A New Year, A New Heart

“Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. Your filth will be washed away, and you will no longer worship idols. And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart. And I will put my Spirit in you so that you will follow my decrees and be careful to obey my regulations."

Ezekiel 36: 25-27
http://bibleresources.bible.com/passagesearchresults2.php?tp=48&book_id=33&c=36&passage1=Ezekiel+36&version1=51

'Gospel of Wealth' Facing Scrutiny

By ERIC GORSKI

The Associated Press
Thursday, December 27, 2007; 2:56 PM

The message flickered into Cindy Fleenor's living room each night: Be faithful in how you live and how you give, the television preachers said, and God will shower you with material riches.

And so the 53-year-old accountant from the Tampa, Fla., area pledged $500 a year to Joyce Meyer, the evangelist whose frank talk about recovering from childhood sexual abuse was so inspirational. She wrote checks to flamboyant faith healer Benny Hinn and a local preacher-made-good, Paula White.

Only the blessings didn't come. Fleenor ended up borrowing money from friends and payday loan companies just to buy groceries. At first she believed the explanation given on television: Her faith wasn't strong enough.

"I wanted to believe God wanted to do something great with me like he was doing with them," she said. "I'm angry and bitter about it. Right now, I don't watch anyone on TV hardly."

Read the full article here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/27/AR2007122701468.html?hpid=sec-religion?hpid=sec-religion

Our Deepest Fear

By Marianne Williamson

From "A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles"

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

What's An Attitude?

It is the 'advance' man of our true selves
Its roots are inward but its fruit outward
It is our best friend and our worst enemy
It is more honest than our words
It is an outward look based on past experiences
It is a thing which draws people or repels them from us
It is never content until it is expressed
It is the librarian of our past
It is the speaker of our present
It is the prophet of out future

Author Unknown

Merry Christmas - Get His Attitude

Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? Then agree wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose. Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.

You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.

Though He was God
He did not think of equality with God

As something to cling to
Instead, He gave up His divine privileges
He took the humble position of a slave

And was born as a human being

When He appeared in human form

He humbled Himself in obedience to God

And died a criminal’s death on a cross

Therefore, God elevated Him to the place of highest honor

And gave Him the name above all other names

That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow

In heaven and on earth and under the earth

And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord
To the glory of God the Father.

Merry Christmas Everyone

Prospero año y Felicidad

You Can't Take Christ Out Of Christmas

By Roland S. Martin, CNN Contributor

This whole push to remove Christ from the Christmas season has gotten so ridiculous that it's pathetic. Because of all the politically correct idiots, we are being encouraged to stop saying "Merry Christmas" for the more palatable "Happy Holidays." What the heck are "Seasons Greetings"? Can someone tell me what season we are greeting folks about? A Christmas tree? Oh, no! It's now a holiday tree. Any Christmas song that even remotely mentions Christ or has a religious undertone is being axed for being overtly religious. And I'm sorry, forget X-M-A-S. Malcolm X? Yes. X replacing Christ? No.

Don't get me wrong; I'm very respectful of other religions. I don't want anyone to be afraid of discussing the Jewish faith when we address Hanukkah. And we shouldn't dismiss Muslims when the annual pilgrimage to Mecca is held during December. In fact, Americans are so ignorant of other faiths that we can all learn from one another. But this seeming backlash against Christianity is bordering on the absurd, and we should continue to remember that Jesus is the reason for the season........

Read the complete article on CNN.com by clicking on the following link:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/12/20/roland.martin/index.html

Roland S. Martin is a nationally award-winning journalist and CNN contributor. Martin is studying to receive his master's degree in Christian communications at Louisiana Baptist University, and he is the author of "Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith." You can read more of his columns athttp://www.rolandsmartin.com/.

Why Didn't God Speak Man Into Being?

Call it the end of year nostalgia, or a brainwave, but the question about the meaning and origin of life has puzzled my mind a lot in these past couple of days. I've found myself wondering, "What does life really mean and what does it mean to be alive?"

