The sermon for November 23rd 2014 is now available on the New Life web-site.
In this sermon, which is based on Matthew 25:31-46, I talk about Jesus the King.
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Book Review: Bill Johnson- “Experience the Impossible”
Bill Johnson
is an experienced pastor and he has a way of simplifying difficult ideas about walking with God in the power of the Holy Spirit. I love his work and listen to his serrmons every week.
In this book, he writes a series of thought provoking short articles around the themes of faith, hope and love. Each article is just two or so pages long and concludes with a prayer and a declaration.
I would recommend this book as a devotional aid.It would be great to read a Bible passage and then use a chapter from this book to provoke you to deeper prayer or deeper thoughts on your relationship with Jesus.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
Today’s Sermon
How To Lose Weight Without Trying
If you ever thought that those “before” and “after” photos for the weight loss programmes and the diet pills and exercise machines look a bit fake, here’s the proof. Also great tips for looking younger, lighter and fitter.
Killer Clowns Terrorise France
From the ABC:
Clown terror spreads in France, another teenager arrested
Updated
A 14-year-old dressed as a clown has been arrested near Paris for attempting to attack a woman, in the latest incident of fake, evil clowns terrorising passers-by in France.
Complaints have poured in recently over “armed clowns” wreaking havoc in various parts of the country.
Police have detained several people dressed as the pranksters – some carrying pistols, knives and baseball bats.
The bizarre phenomenon has even prompted anti-clown vigilantism, forcing police to try to quell the hysteria by saying there have only been a few sightings of the terrifying clowns.
On Monday, a woman who had just got out of her car in Chelles, an eastern suburb 18 kilometres from central Paris, called the police, saying two clowns – one of whom was armed with a fake axe – had attacked her, a source said.
They escaped when a passer-by armed with a baseball bat tried to stop them.
One of the pranksters was later detained when police spotted him, white make-up still covering his face.
In a separate incident just half-an-hour afterwards, a dozen people wearing the smiling, white masks associated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective attacked three youths and stole their mobile phones at a station in Melun, a south-eastern suburb of Paris.
The “evil clown” trend previously seen in the United States and Britain only began in the north of France in early October.
In the town of Bethune, a 19-year-old received a six-month suspended jail term last week for threatening passers-by while dressed as a clown.
The “clowns” have been “mostly spotted outside schools, but also on public roads, in bushes, and in a square.
Their targets are often young children or teenagers, but also adults,” a police source in northern France said. It then spread to the south of France.
‘Clown hunters’ also on police radar
French police released information warning against armed anti-clown vigilantes taking to the streets.
“The National Police have received many reports of clowns frightening passers-by, but many are fanciful and the proportion of children,” the police service said on its Facebook page.
“Symptomatic of the impact of the internet, this phenomenon can generate harmful individual derivatives and disturbances to public order.
“On social networks, groups calling for collective mobilisations against clowns have appeared.
“Any person, aggressive clowns or hunters of clowns, discovered in possession of a weapon on the highway will be arrested.”
Police on Saturday night arrested 14 teenagers dressed as clowns and carrying weapons in the Mediterranean port town of Agde.
In the nearby city of Montpellier, a man disguised as a clown was arrested after beating a pedestrian with an iron bar.
Theories abound as to the origin of the not-so-funny trend of violence in a country where Halloween has yet to take hold.
The suggestions include a challenge launched on social networks, a popular video on YouTube showing a terrifying clown pranking people or even a recent episode of the popular TV series American Horror Story featuring Twisty the killer clown.
AFP
Today’s Sermon
Managing Ebola in Liberia, Mismanaging Ebola in the United States.
Jo Nova shares the contrast between effective management of Ebola by private enterprise and the shambles of bureaucratic aqpproaches in the U.S.
Company stops Ebola, Bureaucracy puts it on a plane
Compare the response of The Firestone Rubber Plantation in Liberia to the Hospital in Dallas, Texas.
The rubber plantation has 8,000 workers with 71,000 dependants. It is an hour north-east of Monrovia, surrounded by Ebola outbreaks. The virus arrived on the plantation in March. Knowing that the UN and the Liberian government were not going to save them, the managers sat around a rubber tree and goggled “Ebola” and learned on the run instead. They turned shipping containers into isolation units, trucks into ambulances, and chemical cleaning suits into “haz-mat” gear. They trained cleaners, and teachers, they blocked visitors, and over the next five months dealt with 71 infections, but by early October were clear of the virus. There were only 17 survivors (the same 70% mortality rate as elsewhere). But without good management, there could have been so many more deaths.
In contrast, the nanny-state takes a good brain and stops it thinking. In Texas, trained health professionals were caught unprepared, following inadequate protocols they assumed were good enough, and even risking their own lives. A nurse who cared for a dying Ebola patient — and knew how bad Ebola could be — still needed to phone someone to ask if it was OK to board a plane with a slightly raised temperature (99.5F or 37.5C). The official she spoke to “didn’t Google”, they just said yes because her temperature was lower than the official threshold of 100.4F. Let’s not blame her, she was doing her job, is now fighting for her life, and almost certainly did what so many others would have done. Let’s ask instead how we train workers to know that officials can sometimes get it wrong and they need to think for themselves. When the officials fail so badly, in so many ways, the failure is not single-point, or bad luck, but systemic. The nanny-state is selecting networkers and smoochers instead of decision-making leaders. Officials rarely lose their jobs and golden handshakes, or face a seriously investigative media — which would keep them on their toes. Surely either the nurse who called or the bureaucrat who answered would, if left to their own devices, have figured it was not ok to fly–but by the smothering dumbness of of bureaucracy she ended up flying.
Stability is good, but the system is so stable it’s ossified. Executives were so busy telling everyone not to worry, they forgot to worry themselves. The Firestone plantation is an inspiring story. It gives me hope.
Read the full article here
Nothing changes.
Computer Troubles
I’ve been frustrated by my main computer the last few days. At random times, for no apparent reason it would turn itself off.
At first this seemed to only happen when I wasn’t using it. Tim thought it might be some power saving feature that had gone wrong. Yesterday, though, it happened while I was actively using it. The power supply was now the chief suspect.
Joshua brought one from the shop and quickly installed it. Success!
The computer ran happily until this afternoon and then resumed its bad behaviour. I thought it must have been overheating. I installed an app that puts up a graph of the CPU temperature.
The temperature steadily increased until it was well over 100 C.
The culprit was a program I was using to rip DVDs. It is very heavy on the CPU, and I discovered that when the temperature reached 128 degrees the system shuts down. When I paused the program, the temperature quickly fell again to about 50 degrees.
Tim is going to get me a “new” motherboard from the computer shops trade-in pile. In the meantime I had better refrain from ripping too many DVDs!
More Bloodshed in Nigeria
Boko Haram strikes again. We continue to pray for Nigeria.
From the ABC:
Boko Haram blamed for deadly Nigeria college attack
Posted
At least 15 people have been killed when police fought a battle with suspected Boko Haram suicide bombers in Nigeria’s second largest city, Kano.
Kano State police commissioner Adelere Shinaba said the gunmen, whom he described as “insurgents”, ran into the Federal College of Education after exchanging fire with police outside the grounds.
“They were obviously suicide bombers. One of our officers shot at one of the gunmen and the explosives on him went off, killing him on the spot,” he told AFP adding another gunman was also killed.
The blast shattered glass and brought down the ceiling in the room.
Authorities said more than 30 people were wounded in the incident and taken to a local hospital.
New Life Narrabri 