The 4:8 Principle
Posted by wagardner - 25/06/08 at 08:06:00 amI am currently reading the 4:8 Principle by Tommy Newberry. I am enjoying the book as it forces me to try and think like the Bible says in Philippians 4:8.
I definitely allow wrong thoughts in and they mess up my mind, my day, and even my trust in the Lord to bring things to pass.
Listening
Posted by wagardner - 25/06/08 at 08:06:13 am“The secret of influencing people lies not so much in being a good talker as in being a good listener. Most people trying to win others to their way of thinking do too much talking themselves. Let the other people talk themselves out. Listen patiently and with an open mind. Be sincere about it. Encourage them to express their ideas fully. They will never forget it. And you will learn a thing or two. Nobody is more persuasive than a good listener.”- Dale Carnegie (The Leader In You, pp. 92-93)
Simplify
Posted by wagardner - 25/05/08 at 03:05:48 amIn order to simplify my life I am planning on moving this over to the Vision News. I will leave this here but from now on I think that I will be putting everything over on the Vision News so I want to invite you to go there and follow whatever I am reading.
God bless you and thank you for being so faithful to follow along. This will mean more posts on Vision News but those that don’t read it will not notice and those that really like it will just get more to like.
God bless you
OFFICIAL UZBEKISTAN VIDEO DECRIES ‘ILLEGAL MISSIONARY ACTIVITY’
Posted by wagardner - 24/05/08 at 03:05:50 amSource: Forum 18 News Service
The Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan continues to use state-run mass media to incite intolerance of religious minorities and freedom of thought, conscience and belief. In the latest national television coverage, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, Presbyterians and Methodists were all described as conducting unspecified “illegal missionary activities.” This was described as “a global problem along with religious dogmatism, fundamentalism, terrorism and drug addiction.” Video footage showed scenes of police raids on worship services. Police had claimed that the film “was necessary for further investigation.” A member of a religious minority stating that some people are now “afraid to go out on the street where they live for fear of being persecuted.” However, sources said that “people who understand a little bit what’s going on in the country sympathize with us.”
What a testimony
Posted by wagardner - 23/05/08 at 03:05:19 amThis is from Project North Africa
In 1921 a missionary couple named David and Svea Flood went with their two-year-old son from Sweden to the heart of Africa: the Belgian Congo. They met up with another young couple and together the traveled to the interior village of N’dolera where they were rebuffed by the chief. They were not allowed to have contact with the town fold for fear of alienating the local gods. The two couples opted to go half a mile up the slope and build their own mud huts.
They prayed for a spiritual breakthrough but all they received was contact with one young boy who was allowed by the chief to sell the families food twice a week. Svea Flood decided that if this was the only african she could talk to, she would try to lead the boy to Jesus. And in fact, she succeeded. Their partners quit and returned to the mission station but the floods stayed. Svea became pregnant and soon died after giving birth to their daughter, Aina. David became bitter toward God and returned to the mission station where he said, “I am going to Sweden. I have lost my wife, and I obviously can’t take care of this baby. God has ruined my life.” With that he gave the baby to an American family and returned to Sweden determined never to serve the Lord again. The American family changed the girls name to Aggie and raised her in the U.S.
Aggie grew up in South Dakota, went to Bible college and married a young preacher named Dewey Hurst. Years past and her husband became president of a Christian college in the Seattle area. One day a Swedish religious magazine appeared in her mailbox. She had no idea who had sent it, and of course, she could read the words. But as she turned the pages a photos stopped her cold. There in a primitive setting was a grave with a white cross and on it the words SVEA FLOOD. Aggie had a local Swede translate the story for her and she found out it was about missionaries who had come to N’dolera long ago. The birth of a white baby…the death of the young mother…the one little African boy who had been led to Christ…and how after the whites had all left, the boy had finally persuaded the cheif to let him build a school in the village. The boy gradually won all the students to Christ…the children let their parents to Christ… even the cheif had become a Christian. Today there were six hundred Christian believers in that one village…all because of the sacrifice of David and Svea Flood. For the Hursts’ 25th wedding anniversary, the college presented them with the gift of a vacation to Sweden.
