The Gospel and what God does with and through it

1 Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, 2 by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:1-2 NASB)

The Apostle Paul defined the gospel for us throughout his writings in the New Testament. In these dark spiritual times in which people believe their opinions and feelings are consistent with “truth” it is vital that we know God’s truth and make it known to all who will hear.  I would like to start in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. I placed vv1-2 at the top of this post. In v1 he tells us that he is going to define the Gospel (εὐαγγέλιον) as a process. In this process, the Gospel must be proclaimed (εὐηγγελισάμην) and through this some who hear it will receive it and it is their very foundation. I pray that you noticed the similarities between the two Greek words above. The word εὐαγγέλιον is Greek for “a good message” or “the good news.” The word εὐηγγελισάμην literally means “announce good news.” It is the word from which we get our English word “evangelize.” Notice also that those who hear the good news and are saved by it also stand (ἑστήκατε) within it because it is their foundation. This Greek word means “you stand.” They abide in the covenant of the Gospel because it is now their foundation. View article →

Jim Bakker Claims ‘Every Prophecy I’ve Made Has Come True. Also, Donald Trump Watches His Show.

Pulpit & Pen News has the story and a couple of videos to watch:

A few things you’ll learn from this clip.

First, Bakker claims that Trump watches the Jim Bakker Program.

Secondly, Bakker claims Trump admires Bakker for “getting back up.”

Third, the applause you hear after Bakker says the above is a sound effect. You can hear the few (25-30) people in the audience clap and then you’ll hear an added-in applause sound effect added in post-production to make it sound like hundreds are in the audience. Listen closely; you can hear it. It’s pretty obvious.

Fourth, Bakker claims he might get shot for wearing a cross hat. Okay.

Fifth, while extolling the religious virtue of Donald Trump, Bakker claims that all of his prophecies have come true.

“Everything God’s ever spoken to me has come to pass. And everything…you give minutes, almost. Your prophecies – the words God has brought  – you’ve given us to the minute…what this book is going to reveal to you is the warfare we are in.”

View article →

Biologist Acknowledges: ‘Rising Number of Publications’ Calling for ‘Major Revision’ of ‘Standard Theory of Evolution’

Christian News reports:

In a recent scientific presentation and subsequent journal article, a well-known evolutionary biologist noted that a “rising number of publications” believe that the standard theory of evolution might need to be revised or even replaced because it has shortcomings and has failed to account for recent trends in evolutionary biology.

Gerd B. Müller is a biologist and professor at the University of Vienna in Austria who is considered an expert in the field of evolutionary biology. In a journal article published by Royal Society Publishing, while by no means dismissing his evolutionary beliefs, Müller posited that the standard theory of evolution needs to be rethought and adjusted to accommodate for modern scientific discoveries as there are “a growing number of challenges to the classical model of evolution.”

View article →

Secularization Comes From Sex

According to Gene Edward Veith of Patrick Henry College, sexual immorality is turning young people away from the Church for the reason that “cohabiting couples and sexually-active singles don’t feel comfortable in church.” Veith’s piece is posted over at Patheos, a site we don’t endorse.

“We overestimate how effectively scientific arguments secularize people. It’s not science that’s secularizing Americans — it’s sex.”

That is the conclusion of University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus in his article Christians are part of the same dating pool as everyone else. That’s bad for the church, in The Washington Post.  

His book “Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy” (Oxford, 2017), Regnerus discusses the changes in sexual attitudes and behavior over the last few decades and demonstrates their consequences in marriage, family, and culture.  This article looks specifically at the impact of what he calls “cheap sex” on the church, with which he is in sympathy.

Though Christians too are struggling with sexual issues, churches are still made up mostly of adults who are married.  But he observes, citing an interesting article about pornography, “Cheap sex, it seems, has a way of deadening religious impulses.”

View article →

Where is your treasure?

