prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What is the future direction mentioned in the conclusion?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: Paper Info

Title: Is In-hospital Meta-information Useful for Abstractive Discharge Summary Generation?
Publish Date: 10 Mar 2023
Author List: Mamoru Komachi (from Tokyo Metropolitan University), Takashi Okumura (from Kitami Institute of Technology), Hiromasa Horiguchi (from National Hospital Organization), Yuji Matsumoto

Figure

Fig  1 Example of part of a discharge summary which is a dummy we created 
Fig  2  Overview of our proposed method A new feature embedding layer encoding hospital, physician, disease, and length of stay is added to the standard transformer architecture The figure shows an example of hospital embedding 
Statistics of our data for experiment 
of summarization models with different meta-information The best results are highlighted in bold Each score is the average of three models with different seeds The BS and BR indicate BERTScore and BLEURT, respectively 
Statistics on the number of cases handled by physicians C/P denotes Cases/Physician, which indicates how many cases an individual physician has Method of Grouping Physician IDs A most naive method of mapping physician IDs to features is without any grouping process The data contains 4,846 physicians, so |M | was set to 4,846 However it caused our model's training to be unstable This might be due to the many physician IDs appearing for the first time in the test time Table

abstract

During the patient's hospitalization, the physician must record daily observations of the patient and summarize them into a brief document called "discharge summary" when the patient is discharged  Automated generation of discharge summary can greatly relieve the physicians' burden, and has been addressed recently in the research community 
Most previous studies of discharge summary generation using the sequenceto-sequence architecture focus on only inpatient notes for input  However, electric health records (EHR) also have rich structured metadata (e g , hospital, physician, disease, length of stay, etc ) that might be useful  This paper investigates the effectiveness of medical meta-information for summarization tasks 
We obtain four types of meta-information from the EHR systems and encode each meta-information into a sequence-to-sequence model  Using Japanese EHRs, meta-information encoded models increased ROUGE-1 by up to 4 45 points and BERTScore by 3 77 points over the vanilla Longformer  Also, we found that the encoded meta-information improves the precisions of its related terms in the outputs 
Our results showed the benefit of the use of medical meta-information 

INTRODUCTION

Clinical notes are written daily by physicians from their consults and are used for their own decision-making or coordination of treatment  They contain a large amount of important data for machine learning, such as conditions, laboratory tests, diagnoses, procedures, and treatments  While invaluable to physicians and researchers, the paperwork is burdensome for physicians ,  
Discharge summaries, a subset of these, also play a crucial role in patient care, and are used to share information between hospitals and physicians (see an example in Figure )  It is created by the physician as a summary of notes during hospitalization at the time of the patient's discharge, which is known to be very time-consuming 
Researchers have begun to apply automatic summarization techniques to address this problem -   Previous studies used extractive or abstractive summarization methods, but most of them focused on only progress notes for inputs  Properly summarizing an admission of a patient is a quite complex task, and requires various meta-information such as the patient's age, gender, vital signs, laboratory values and background to specific diseases 
Therefore, discharge summary generation needs more medical meta-information, than similar but narrower tasks such as radiology report generation  However, what kind of meta-information is important for summarization has not been investigated, even though it is critical not only for future research on medical summarization but also for the policy of data collection infrastructure 
In this paper, we first reveal the effects of meta-information on neural abstractive summarization on admissions  Our model is based on an encoder-decoder transformer with an additional feature embedding layer in the encoder (Figure )  Hospital, physician, disease, and length of stay are used as meta-information, and each feature is embedded in the vector space 
For experiments, we collect progress notes, discharge summaries and coded information from the electronic health record system, which are managed by a largest multi-hospital organization in Japan  Our main contributions are as follows: • We found that a transformer encoding meta-information generates higher quality summaries than the vanilla one, and clarified the benefit of using meta-information for medical summarization tasks 
• We found that a model encoding disease information can produce proper disease and symptom words following the source  In addition, we found that the model using physician and hospital information can generate symbols that are commonly written in the summary  • We are the first to apply the abstractive summarization method to generate Japanese discharge summaries 
In the studies of summarization of medical documents, it is common to retrieve key information such as disease, examination result, or medication from EHRs -   Other researchs more similar to our study targeted to help physicians get the point of medical documents quickly by generating a few key sentences -  
Studies generating contextualized summaries can be categorized by the type of model inputs and architectures  Some studies produced a whole discharge summary using structured data for input - The sensitivity of the gram stain for bacterial meningitis is about 60%, and the sensitivity of the culture is not high either 
Also, the glucose in the cerebrospinal fluid would have been slightly lower  Although no definitive diagnosis could be made, bacterial meningitis was the most suspicious disease  The causative organism was assumed to be MRSA, and vancomycin and meropenem (meningitis dose) were used to cover a wide range of enteric bacteria 
a whole discharge summary from free-form inpatient records -   The free-form data is more challenging since it is noisier than structured data  In inputting of the free-form data, extractive summarization methods, which extract sentences from the source, are commonly used , -   On the other hands, an encoder-decoder model was used for abstractive summarization , , with a limited number of studies 
The various issues in the abstractive generation of discharge summary would be studied in the future  Studies using medical meta-information have long been conducted on a lot of tasks -   In abstractive summarization on discharge summary,  developed a model incorporating similarity of progress notes and information of the record author 
They presented an idea of integrating meta-information into the abstractive summarization model on medical documents, but did not reveal how meta-information would affect the quality of the summaries  Our method is based on the encoder-decoder transformer model  The transformer model is known for its high performance and has been widely used in recent studies, thus it is suitable for our purpose 
As shown in Figure , the standard input to a transformer's encoder is created by a token sequence T = [t 0 , t 1 ,    , t i ] and position sequence P = [p 0 , p 1 ,    , p i ], where i is the maximum input length  The token and position sequences are converted into token embeddings E T and positional embeddings E P by looking up the vocabulary tables 
The sum of E T and E P is input into the model  In this paper, we attempt to encode meta-information to feature embeddings  We follow the segment embeddings of BERT and the language embeddings of XLM , which provide additional information to the model  It is not a new idea but is suitable for our validation 
Our method is formulated as follows: Let M be feature type, M ∈ {Vanilla, Hospital, Physician, Disease, Length of stay}, since we set five types of features  Feature embeddings E M is created by looking up the feature table where m j is featue value (e g , pysician ID, disease code, etc ) and |M | is the maximum number of differences in a feature 
In our study, |M | is set to four different values depending on features  Specifically, they are as follows  a) Hospital: As shown in Table , the data includes five hospital records  They were obtained mechanically from the EHR system  b) Physician: Physicians are also managed by IDs in the EHR systems  We hashed the physician IDs into 485 groups containing 10 people each 
Specifically, as a naive strategy, we shuffled and listed the cases within each hospital, and hashed them into groups in the order of appearance of the physician IDs  So each group has the information about the relevance of the hospitals  The reason for employing a grouping strategy is described in Appendix A 
c) Disease: Two types of disease information exist in our EHRs: disease names and disease codes called ICD-10   We did not use any disease names in the inputs for our experiment  Instead, we encoded diseases with the first three letters of the ICD-10 code, because they represent well the higher level concept 
The initial three letters of the ICD-10 codes are arranged in the order of an alphabetic letter, a digit, and a digit, so there are a total of 2,600 ways to encode a disease  In our data, some ICD-10 codes were missing, although all disease names were systematically obtained from the EHR system  For such cases, we converted the disease names into ICD-10 codes using MeCab with the J-MeDic (MANBYO 201905) dictionary 
Also, diseases can be divided into primary and secondary diseases, but we only deal with the primary diseases  d) Length of stay: The length of stay can be obtained mechanically from the EHR system and the maximum value was set to 1,000 days  We set |M | for vanilla, hospital, physician, disease, and length of stay to 1, 5, 485, 2,600, and 1,000, respectively  
The vanilla embedding is prepared for the baseline in our experiment and to equalize the total number of parameters with the other models  The input to our model is the sum of E T , E P and E M   We also prepare an extra model with all features for our experiments  This takes all four feature embeddings (hospital, physician, disease, and length of stay) added to the encoder 

Datasets and Metrics

We evaluated our proposed method on a subset of data from National Hospital Organization (NHO), the largest multiinstitutional organization in Japan  The statistics of our data are shown in Table  , which includes 24,630 cases collected from five hospitals  Each case includes a discharge summary and progress notes for the days of stay 
The data are randomly split into 22,630, 1,000, and 1,000 for train, validation, and test, respectively  Summarization performances are reported in ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L and BERTScore in terms of F1  In addition, we also employed BLEURT , which models human judgment 