There Aggie found her father, now an old man and dying from alcohol. His children warned her not to mention God to him. Aggie was not to be deterred. She walked in to the squalid apartment, with liquor everywhere, and approached the 73 year-old man lying in a rumpled bed. “Papa”, she said tentatively.
He turned and began to cry. “Aina! I never meant to give you away.”
“It’s all right, Papa.” She replied, “God took care of me.”
The man instantly stiffened. “God forgot all of us. Our lives have been like this because of Him.”
Aggie continued, “Papa, I’ve got a little story to tell you, and it’s a true one. You didn’t go to Africa in vain. Mama didn’t die in vain. The little boy she won to the Lord grew up to win that whole village to Jesus Christ. The one seed you planted just kept growing and growing. Today there are six hundred African people serving the Lord because you were faithful to the call of God in your live… Papa, Jesus loves you. He has never hated you.”
The old man turned back to look into his daughter’s eyes. His body relaxed. He began to talk. By the end of the afternoon, he had come back to the God he had resented for so long. Within a few weeks, David Flood had gone to his rest.
A few year later, while the Hursts were attending an evangelism conference in London, a report was given from the nation of Zaire. The superintendent of the national church, representing some 11,000 Baptized believers, spoke of the gospel’s spread in his nation. Aggie asked him afterward if he had ever heard of David and Svea Flood. “Yes, madam,” the man replied in French, his words being translated into English. “It was Svea Flood who led me to Christ. I was the boy who brought food to your parents before you were born. In fact, to this day you mother’s grace and her memory are honored by all of us.” He embraced her in a long, sobbing hug. Then he continued, “YOu must come to Africa to see, because your mother is the most famous person in our history.” In time that is exactly what Aggie Hurst and her husband did. They were welcomed by cheering villagers. She even met the man who had been hired by her father many years before to carry her back down the mountain in a hammock.
You can meet the missionary telling this story at Vision Baptist Church for the Our Generation Leadership Conference the first week in June if you will just come.
Modern Thought!
Posted by wagardner - 17/05/08 at 12:05:35 pmThere are some cringing, fawning spirits in this world, who must always go with the majority. What everybody says, they say. They take their cue from those who lead the fashion of the hour. They ask leave of common custom to breathe or eat. They dare not swallow down their spittle till they have obtained permission so to do. Cringing, fawning sycophants of all that is great, and all that is fashionable, scarcely could a soul be found in them if they were searched through and through with a microscope. . . .
Shame on [men of that sort who] are called Christian ministers! They believe in Christ, but it is a Christ without his crown, his atonement, his judgment-seat, or even his Godhead. They mock us with orthodox phrases, from which the essential truth is gone. They pretend that they believe in the atonement, and when we listen to their atonement we find that it does not effectually atone for anyone. It is a mere fiction, and not a fact. It saves nobody, but is a mere sham.
They have eviscerated the gospel, and then they hold up the empty carcase, and claim that they are Christians still. Christians who have murdered Christianity! Believers who doubt whether there is anything to be believed! Yet we are entreated in our charity to hug such traitors to our bosom. We shall do nothing of the kind. We would sooner believe in infidels outright than in those who pretend to be Christians and are infidels at heart.
“Modern thought” is a more evil thing than downright atheism; even as a wolf in a sheep’s skin is worse than a wolf in his natural form.
