery borghese - bernini
- moses in church st peter's in chain, opens an hour before colosseum, not much crowd, free, 5 minutes walk from colosseum
-market of trajan, first shopping mall
Florence:
- the space mall
From my 2018-06-22 notes:
In his Hebrews #52 video lecture (@36:45) Stephen Tong listed these Francis Schaeffer' books:
- The God who is There
- He is There and He is Not Silent
- Escape from Reason
- How Should We then Live
I pull this from a note I put in my phone on 2017-06-25.
Seeing that many book stores are closing down, and I don't want them to, particularly, Barnes & Nobles. B&N incorporated Starbucks in their stores to save their market.
One idea of mine: Get authors to sign contracts in order to display their books in the stores, the idea is that the main revenue of the stores would come from the authors, not readers. Not a great idea, but it's a start, for something more creative.
Sickening by this news on Google's stupidity: Google pays $3.8 millions to female employees and job applicants due to discrimination. What's sick? Workers/applicants demand equality. They'll never survive Jesus' world (Matthew 20:1-16). The employer decides on compensation, hiring, not the workers nor the applicants. Simply stupid. If there's truly discrimination, then go find job elsewhere, stupid yet again. I wonder if Google is just too rich to bother (after all $3.8Mil is just pennies for them), or they really bought into this nonsense? Definitely not both, otherwise, it just means that they are living too well, maybe I can have a piece of this cake too then.
Pennsylvania snow shoveling: 3 people got killed. Couples (James & Lisa Goy) dispute with neighbor (Jeffrey Spaide) across the street on where to dump the snow. Spaide went to get his gunS and killed the couple, then committed suicide himself. There are definitely crazies in the conservative/gun toting violent folks, despite some right wing's denial of such and when confronted with facts, they could only invent more denials. Conservatives way won't work. Love your neighbor, take initiatives to take the humble route even if it may sometime seems stupid. There's no need for war with neighbors. But when war demands, letting others live is suicidal. Although such is only at the command of God, not of men nor of man's idea of God's command, and such calling is so rare that most who claim it are false. God hatest him who loveth violence.
Question: Is gender differences transcendental?
This could prove or disprove sayings like "You men never...", "women, ..."; and also discredit transgenderism.
Hymn: Come Thou Almighty King - Felice de Giardini
Hymn: O Love that Will Not Let Me Go - George Matheson, Albert L. Peace. St. Margaret
Hymn: It is well with my Soul - Horatio G. Spafford
v.16 My take on: Are grapes gathered from non-grape vines?
True, false prophets can steal the fruits of others, take their credits, however, it's not possible to hide one's true self from those who know one close and well enough. If you believe the falsehood, that just means you only care to look at the surface, as superficially as the rest of the world. Although this video is worth to look into, which is past 5 years of news and no more follow up found easily online (Of course, if it's true, it's a bit too much of stretch in the analogy, getting off topic):
Tong gave lesson on how to prune grape vine in Chinese session as well.
5 Connections of Christ to the Church in Reformed Doctrine:
1. Foundation of the Building
2. Shepherd and Sheep
3. Vine and Branches
4. Husband and Wife
5. Head and body
Greek Orthodox Church on Union with Christ:
1. Mysterious union
2. Organic union
3. Eternal union
4. Spiritual union
Tong mentioned 7 types of fruits (with Spiritual fruits being one of them). I think, detail was not given, must look up in past sermons. i.e. Fruit of labor, fruit of repentance, fruit of righteousness, Spiritual fruits (against which there are no law), etc.
For 7 types of fruits, this is the best I could find:
有一次我在三寶瓏（Kota Semarang）講基督所結的七種果子【編按：聖經列有的果子，如：福音的果子（羅1:13），成聖的果子（羅6:22），仁義的果子（林後9:10），聖靈的果子（加5:22），工夫的果子（腓1:22），嘴唇的果子（來13:15），行為的果子（西1:10）】，三教聯合的儒、道、佛人士驚訝於基督教真理的豐盛，因為在佛教中只有一種果子，就是行為的果子。我們要讓基督的智慧被彰顯出來，攻破仇敵的營壘，將人的心意奪回，使他們歸向上帝。我們看見聖經給我們的教訓太豐富了。許多時候，傳道人照抄文章，沒有好好把上帝真理豐盛的奧祕找出來，無形之中顯出自己的缺乏。但聖靈的九種果子使我們彰顯基督的豐盛。我們所結的果子就證明我們是怎樣的基督徒。如果一個基督徒是欺詐、惡毒的，就表明他沒有上帝的生命，因為有上帝真福音的品種，才有真道德的標準。今天的講道告訴我們誰是真的、誰是假的。如果裡面真與神發生關係，一定在外表表露出來，你要靠著聖靈的能力才能結出果子。聖靈是神與人之間流通的管子，使我們結果子表明上帝生命的品種的優良。
Hymn: The Solid Rock - Edward Mote, W.B. Bradbury
GameStop, etc. Stocks Short Squeezed yesterday.
Here's my take with my limited understanding. It looks a joke in the economics world. The short story is, Stocks like GameStop (video game shops), AMC, BlackBerry, are not doing well in their profits, they are kind of outdated, so investment companies are short selling these stocks (Watch the movie "The Big Short (2015)" about a few smart people who figured out the world economics are going to collapse in 2008 and took advantage of it), but thanks to the Internet world, famous forums like the Reddit r/wallstreetbets group are ganging up against these short sellers and bought into these stocks to jack up the price, causing big lost for these short sells investors. Obviously, the owner of Reddit had this forum shutdown for a while and SEC supposed to investigate. Outcome will be uncertain.
What does this have to do with me? I used Robinhood account for my mom. A trading app that's heavily supported by Citadel LLC whose subbranch is Melvin Capital Management which short selled GME (GameStop) and is now suffering from the pranksters of wallstreetbets who are allegedly buying in these stocks using Robinhood, so Robinhood restricted trading in several stocks. This bad faith made me considering moving from Robinhood to other platform, such as MooMoo.
Stock Market's purpose is supposed to be for standardizing prices (properly value companies) and for companies to raise money by selling their stocks. I've asked for detail mechanisms of stock market but no one seems to be able to answer me that, either it's too secretive for them to share or they do not know. Now I know a little, after what wallstreetbets did. Because they exploited one of the loop holes I was trying to ascertain. Same kind of loop holes exploited by the smart ones during the world economic crash in 2008. I guess Biden's going to bail the "non-gambling" losers, as they did the hedge funds in 2007. I wonder how Bitcoins will do in light of this.
California's first death case after 2nd Covid-19 Vaccination
Health care worker Tim Zook of Orange County, who has high blood pressure, died in hours after 2nd Pfizer vaccination. Cause relating to vaccine is still under investigation. Many said it's likely not the vaccine, not sure if this is a panic prevention or for real.
