Mike Wilhelm, senior chaplain at Cal Farley's Boys Ranch will be teaching Wednesday nights in February. His focus will be on a modern world that has diminished the capacity to believe. As a result, a screen-addicted generation has emerged with a confusing mixture of spiritual hunger mingled with a tragic tone deafness to God. Some of our common reactions have actually hurt people and made matters worse.
The good news is this: there are simple things we can do to help restore an environment conducive to faith. This four-session seminar will be of interest to a wide range of folks; parents, youth workers, and especially, concerned grandparents!
Feb 2nd: Understanding the Young People in Our Lives
Feb 9th: Restoring a Healthy Environment for Faith
Feb 16th: Welcoming Hard Questions
Feb 23rd: Showing the True Face of God
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Nathan's message was on the importance of framing your life/ministry in the Holy Spirit.
Sunday's lesson is here.
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Even if we don’t agree with his outrageous strategy for eliminating kids people think they can do without, give Alabama’s State Representative John Rogers an A+ for honesty.
When that state’s House of Representatives was debating a law to ban abortion, Rogers offered the usual “woman’s choice” arguments to defend the right to abort any unborn baby.
Then, with surprising candor, he confessed his real reason for favoring even late-term abortions. “Some kids are unwanted,” he observed. “So you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them into the world unwanted, unloved, then send them to the electric chair. So you kill them now or kill them later.”
While his defense of baby killing seems brash and brutal, John Rogers exposed a truth that lurks behind almost all pro-abortion sentiments. In America we abort 926,000 babies every year (according to the Guttmacher Institute’s stats). A small percentage of these abortions take place because of serious health issues in the embryo, but the overwhelming majority of these babies die because they are unwanted.
Police in Bakersfield, California, believed this to be the case when a 23-year-old man held his former girlfriend at gunpoint and forced her to take pills that aborted her unborn child. He didn’t want that infant to be born, so he killed her.
Abortion advocates call their movement pro-choice, but they ignore the fact that a high percentage of abortions are not the prospective mother’s choice. In National Review, Alexandra Descantis cited a study in which 75 percent of women said their abortion was done because of pressure put on them, 58 percent said they did it to make somebody else happy, and 30 percent agreed to the abortion to keep their partner from leaving. These abortions were coerced, not chosen. Someone besides the pregnant female did not want the child.
Space here won’t permit a list of all the reasons kids are unwanted. Diaper changing, late-night feeding, childcare costs, and lifestyle changes are just a few obvious ones. But these worries about having a baby pale compared to concerns because the mother-to-be is unwed.
Whatever may be the hesitance to have a child, most mothers are like the one Jesus described in John 16. Labor pains distress a prospective mother, Jesus said, but “when her child is born, her anguish gives way to joy.” Then her “choice” changes. Then her child is wanted.
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Gene Shelburne
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MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU
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"May the Force be with you.” This is a phrase most people have heard or used even if they don’t know what it’s from. This is just one example of how Star Wars has affected our society. Maybe you can think of a few phrases made mainstream by famous people or movies.
You may have gotten ahead of me, but there are some phrases that many people say and they don’t even realize are from the Bible:
Spare the rod, spoil the child. Proverbs 13:24
Do unto others as you would have done to you. Luke 6:31
A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Matthew 7:15
Can a leopard change its spots? Jeremiah 13:23
Straight and narrow. Matthew 7:13, 14
If you were to do more research yourself, you’d find there are hundreds more. The Bible has made such an impact on the way we think, whether people wish to admit it or not. These hundreds of highly used phrases are a direct result of its impact. Laying the Bible aside, we can still argue that God has made a massive impact on society. The day God breathed life into Adam was the day his Spirit was inserted in man. The result? All men have this Spirit which gives them consciousness about morality. The fact that we have laws or morals is a direct result of one fractional portion of God’s wisdom. We are his creations. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can live with a purpose. To glorify Him.
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Nathan Keller
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