16 So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth. 17 Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, 18 I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. Revelation 3:16-18 (NASB) 

I have stopped listening to the media on anything having to do with politics. Since the entertainment elites are bound and determined to have their say in the political fray I have also stopped watching much of that, of course, I don’t watch that much TV anyway so this isn’t a great sacrifice for me. This morning on Facebook a good friend posted something where she was venting about the stuff that had gone on at the Emmys last night. I didn’t see it so I had no idea what it was, but I had a good idea by reading some of the comments. I made this comment:

I quit watching the news several months ago. I guess I don’t know what is going on, but then again, my hope is not in a President or a political party. My hope is in Christ. Pray for your family. Pray for your lost relatives and friends. Be that person always ready to be the hands and feet of Christ in all situations. Racism is for fools. Our enemy is using all those negative things to divide us. Get you focus back on Christ and follow Him. I have to work on this as well…

As we walk out our lives here in the Church age where should our focus be? I know many professing Christians who are all about using politics and political parties to maneuver things around in such a way that they believe they can bring about a national revival of some sort. I was serious in my comment that our hope cannot be in those things. No our focus, our hope, must be in Christ and our treasure, therefore, must not be here in this lost and dying world, but in Heaven.  View article →

Illegal Aliens Crash Nancy Pelosi’s DACA Press Conference: ‘All of Us or None of Us!’

Breitbart has the story:

A group of illegal aliens calling themselves the “Immigration Liberation Movement” crashed a press conference by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Monday, warning the Democratic Party not to “sell [us] out.”

The group shouted down Rep. Pelosi, who struggled to maintain control of the meeting, and unfurled a large banner calling for all illegal aliens to be legalized.

Others held up signs, including: “Fight 4 All 11 Million,” referring to the estimated total of all illegal aliens in the U.S.

In the “mic check” call-and-response style popularized by the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the activists declared:

We remember all too well how for eight years the Democrats laid siege to our communities, raiding and deporting nearly three million people, of our family members and loved ones. Where was your resistance then? Ms. Pelosi, did you think we would forget? We send a clear message to our fellow undocumented youth and community: We are the resistance to Trump! Not the Democrats!

View article →

Adrian Rogers center has a commitment to expository preaching

According to Baptist Press, Adrian Rogers son Steve spoke of the 4,0000 hours he and his brother David spent reviewing his father’s recorded sermons and how it underscored for them their father’s commitment to expository preaching.

With a commitment to helping a new generation of preachers and pastors in the pulpit, the Adrian Rogers Center for Expository Preaching at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was dedicated in a Sept. 12 chapel service.

In partnership with the late Adrian Rogers’ proclamation ministry Love Worth Finding, the NOBTS center will provide resources and present conferences and lectureships to encourage and equip students and pastors.

The center’s inaugural “Empowering the Pulpit” preaching conference, Jan. 29-31, will feature leading expository preachers Jim Shaddix and Robert Smith Jr.

The dedication took place on Rogers’ birthday; he died in 2005 at the age of 74.

View article →

UK Speaker: Same-Sex Marriage Won’t Be ‘Proper’ Until Churches Can’t Opt Out

PJ Media reports:

 

In a shocking attack on religious freedom and even property rights, the speaker of Britain’s House of Commons argued that the country won’t have “proper equal marriage” until churches are unable to turn away requests to host a same-sex marriage.

“I still feel we’ll only have proper equal marriage when you can bloody well get married in a church if you want to do so, without having to fight the church for the equality that should be your right,” John Bercow, the Commons speaker, declared at a PinkNews reception in July.

Britain legalized same-sex marriage in 2013, but Bercow suggested that the LGBT issue will not be settled until churches are unable to refuse to host such weddings. “We don’t want to behave like it’s all over, everything’s been done and nothing remains, because that isn’t true,” he added.

View article →

Spiritual Disciplines and the Appearance of Wisdom

Spiritual Formation ….Contemplative/Centering/ Apopathic/Breath Prayer….”Christian Yoga“….Enneagram (you’ll learn about this below) are terms Bible believing evangelicals must become familiar with. All of these practices have been introduced into mainstream evangelicalism. Where do they come from? You don’t have to dig very deep to discover that practices such as these are rooted in Eastern mysticism. In other words, neo-paganism. What’s concerning is that nearly everyone dabbles in some form of mysticism (occult knowledge). Even the Church is entrenched in “Christian” mysticism (much of it borrowed from Roman Catholicism) and they don’t even know it. However, many professing believers do know. They’ve heard the warnings and continue down the neo-pagan path that leads to death. Why? Because having to give up things we enjoy is hard!  And besides, God understands…. right?