Architectures and Hyperparameters

Due to our hardware constraints we need a model that is computationally efficient, so we employed the Longformer instead of the conventional transformer  Longformer can    In our model, number of layers, window size, dilation, input sequence length, output sequence length, batch size, learning rate and number of warmup steps are 8, 256, 1, 1024, 256, 4, 3e-5 and 1K, respectively 
Other hyperparameters are the same as in the original Longformer, except for the maximum number of epochs is not fixed and the best epoch  It is selected for each training using the validation data based on ROUGE-1  Also, the original Longformer imports pretrained-BART parameters to initial values, but we do not use pre-trained Japanese BART in this study 
We used three GeForce RTX 2080 TI for our experiments  Our vocabulary for preparing input to Longformer is taken from UTH-BERT , which is pre-trained on the Japanese clinical records  Since the vocabulary of UTH-BERT is trained by WordPiece , we also tokenize our data with WordPiece  However, the vocabulary does not include white space and line breaks, which cannot be handled, so we add those two tokens to the vocabulary, resulting in a total size of 25,002 
The vocabulary has all tokens in full characters, so we normalized full-wdith characters by converting all alphanumeric and symbolic characters to half-width for byte fallback  , we found that all the models with encoded medical meta-information perform better in ROUGE-1, ROUGE-L and BLEURT than the vanilla Longformer 
However, in BERTScore, only hospital and disease models outperform the vanilla  Specifically, disease information is most effective, improving ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L, BERTScore and BLEURT by 4 45, 0 73, 3 12, 3 77 and 0 21 points over the vanilla model, respectively  This seems to be because disease information and the ICD-10 ontology efficiently cluster groups with similar representations 
In contrast, in ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L, the model with physician embedding is inferior to the vanilla model  This seems to be a negative effect of grouping physicians without any consideration of their relevance  It would be better to cluster them by department, physician attributes, similarity of progress notes, etc  Regarding low ROUGE-2 scores in all models, a previous study using the English data set also reported a low ROUGE-2 score of about 5%, which may indicate an inherent difficulty in discharge summary generation 
In BERTScore, the models with the physician and the length of stay did not reach the performance of the vanilla model, suggesting that the system's outputs are semantically inferior  The model with all features performed the lowest of all models in BERTScore  The reason for the low score of the model with all features seems to be that its number of parameters in feature embedding was four times larger than that of the model with the individual feature, and the amount of training data was insufficient 
In BLEURT, all models with meta-information outperform vanilla, which suggests that they are more natural to humans  To analyze the influence of encoded meta-information on the outputs, we evaluate the precisions of the generated text  Specifically, we measure the probability that the generated words are included in the gold summary to investigate if the proper words are generated 
Some previous studies on faithfulness, which also analyze the output of summarization, have employed words or entities -   In this study, we focused on words, not entities, because we wanted to visualize expressions that are not only nouns  The words were segmented by MeCab with the J-MeDic  For each segmented word, the numeral and symbol labels were assigned as parts of speech by MeCab, the morphological analyzer, while the disease and symptom were assigned by the J-Medic dictionary 
The results, shown in Figure , indicate that the encoded disease information leads to generate more proper disease and symptom words  This indicates that the meta-information successfully learns disease-related expressions  The encoded hospital or physician information also improved the precision of symbols generation 
This suggests that different hospitals and physicians have different description habits (e g , bullet points such as "•", "*" and "-", punctuation such as "。" and " ", etc ), which can be grouped by meta-information  In this paper, we conducted a discharge summary generation experiment by adding four types of information to Longformer and verified the impact of the meta-information 
The results showed that all four types of information exceeded the performance of the vanilla Longformer model, with the highest performance achieved by encoding disease information  We found that meta-information is useful for abstractive summarization on discharge summaries  Our limitations are that we used Japanese EHR, the limited number of tested features and not performing human evaluations 
As for the efficacy of the meta-information, we believe that our results are applicable to non-Japanese, but it is left as Fig    The precisions of words in the generated summaries  The vertical axis shows the probability that the words exist in the gold summary  a future work  Other meta-information may be worth verifying such as the patient's gender, age, race, religion and used EHR system, etc 
It is hard to collect a large amount of medical information and process it into meta-information, so we may need to develop a robust and flexible research infrastructure to conduct a more large scale cross-sectional study in the future  In the discharge summary generation task, which demands a high level of expertise, the human evaluation requires a lot of physicians' efforts and it is a very high cost which is unrealistic 
This is a general issue in tasks dealing with medical documents, and this study also could not perform human evaluations  On this research, informed consent and patient privacy are ensured in the following manner  Notices about their policy and the EHR data usage are posted at the hospitals  The patients who disagree with the policies can request opt-out and are excluded from the archive 
In case of minors and their parents, followed the same manner  In the case of minors and their parents are same  To conduct a research on the archive, researchers must submit their research proposals to the institutional review board  After the proposal is approved, the data is anonymized to build a dataset for analysis 
The data is accessible only in a secured room at the NHO headquarters, and only statistics are brought out of the secured room, for protection of patients' privacy  In the present research, the analysis was conducted under the IRB approval (IRB Approval No : Wako3 2019-22) of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Japan, which has a collaboration agreement with the National Hospital Organization 
This data is not publicly available due to privacy restrictions  shows the detailed number of cases handled by physicians  In all hospitals, there is a large difference between the median and the maximum of cases/physician  This indicates that a few physicians handle a large number of cases and many physicians handle fewer cases 
It is impossible to avoid physician IDs first seen at test time without some process that averages the number of cases a physician holds 
Context 2: // josh vajda // | a blog about theology and everything else
// josh vajda //
Sunday School Notes
Preaching Method
January 17, 2016 Josh Vajda	Leave a comment
I’m not a preacher; I’m a theologian  But now that I’ve graduated seminary I sometimes have the honor of preaching  And as someone who just barely passed the two required preaching courses while he was focused on other things, I’ve had to go back and really develop a theology and strategy of preaching  It should go without saying that it’s a work in progress, but I’m at a place now where I’m comfortable with my system—which means the next step is to share it  Maybe someone out there can benefit from what I’ve learned, but either way there’s always room for improvement and maybe you can help me see where 
Topic/Text Selection
The first and most obvious question is what to preach on  I was trained to be sensitive to what the congregation needs to hear, but not being a pastor I don’t have that kind of insight  I once heard John Piper say when he’s a guest preacher he preaches to himself that way he knows at least one person needed it  I like that better, but this early in my ministry I’ve taken to something a little less holy: what can I preach well?
This has really driven most of my sermons to-date, especially because I usually have only a few weeks’ notice  I preached on Ahab because I had just read about him in my devotions  I preached on the tree and its fruits because I had just studied the passage in the context of LGBT acceptance  Most recently, I preached on 1 Corinthians because that’s what we’ve been studying in Sunday School  The more I know something ahead of time, the better chance I have of knowing what to look for and how to communicate it 
Once I have my topic, I start running the passage through a system in the three phases we used in seminary: exegetical, theological, and homiletical 
Phase 1: Exegetical
The exegetical phase is just getting into the passage itself  First, I want to know the immediate context for the passage  Why is this here? What ideas are continuing, and which are new? How the author frames the passage is probably the most important factor in choosing how I will introduce it in the sermon  If it’s an epistle, I will also play with a structural outline to try and identify rhetorical choices 
Second, I want to try and surface issues in the Greek  I do a very rough translation, and if a word jumps out at me I take note  I’m looking for ambiguous meanings, untranslated concepts, repeated words, related words, etc  I don’t expect to come up with a better translation than the professionals; I just want to have some idea of why they made the choices they did and what might be getting lost in translation  (Note: I don’t talk about Greek and Hebrew words from the pulpit; I only explain the concepts because that’s what I expect people to remember )
Third, I take the list of questions I’ve been building and I start to do research  Who’s the referent in this verse? What does this metaphor mean? Is it used elsewhere? What’s the relationship between these two ideas? Does this command really imply that? My research is mostly based on Scripture alone, although there are times when I have to turn to historical background information to really get a reference  I see the Bible as one whole text even though it has many authors, and I’m very interested at drawing legitimate connections across books  I’ve also found Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies is a great help at avoiding common errors in biblical studies 
Phase 2: Theological
The boundary between exegesis and theology is thin and messy  I was given conflicting advice on this: some professors insisted I “bracket out” my theology, take nothing for granted; others insisted the only way to read it rightly is with Christian presuppositions 
I try to do both if I can 
Not all doctrines are equal  I refuse to bracket out core doctrines like the Trinity or salvation by grace alone through faith alone  But I feel very free to challenge other doctrines  My sense of how far to take which ideas is really very intuitive and not something that lends itself to explanation 
