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The law is only binding as long as you live.

A woman is only bond to her husband while he is alive. When he dies she is unbound and she is free from that law. However, If she were to move in with some other man while her husband still lives than she would be an adulteress.

WE have died to the law through Christ Jesus! It no long has a hold over us and WE ARE FREE!
We’ve been set free so we can belong to Christ and not to the law or to sin. For, we will be long to one of those 3.

The law, even though it is good, aroused sinful passions in us. It caused us to sin. But we’ve died to that law in Christ Jesus.

The law is not sin. It tell us what sin is, and sin, takes that opportunity to grab the moment and produce sinful passions in us. Paul’s example would be coveting, mine is lust. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and “if you look at a woman lustfully you commit adultery” The law tells me what sin is, and sin then, produces the passion.

With out the law however, sin is dead. Before we heard the law we were alive but when the law came, sin also came and we died.

The law is good and no death came thorough it. Sin produced death through the law so that we might see sin as sin.

This causes this to happen: I don’t do what I want to do.
I want to do good and follow the law, but since i’m flesh, sold to sin, nothing good lives in me. So, Tho I want to do good, I do sin.

Paul claims to be a wretched man because of this! But he says thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! He’s been rescued! His mind serves God and his body tries to serve sin. 8:1 says “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”

I take this to mean, you try to put to death the sinful nature in your body, you fight it with the power of Christ. The Spirit gives you the strength and when you fail, there’s no condemnation because you are in Christ, you get up, and you keep fighting.

#win!

Alright, you could also use Swiss721 BlkCn BT. It’s 29 bucks if you don’t have it, but it used to come preloaded on machines. Impact could work as well, tho it will be a bit more rounded with out the point on the M.

Right, so here we go.

Open up photoshop and make a new document, i went 800 px by 800 px. That’s big i know but it’s just for the demo, i like to work big. I went with 72 DPI here because it’s for the web. If your going to print this thing you should be 200 or 300 DPI.

Right, so you’ve got that up, now either press “t” on your keyboard or go over to the tool bar and click the Text tool. the “T” then click on the art board.

Obviously here you’ll type “Bad Company” I’m going to use Interstate. But remember, any black compressed font will work. Check out Font Squirrel or dafont.com. When you preview your font be sure you’ve typed it in all caps.

The image with flat base type

Right, so moving on. Select your font, I’m using “Interstate Black Compressed” for mine. I set it to about 150pt. And that gives me this. Notice how far above “company” the word “bad” is. We need to bring them together. In design talk that’s called the leading. We need to set it to about 112. next is the tracking. We want the letters to be tight but not touching. We want to get rid of the awkward spaces that come when you simply type words out on the page. Those of you using free fonts will have much more work to do since most of the time the creators of these fonts don’t take the extra time to correct this for you. I would normally do this in Illustrator for title text like this, but, for the sake of this tutorial i’ll suffer with you, assuming you don’t have Illustrator. (If you do, type it out in illustrator, check your spelling then convert the type to outlines.(by pressing shift + command + O) and then ungroup it (by pressing shift + command +G) and click each letter to move it closer or further away. It takes some training and experience to get things right. Keep trying. There are lots of other ways to do this, it’s just how i do it.)

Corect the Leading and Tracking

Once you have those things set right, you’ll want to click on the black arrow tool. The “Selection Tool.”
in your layers pallet right click on the “Bad Company” layer and convert it to a smart object. This makes it a vector object instead of type. That’s important because now you can’t screw it up You can still apply layer styles or masks, but you can scale it to any size and, now, you can’t accidentally click on it and delete letters.

Convert your text to a smart object for your own protection and convenience.

So how do you get the distress. Photoshop novices are sick right now because it’s fairly simple. Create a layer mask for the “Bad Company layer.” There are many ways to do this but i click the icon at the bottom of the layers pallet. For those of you who haven’t used masks, your missing out. You’ll notice that it brings up a white box next to the layer you placed the mask on. When you click on this box, it means that all the painting and what not you are doing goes to the mask and not the object.

Create a mask on the "Bad Company" text

So we are going to paint in our distress. You’ll need to find some good grunge brushes, which shouldn’t be hard. There are TONS of them out there. Just run a search in google for “Distress Brushes” or “Photoshop grunge brushes” and just look for something subtle. Remember that Subtle is better than over the top. The logo they are using has little cracks, it hasn’t been destroyed.  Most of the free fonts you’ll run across have had a nuclear bomb dropped on them. The whole reason we are doing this is because we want control over the amount of distress that is included.

