Archive for February, 2012

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

PERSECUTION COMES TO AMERICA (PART 1)

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

Matthew 10:16 I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.

The people of God were never meant to be a part of this dying world system! That could not be more evident right now as we see the very tenets of religious liberty under attack in America. Some folks act as if this is new! There is nothing new about any of this!

Since Adam stood by and allowed his wife to be lied to and deceived by the serpent in Genesis 3, God’s Will has been under attack…and it has been for the past 6000 of our existence here on Planet Earth. The difference is: the gig is up and the devil is pulling a Pat Benatar (i.e. “Hitting us with his best shot”!)

We see events spinning out of control all over the world. In the past year alone, we have witnessed live on worldwide television the following: 1000’s killed in Tsunamis in Japan; earthquakes in Haiti and Tornadoes in Alabama and Joplin, Missouri among other catastrophic events. Even scarier is the collapse of almost every major financial system in this world – from the European Union to the United States.

This sort of thing does not happen in a vacuum. The seeds of disorder was planned long ago and executed in the past 70 years, for such a time as this. Go back to the late 1700’s and we see that a goal of those evil Jacobins, who created the French Revolution to do away with the church and the Bible was to spread that revolution to America. They even had a unit set up in New York city to do what one of its proponents, Voltaire, said was “to kill Christianity” and to make the “bible obsolete”!

George Washington and some other patriots were so alarmed, they put a stop to it.

Fast forward from the 1790’s to the late 1940’s. The post World War 2 prosperity in the West allowed those brave souls, who survived the awful Great Depression and the long World War, to let their guard down. Their children started looking for comfort and new things to amuse and fast cars and the easy life. Back then the great Chicago Preacher A. W Tozer and others in the Bible belt were warning about the loss of  our First Love – Jesus Christ. America would not listen, and began to play church.

Politicians and liberal judges from the lowest to the US Supreme Court waited their turn, until the weakened body of Christ were no longer able to be stand firm….and then gradually we have what we have today. They removed prayer and the Bible from school and the entire public arena.

Today, the American church has decided to fight back as the ‘giver of modern day life’ – the Government has decided to start telling church-based organizations just how they will operate. The latest outrage over the government-ordered mandated contraceptives and abortions pills (RU486) is the first major thing to strike a nerve with the general public. Before this, all kinds of persecution of Christians had begun in the United States military and gone on, completely unnoticed by most.
Just in the past two years or so, the following has come out of the now politicized Pentagon:
– Rev. Franklin Graham was kicked out and disinvited from a National Day of Prayer service inside the Pentagon in 2010 because of his solid stance for Christ!
–  Rev. Franklin Graham runs the worldwide charitable SAMARITAN’S PURSE, which gave over 8 million shoeboxes full of gifts to poor children of all races and religion around the world. This past December, the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs kicked Samaritan’s Purse off the Campus because two atheists complained!  Yet this same Air Force Academy has given witches some high ground to build and conduct their Pagan rituals!!!
–  US Chaplains are forbidden from praying in the Name of Jesus.
–  Last fall, the brass at Walter Reed Hospital, the largest military one where wounded military from Iraq and Afghanistan are treated, sent down a written memo banning ALL bibles from Reed! After it was discovered and some US congressman started condemning the ban from the floor of Capitol Hill, the US government took back their memo and allowed families to bring bibles for their wounded sons and daughters again.
–  Just two weeks ago, all Army chaplains were banned by the government from reading a letter from the Catholic bishops, where the bishops spoke against the fact the church was being made to buy and give employees medications for free, which violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution!

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on PERSECUTION COMES TO AMERICA (PART 1)

TOM BRADY OR THE APOSTLE PAUL?

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

This just-concluded Super Bowl 46 game between the New England Patriots and the upstart New York Giants was the most captivating for its worldwide audience, than most!

 What stood out, to me,  was how one man handled adversity and another lived. NY Giants quarterback Eli Manning, the latest of the successful Manning football clan, had become well-known for last minute comeback wins. This most exciting of Super Bowls was no different, as it went down to the last second! The super-rich and seemingly unbeatable Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was a different story.
Brady is a man who has everything: from three Super Bowl rings to a new $20 million dollar mansion outside Hollywood to a famous international supermodel wife. In Boston, he has almost the divine right of kings and treated as local royalty. So it was, after leading in the game, for most of it, after a rough start, Tom Brady soon got in a dazed and confused state. He was suddenly watching a team with no outstanding celebrity being led by a good old boy from Mississippi, who lives in the deep south as a regular guy in the off season!
Because of his superior talents, this man, Tom Brady, expected to win and win big. However, because football was his god, when things went south towards the end of his pending loss, Brady got in a surreal funk. This has also led his celebrity wife into a controversy of her own, when she used four letter words to blast Brady’s fellow team members for costing her husband the game by dropping catches. The media seemed captivated by a beaten man, who could not even speak, as this loss shook him to the core.
None of these sports teams – from the Giants to the Patriots or even last year’s baseball World Series winners St. Louis Cardinals – could be classified as full of born again Christians. In fact when they win, not one of them give credit to the Holy God Who gave them their gifts. But what is evident is that these teams are full of men who are narcissists and so full of themselves that they think themselves to be godlike.
Jesus said in Mark 8:36 NLT “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” We have people here who, while possessing every worldly benefit and all the riches they desire, are unhappy to the core, because their joy and happiness is completely dependent on WHAT they do. The object of their happiness is their opinion of themselves. The core of their being is defined by how many trophies and wins they have over the other guy. They define winning by, well, winning this thing at all costs.
Because they have no core set of true beliefs….because their lives are not enriched by the knowledge of the wonder of the eternal God of Heaven….because their sins are not washed away by surrendering to the Blood of the Lamb of God, when it all goes south, they are devastated.
The Apostle Paul was the Tom Brady of the great Religious order of the day. He was on a path to be high priest of Jerusalem one day. But God had another plan. He took this man, then called Saul, knocked him off his high horse, just like Brady was,  and humbled him to the point of blindness. Saul came to realize not just how spiritually blind he was, but how much he saw once he looked at life through the very Eyes of Christ! When God changed Saul’s name to Paul, He gave him a new heart of flesh and hope in his heart which he carried through the end.
Nobody was persecuted, beaten and almost killed many times before his actual beheading in Rome, than the Apostle Paul. Yet he kept his eyes on the real prize – the Prize of Christ. Paul was the opposite of Tom Brady. How many men would have the following last words as they face execution for winning millions of souls to Christ from then until, now, with his writings. Here, we see Paul’s final words …..
(photo by Reuters)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on TOM BRADY OR THE APOSTLE PAUL?

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »