Reflection on James 2:1-17

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Scripture
Just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works.

Observation
To give attention to the rich at the expense of the poor is a sin. It shows our judgement is guided by evil motives.

To break one of God’s laws makes us as guilty as the person who breaks all of the laws. When we interact with others we must show mercy in order to receive mercy from God.

Faith is not real unless it shows itself in good works. Abraham’s faith was counted to him as righteousness at the point where he prepared to sacrifice his son. His faith was shown in costly obedience to God.

Application
Faith is more than a belief about God. James reminds us that even the demons know about God, but they are not saved.

True faith comes out in the actions of a life transformed by Christ. That is not to say that christians never sin. No, we are on a journey from sin to holiness.

True faith is about trusting in Jesus for all things. It results in a different way of thinking and of living. No more are we motivated by the kind of selfishness that causes us to ignore the poor or that condemns people who are not in our group.

True faith leads us to express love to other people regardless of their social standing, to put others’ needs ahead of our own.

Prayer
Let my faith be shown in a life transformed by your love, Jesus. Amen.

Action on Climate: Stealing From the Poor to Give to the Rich

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You never hear from the Greens about how their policies hit the poor and favour the rich.One example of course is that subsidies for roof top solar force up electricity prices for those who cannot use solar power- renters and the poor. But it gets a lot worse as these examples from the US show.

From WUWT:

The Hood Robin Syndrome

/4 hours ago August 29, 2015

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

There’s a new study out, under the imprimatur of the Energy Institute of the Haas School of Business in Berkeley, California, entitledThe Distributional Effects of U.S. Clean Energy Tax Credits.  As the title implies, it looks at who actually profited from the various “green energy” tax credits across the United States. SPOILER ALERT! It wasn’t the poor folks.

How much money are we talking about? Well, the paper says that from 2006 to 2012, the taxpayers have been on the hook for $18 BILLION DOLLARS to fund these subsidies, money that would have otherwise gone into the General Fund.

And just how much money is eighteen billion dollars? Here’s one way to think about eighteen gigabucks, regarding safe, clean drinking water.

Water Wells for Africa reports from their ongoing projects that on average it has cost them about $3.50 per person ($7,000 per well serving 2,000 people) to provide people with clean safe well water. Soeighteen billion dollars is enough money to drill drinking water wells for three-quarters of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants.(Yes, I know that’s a gross simplification, some folks don’t live over a subterranean water table, and so on, but it isstill enough money to drill the two and a half million wells that would be needed.)

So what did we do with this huge amount of money, enough wealth to truly change the lives of the world’s poor?

Well, following the brilliant policies pushed by the Obama Administration and the climate alarmists, we took enough taxpayer money to truly change the lives of the world’s poor folks … and instead, we gave it to the American rich folks.

No kidding! This is not a joke. This is what passes for moral activism in the liberal American universe. Throwing money at the rich is seen as striking a noble blow for POSSIBLY saving the poor from a tenth of a degree of warming by 2100.

Sadly, it’s no joke at all—the whole war on carbon has been a tragedy for the poor. In this case, the result of these misguided tax subsidies, of the type which have been pushed by climate alarmists for years, has been to create a real climate “hockeystick”.

Read the rest here

More Hypocrisy on the Left

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tolerance

Most reasonable people would think that school is no place to be showing gay “marriage” propaganda films.

So when the Education Minister bans the showing of the film “Gaby Baby” during school time, the usual suspects come out saying how this increases intolerance.

Really? The absence of a pro-gay film actually reduces people’s tendency to “live and let live” in regard to homosexual relationships? Can we expect a spike in gay-bashing next week because public schools aren’t allowed to show in class time one particular video this week?

Tolerance seems to be one of those code words that in an Orwellian fashion has been twisted to mean the opposite of its original meaning. It seems that it now means a compulsory celebration of something that one might disagree with but is not allowed to express opposition to.

What a strange and sad world we now live in.

Reflection on James 1:17-27

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Scripture

Do not merely listen to the word of God and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.

Observation

Every good gift comes from heaven, from the Father who never changes. He is the one who chose to give us birth.

We need to be quick to listen, slow to speak and even slower to anger. We must get rid of all moral filth.

It does no good just to listen to the word- we must obey it as well. Otherwise we are like someone who after looking into a mirror forgets what he looks like.

True religion results in a controlled tongue, care for widows and orphans, and holiness of living.

Application

Faith has to result in a change of life. We don’t need to copy what other believers do, but instead allow God to change us from the inside.

Reading Scripture and watching Bible teachers are good. But we need to let the divine word of God take root in our heart and put it into practice.

It is sad that many christian live lives that are indistinguishable in character from those of their unsaved neighbours. If we let the word of God dwell in us, then everything about us will change.

Prayer

Father, please show me what you want me to change about the way I do life and grant me the grace to change. Convict me of my sin and prompt me to care for the poor and vulnerable people in my neighbourhood. Amen.

Church Growth in China

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Nobody really knows how many Christians there are in China, just that there are an awful lot of them. Despite decades of persecution, the government has not been able to stomp out the church nor retstrict its growth.

This report from Catholic News Agency:

Why is Christianity growing so quickly in mainland China?