Your image might look like this

So you’ll just need to play with different brushes and paint things on differently to get the effect you are looking for.  It takes time. I didn’t give it much time because I have work to do. But that gives you the over all look you are looking for. Now, remember that a mask masks what it’s covering and the back ground shows through. So if we change the background color from white, the mask covers that and the new color comes through the letters. So, if you want it to be transparent you just turn off your background layer and save it out as a png-24 for best quality
Right, I almost forgot, you need to crop this bad boy because you don’t want to have to deal with having this huge image. 2 things you can do.

1.) open the image you want to put the logo on and drag the logo on to the image. The mask will follow. And remember, it’s easier to scale down than up. But since you are working with a vector smart object, that doesn’t matter. (If you drop it on to your new image and it’s too big, no worries. Just ok the action and press f for full screen mode and then Command (or control) T for “free transform” and scale the logo the size it needs to be. Use the shift key to keep it scaled right.)

2.) Crop. Just command click the smart object box to select it. Once it’s selected go to “Image -> Crop”
That crops the image to the selected artwork.

I know this is harder than just dropping in a random free font, but the results are worth it!
Remember, I didn’t hunt down the actual font, because i’m just giving you a demo. I also didn’t do the “battlefield” part for the same reason. If you want to do that, you can, it’s not hard. I believe in you! It involves the line tool and a little rotation. It’s not hard at all Good luck!

Other fonts of note for those of you that feel a little tactical are of course Impact, which was used for “Call of Duty.” And of course “Bank Gothic” which was used for “Modern Warfare.” There are some good tutorials out there for making those logos

I cracked it open to Philippians and here we go!

Chapter 2 verse 3

“Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. (Verse 4) Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (Verse 5) Have this mind among yourselves”

So this really hit me today. I am so stinkin’ selfish that it’s not even funny. God has really been dealing with me on the fact that i am a rich, luke warm little me monster. Because as a believer, I am suppose to have the mind of Christ. Keep goin in the scriptures.

“(starting with 5 again) Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

Ouch man. That stings me. I don’t know about you but how often do I put others above my self with out some sort of “Me first” agenda. Not very often. What i am learn is that the key to this is death. Romans 7 puts it this way, and i like it:

“For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress. Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.”

So back to Philippians Paul says in Chapter 1: ” but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” Yes he is talking about how if he were to die and go to heaven that’s far better than here on earth but the idea is, you’ve died to sin, just like it says in Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God.”

It’s death that sets us free! For us to truly humble ourselves, to not be rich little luke-warm me monsters, we must die. Not our bodies, no, we must die to the sinful nature, so that through the death of that we can be set free to live for Christ.

Just my thoughts.

Desktop Wallpapers!

I hope you enjoy these!

1 CORINTHIANS 11:17-22

One goes hungry, another gets drunk. The first thing that lept off the page to me was that he doesn’t reprimand them for being drunk. This isn’t what’s important here. There is something MORE important than “your drunk and hurting your witness.” Its that some people are going hungry at the Lord’s Supper. This is an interesting shift of priorities.

This is a big additive here. “Do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” I think we still do that today. We have become so concerned with the rules of church that those who don’t fit into church don’t make it. If they don’t have nice cloths they get stared at. If they smell funny, look different anything. Perhaps we aren’t eating and getting drunk but the same idea is there. We are humiliating those who have nothing.

There are definitely divisions among us as a church. We bicker over stupid stuff, like OU vs OSU football and what kind of music we sing and how we dress and what time services should be. Some are more conservative than others and think that some things are a sin for everyone when people like me don’t think that some things are a sin.

I feel like it’s an attitude/heart issue. Like me going and picking up Jay because his car is broke down. This is a huge change to show the love of God to him, but i am upset about it. That’s lame.
Father change my heart!

I had never heard of The Letter Black until one day when my iPhone was dead and I was driving home from work. The HouseFM played “The Best of Me” and I thought WHO IS THAT? I was very excited when they announced the band name. I went to Amazon.com to download the song and was very disappointed that the EP didn’t come out for a whole week. I listened to all the songs on YouTube. The quality sure wasn’t good but I thought, this will be a great band. When September 22nd rolled around i got the Ep. I was Disappointed once again. The Letter Black is good. Don’t get me wrong. I love the lyrics and even the music isn’t that bad. It’s just really pop rocky. The Music really makes me think of Old Rebecka St. James or Plumb. I am just not a big fan of that style of music. This doesn’t mean that the letter black is bad. They are really good. I love “The Best of Me” and since i don’t listen to the radio it won’t get over played for awhile now.

The Letter Black – Breaking The Silence < The David Crowder* Band – Church Music

I am sorry for ignoring you blog!

I think 2 cool things are going on in my life at the moment. Two things that are note worthy that is.

The first is how God is working in my life. He Really hit me hard with a Francis Chan sermon about being luke warm. That was Friday and it turned my world upside down.
The second thing is shaving with a straight razor. That’s AWESOME.