In short, the question raising and answering process is really the beginning of the theological phase for me  I’m looking for key ideas and trying to identify the timeless truths they communicate  Now there’s a danger here: you can use a passage to communicate all kinds of good theology  I think it’s much better when you can identify the theology the author was trying to communicate 
So one could hypothetically use Jesus’ tree/fruit analogy to talk about order in creation or a theology of arboreal imagery—and I might even do that in a teaching context  But preaching is a different task to me  I believe preaching is exhorting with the authoritative words of God  I’m not up there to educate  I’m there to press the points I believe God is pressing  If I teach anything else, it’s on my own authority  Hopefully it’s right  But if I’m going to say “thus saith the Lord,” I’d better be a sure as I can be that this is really His point; because again, not all doctrines are equal  So that’s why in this example I preached that the fruit of your life reveals the tree of your heart  I’m confident that was Jesus’ point, not mine 
Once I’m done with my exegetical studies, once I’ve done my best to figure everything out on my own—that’s when I turn to the commentaries  Just like with doing the translation, it’s not that I think I’m better than the experts; I do it because I know the text better when I wrestle with it myself  What’s more, as I wrestle with it I get a better sense of where others may have trouble, so I know to explain them more carefully or illustrate them more vividly  The only reason I even open the commentaries is for validation: did I miss anything or draw a wrong conclusion 
Phase 3: Homiletical
Throughout the whole process thus far, I’m keeping my eyes open for anything interesting, catchy, or eloquent  In some ways I’m having a conversation with the text and cross-references, and I note the parts of the conversation I like  If a crucial idea jumps out, I want to note it so I can craft a phrase around it  If an idea gets me really excited, I’ll jump out of my seat and pretend I’m preaching on it right then and there  Often those bursts of inspiration have gems worth polishing  Hopefully by the end of the exegetical process and the theological Q&A, I have a list of ideas and phrases to sprinkle in as I actually write the sermon 
One unfair advantage here is I took a course in copy writing, which is basically script for advertising  I especially liked what my professor called “fulcrum phrases,” like M&M’s famous “melts in your mouth / not in your hand ” It’s a skill I’ve tried to hone in my songwriting  If you can find that well-crafted phrase that has symmetry, it connects deeper and sticks better  I try to make sure I find at least one for every sermon  Here are some I’ve used:
It’s not yours to take; it’s God’s to give 
He who walks in humility walks in grace 
The fruit of your life reveals the tree of your heart 
You don’t have to hold on to anything for God to hold on to you 
So that’s my ideal, but I’m looking for anything at all that excites me, because if I’m excited about something there’s a good chance someone else will be, too 
Sermon Structure
At this point, I’m ready to start writing my sermon  I know what the text is about, why it exists, how it relates to the rest of Scripture, which parts are difficult to understand, and which parts are exciting  But before I can build content, I need a skeleton 
At Dallas Seminary I learned that a good introduction has the same essential parts, and I use the acronym INSTeP to remember them: image, need, subject, text, and preview  As someone with some creative writing background, I didn’t like this at first  But truth be told, a good sermon borrows from both storytelling and essay  The story draws you in, but the essay keeps you grounded  And just like a good essay, you need a thesis statement and its essential supports to help prepare people for what’s to come 
In my mind, the most important aspect of the introduction is the boring stuff: what’s the subject, what problem does it solve, where is our passage, and what are the main points  The image serves that  As a student I wanted to pick a great image that really stood out and captured people’s attention  But right now I’m in a place where all I care about is getting people interested in the need  If I have an image that raises the need, great; if not, I’ll try to explain my way to it  If you get through the introduction and people still don’t know what you’re talking about or why they should care, you’re about to fight an uphill battle 
The preaching style taught at Dallas and many other evangelical schools is sometimes called “Big Idea” preaching  The short version is that every sermon should have a well-crafted thesis statement  The way it’s taught, it’s everything; your exegesis is all about finding it, your homiletics are all about driving it home  In some cases the thesis becomes more important than the passage itself, which I think is going too far 
But I do think there should be one main idea tying everything together  It shouldn’t replace the passage, but it should drive the passage  As I go through my study process I’m making a list of possible thesis statements  If I haven’t found it by the end of the study process, I keep working toward it  There’s no point in writing the sermon until I have that unifying thought because I’m interested in every detail, every rabbit trail  I need that thesis to give my writing purpose, to tell me what to cut and what to emphasize 
Once I have the thesis, I try to take the existing structure of the passage and relate it back to that thesis  I know there are many different structures you can play with, but I find I do a better job of preaching the passage when I follow its structural cues  When I try to write a novel structure, I tend to make the passage just a series of illustrations for my own points; I’m sure better preachers are skilled at avoiding this problem 
Once I have the thesis and the structure, I write a draft of the whole sermon, weaving in those phrases I had stored up 
Somehow application seems to be the most contentious part of the sermon  Some preachers try to draw out every possible implication while others see application as purely the Holy Spirit’s job and provide nothing  While there are many possible applications, I try to find one that the text emphasizes more than the others and make that the whole deal  So while I really wanted to say something in my last sermon about how we should love unconditionally just as God does, that wasn’t Paul’s application  It’s true and we should do it, but Paul’s application trumps mine because it’s his passage  So I talked about boasting in the Lord 
Once I have my application, I take it in two directions—and I consider this my own secret sauce  I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of it, but I didn’t hear it anywhere else  My professor always told us “give them something to do!” In fact, he would say to give them something concrete to do that very day to maximize the chances that they will actually apply the sermon  I love it! It takes no time at all to forget a sermon 
But then I discovered there are some who take issue with this entire method of application, among them one of my favorite preachers, Tim Keller  For them, giving people something to do inspires legalism, and that endangers the Gospel  Instead they strive to show how Jesus already fulfilled the command of this passage, and the application is just to believe in Him, to adore Him, to marvel at Him  I love this, too! I absolutely believe that every passage properly understood relates to Christ in some way, and every application can be used to point to His perfect example and finished work 
So I try to do both  And here’s why: both are true  Christ has given us new life and yet we are called to live out a new life  The work is done in one sense, and yet we labor in another  So I always begin with showing how Christ has perfectly applied the passage and inviting people to believe in Him and rest in His finished work  Then because of what Christ has done, I call us to imitate Him by applying it ourselves 
At this point all I have to show for my labor is a rough draft  In order to make it presentable, I have a few more steps I go through, and these typically take me a week all by themselves  My goal is to make the sermon sound as natural and engaging as possible 
First, I read the sermon out loud and mark anything that doesn’t sound like me  Maybe I was copying someone’s tone, or more likely my tone was too formal or too informal for the moment  I also italicize the words I want to emphasize  It’s all about the sound 
Second, I memorize the sermon  (Yes, the whole thing ) This is what they trained us to do in seminary, and I thought it was overkill  Yes, you can get better eye contact, step away from the podium, I get that  But what I’ve discovered is that when I memorize my work it polishes the sermon like nothing else  If I can’t remember what I’m about to say, how can I expect the congregation to remember? Memorizing forces me to find the best words for the job 
It also helps me on a structural level, because if I can’t remember what I was about to say next, it shows that there’s a weak connection between the two points  In a compelling script, the next thing has to follow the last  Once you know why the two are married, you can go back and make it more obvious to the congregation 
As I memorize, I boil down the transcript into a preaching outline, which has just enough structure and content to cue me if my mind goes blank in the pulpit  It will have the necessary structural elements, markers for key phrases, and all condensed so that it fits on just a few pages on the platform  (One danger is if I don’t use it in practice, it’s less helpful on Sunday )
Third—and frankly this is the step I’m most likely to skip—I try to choreograph my movements  I believe good preaching is theater, but not in the sense that you’re dramatizing the text  Your whole body is communicating whether you want it to or not, so your gestures should be purposeful  Use the space to organize thoughts, repeat certain motions when you repeat the same thought, make sure you’re not sending mixed signals  Usually I run out of time before I get here, so I have plenty of room to grow in this area 
As I reflect on my process I realize that it’s uniquely tailored to me  My background as a writer, my love for theology, and my unique skills all lead me to emphasize different things  For someone with a different background and skill set this might be like trying on another man’s armor  How can you leverage who you are to preach better?
Of course, I didn’t do this from scratch; I was given a great model in seminary and have observed some great preachers thanks to modern technology  The key for me is molding this process to fit my unique mix of strengths and weaknesses, and that’s sure to be a never-ending project 
Annual Meeting in Review: ETS 2015
November 22, 2015 Josh Vajda	2 Comments
Last week I made my usual pilgrimage to the place where all the evangelical seminary geeks converge: the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society  This year was the second time Atlanta has hosted since I began attending, and it was fun reliving early autumn just before the snow arrived back home 
Over the years I developed a strategy: make plans to attend nonstop papers, then throw out those plans when relational opportunities arise  This year the program was a bit light, but thankfully the people made up for what was lacking 
When reflecting on the meeting I was reminded of just how good last year’s meeting had been  This year had none of the same “aha!” moments, but I did enjoy many rich times of reflection after various papers 
As is my usual habit, I attended a number of friend’s papers (e g , Ford on Ignatius, Roeber on historiography, Svigel on the Didache)  But then I also stalked a few of the theologians I’ve come to admire in recent years: Al Mohler, Carl Trueman, and Anthony Bradley  Of course the problem there is that once you begin following someone you have the ever-increasing experience of anticipating what they are going to say on a given subject  This is especially true of Mohler, whose two podcasts have been my intellectual lifeline this year in times when babies and house projects and service commitments have prevented deeper study 
Analytic Theology
What came as an outright disappointment was the afternoon I spent in the Analytic Theology section  For those of you who don’t know, “analytic theology” is a recent movement to apply the tools of analytic philosophy to the questions of theology  I’ve been thrilled about this from the moment I heard of it, but what I saw really didn’t reflect what I think the movement is capable of  The thinking seemed lackluster and the questions unhelpful  Crisp and especially Rae were there asking insightful questions, but I think being overly kind to the presenters  I suppose you can’t be too inhospitable if you want guests to come back next year 
Avoiding the Marriage-and-Family Theme
The theme this year was “Marriage and Family” but it’s clear the real interest was continued discussion of how to deal with LGBT-related doctrines  In the past year I’ve read numerous books, taught two classes, and delivered a regional paper on the subject  That was enough for me  Maybe there were some missed opportunities here, but I’m ok with that 
Reflection on 2015
One of the things I’ve been forced to do each year—and rightly so, I think—is to reevaluate my purpose and progress in the intellectual community  This occupied much of my reflection in private, some with friends, and significant portions of the drive time from Michigan 
Here are a few conclusions I reached:
Even though I can’t justify a doctorate for my career, I am coming to the conviction that I can justify one for ministry  It may even be something I must do 
Even though I have the tools for self-study, I can accomplish much more with a cohort of like-minded individuals  I need to find a group of theologians I can run with or I will fall behind 
Even though I feel as though I’ve hardly studied this past year, (I recall reading only two theology books!), I’m reminded that I’ve still accomplished quite a bit with my LGBT studies, weekly Sunday School prep, church doctrinal formulations, and ministry strategizing  It’s different work, but I haven’t been as lazy as I feared 
Even though I have been working to be useful to our local church congregation and open to correction about my academic bent, the fact remains that right beliefs are a crucial part of our walk with Christ  Theology matters 
I used to journal incessantly, but have cut back quite a bit this year to focus on getting stuff done  All that to say the time was ripe for some reflection 
Lately I’ve referred to my calling as a “ministry of ideas ” As I chart a course for 2016, the question of what that ministry looks like looms large  The plans are still up in the air, but my time in Atlanta this year has been enormously helpful in the process 
See you next year in good old San Antonio, TX!
Sanctify Us with the Truth
July 9, 2015 Josh Vajda	Leave a comment
I’ve been a big fan of the Bible all my life  As a child I was amazed by the miracles God did  As I got older it was His character that captivated me  These days I’m intrigued by His wisdom  I want to know how He thinks, what He’s planning, how to make sense of His creation  The Bible is at the center of my relationship with God, and it always has been 
But the Bible isn’t God, and the Bible isn’t the whole of my relationship with God  So why is it that I always come back here? I believe that God reveals Himself in Creation and in the Church; I believe I have His Holy Spirit  So why does my relationship with Him keep coming back to a book?
One passage that gives us some clues is John 13–17—known as the Upper Room Discourse  It’s Jesus’ last teaching time with His disciples before He goes to the cross  It’s a time of transition 
Up until now, having a personal relationship with God was as easy as ever  You just spend time with Jesus—the Jewish guy  You want to talk to God? Just go find Jesus  You want an answer from God? Ask Jesus a question  You need divine intervention? Call Jesus for help 
In fact, not only is Jesus God in the flesh as the second person of the Trinity, but we see that He also manifests the Father and is indwelt by the Spirit  This goes beyond the perfect unity of the Trinity: all three persons are present in unique ways 
But in the Upper Room, Jesus is about to leave  He won’t be there to answer questions, to heal the sick, to right the wrong  And if He’s gone, so is the manifestation of the Father, and so is the Holy Spirit within Him 
So what does a personal relationship with God look like when God leaves the building?
First and most importantly, God hasn’t really left  Even though God incarnate has ascended into heaven, He did not leave us alone  The Holy Spirit is God’s special presence in this age 
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him  You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you ” (John 14:16, 17 ESV)
The same Spirit that indwells Jesus will indwell His disciples, and if we skip ahead to Acts, we can see that this Spirit of Truth indwells all believers  He is described as a Helper—which should come as no surprise from the God who just washed His disciples’ feet  And at least one aspect of His ministry is to point back to Christ 
“But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me ” (John 15:26 ESV)
But it’s not as though the Spirit is a consolation prize  Even though His ministry is all about Christ, Jesus seems to say the Spirit’s ministry will be better than His!—at least for the next phase of God’s plan 
“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you  But if I go, I will send him to you  And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged  I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come  He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you  All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you ” (John 16:7–15 ESV)
There’s a lot to unpack here, but first I just want you to notice: when we lost the Savior, we gained the Helper, and He’s exactly what we needed next  Even though Jesus fully paid for our sins, we need a Helper to teach us the perfect obedience that Jesus modeled, to realize the change that Jesus purchased for us 
Now we get a fuller picture of what the Spirit of Truth has come to do  To the unbelieving world, He is a source of conviction, confronting sinners with the reality of who Jesus really was and what He did  To believers, He is a source of wisdom and knowledge 
This is a ministry of words and truth  We usually call Him the Holy Spirit, which rightly emphasizes His character and the work that He does in our hearts, but He is also called the Spirit of Truth  He draws us back to the words Jesus spoke, which bear the Father’s authority 
The Sanctifying Word
These days we’ve become cautious about putting our trust in words or staking claim to truth  We’re allowed to have our own truth, and we’re expected to have our own interpretations  But to go beyond this is to invite conflict 
Some of us have also grown weary of knowledge because we’ve seen people devote themselves to a dead orthodoxy that devours truth and then does nothing with it  So we associate the Christian walk with a ministry of love and compassion and holiness—which it is—and try not to get too distracted by the rest 
But it’s clear that Jesus spent a good deal of time ministering in words and teaching truth, and that the Holy Spirit is also committed to a ministry of words and truth 
“Whoever does not love me does not keep my words  And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me  These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you  But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you ” (John 14:24–26 ESV)
When Jesus prays, He even emphasizes this before the Father:
“Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you  For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me ” (John 17:7, 8 ESV)
It’s a precious thing to have the words of God  They came from the Father, through the Son, and by the Spirit  These words have been compiled in Scripture—the Bible—and it’s not God’s leftovers  At the heart of the Trinity’s ministry is a message  When we put our faith in Christ, we confess and believe specific realities 
“I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world ” (John 17:14 ESV)
But this word is not some passive collection of propositions to be absorbed  Just as the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of Truth, so the true words and message of Scripture are given to make us holy 
“Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth  As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world  And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth ” (John 17:17–19 ESV)
This truth has a purpose  God’s message—the words of the Father—they are to make us holy  They are to wash us and set us apart  We are to be purified by this message, and at the heart of these instructions is love 
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love  These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full  This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you ” (John 15:10–12 ESV)
God has not left us alone  We have the Holy Spirit of Truth, and we also have the words of the Father 
I think this must be what Jesus alluded to in John 4, when He told the Samaritan woman at the well about those who would worship in spirit and in truth  Jesus clearly leaves us here with His Spirit and His truth  These are the twin lights guiding us on our pilgrimage  These are the two ways God is present with us today  Even though He is not with us physically, He is with us personally, spiritually, and verbally 
Truth is good for its own sake, and sanctification is, too  But we must not forget that our relationship with God as Spirit and through the Word draws those two things together  We pursue truth in order to be sanctified  We are sanctified by the truth 
When we talk about how we relate to God, our first thought is often the Cross, and that’s not wrong  Without Jesus’ work on the Cross we could have no fellowship with God  But even though it is what made a relationship with God possible, our relationship with Him goes much deeper  God is specially present in the world today by His Holy Spirit, Who indwells each and every believer
Context 3: McPherson County (standard abbreviation: MP) is a county located in the U S  state of Kansas   As of the 2020 census, the county population was 30,223  The largest city and county seat is McPherson  The county is named for Civil War General James B  McPherson 