Credit: BriYYZ via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Credit: BriYYZ via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Carl Bunderson
 
 
 

Fort Worth, Texas, Aug 17, 2015 / 05:19 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Christianity is spreading rapidly in China, and it could be because of how well the faith fits in with modern scientific technology.

According to the renowned sociologist Rodney Stark, the number of Christians in China is growing at an impressive annual rate of seven percent.

Stark coauthored, with Xiuhua Wang, the 2015 work A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China. Stark views himself as a social historian and is co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.

Stark and Wang estimate that in 1980 there were 10 million Christians in the People’s Republic of China, and that in 2007 the figure was 60 million. These numbers yield an annual growth rate of 7 percent – which means that last year, there were nearly 100 million Christians in China.

They hold that this large increase in the number of Christians in China is driven by the conversion of the better educated, who are experiencing “cultural incongruity” between traditional Asian culture and industrial-technological modernity, which results in a spiritual deprivation, which Christianity is able to answer.

China’s intellectuals, Stark told CNA Aug. 14, “are very convinced they’ve got to turn West to understand the world they live in … and they’re convinced by my argument that eastern religions don’t fit the modern world they’re engaged in, and that they need to look to the West to find philosophies and religions. It’s quite amazing.”

Eastern religions, like Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, Stark maintained, “are all anti-progress; they all proclaim the world is going downhill from a glorious past, and that we should look backwards, not forwards. None of them admit that we’re able to understand anything about the universe – it’s something we have to meditate on, not something to try and theorize about, as the physicists and chemists do. And that doesn’t fit with the world that modern Chinese are experiencing having happened around them.”

“Industrial society, and all the science it’s based on, doesn’t fit well with those kind of religious views,” Stark reflected.

“But the question of what does the world mean, and how do we live in it, persists – and so that’s a major motor in the Christianization of China, and it explains why it’s the most educated Chinese who are the most apt to join.”

The spread of Christianity in China, he said, has been possible even “during the worst time of Chinese persecution” under Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s because “this process of conversion is invisible; the government can’t see it.”

Read the full article here

Mark Virkler: Stop Owning This!

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Mark Virkler shares an important key to healing: Focus on what Jesus is doing not on what the devil is doing.

 

Stop Owning This! “Let me tell you about MY painful…”

Mark Virkler's picture
Submitted by Mark Virkler on August 24, 2015 – 14:49

I vividly remember many years ago I met a person for the first time and they wanted to tell me their life’s story, so I listened for 90 minutes as they described to me, in great detail, every nasty, hurtful thing that had ever been done to them. We relived together every second of every story. Talk about depression overload. I would never let a person do that today, because it is far too damaging to their life.

They will never get healed of their hurts by repeating them over and over, visualizing them and living continuously in that darkness. By focusing on their pain, they are enlarging the darkness within them and it becomes their life, their identity.

Jesus spoke to me:“Whatever you fix your eyes on grows within you. Whatever grows within you, you become.”

Inner Healing Defined:“Allowing Jesus to remove the pictures in the art gallery of your mind, removing pictures that do not have Jesus in them and replacing them with pictures which do.”

Hurt, pain, sickness and infirmity are healed when they are brought to Jesus and you ask Him, “Lord, where are You in the midst of this event? Let me see You, please. What are You saying to me? Let me hear You, please.” Then you look for Jesus to appear. Relax and put a smile on your face, for you know that as He appears it is all going to be OK, plus your relaxing allows Him to appear, because you are no longer striving.

You tune to flowing thoughts (His voice) and flowing pictures (His visions), and you listen and watch, recording what He is saying and doing, and cooperating with Him in all the ways He is asking you to.This is inner healing!This works.

Now whenever you recount this story, in your thoughts or when talking to another, you describe what Jesus did as He appeared in the midst of the situation and spoke and moved. THIS IS WHAT YOU TALK ABOUT! You don’t focus on the evil or the pain. You spend your time focused on what Jesus did and said. Then His light grows within you, rather than satan’s darkness and gloom.

This process works equally well for physical, emotional or mental hurts and pains. You ALWAYS look for Jesus in the situation, and you always focus on Him and always recount what He is doing. It is called fixing your eyes on Jesus (Heb. 12:1-2) or abiding in Christ (Jn. 15) or seeing Jesus always at your right hand (Acts 2:25; Ps. 16:8).

More recently I have had people claim their infirmities by telling me, “I have this (insert the name of your physical problem).” Folks, I don’t want to claim any sickness or infirmity! I don’t want to affix it to myself. Instead, I want to journal and hear what the Lord says about this infirmity, and then speak ONLY that!

So I end up saying, “Jesus has healed this (state the infirmity) and set me free. Infirmity, be gone in Jesus’ name! Jesus spoke to me concering this and said….” I receive what Jesus has spoken. I declare it. I speak it over myself. I speak life and wholeness to my entire being – spirit, soul, body and mind: “You are healed. Be healed. Function normally, in Jesus’ name.”

And of course, since pictures are the language of the heart, I always ask the Lord for a picture of myself fully healed. He shows me and I choose to hold that picture constantly in the imagination of my heart. This releases God’s emotions, power, light and glory into every cell of my being. Doesn’t this sound better than claiming the infirmity as my own?