Dear Lord; Happy Wednesday Father!<\/p>\n
You know Lord, I love it when You plant a seed in my heart and it drives me to seek out answers.\u00a0 Such was the case with the Scripture verse I posted to my Facebook Wall today:<\/p>\n
\u201cFinally, brothers and sisters, rejoice! Strive for full restoration, encourage one another, be of one mind, live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you.\u201d \u2013 2 Corinthians 13:11 (NIV)<\/strong><\/p>\n But apparently You weren\u2019t done with me on this one.\u00a0 Over the following hours, the phrase \u201cStrive for full restoration\u2026\u201d<\/em> kept running through my head, over and over.\u00a0 Finally, I decided to do some research on that particular expression in context and see where it led me.<\/p>\n Now Father, as You know I usually reference the New International Version (NIV) Bible as that\u2019s the version that speaks to my heart most often.\u00a0 However, when I run into a passage that churns in my head one of the first things I do is to compare it to other translations to see it from other perspectives.\u00a0 In the case of this verse, the variance seems to be significant across translations\u2026 even in the case of the previous NIV (1984):<\/p>\n \u201cFinally, brothers, good\u2011by. Aim for perfection, listen to my appeal, be of one mind, live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you.\u201d \u2013 (NIV 1984)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cFinally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you.\u201d \u2013 (KJV)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cFinally, brothers and sisters, rejoice, set things right, be encouraged, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.\u201d \u2013 (NET)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cAnd that’s about it, friends. Be cheerful. Keep things in good repair. Keep your spirits up. Think in harmony. Be agreeable. Do all that, and the God of love and peace will be with you for sure.\u201d \u2013 (MSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n Wow\u2026 There\u2019s obviously some differences there Lord.\u00a0 Realizing that these translations stem from words that may not have an exact English equivalent, I then decided to dig deeper and see what the Biblical Scholars had to say on this phrase.\u00a0 From what I found, it appears the original word was \u039a\u03b1\u03c4\u03b1\u03c1\u03c4\u03b9\u03b6\u03b5\u03c3\u03b8\u03b5<\/strong>, which according to Clarke\u2019s Commentary<\/a> converts to mean : \u201cBe compact; get into joint again; let unity and harmony be restored\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 Other commentaries were similar, but the description that finally settled my heart was from Wesley\u2019s Notes<\/a> which stated : \u201cBe perfect – Aspire to the highest degree of holiness.\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n Strive for full restoration\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I love seeing where Your whispers take me Father.<\/p>\n Heavenly Father, I thank You for making Your Presence known through these quiet instructions to my heart.\u00a0 I pray that You continue to challenge me to dig deeper into Your Word, so as to bring my Walk even closer to Your side.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n ~Phather Phil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Lord; Happy Wednesday Father! You know Lord, I love it when You plant a seed in my heart and it drives me to seek out answers.\u00a0 Such was the case with the Scripture verse I posted to my Facebook Wall today: \u201cFinally, brothers and sisters, rejoice! Strive for full restoration, encourage one another, be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[1444,1538,359,1541,473,1540,1536,27,43,915,743,1535,702,821,1523,173,844,228,24,966,1542,1539,444,731,140,593,916,839,1529,1528,104,682,133,141,1532,1530,1531,1526,1525,1527,1534,392,85,887,25,55,16,1522,217,41,69,727,1358,796,493,95,512,1524,114,1533,663,1537,348,723],"class_list":["post-1176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-emails-to-god","tag-2-corinthians","tag-be-perfect","tag-bible","tag-brethren","tag-brother","tag-brothers-and-sisters","tag-clarkes-commentary","tag-comfort","tag-courage","tag-dear-lord","tag-differences","tag-dig-deeper","tag-drive","tag-encouraged","tag-facebook-wall","tag-father","tag-follow","tag-friend","tag-friends","tag-god","tag-god-of-love","tag-gods-instructions","tag-happy","tag-head","tag-heart","tag-heavenly","tag-heavenly-father","tag-john","tag-king-james-version","tag-kjv","tag-light","tag-listen","tag-love","tag-mind","tag-msg","tag-net","tag-new-english-translation","tag-new-international-version","tag-niv","tag-niv-1984","tag-no-english-equivalent","tag-obvious","tag-origin","tag-passage","tag-peace","tag-perspective","tag-plan","tag-plant-a-seed","tag-pray","tag-presence","tag-quiet","tag-rest","tag-scripture","tag-significant","tag-speak","tag-spirit","tag-spirits","tag-strive-for-full-restoration","tag-thank-you","tag-the-message","tag-wednesday","tag-wesleys-notes","tag-word","tag-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p18mMc-iY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1176"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1178,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions\/1178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}