Now I have all the reasons in the world to be grateful and thankful to God for being alive - and I do that the best I could - but neither as much nor as often as I should. I owe Him what I am, have, and will have.

He has done so much for me and has been faithful to me - inspite of myself.

In my quest for an answer I opened Bible to the Book of Genesis - the book about the beginning. I read about the "...Let there be...." and about the "...then God made..." I found that He spoke some into existence and some He brought to being by making them. And as for man He made him after His own image and after His own likeness.

"Have you ever wondered why God didn't speak man into being, but instead chose to form him?"

Amazing Grace - The Story of William Wilberforce (1759-1833)

William Wilberforce was born in Hull on 24 August 1759, the only son of Robert Wilberforce (1728–68), a wealthy merchant and his wife Elizabeth.

In October 1784 Wilberforce embarked upon a tour of Europe which would change his life and, ultimately, his whole future career. This is thought to have been the beginning of Wilberforce’s spiritual journey, and he began to rise early to read the Bible and pray, as well as to keep a personal private journal. He experienced an evangelical conversion experience, regretting his past life and resolving to commit his future life and work to the service of God.

William Wilberforce led the twenty-year fight to end the British slave trade. He finally succeeded in March 1807 and continued to fight for abolition until, days before his death in 1833, he saw the institution of slavery abolished throughout the British colonies. On May 12, 1787, under an English oak on his Holwood Estate, Prime Minister William Pitt pressed Wilberforce to introduce a bill for the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce's research found that the holds of slave ships were, according to one witness, "so covered in blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the (dysentery) that it resembled a slaughterhouse." Enslaved Africans on the ships attempted to starve themselves to death or to jump into the ocean. Wilberforce thought this suffering a good reason for reform.

Not limiting himself to just abolitionist work, he dedicated his life to what he called his "two great objects:" abolishing slavery in the British Empire and what he called "the reformation of manners (society)." To this end, he advocated for child labor laws, campaigned for education of the blind and deaf, and founded organizations as diverse as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the National Gallery (of Art). "Good causes," it has been said, "stuck to him like pins to a magnet."

His life story is told in the movie "Amazing Grace" starring Ioan Gruffudd, Romola Garai, and Youssou N'Dour. A powerful movie - almost moved me to tears -I recommend it to everyone.

Where Do You Do Your Christmas Shopping?

Would you do your Chrismas shopping in a store that does not recognize, or actively attempts to stiffle the recognition of, Christmas? Would you give your God's given resources to a business establishment that only greets you a "Happy Holiday" rather than a "Merry Christmas"?

A Focus on the Family review of more than 50 prominent retailers’ Web sites and Christmas catalogs during the first two weeks of November revealed that about 40 percent of them suppressed all prominent references to “Christmas,” and over half, at best, provided token acknowledgment of “Christmas.”

Two weeks ago, Dr. James Dobson put out the call to action, highlighting which retailers were ignoring Christmas in their advertising. On today's radio broadcast, he reports which establishments have changed their tune.

Click on the folowing link for a list of the good, the bad, and the ugly retailers.:

http://www.citizenlink.org/clspecialalert/A000006077.cfm

The Many Myths Of the Magi

Were They Really Kings? Were There Really Three? And Did They Travel by Camel to Bethlehem?

The scene ingrained in the public imagination -- a stately procession of three kings in turbans, crowns, elaborate capes and fancy slippers, with an entourage of servants and camels trailing behind -- is a common image in books and films, but it isn't from Scripture.

In fact, there's no evidence in the Gospels that the Magi were kings, or even that there were three, much less that they sidled up to a manger on dromedaries exactly 12 days after Jesus's birth.

"Legends pop up when people begin to look closely at historical events," said Christopher Bellitto, assistant professor of history at New Jersey's Kean University. "They want to fill in the blanks."