But what if He doesn’t? What if He actually meant business when He commanded the Jews not to learn to follow the abominable ways of pagan nations (Deut 18:9).  Some of the pagan practices we’ve learned in the Church include yoga and Eastern-style meditation (altered states of consciousness), i.e. Contemplative Prayer.

What this boils down to is that the visible Church is teaming with biblically challenged Christians, those who rarely read and study the Bible.  So how can they possibly know what God says?  They can’t and they don’t. Paul has some advice for believers such as these: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling [accurately or correctly explaining] the word of truth.” (2 Tim 2:15) The word of truth is the Bible aka God’s Word.

Over at Midwest Christian Outreach, husband and wife team Don and Joy Venoit have written a piece that is chock full of information to help those who profess Christ make choices that will lead to a biblical worldview.  They write:

Writing to the Colossians in the First Century, the Apostle Paul warned about certain spiritual disciplines that had “the appearance of wisdom” (Colossians. 2:23) but, in fact, conflicted with sound biblical teaching and were very harmful to the Christian life. False teachers were in this case Gnostics, who crept into the church and claimed special “spiritual knowledge.” They gained influence in the church because what they were teaching felt “right” and “good” and oh so “spiritual” to the unwary, appealing as they did (and do) to the old fallen nature, which Christians still carry and must struggle against. False teachings of all types are guaranteed to appeal to our old sin nature. Gnosticism caused much damage to the early church, and quite a bit of the New Testament was written to dispel this egregious error.

Jude addresses a similar problem in his epistle as he writes of false teachers (Gnostics) who had “crept in unnoticed” (Jude 4). The Apostle John addresses the issue in his First Epistle as well at the beginning of his Gospel. The Apostle Paul had warned the Ephesian elders not only to be on the alert for false teachers (usually traveling teachers) who would sneak in from the outside but also to watch out for false teachers who would arise from within the congregation. (Acts 20:28-31) The problem didn’t fade out in the First Century. False teachings and false teachers have been with the church down through the ages and are, in fact, rampaging through the church today.

In recent years, there has been less sound biblical teaching in the church as a whole, and we have witnessed the introduction of and emphasis on mystical spiritual disciplines through “Contemplative Prayer.” Much of the Contemplative Prayer Movement goes back to and draws from Roman Catholic mystics (the Desert Fathers ) who were hermits and ascetics – the very practices Paul warned against in Colossians. One of the luminaries of this movement is Roman Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whose spiritual influences included Aldous Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”). As Jackie Alnor points out in our Journal article, “Thomas Merton: The Contemplative Dark Thread” (beginning on page 8), his influences were varied:

Merton was a believer in all religions – he created his own syncretistic brand of religion while remaining under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. He gave equal attention to the mystical traditions within Catholicism, Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism. But he was an equal-opportunity Mystic who was drawn to the common thread of “…Satan’s so-called deep secrets…” (Rev. 2:24) found in all the world’s false religions – including his own. He even delved into the mystical branch of Islam and corresponded for many years with a Muslim Sufi cleric by the name of Abdul Aziz.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, most of the movers and shakers in the Contemplative movement have similar backgrounds and guiding influences. For a more thorough treatment of this see our article by Marcia Montenegro, “Contemplating Contemplative Prayer: Is It Really Prayer?” (beginning on page 10) and/or watch our recent webcast with Marcia, “Contemplating Contemplative Prayer.”

A more recent arrival on the scene is the Enneagram. For the uninitiated, our friend and associate, Marcia Montenegro, produced an explanation and history on her CANA website titled, “The Enneagram GPS: Gnostic Path to Self.” As you might expect, it did not originate from sound biblical teaching. It came from George Gurdjieff, a mystic who claimed to have learned it from “the Sufis (a mystical spin-off sect of Islam).” In her article, Marcia introduces the original teachers:

–  George Gurdjieff, an Armenian teacher of esoteric spiritual philosophies, based his teaching on knowledge he allegedly garnered during travels and contacts with secret groups.

–  Peter D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s pupil, presented Gurdjieff’s ideas as the Fourth Way.

–  Oscar Ichazo, heavily involved in psychedelic drugs and shamanism, asserted that he had “received instructions from a higher entity called Metatron” and that his group “was guided by an interior master.”

