Category: faith

This Election Cannot Be About Electability

This Election Cannot Be About Electability
by Dr. Laurence White

After months of coy flirting and media maneuvering former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson has finally admitted that he is running for president. He made it official – in a manner completely consistent with his style over substance approach to date – on the Jay Leno Show rather than the New Hampshire Presidential Candidate Debate held the same night. CNN reports today that on his first official day of campaigning in Iowa the core of his pitch was electability – he’s the man who can beat Hillary Clinton. (CNN “Thompson: I Can Stop Hillary Clinton” Thursday, September 6th, 2007) My response, as a Christian conservative who is deeply concerned about the future of this country, is “So wha t?” Beating Hillary Clinton is not good enough at this critical moment in America’s history. Thirty-four years into an abortion holocaust that has produced the slaughter of nearly fifty million defenseless infants we need more than an election victory. We need to transform American culture and put an end to abortion.
Continue reading This Election Cannot Be About Electability

Why aren’t more people signing up?

bin Laden is encouraging Americans to give up their own faith and follow Islam.

“To conclude,” bin Laden says, “I invite you to embrace Islam.” He goes on to say: “There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent.”

I guess if you’re Muslim you don’t have to pay taxes anymore? Maybe I’m missing something.
Either way, with that kind of argument I don’t know why more people aren’t signing up.

Thanks to DMN for the heads up

FREE: Community group video

Gracepoint Fellowship has made a special offer available to churches.
They’ve produced a great video on small groups and are making it available to other churches for free.
You can download a flash file or MOV file or download the individual elements and edit the video for your specific church and application.
I don’t have After Effects or Final Cut Pro, so I may be a bit limited as to what I can do with it, but it’s even without editing, it’s a great generic video giving the high points of community groups.
I wish more churches were doing things like that – sharing videos and media with one another.
Speaking of… if you see an encounter video you like and would like to use for your church – just let me know – I’ll be glad to help you out. The only downside is that ours tend to be a bit more specific to the actual message and week – but let me know and I’ll do my best to get you a copy.

See and download the Gracepoint Fellowship video here.

14 Days of Pursuit

Brian challenged us yesterday to a 14 day challenge, in which we read through the book of Colossians with 5-10 verses a day.
We’re posting the passages online and allowing people to comment if they like.
At the end of 14 days we plan to have a time of sharing to let people talk about what they learned during the 14 days.
I invite you to follow along for 14 Days of Pursuit

Proverbs 2

This is coming a little late in the day (10:43 p.m.) but thought I’d share some thoughts from my reading this morning, Prov. 2.
It was great to see God at work even more when I came to encounter this morning and it was the primary passage Brian spoke from.

Like most of Proverbs, the focus of Prov. 2 on wisdom and learning the fear and knowledge of the Lord.
As I seek God’s wisdom, will and direction in various areas of my life it’s easy to assume/hope/pray that God will magically open a door, we’ll walk through and presto life will make sense.

As I read this passage I think God is saying things might work a little differently.

turning your ear to wisdom
and applying your heart to understanding,
and if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,
and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,
then you will understand the fear of the LORD
and find the knowledge of God.

I look at the steps needed to find knowledge and I need to turn my ear towards wisdom, apply my heart to understanding, call out for insight, call out, cry aloud, look for it as treasure and search for it as hidden treasure.

Those aren’t easy things to do.

It’s not ouija Bible or flip a coin to find God’s will – it’s seek and look hard for it as you would look for silver or hidden treasure.

I’ve never really searched for hidden treasure, other than geocaching, so that’s about all I can compare it to.
But it’s easy to get out and look for a couple minutes for a geocache and then give up if we don’t find it right away. Sometimes we might find an easy “park and grab” that takes very little effort to find. But the real reward comes when we search and search and search and find that hidden treasure that’s really worth the effort.

Same with seeking God’s wisdom. Sometimes we might get little nuggets that come easy – those are great and helpful but may not take us very far. But those pieces of wisdom that we really seek out and search for will really make a difference. That’s when we’ll learn the fear and knowledge of the Lord.

I’ll post Brian’s thoughts on the encounter podcast soon. Feel free to share your own in the comments below as well.