History

Early history

For many millennia, the Great Plains of North America was inhabited by nomadic Native Americans  From the 16th century to 18th century, the Kingdom of France claimed ownership of large parts of North America  In 1762, after the French and Indian War, France secretly ceded New France to Spain, per the Treaty of Fontainebleau  In 1802, Spain returned most of the land to France, but keeping title to about 7,500 square miles 

In 1803, most of the land for modern day Kansas was acquired by the United States from France as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase for 2 83 cents per acre  In 1848, after the Mexican–American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Spain brought into the United States all or part of land for ten future states, including southwest Kansas  In 1854, the Kansas Territory was organized, then in 1861 Kansas became the 34th U S  state 

19th century

From the 1820s to 1870s, the Santa Fe Trail passed through, what is now McPherson County  The trail entered the county, east of Canton, then south of Galva, then north of Inman, and west towards Lyons  In 1855, Charles O  Fuller established a ranch adjacent to the Running Turkey Creek Crossing about two miles south and one mile east of Galva  Fuller's Ranch provided accommodations for travelers on the Santa Fe Trail and was probably the first white settlement in McPherson County 

Peketon County was established in 1860, by the passage of a bill by S  N  Wood:  An act to establish Peketon County  Section 1  - That all that territory west of the sixth principal meridian and south of Township 16, in Kansas Territory, be and the same is hereby erected into a county, to be known by the name of Peketon County  On February 17, 1865, Peketon County was abolished, and McPherson County was made a part of Marion County, which extended from the west line of Chase County to the present western boundary of Kansas 

In 1868, Solomon Stephens and L  N  Holmberg were appointed Justices of the Peace—the first officers in what is now McPherson County  The next year (1869) occurred the first election for the township, now the county of McPherson  McPherson was regularly organized as a county in the spring of 1870, a mass meeting being held at Sweadal  Sweadal, the county seat thus selected, was located about one mile and a half southwest of the present site of Lindsborg  In September, however, the County Commissioners resolved to meet at the latter place, McPherson which had already been located some two years 

In April, 1873, a petition was filed for the county seat re-location  It was signed by 483 voters, and a special election was accordingly ordered for June 10  Upon that day, McPherson received 605 votes, New Gottland 325, King City 3 and Lindsborg 1; McPherson's majority over all, 276  In May the McPherson Town Company had offered, as an inducement for the location of the county seat at this point, the free use of rooms for ten years, and the donation of two squares of land on the town site  The offer was accepted the next month, the County Commissioners selecting blocks 56 and 65  Thus the county seat was established at McPherson and has remained since 

As early as 1875, city leaders of Marion held a meeting to consider a branch railroad from Florence  In 1878, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and parties from Marion County and McPherson County chartered the Marion and McPherson Railway Company   In 1879, a branch line was built from Florence to McPherson, in 1880 it was extended to Lyons, in 1881 it was extended to Ellinwood  The line was leased and operated by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway  The line from Florence to Marion, was abandoned in 1968  In 1992, the line from Marion to McPherson was sold to Central Kansas Railway  In 1993, after heavy flood damage, the line from Marion to McPherson was abandoned  The original branch line connected Florence, Marion, Canada, Hillsboro, Lehigh, Canton, Galva, McPherson, Conway, Windom, Little River, Mitchell, Lyons, Chase, then connected with the original AT&SF main line at Ellinwood 

In 1887, the Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway extended its main line from Herington to Pratt   This main line connected Herington, Ramona, Tampa, Durham, Waldeck, Canton, Galva, McPherson, Groveland, Inman, Medora, Hutchinson, Whiteside, Partridge, Arlington,  Langdon, Turon, Preston, Natrona, Pratt   In 1888, this main line was extended to Liberal   Later, this line was extended to Tucumcari, New Mexico and Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where it made a connection with the Southern Pacific from El Paso, Texas   The Chicago, Kansas and Nebraska Railway was absorbed by the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway  This line is also called the "Golden State Route" 

20th century
The National Old Trails Road, also known as the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, was established in 1912, and was routed through Windom, Conway, McPherson 

Geography

According to the U S  Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which  is land and  (0 3%) is water 

Adjacent counties
 Saline County (north)
 Dickinson County (northeast)
 Marion County (east)
 Harvey County (southeast)
 Reno County (southwest)
 Rice County (west)
 Ellsworth County (northwest)

Major highways
  Interstate 135
  U S  Route 56
  U S  Route 81
  K-4
  K-61
  K-153

Demographics

The McPherson Micropolitan Statistical Area includes all of McPherson County 

2000 census
As of the census of 2000, there were 29,554 people, 11,205 households, and 7,966 families residing in the county   The population density was 33 people per square mile (13/km2)   There were 11,830 housing units at an average density of 13 per square mile (5/km2)   The racial makeup of the county was 96 53% White, 0 81% Black or African American, 0 34% Native American, 0 32% Asian, 0 06% Pacific Islander, 0 79% from other races, and 1 16% from two or more races   1 94% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race  37 1% were of German, 12 9% Swedish, 12 1% American, 6 7% English and 6 3% Irish ancestry according to Census 2000 

There were 11,205 households, out of which 33 00% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 62 50% were married couples living together, 6 00% had a female householder with no husband present, and 28 90% were non-families  25 50% of all households were made up of individuals, and 11 80% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older   The average household size was 2 49 and the average family size was 2 99 

In the county, the population was spread out, with 25 40% under the age of 18, 10 30% from 18 to 24, 25 20% from 25 to 44, 21 80% from 45 to 64, and 17 30% who were 65 years of age or older   The median age was 38 years  For every 100 females there were 95 90 males   For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 92 90 males 

The median income for a household in the county was $41,138, and the median income for a family was $48,243  Males had a median income of $33,530 versus $21,175 for females  The per capita income for the county was $18,921   About 4 20% of families and 6 60% of the population were below the poverty line, including 5 20% of those under age 18 and 8 10% of those age 65 or over 

Government

Presidential elections
McPherson county is often carried by Republican candidates  The last time a Democratic candidate has carried this county was in 1964 by Lyndon B  Johnson 

Laws
Following amendment to the Kansas Constitution in 1986, the county remained a prohibition, or "dry", county until 1996, when voters approved the sale of alcoholic liquor by the individual drink with a 30 percent food sales requirement 

Education

Colleges
 McPherson College in McPherson
 Bethany College in Lindsborg
 Central Christian College in McPherson

Unified school districts
 Smoky Valley USD 400
 McPherson USD 418
 Canton-Galva USD 419
 Moundridge USD 423
 Inman USD 448

School district office in neighboring county
 Goessel USD 411
 Little River-Windom USD 444

Museums
 Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg
 McCormick-Deering Days Museum in Inman
 McPherson Museum in McPherson
 Lindsborg Old Mill & Swedish Heritage Museum in Lindsborg
 Kansas Motorcycle Museum in Marquette

Communities

Cities

 Canton
 Galva
 Inman
 Lindsborg
 Marquette
 McPherson (county seat) 
 Moundridge
 Windom

Unincorporated communities
† means a Census-Designated Place (CDP) by the United States Census Bureau 
 Conway
 Elyria†
 Groveland
 Johnstown
 New Gottland
 Roxbury†

Ghost towns
 Alta Mills
 Battle Hill
 Christian
 Doles Park
 Elivon
 King City
 Sweadal

Townships
McPherson County is divided into twenty-five townships   The cities of Lindsborg and McPherson are considered governmentally independent and are excluded from the census figures for the townships   In the following table, the population center is the largest city (or cities) included in that township's population total, if it is of a significant size 

See also
 List of people from McPherson County, Kansas
 National Register of Historic Places listings in McPherson County, Kansas
 McPherson Valley Wetlands
 Maxwell Wildlife Refuge

References

Notes

Further reading

 Wheeler, Wayne Leland  "An Analysis of Social Change in a Swedish-Immigrant Community: The Case of Lindsborg, Kansas " (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1959  5905657) 

County
 Through the Years: A Pictorial History of McPherson County; McPherson Sentinel' Heritage House Publishing Co; 1992 
 McPherson County First Courthouse Built About 1869 or 1870; Lindsborg News-Record; March 30, 1959 
 Pioneer Life and Lore of McPherson County, Kansas; Edna Nyquist; Democratic-Opinion Press; 1932 
 A History of the Church of the Brethren in Kansas (includes McPherson College history); Elmer LeRoy Craik; McPherson Daily; Republican Press; 397 pages; 1922 
 Portrait and Biographical Record of Dickinson, Saline, McPherson, and Marion Counties, Kansas; Chapman Bros; 614 pages; 1893 
 Standard Atlas of McPherson County, Kansas; Geo  A  Ogle & Co; 82 pages; 1921 
 Plat Book of McPherson County, Kansas; North West Publishing Co; 50 pages; 1903 
 Edwards' Atlas of McPherson County, Kansas; John P  Edwards; 51 pages; 1884 

Trails
 The Story of the Marking of the Santa Fe Trail by the Daughters of the American Revolution in Kansas and the State of Kansas; Almira Cordry; Crane Co; 164 pages; 1915  (Download 4MB PDF eBook)
 The National Old Trails Road To Southern California, Part 1 (LA to KC); Automobile Club Of Southern California; 64 pages; 1916  (Download 6 8MB PDF eBook)