–  Psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo studied with Ichazo in Chile who also claimed to be using a Sufi method.

–  The Enneagram teachings were passed on to Jesuit Bob Ochs, who then brought it into Roman Catholic circles at the New Age Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Continue reading…

RELATED

Peter Scazzero Intoducing Enneagrams Into Mainstream Evangelicalism by Ken Silva

Christians Are Mixed Up In…Mysticism by Marsha West

The Interface of Medieval Mysticism and Buddhist Mindfulness Meditation by Pam Frost

The words of God

34 For He whom God sent speaks the words of God; for He give the Spirit without measure. John 3:34 (translated from the NA28 Greek text)

In the New Testament we have a Greek word translated “Word” that most of us are very familiar with, which is λόγος (logos). This word is used by the writers of New Testament most often to refer to a “Christian proclamation as a whole of the N.T.” On the other hand, there is another Greek word translated as “word” or “words” in the New Testament which we will look at in this post. It is ῥῆμα (rhēma). The plural of this word found in the passage above is ῥήματα (rhēmata) and I translated it as “words.” This word usually relates to individual words and utterances. View article →

The washing of regeneration

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, 26 so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless. Ephesians 5:25-27 (NASB) 

4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, 5 He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, 6 whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. Titus 3:4-7 (NASB)

Many false teachers in the past and currently have taken the word “washing” in the two passages above and taught that this refers to baptism. However, a careful reading of the text reveals that baptism is never mentioned nor is the Greek word for baptism used by Paul in either passage, therefore, we know that he, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was writing about something else entirely. View article →

Proof That Dr. Michael Brown Has a Gullible Audience

Steve Kozar has gone to the trouble of compiling a list to show Dr. Michael Brown’s followers that they’d better think twice before believing everything this man says. Brown’s fans must become Bereans: Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.(Acts 15:11)

Here’s one example from the list:

Brown often makes the claim that the bloggers who criticize him are anonymous people with no accountability, so they can be ignored. People like me, Steven Kozar. Or Phil Johnson. Or Anthony Wade. Or Chris Rosebrough. Or Marsha West. Or Chris Rice… you know, “anonymous.”

In his piece over at Messed Up Church, Kozar has many more examples:

  • Brown claims that he is not a part of the New Apostolic Reformation, but the clear, obvious and overwhelming evidence says otherwise. (Read: Michael Brown: More Proof He’s Part of the (So-Called) New Apostolic Reformation)
  • Brown always tells people that he has no time to research any of the false teachers he associates with, but he claims to be a great scholar/expert who can be trusted because of all the important research he does and all the knowledge he has.
  • Brown claims that he has no time to research Benny Hinn, but he wrote an entire book that refuted “Strange Fire” by John MacArthur, which has tons of documentation of Benny Hinn’s false teaching. Did Brown not even read the book that he tried to refute? How can anyone actually fall for this?

View article →

Advances in AI are used to spot signs of sexuality

According to The Economist, “when asked to pick out the ten faces it was most confident about, nine of the chosen were in fact gay. If the goal is to pick a small number of people who are very likely to be gay out of a large group, the system appears able to do so.”

MODERN artificial intelligence is much feted. But its talents boil down to a superhuman ability to spot patterns in large volumes of data. Facebook has used this ability to produce maps of poor regions in unprecedented detail, with an AI system that has learned what human settlements look like from satellite pictures. Medical researchers have trained AI in smartphones to detect cancerous lesions; a Google system can make precise guesses about the year a photograph was taken, simply because it has seen more photos than a human could ever inspect, and has spotted patterns that no human could.

View article →

The Life Of Jesus In Mortal Bodies

For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body (2 Corinthians 4:11).

What we want, of course, is to be like Him. But the power of God is the miracle of others seeing in us, in the midst of our pressures and trials, the character and the life of Jesus. I have always been amused and challenged by the verse in Colossians 1, where Paul prays that his friends in Colosse may be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might  (Colossians 1:11a). What are they going to use all this power for? It sounds as though Paul ought to say, So that you can go about doing great miracles; so that you can astonish people with the tremendous magnetism of your preaching and teaching and be followed by great crowds.But that is not what he says. He says, I pray that you may be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience (Colossians 1:11). That is what takes power; that is where the life and the power of God is manifest. That is the life of Jesus.  View article →

Hillsong Gets Romantic With God, Commits Theoerosism

Before we get to the Pulpit & Pen News piece, which includes a video, it’s important to note that Hillsong royalty, King Brian and Queen Bobbie, have absolutely no concept of the holiness of God. Because if the Houstons actually do understand who the God of the Bible is, they’d have put a stop to the release of “Where Are You.”  But they didn’t. Likewise, whoever came up with the “love song to God” couldn’t possibly grasp who our God is, as the words clearly suggest…words that don’t come close to glorifying Him.

