Youcef Nadarkhani

http://presenttruthmn.com/the-ministry/youcef-nadarkhani/

or just google his name

The Great Isaiah Scroll

Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

Click the link and be amazed....

Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

Strange and mysterious

Strange and mysterious is my life.
What opposites I feel within!
A stable peace, a constant strife;
The rule of grace, the power of sin:
Too often I am captive led,
Yet daily triumph in my Head,
Yet daily triumph in my Head.

I prize the privilege of prayer,
But oh! what backwardness to pray!
Though on the Lord I cast my care,
I feel its burden every day;
I seek His will in all I do,
Yet find my own is working too,
Yet find my own is working too.

I call the promises my own,
And prize them more than mines of gold;
Yet though their sweetness I have known,
They leave me unimpressed and cold
One hour upon the truth I feed,
The next I know not what I read,
The next I know not what I read.

I love the holy day of rest,
When Jesus meets His gathered saints;
Sweet day, of all the week the best!
For its return my spirit pants:
Yet often, through my unbelief,
It proves a day of guilt and grief,
It proves a day of guilt and grief.

While on my Savior I rely,
I know my foes shall lose their aim,
And therefore dare their power defy,
Assured of conquest through His Name,
But soon my confidence is slain,
And all my fears return again,
And all my fears return again.

Thus different powers within me strive,
And grace and sin by turns prevail;
I grieve, rejoice, decline, revive,
And victory hangs in doubtful scale:
But Jesus has His promise passed,
That grace shall overcome at last,
That grace shall overcome at last.

--John Newton

The wheat and tares

Though, in the outward church below,
The wheat and tares together grow;
Jesus ere long will weed the crop,
And pluck the tares in anger up.

For soon the reaping time will come,
And angels shout the harvest home.

Will it relieve their horrors there,
To recollect their stations here;
How much they heard, how much they knew,
How much among the wheat they grew?

No! this will aggravate their case,
They perished under means of grace;
To them the word of life and faith
Became an instrument of death.

We seem alike when thus we meet,
Strangers might think we all were wheat;
But to the Lord's all-searching eyes
Each heart appears without disguise.

The tares are spared for various ends,
Some for the sake of praying friends;
Others the Lord, against their will,
Employs his counsels to fulfil.

But though they grow so tall and strong,
His plan will not require them long;
In harvest, when he saves his own,
The tares shall into hell be thrown.

Oh! awful thought, and is it so?
Must all mankind the harvest know?
Is every man a wheat or tare?
Me for that harvest, Lord, prepare.

For soon the reaping time will come, 

And angels shout the harvest home.

--John Newton

And now for something completely different

People haven't changed

Here are five characteristics for which the Pharisees were rebuked. They are ever-present dangers for Christian leaders. First, they may not practise what they preach. Secondly, they may be unwilling to undertake themselves what they prescribe for others . Thirdly, they may love to show off. Fourthly, they may revel in honorific titles and in being paid respect. Finally, they may misunderstand ministry. They may see it less as an opportunity for service than as a sphere of management or a chance to gain recognition. Are these weaknesses confined to Jewish leaders in the first century AD? Are they not always contemporary? If Christian leaders fail in these five ways, their failure is comprehensive indeed. Michael Green, The Message of Matthew : The Kingdom of Heaven (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, Ill., U.S.A.: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000), 241-42.

How can you tell if a televangelist is lying?

I love Harry Ironside

http://faithbiblechurchnh.org/ironside_repentance.htm

I'm not OK, you're not OK

But the light Christ brought made Him a controversial figure. One of the most offensive parts of His teaching was that even the most religious people weren't good enough to enter into the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:20). The candor of Jesus was taken as an insult by the religious leaders of Israel. They considered themselves teachers of righteousness and believed that their knowledge of the law put them above the crowd.

 Yet despite their unique spiritual heritage, Jesus declared that those who rejected Him-though they be "sons of the kingdom"-would be rejected from God's presence in the world to come: The sons of the kingdom will be cast into outer darkness. There will be weeping and and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 8:12)

 taken from here:
http://web001.rbc.org/pdf/discovery-series/does-god-grade-on-a-curve-passing-lifes-final-exam.pdf

The world has gone insane

Where's my separation of church and state!?

Jonathan Winters

Like many comedians, Jonathan Winters had a very bad relationship with his parents.  In an interview, he describes a conversation he and his mother had upon his return from World War II.

"I went to the house and she said automatically, 'Welcome home' and 'you made it'.  And then "How long are we going to be in the uniform?  There's a lot of work to be done around here, your stepfather is out in the garden working and you could get out there and help him now."

He describes going to get some things out of the attic from his childhood they had put away before he went to war, and finding them gone.  This was the conversation with his mother:

"I asked 'What happened to my cars?'

And she said, 'We gave them to the mission.'

I said, 'Well, that's OK, but you should have notified me, there's some things that I wanted to keep.'

And she said, quote 'How did we know you were gonna live?'"

Later in the interview he says,
"not that I'm any magic Christian, I happen to be a Christian, but I'm certainly not a kook about it, my faith, I don't bug people about it.  I don't lecture, tell them you better be this, or you better be that, I've often said,
'We're all visitors, we're just passing through, don't blow the visit.'"

--from Marc Maron's interview with Jonathan Winters  

A mind at perfect peace with God

A mind at perfect peace with God;
  O what a word is this!
A sinner reconciled through blood;
  This, this indeed is peace.

By nature and by practice far,
  How very far from God;
Yet now by grace brought nigh to Him,
  Through faith in Jesus' blood.

So nigh, so very nigh to God,
  I cannot nearer be;
For in the person of His Son
  I am as near as He.

So dear, so very dear to God,
  More dear I cannot be;
The love wherewith He loves the Son,
  Such is His love to me.

Why should I ever anxious be,
  Since such a God is mine?
He watches o'er me night and day,
  And tells me "Mine is thine."


Lyrics - C. Paget

The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists

A list of things that according to an atheist, would change his mind on religion:

• Verified, specific prophecies that couldn't have been contrived.
• Scientific knowledge in holy books that wasn't available at the time.
• Miraculous occurrences, especially if brought about through prayer.
• Any direct manifestation of the divine.
• Aliens who believed in the exact same religion.

Full article here:
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/theistguide.html

I find it interesting that many people witnessed Jesus performing miracles, and yet did not believe.

Gandhi II

These thoughts represent my take on my own limited study of Mohandas K. Gandhi. If I have misunderstood or misrepresented things here, it is unintentional and out of ignorance.

Gandhi was a good man. He was very self-sacrificing, very committed to the poor and the downcast. His championing of non-violence was much more powerful than simply a means to a political end, it was at the core of his philosophy. He lived very simply, and by the work of his own hands. How many Christians can claim to have endured and suffered as much for their beliefs as he did?

Gandhi embraced the teachings of Christ, though he did not believe that Christ was the only Son of God, or that He was raised from the dead. Instead, he took Christ's sermon on the mount as a philosophy that he endeavored to live out.

How are people made right with God? It is easy to make the case that a murderer is in need of grace from God, in need of a savior. What about someone like Gandhi? Were all of his efforts to be pleasing to God on his own enough?