Mennonite Settlements
 Impact of Mennonite settlement on the cultural landscape of Kansas; Brenda Martin; Kansas State University; 1985/1988  
 Mennonite settlement : the relationship between the physical and cultural environment; Susan Movle; University of Utah; 1975/1886 
 Status of Mennonite women in Kansas in their church and home relationships; Eva Harshbarger; Bluffton College; 1925/1945 

External links

County
 
 McPherson County - Directory of Public Officials
Historical
 , from Hatteberg's People'' on KAKE TV news
Maps
 McPherson County Maps: Current, Historic, KDOT
 Kansas Highway Maps: Current, Historic, KDOT
 Kansas Railroad Maps: Current, 1996, 1915, KDOT and Kansas Historical Society

 
Kansas counties
1867 establishments in Kansas




ground_truth: Verifying other meta-information such as patient's gender, age, race, etc.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What are the three phases of the author's preaching process?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 2:  And the words of the Father have come by the Son and the Spirit to us in the form of the Bible  It is the Holy Spirit of Truth together with the Holy Words of God that mark God’s presence in our lives  They are what guide us and sanctify us 
This is why we can’t get away from Scripture  This is why our relationship with God depends so much on our relationship with this book  Creation reveals God by what He has done, but it does not offer His words to us  The Church is united and empowered by the Spirit of God, but it cannot speak His words either  The Bible is how the Holy Spirit speaks to us; it is one of the means by which God has chosen to sanctify His people  Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God 
The Story of Death (2/15/15)
February 18, 2015 Josh Vajda	2 Comments
Intro: The Matter of Life and Death
Death as Punishment
Death and God
Chinks in Death’s Armor
For Now We Wait
Closing Thoughts: Ash Wednesday
Introduction: The Matter of Life and Death
A friend once told me that Christianity is a “culture of death ” This was of course a reversal of Pope John Paul II’s 1995 condemnation of the modern culture of death, which sees the weak as useless at best—a burden to be eliminated  He pointed to the crucifixion, the Old Testament sacrificial system, and the way we seem to look forward to death so that we can go to heaven 
In a strange sense my friend was right: Christianity has a lot to say about death, and sacrifice is central to our theology  Of course, in context Christianity is anything but a culture of death, but if we’re not careful we can definitely sound the way my friend described us  We sometimes get confused about the role death plays in God’s plan 
So today we examine what the Bible says about death and reconsider what role it plays in our lives 
It’s interesting: there’s a way in which you could read the Bible as a book about death  That’s obviously not all it talks about, but the “story arc” of death spans the entire book 
Let’s take a stroll, shall we?
The first mention of death is in the second chapter of the Bible: “in the day you eat of [the forbidden fruit] you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17)  This promise was the center of the debate between the woman and the serpent in Genesis 3, and they ate of the fruit  But they didn’t die  God was gracious not to put them to death physically, but there is a kind of spiritual death that took place then  Since the Fall, mankind has been unresponsive to God 
But make no mistake, physical death was coming  We know from Romans that death entered through Adam’s sin—it wasn’t part of the original created order  And as proof, we see in Adam’s genealogy the reign of death: each one dies  We read “and he died” over and over here  Romans 3:23 tells us “the wages of sin is death ” All sinned, so all die  Death had become a part of life 
But Genesis is just getting warmed up! Because next comes the Flood where—you guessed it—everybody dies  Then the Patriarchs die  Then the book ends with the death of Joseph  Who ends a book that way?!? This is not a happy ending 
But then there’s Exodus, where the Egyptians die, Leviticus where animals die, Numbers where unbelieving Israel dies, Joshua where the Canaanites die  Death is everywhere! It’s all over the Pentateuch 
Why would this be? Because death is the punishment for sin  All crimes against God are capital offenses  That doesn’t mean He immediately smites everyone the moment they sin—but technically speaking, He could  That would be just  And if it doesn’t feel just then maybe we don’t understand sin as well as we thought we did 
In Ezekiel, God tells us He gets no pleasure from the death of the wicked  Does this surprise you? He would much rather see the wicked turn from their ways—to repent and live  But those who will not get what they deserve 
Sometimes if we’re not careful this is a way that we distort God’s character, as though God somehow hungers for death and blood  God isn’t pleased by animal sacrifice, but He requires some recompense for sin  God didn’t send the Flood on a whim but because evil on the earth had become unbearable  If we take death out of the context of grace and patience and kindness, we get a very wrong view of God 
But because death is part of life in a fallen world, we sometimes get confused about our relationship with death on the one hand and God’s sovereignty on the other  The author of Ecclesiastes notes that people are just as dead as animals in the end  The wise man for all of his wisdom still ends up just as dead as the fool  The nice thing about being dead is you don’t have to live in fear of death anymore! It’s a bleak way to look at things, but not wrong  What’s the point of life if the only thing we can be sure of is death?
If this is getting depressing, good! Sin is serious business and so is death  Christianity has a lot to say about death because it takes sin seriously 
But there’s a whole lot left to be said 
It turns out contrary to popular belief, death can be undone  Yes, you heard me: the end might not really be the end after all  Elijah and Elisha are both able to raise the dead  Jesus raises the dead  Jesus’ disciples raise the dead  Of course, these were all temporary  But it’s a start!
God promises us that it gets better than this  In Isaiah 25, He promises to swallow up death forever  How is this possible?!? The wages of sin is death  A holy God can’t just get rid of death 
He’d have to get rid of sin somehow 
This is where everything gets turned on its head  This is that part in the movie where you fly through the black hole and end up in a different dimension, or where Alice jumps down the rabbit hole  God swallows up death by letting death swallow Him up  Jesus, being fully God, lives a perfectly sinless life—a life not meriting death—and dies on our behalf, paying for all the sin of the world 
Let that sink in for a moment: God dies  But the death of God becomes the death of sin, and the death of sin becomes the death of death  And death’s final defeat is announced through the resurrection of God back from the dead  The God of life is alive! And He offers eternal life to all 
As Tim Keller likes to put it, Jesus died the death we deserved so that we could live the life He deserved  Because Jesus submitted to death on our behalf, our relationship with death gets really complicated  It’s still the enemy  It’s still the wages of sin  It’s still not good  But every good thing—salvation, resurrection, eternal life, peace with God—these all came from one great death: the Crucifixion 
So now all death is bad, but that one death brought us everything good  We praise the God of life, but we celebrate His death  God took a horrible, terrible, rotten, no-good thing and redeemed it 
I suppose that shouldn’t surprise us either 
We may sometimes look like we’re rejoicing in death itself, but really we rejoice in that one death that God used to bring eternal life  Our problem isn’t that we sing about death too much—we probably don’t sing about it enough! But we have to keep it in the context of the bigger story  We can’t make any sense of the Crucifixion apart from the Fall, the Resurrection, and Return of Christ 
This is the theme we see in the Book of Acts: God raised Jesus from the dead  It’s all about resurrection now! We baptize in the likeness of His death—and resurrection  We take the bread and cup to remember His death—all the while waiting for His return 
In Romans, death takes on a whole new meaning: since our sins were buried with Christ, we are now alive to God and dead to sin  Spiritual death is over now  Death has become just a metaphor for our relationship with sin 
But make no mistake, death didn’t just die spiritually  We might think that because we still see death all around us  Christians still die  But at the very end of the Bible we see that when Christ returns, death will finally be thrown into the lake of fire and be no more  All the dead will come to life—but this time never to die again 
I can’t help but think of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X: Death Be Not Proud:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow
And soonest our best men with thee do go
Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery 
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppies or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke  Why swellst thou then?
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!
Today we sit knowing that we are no longer spiritually dead, and instead we are dead to sin  Christ has risen from the dead, but He has not yet returned  Physical death is still a reality  It’s still cruel  But it’s not the end 
I have another friend, a learned scholar who is emphatic about how much he hates death  He doesn’t want to die  Yet Paul almost seems to disagree  In Philippians he writes, “To live is Christ and to die is gain ” Is death gain? Is there something good about death—our deaths? Is my death-hating friend overreacting?
Insofar as my friend is only talking about death, he’s right  You can’t really hate death enough  And our hope is in the resurrection, when we get our new bodies and live with Christ forever  Paul’s not saying that death isn’t really so bad after all  He’s saying Christ means so much to him that he would even suffer death to be with Him  It’s not that death is lesser; it’s that Jesus is greater 
This is how we make sense of Paul’s taunt in 1 Corinthians 15, which talks at length about the resurrection: “Death is swallowed up in victory  O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” Ultimately he’s talking about the end of death when we are raised, but there’s a sense in which death’s sting is tempered by the sweetness of life with Jesus 
When we lose a loved one, it’s hard  If he or she is a believer, we’re comforted by the fact that even though they died they enjoy the sweetness of Christ’s presence  Don’t let anyone take that away from you  Just don’t forget: that’s not the end of the story  It gets better!
They won’t stay dead 
Who is this God who can even bring good out of death?
Today is Ash Wednesday  Many Christians will receive ash on their foreheads and be reminded, “You are dust, and to dust you will return ” Not a message we particularly like to hear  We often think of ourselves as souls who just happen to be in bodies, that our parts are interchangeable—maybe even expendable  But these words are the words God Himself spoke to Adam after the Fall  You are dust  A sobering thought  Our bodies are a part of us, and our reflection is a daily reminder that we’re not as strong as we think we are 
That’s not the whole truth about us, but it’s a part we can’t afford to forget  Considering our frailty and our mortality shouldn’t lead to despair; it should bring us to our knees before our Savior  We confess how much we need Him, and how grateful we are that we have Him  Recognizing our insufficiency is just one way we deepen our appreciation for all we have in Christ  We humble ourselves not to make Him greater but because He is greater! He has brought us forgiveness and eternal life, sent us His Spirit  If we were left to our own devices, we would have no hope  But because of His love, rich in mercy, we have this gift from God 
Bonus: Christ is Risen by Matt Maher
We Didn’t Stay Perfect (2/1/15)
February 2, 2015 Josh Vajda	Leave a comment
The Unfolding of the Fall
Fractured Relationships
Total Depravity—but not Extreme Depravity
Comparing Theories [new! not discussed in class]
So What Do We Do Until Then?
Bonus Thoughts
We all know the story of the Fall from Genesis 3  Perfect woman with perfect husband in perfect garden meets talking snake  He tempts her to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit, then she hands some to her husband who does the same  God comes and gives them a spanking and sends them out of the garden 
Ok, so the details might be a little off… maybe even a little forgettable  But the story is familiar and the consequences tragic  We live in those consequences  So what does this story have to tell us about the world today and our lives in it?
You can learn a lot about sin and humanity by really chewing on the details here  Consider:
The serpent (we’re later told it’s also Satan) begins with questioning what God has said 
The question overgeneralizes and invites a conversation 
The woman adds to God’s commandment 
The serpent challenges God and offers a desirable half-truth 
The woman (although perfect) is tempted  That temptation draws her to inspect the fruit 
Looking at the fruit, the woman focused on the positive side of the equation 
She risked her life trusting the serpent over God, because eating the fruit should have meant certain death 
The man ate without any signs of a struggle 
Their eyes were open  Before they knew only the good; now they knew good and evil 
Their first response to sin is to cover up, which indicates fear and probably shame 
Their response to God (their creator whom they knew personally!) was to hide  Apparently they either didn’t know or forgot that God is everywhere and knows everything 
God asks the man a question for effect 
The man blames his wife and even seems to accuse God 
The woman blames the serpent and even seems to deflect by saying she was tricked 
At this point God punishes the serpent, the man, and the woman by cursing all creation  Work will be hard, childbearing will be painful  But there is hope in the promise of One to come who will crush the serpent 
I love how the Good News glimmers even in that first dark moment 
It’s so tempting to read more into the story because there are so many more details we wish we had  The gaps in the story invite our imaginations to jump in, but we need to be careful not to put words in God’s mouth 
One theme we see in the Fall is one broken relationship after another  We noted last week how we were created to need one another and how that’s a good thing  But after the Fall we see husband and wife blaming each other  Worse yet, we see them hiding from God  After creation is cursed there’s really nothing left: man’s relationships with God, with others, with creation, and even with himself are all broken  And so our need for each other grows even greater, but our incapacity to find what we need and be who we need to be for others makes meeting this need impossible 
But let’s be honest here: the biggest problem is this broken relationship with God  He is their Creator and Sustainer  He knows them personally, guides them, and has given them all they need  What’s more, He’s perfectly good  This fall into sin was an act of rebellion against a God who had been nothing but loving and giving  Everything depends on Him 
Is it any wonder He warned them they would die?
Now the astute reader will note they didn’t drop dead  Does this mean the serpent was right? Not hardly! This broken relationship with God is sometimes thought of a “spiritual death,” a state of unresponsiveness to God  I’m generally fine with this idea—after all, they certainly became separated from God! What else could you call a state apart from the God of life? Death makes sense 
But we know that this is where physical death enters the picture  Mankind wasn’t supposed to die  YOU right now reading this: you were never supposed to die  Now we tend to say death is a part of life  It wasn’t supposed to be that way  Death was never a part of life  Death is a reality we have to live with, but it’s not good 
So I think spiritual death metaphorically happened, but physical death literally happened  And the only reason they walked out of that garden alive has to have been God’s grace and mercy 
Another observation we can make is that Adam and Eve weren’t immediately as bad as they could have been  This is sometimes what we think when we talk about “total depravity ” If you want a really bleak picture you have to turn ahead a few pages to the state of the world before the Flood  It took a long time to get there 
No, extreme depravity wasn’t the result of the Fall, but total depravity still is  Total depravity is the doctrine that says sin bent every part of man  Sin pollutes man’s reason, man’s emotions, man’s willpower, man’s desires, man’s imagination, man’s memories, man’s senses, man’s body, and even man’s conscience  Nothing is safe  Nothing is pure 
And this is intimately wrapped up in the image of God  Remember that man was made in God’s image, unique among all creation  But sin now pollutes that image  It’s still present—we still can’t help but “image” our Creator when we act rationally, make wise decisions, love others selflessly, and so on  Instead the image is defaced but not erased  What should normally reflect God’s character instead reflects a mixture of good and evil 
Comparing Theories
Now if we take a step back, we all recognize that we live in a broken world  Very few people would argue that everything is perfect, that sin, suffering, and death somehow don’t exist or aren’t really bad  We (generally) all agree that there’s a problem  But there’s little agreement about why it is the way it is 
People who don’t believe in a literal Adam and Even tanking the human race are generally stuck  For example, if you only believe in the natural world, evil is just a part of nature  Death is a part of life  Suffering is a biochemical response to destructive conditions  And if you’re just one organism out of millions competing for resources, all you can really say is that you don’t like these things  They are distasteful  Maybe you’re hard-wired to show empathy with others because of some evolutionary imperative, but objectively speaking what can you say?
Well, you can say lots I suppose, but you can’t be consistent without ending up a nihilist 
Other religions have the same problem: either evil belongs as some part of the bigger cosmic plan or it’s an illusion  Either way, it’s hard to take evil seriously  Either it belongs in some way, or it doesn’t exist at all  Either way it’s hard to justify our natural reactions to injustice, suffering, and death 
But let’s forget about consistency and get to work: what problems can we name and how do we fix them?
If the problem is society, the cure is social change 
If the problem is pride, the cure is humility 
If the problem is bad decisions, the cure is right decisions 
If the problem is lack of love, the cure is love 
If the problem is a broken relationship, the cure is forgiveness 
If the problem is rebellion, the cure is submission 
If the problem is demons, the cure is their destruction 
If the problem is illusion, the cure is truth 
If the problem is original sin, the cure is death of the old self 
If the problem is doubt, the cure is faith 
If the problem is in every part of us, the cure is a new creation 
If the problem is death, the cure is eternal life 
Of course this just scratches the surface  But what I want you to notice is that for all of these problems, Christianity offers the solution  And for all of these problems, the solution is the same: that one seed of woman that God promised, the One to come that would crush the serpent  His name is Jesus 
Some of these things were addressed in His first coming, when He died on the cross for our sins and rose to life to offer us eternal life  But the work isn’t done yet  He’s coming back to finish the work, to make all things new  Think about that  We’ll explain further another time 
As a wise poet named Tom once wrote, the waiting is the hardest part  If we as Christians are a new creation (we are), have eternal life (we do), are filled with the Holy Spirit (yup), and are no longer slaves to sin (seriously!), then why is the world still messed up? And more to the point, why are WE still messed up?
Frankly, we still suffer the effects of sin in all our faculties  Our wills have been freed from slavery, but they’re still polluted  We won’t be fully free from the effects of sin until Jesus comes back 
So we’re no longer slaves, but we’re still polluted and live in a polluted world  We have the Holy Spirit, but we still choose to disobey  In theory you should be able to live a perfect life after you’re saved, but because we’ve already been marked by sin in our lives and live in an imperfect world, we will never be perfect under our own power 
What do we do then? Give up? Of course not! We beat our bodies into submission  We learn right and wrong from Scripture, and we challenge our motives day to day 
But if we want to go the extra mile, we can’t do it alone 
There will be times you trick yourself into thinking you’re doing what’s right  There will be times you misread Scripture and misunderstand what God expects  And to guard against those times you need to surround yourself with fellow believers  You need people who know you, who know the Word, and who are committed to following Jesus with you  They can provide that outside check to make sure sin isn’t getting the best of you 
Because let’s face it: some days it’s hard to tell the difference between the Holy Spirit’s promptings and our own desires  Nothing can do better to counter that than other Spirit-filled people who bring a different perspective 
We ended up talking a lot about sanctification today, but that’s because it’s how we cope with the effects of the Fall in our lives  I don’t ever want to teach about sin and suffering and death without also pointing to the hope we have in Christ! The sin we as Christians struggle with is our bad choices day to day  If you’re saved, all you can do is persevere in what’s right and help others to do the same  We’ll say more about suffering and death another time 
My challenge to you is this: who do you have in your life who can give you that outside angle to your struggles and decisions? Where can you go to make sure you’re on the right path? If you’re not sure, start looking!
We need each other more than ever 
Isn’t it interesting how hard it is to remember the details of a story we’ve heard dozens of times? Our memories aren’t perfect  It sure helps having other people to lean on…
Historically speaking, the discussion of the effects of the Fall gets really fun with Augustine and Pelagius  In a nutshell, Augustine argued that we are always in need of God’s grace, but Pelagius believed we didn’t suffer from original sin and could become perfect if we try hard enough 
Regarding different relationships with sin, Augustine put it this way: God is not able to sin, Adam was created able not to sin, the Fall left us not able not to sin, and those in Christ are back where created Adam was: able not to sin 
Next →	about josh	Josh Vajda is a recent seminary grad who enjoys discussing theology, history, philosophy, Scripture, and culture  Read on   
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ground_truth: The three phases are exegetical, theological, and homiletical.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Where is McPherson County located?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 4:  For illustrative purposes, we take ω/2π = 0 1 THz and E 0 ⊥ d 0 = 10 mV in what follows  Figures ) and (c) present the electronic band structures along with the layer composition σ z n (k) at twist angles θ = 1 2 • and θ = 2 •  
In both cases, the energy spectra exhibit isolated narrow bands with strong layer hybridization  At θ = 1 2 • , the conductivity shows two peaks ∼ 0 1e 2 /h at low energies associated with the first two valence bands  The third band does not host any sizable conductivity signal  At higher hole-doping levels, a remarkable conductivity peak ∼ e 2 /h appears near the gap separating the fourth and fifth bands 
At θ = 2 • , the conductivity shows smaller values, but the overall trends are similar: A peak ∼ O(0 01)e 2 /h appears at low energies, while larger responses ∼ O(0 1)e 2 /h can be spotted as the Fermi level decreases  One can understand the behaviors of σ H from the interlayer BCP in Eq  ( )  It favors band near-degeneracy regions in k -space made up of strongly layer hybridized electronic states 
As such, the conductivity is most pro- nounced when the Fermi level is located around such regions, which directly accounts for the peaks of response in Fig  that [∂ k × G] z is negligible at lower energies, and it is dominated by positive values as the doping increases, thus the conductivity rises initially 
When the doping level is higher, regions with [∂ k × G] z < 0 start to contribute, thus the conductivity decreases after reaching a maximum  Application to tBG  The second example is tBG  We focus on commensurate twist angles in the large angle limit in the main text , which possess moiré-lattice assisted strong interlayer tunneling via Umklapp processes  
This case is appealing because the Umklapp interlayer tunneling is a manifestation of discrete translational symmetry of moiré superlattice, which is irrelevant at small twist angles and not captured by the continuum model but plays important roles in physical contexts such as higher order topological insulator and moiré excitons  
The Umklapp tunneling is strongest for the commensurate twist angles of θ = 21 8 • and θ = 38 2 • , whose corresponding periodic moiré superlattices have the smallest lattice constant ( √ 7 of the monolayer counterpart)  Such a small moiré scale implies that the exact crystalline symmetry, which depends sensitively on fine details of rotation center, has critical influence on lowenergy response properties 
To capture the Umklapp tunneling, we employ the tight-binding model   Figures ) and (c) show two distinct commensurate structures of tBG at θ = 21 8 • belonging to chiral point groups D 3 and D 6 , respectively  The atomic configurations in Figs  ) are equivalent, which are constructed by twisting AA-stacked bilayer graphene around an overlapping atom site, and that in Fig  ) is obtained by rotating around a hexagonal center 
Band structures of these two configurations are drastically different within a low-energy window of ∼ 10 meV around the κ point   Remarkably, despite large θ, we still get σ H ∼ O(0 001) e 2 /h (D 3 ) and ∼ O(0 1) e 2 /h (D 6 ), which are comparable to those at small angles (cf  Fig  in the Supplemental Material ) 
Such sizable responses can be attributed to the strong interlayer coupling enabled by Umklapp processes   Apart from different intensities, the Hall conductivities in the two stacking configurations have distinct energy dependence: In Fig  , σ H shows a single peak centered at zero energy; In Fig  (f), it exhibits two antisymmetric peaks around zero 
The peaks are centered around band degeneracies, and their profiles can be understood from the distribution of [∂ k × G] z   Figure (d) illustrates the atomic structure of tBG with a twist angle slightly deviating from θ = 21 8 • , forming a supermoiré pattern  In short range, the local stacking geometries resemble the commensurate configurations at θ = 21 8 • , while the stacking registries at different locales differ by a translation 
Similar to the moiré landscapes in the small-angle limit, there also exist high-symmetry locales: Regions A and B enclose the D 3 structure, and region C contains the D 6 configuration  Position-dependent Hall response is therefore expected in such a supermoiré  As the intrinsic Hall signal from the D 6 configuration dominates [see Figs 
3(e) vs (f)], the net response mimics that in Fig    Discussion  We have uncovered the crossed nonlinear dynamical intrinsic Hall effect characteristic of layer hybridized electronic states in twisted bilayers, and elucidated its geometric origin in the k -space curl of interlayer BCP  It offers a new tool for rectification and frequency doubling in chiral vdW bilayers, and is sizable in tTMD and tBG 
Here our focus is on the intrinsic effect, which can be evaluated quantitatively for each material and provides a benchmark for experiments  There may also be extrinsic contributions, similar to the side jump and skew scattering ones in anomalous Hall effect  They typically have distinct scaling behavior with the relaxation time τ from the intrinsic effect, hence can be distinguished from the latter in experiments  
Moreover, they are suppressed in the clean limit ωτ 1 [(ωτ ) 2 1, more precisely]   In high-quality tBG samples, τ ∼ ps at room temperature   Much longer τ can be obtained at lower temperatures  In fact, a recent theory explaining well the resistivity of tBG predicted τ ∼ 10 −8 s at 10 K   As such, high-quality tBG under low temperatures and sub-terahertz input (ω/2π = 0 1 THz) is located in the clean limit, rendering an ideal platform for isolating the intrinsic effect 
This work paves a new route to driving in-plane response by out-of-plane dynamical control of layered vdW structures   The study can be generalized to other observables such as spin current and spin polarization, and the in-plane driving can be statistical forces, like temperature gradient  Such orthogonal controls rely critically on the nonconservation of layer pseudospin degree of freedom endowed by interlayer coupling, and constitute an emerging research field at the crossing of 2D vdW materials, layertronics, twistronics and nonlinear electronics 
This work is supported by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong (AoE/P-701/20, HKU SRFS2122-7S05), and the Croucher Foundation  W Y  also acknowledges support by Tencent Foundation  Cong Chen, 1, 2, * Dawei Zhai, 1, 2, * Cong Xiao, 1, 2, † and Wang Yao 1, 2, ‡ 1 Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China 2 HKU-UCAS Joint Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics at Hong Kong, China Extra figures for tBG at small twist angles Figure (a) shows the band structure of tBG with θ = 1 47 • obtained from the continuum model  
The central bands are well separated from higher ones, and show Dirac points at κ/κ points protected by valley U (1) symmetry and a composite operation of twofold rotation and time reversal C 2z T   Degeneracies at higher energies can also be identified, for example, around ±75 meV at the γ point  As the two Dirac cones from the two layers intersect around the same area, such degeneracies are usually accompanied by strong layer hybridization [see the color in the left panel of Fig  ] 
Additionally, it is well-known that the two layers are strongly coupled when θ is around the magic angle (∼ 1 08 • ), rendering narrow bandwidths for the central bands  As discussed in the main text, coexistence of strong interlayer hybridization and small energy separations is expected to contribute sharp conductivity peaks near band degeneracies, as shown in Fig   
In this case, the conductivity peak near the Dirac point can reach ∼ 0 1e 2 /h, while the responses around ±0 08 eV are smaller at ∼ 0 01e 2 /h  The above features are maintained when θ is enlarged, as illustrated in Figs  ) and (c) using θ = 2 65 • and θ = 6 01 •   Since interlayer coupling becomes weaker and the bands are more separated at low energies when θ increases, intensity of the conductivity drops significantly 
We stress that G is not defined at degenerate points, and interband transitions may occur when energy separation satisfies |ε n − ε m | ∼ ω, the effects of which are not included in the current formulations  Consequently, the results around band degeneracies within energy ∼ ω [shaded areas in Fig  ] should be excluded 



ground_truth: McPherson County is located in the U.S. state of Kansas.