Only the Gospel of Matthew mentions "wise men from the East" who follow a star to Bethlehem. In the original Greek, they were called magoi (in Latin, magi), from the same root that gives us the word magic. It's been posited that they were astrologers or members of a Persian priestly caste.

Read the full story here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/07/AR2007120701782.html?hpid=sec-religion

Creflo Dollar Refuses to Turn Over More Financial Documents

Georgia televangelist Creflo Dollar is refusing to turn over any more financial documents to the Senate Finance Committee, even though they are overdue.

Last month, the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley, asked Dollar and five other TV and megachurch preachers to provide him detailed reports on how they're spending billions of dollars in church donations. He wants to make sure their ministries aren't violating their tax-exempt status by spending church donations on personal luxuries.

Five of the six ministries have either turned over documents or asked Grassley for more time, which the senator readily agreed to give them. But Dollar and his World Changers Church have refused, and he's hired a lawyer. He said if Grassley wants more information he'll have to subpoena him to testify before the committee.

Read full story here: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/07/prosperity.preachers/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

The Origin of Life: Evolution vs Intelligent Design vs Creationism

A newspaper columnist made the following statement yesterday, "It is absurd..........................that he does not have to explain how, in this day and age, he does not believe in evolution."

Look at these definitions and descriptions according to Wikipedia:

The origin of life is a necessary precursor for biological evolution, but understanding that evolution occurred once organisms appeared and investigating how this happens, does not depend on understanding exactly how life began. The current scientific consensus is that the complex biochemistry that makes up life came from simpler chemical reactions, but it is unclear how this occurred. Not much is certain about the earliest developments in life, the structure of the first living things, or the identity and nature of any last universal common ancestor or ancestral gene pool. Consequently, there is no scientific consensus on how life began, but proposals include self-replicating molecules such as RNA, and the assembly of simple cells. Despite the uncertainty on how life began, it is clear that prokaryotes were the first organisms to inhabit Earth, approximately 3–4 billion years ago. The eukaryotes were the next major innovation in evolution. These came from ancient bacteria being engulfed by the ancestors of eukaryotic cells. The history of life was that of the unicellular eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and archaea until about a billion years ago when multicellular organisms began to appear in the oceans. Soon after the emergence of these first multicellular organisms, a remarkable amount of biological diversity appeared over approximately 10 million years, in an event called the Cambrian explosion. Here, the majority of types of modern animals evolved, as well as unique lineages that subsequently became extinct. About 500 million years ago, plants and fungi colonized the land, and were soon followed by arthropods and other animals. Amphibians first appeared around 300 million years ago, followed by early amniotes, then mammals around 200 million years ago and birds around 100 million years ago (both from "reptile"-like lineages).

Evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population from one generation to the next. These traits are the expression of genes that are copied and passed on to offspring during reproduction. Mutations in these genes can produce new or altered traits, resulting in heritable differences between organisms. Natural selection is a process that causes heritable traits that are helpful for survival and reproduction to become more common, and harmful traits to become more rare.

Intelligent Design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, modified to avoid specifying the nature or identity of the designer. Its primary proponents believe the designer to be God. Advocates of intelligent design claim it is a scientific theory, and seek to fundamentally redefine science to accept supernatural explanations. The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own. The National Science Teachers Association, an organization of American science teachers and the largest organization of science teachers in the world, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have termed it pseudoscience. Others have concurred, and some have called it junk science.

Creationism is a religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in their original form by a deity or deities (often the Abrahamic God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam), whose existence is presupposed. In relation to the creation-evolution controversy the term creationism (or strict creationism) is commonly used to refer to religiously-motivated rejection of evolution. Such beliefs include young Earth creationism, which takes Genesis literally, while Old Earth creationism accepts geological findings but rejects evolution. The term theistic evolution has been coined to refer to beliefs in creation which are more compatible with the scientific view of evolution and the age of the Earth.

So what do you really believe? The assertions of smart scientists or the Word of the Almighty God?