Clearly, the song was inspired, not by the Holy Spirit, but by spiritual forces of wickedness.

Now to P&P’s piece:

Theoerosism is a heresy named from two words in Greek, θεός and ἔρως, meaning God and love. ἔρως, however, is often used to describe an erotic type of love, and so Theoerosism is mean to mean “erotic love for God.”

Although Theoerosism is not new in terms of world religion and was common place among the Greeks and other pagan traditions, Theoerosism is relatively new among purported Christians. Theoerosists view or speak of God in terms of sensuality or eroticism, and is contained historically to the 20th and 21st Century.

Theoerosism is popularized in much of sub-Christian media, in worship songs that speak of God romantically or in literature that discusses God with erotic styling.

View article →

OUR GREAT GOD!

Trump Urges ‘Larger, Tougher’ Travel Ban After London Attack

Newsmax reports:

President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Friday to denounce a terror attack that took place in London, urging authorities and others to take more “proactive” steps while calling for a “larger, tougher and more specific” travel ban.

“Another attack in London by a loser terrorist. These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter.

British police said Friday that the president’s tweets are “unhelpful” given their investigation, CNN reported.

View article →

DC socialite worries the hexes she put on people might have killed them

This is no joke. A highly regarded journalist and author believes three people are dead because she put a hex on them…and her friends have asked her to put a hex on President Trump. Fox News has the story:

A longtime Washington socialite is raising eyebrows with her new book on spirituality as she claims the hexes she put on three people in the past may have led to their deaths.

Sally Quinn – a journalist who was famously married to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee – admits to being an Occultist in her new “spiritual memoir” titled Finding Magic.

Quinn says she feels guilty about her hexes and won’t do them anymore. She also says she refuses to cast a spell on President Trump as some of her friends have asked.

“Believe me, since Trump was elected, and since the election, I can’t tell you how many friends have asked me to put a hex on Donald Trump, and I won’t do it,” Quinn said in a book interview with USA Today. “I just said no. I don’t do that anymore.”

View article →

Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God

 29 The next day he *saw Jesus coming to him and *said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! John 1:29 (NASB)

In my Nave’s Topical Bible there is a subsection under “Atonement” titled “Atonement – Made by Jesus.” It covers half of page 85 and runs through half of page 88. I find it interesting that the leaders in the emergent church such as Brian McLaren focus so much of their energies on trying to deny that the Lord Jesus’ substitutionary sacrifice on the Cross to atone for the sins of His people was the primary mission of His incarnation. Instead, these false Christian leaders point their followers to follow a man-made Jesus whose purpose in His incarnation was to show people how best to live and make the world a better place. At the same time, so many “denominations” are rapidly apostatizing through cultural compromise and moving away from God’s moral standards. Our enemy has planted easily believable lies throughout the visible Church and has given verbiage to the lying mouths of his prophets that are designed to confuse and take away the clarity of God’s Truth. For instance, the emergent leaders cannot preach a thing without emphasizing that ultimate truth is unknowable while elevating indefiniteness as a virtue. They teach that if solid, defined lines run between professing Christians and God in which doctrines are clearly held and proclaimed then those Christians have made-up what they believe and are no longer in communion with God. Sounds a bit like a post-modern version of Gnosticism to me. View article →

Hillary’s Hysterically Orwellian Take On ‘1984’

A blogger over at Fire Breathing Christian offers a glimpse into why the twice failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is a “laughably (and dangerously) confused, warped shell of a woman.”

As any of us who’ve listened to “Progressives” address Scripture know all too well, reading comprehension isn’t really “a thing” on the Left. For all the arrogant, snide, and prideful preening common to pseudo-intellectual Progressives, more often than not, the more they talk, the more they make plain that they don’t know much about what they’re talking about.

Which, of course, makes them quite entertaining to listen to at times, in a slow-motion trainwreck sort of way.

The latest reminder of this comes by way of Hillary’s new book, What Happened, in which she has what can (and should) be categorized as a hysterically Orwellian take on Orwell’s classic 1984.

View article →

Anti-Hurricane Declarations Making Prophets Re-Think Ability to Control Weather

Although some charismatic “Weather Warriors” thought they could control the weather simply by confidently decreeing and declaring, even finger shooting, a cat 4 hurricane into the Atlantic Ocean and “dissipating,” Hurricane Irma failed to respond to their commands. After leaving a path of devastation across the Caribbean, the hurricane whipped through Florida, causing death and destruction. Now the hurricane hunters have some splainin to do. According to Pulpit & Pen News, one of them “acknowledges that maybe the charismatic community hasn’t got the whole ‘controlling the weather’ thing down yet.” And they never will. Why? Because God controls the weather.

Now to P&P’s story:

NAR Apostle Lance Wallnau finger shooting Hurricane Irma

Weather is one of those things that happens. In fact, weather happens every day. In further fact, weather happens every day everywhere. Proving that humanity continues to be as superstitious as our ancestors ever were, there have been lots of theories about why the recent hurricanes have occurred. Actress, Jennifer Lawrence, says that it is “nature’s wrath” for the election of Trump. Stevie Wonder said anyone who doesn’t think climate change caused it is “blind” (it’s unclear whether he was making a pun). Kirk Cameron is the celebrity with the perhaps the best answer, which was essentially the Providence of God. One charismatic preacher claimed that it was meant to resemble a sonogram of a baby, and blamed abortion. Other charismatics have also claimed to know the specific divine reasons for these hurricanes.

View article →

Opioid Crisis Is Sending A Record Number Of Kids Into Foster Care

According to Circa:

About 78 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.

Janet Siemer is a nurse and single mother from Ohio, one of the states hit hardest by the opioid crisis. Thousands of children get trapped inside the states foster care system waiting to be adopted or turned back over to their parents once they get sober.

Siemer adopted two young children named Landon and Mi after fostering them for two years.

“The reason I became a foster parent is I saw every day how heroin affects families and there were children in need of foster care,” said Janet. “But also because I love children, so why not?”

View article →

The Law of the Spirit

1 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1 (NASB) 

In this post we will look at Paul’s “therefore” he placed in the passage above. In other words, in Romans 8:1 Paul begins an important summary and conclusion which is related to his preceding arguments. We normally find that argument in the passages directly preceding the “therefore.” However, this “therefore” introduces the staggering results of all Paul’s teachings in the first seven chapters of Romans, which would include justification by faith alone on the basis of God’s overwhelming grace. View article →

Do cults seem to care more about the Protestant Reformation than Christianity?

Ellen G. White, founder of the Seventh Day Adventist cult

At the beginning of this year, we made the claim that international cults will use the Protestant Reformation as a ‘sheepskin’ to mislead society into thinking they are Christian charities.

It has been an absolute tragedy to observe just how many Protestant Churches show little regard to their history, heritage or express any real interest in celebrating 500 years of the Protestant Reformation.

Instead – liberal cults and NAR cults (Hillsong, etc.) seem to care more about making a big deal about the Reformation in order to mislead people into thinking they are legitimate Christian organizations and groups.

Jordan Hall of Pulpit & Pen shared his concerns about another world-wide cult trying to give the impression they are legitimately part of the Christian Faith.

View article →

 

Teenage Boy Who ‘Transitioned’ to Girl Changes Mind: ‘I Realized I Could Be Happy Without Changing’

Christian News reports:

A teenage boy who “transitioned” to a girl two years ago with his mother’s help has now changed his mind, as he has realized that he is not really a girl and is actually comfortable with the way he was born.

Patrick Mitchell, now 14, and his mother Ellie, who hail from Australia but currently live in the U.K., recently appeared on “60 Minutes” to share their story.

“[The doctors] were wrong to pigeonhole him so quickly,” Ellie Mitchell said. “I think they should have said, ‘Here we have a child who does have gender dysphoria and he’s going through a period of transition, where he needs to work out exactly how he feels.’”

View article →