There are pretty things said of our Lord Jesus by those who deny the faith which are sickening to me. I loathe to hear our true Lord praised by false lips. They deny the doctrines which he taught, and yet prate about believing him. It is a shallow trick, but yet it deceives shallow souls. Poor, weak minds say, “The man speaks so beautifully of Jesus, surely he cannot be in error.” I tell you it is the old Judas trickthe Son of man is betrayed with a kiss. How nauseating their praises must be to him whom they are betraying! Think not that they are honest; their designs are far other than appear upon the surface. They laud him as man that they may dishonor him as God: they cry up his life, and his example, that they may cast his atoning sacrifice into the ditch. They lift up one part of the divine revelation with no other intention than that they may dash down the other: they crouch at his feet that they may stab at his heart.
I avow myself at this hour the partisan of Christ, and of the whole truth of Christ, in its old-fashioned form: the more old-fashioned the better for me. I am for Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. I am for the Gospel of martyrs and confessors who gave their hearts’ blood as the seal of their faith. New gospels and new theologies I abhor. I am for that same ancient gospel which to-day is said to be absolutely defunct. Science has wiped out the evangelicals; we are dead; we are gone. So they say of us. Yet in our graves we turn; even in our ashes live our wonted fires; we expect a resurrection.
Truth may be crushed down, but it cannot be crushed out. If there survived but one lover of the doctrines of grace he would suffice by God’s Spirit to sow the world again with the verities of our holy faith. The eternal truth which Christ and his apostles taught is not dead but sleepeth; at a touch of the Lord’s hand she shall rise in all her ancient power and look round for her adversaries, and they shall not be: yea, she shall diligently consider their place and they shall not be. Blessed are they who at this time are not afraid to be on the side that is ridiculed and laughed at. Truth will have its turn, and though it now grind the dust it shall be at the top before long, and they who are loyal to it shall share its fortunes. Let us be bold enough to say, “Put down my name among the fools who believe, and not among those whose wisdom lies in doubting everything.” God save us from the wisdom which believes in itself, and give us more of the wisdom which believes in him!
Charles Spurgeon
Baptist population plummets in Georgia
Posted by wagardner - 15/05/08 at 12:05:19 pmOne in 10 now Baptists as compared to one in 5
By CHRISTOPHER QUINN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/15/08
Southern Baptists in Georgia are declining as a percentage of the state population, according to their Annual Church Profile.
In 1970, nearly one in five Georgians were Southern Baptists, but the most recent profile from 2007 statistics shows a little more than one in ten Georgians are members of the denomination. Growth has flattened in recent years and dropped by a tiny margin in 2007 while Georgia’s population has grown rapidly in the last 30 years.
More than 1 million Southern Baptist live in the state, according to a report in “The Christian Index,” the state newspaper published by the denomination.
There were 9.4 million Georgia residents in 2006, according to the U.S. Census.
The report says Southern Baptists, known for their evangelistic efforts, lost 1,086 members in Georgia (less than 1 percent), while nationally they lost 40,000 members in 2007.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, with more than 16 million members.
YOU HAVE STRUCK ME AS WITH ROSES
Posted by wagardner - 14/05/08 at 07:05:24 pmThe following came from here! What a story! I want a testimony that I love Jesus with all my heart!
Pastor Obadiah Holmes was the second pastor of the Newport Church in Rhode Island, the first Baptist Church in America. In the following [copied from History of the Baptists, Armitage, BSB Publishers, 1887. pg 687-688] he and two of the brethren suffer much for the cause of Christ, but it was the blood of Brother Holmes that was the first to be shed in America for the sake of our Saviour.
On Monday they were removed to Boston an cast into prison, the charges against them being for ‘disturbing the congregation in the afternoon, for drawing aside others after their erroneous judgments and practices, and for suspicion of rebaptizing one or more amongst us’.
Clarke [this is John Clarke, first pastor of the Newport Church] was fined 20 pounds sterling, Holmes 30, and [James] Crandall 5 pounds sterling; and on refusal to pay they were ‘to be well whipped’, although [Governor] Winslow had told the English Government that they had no law ‘to whip in that kind’.
Edwards [historian] says that while ‘Mr. Clarke stood stripped at the whipping post, some humane person was so affected with the sight of a scholar, a gentleman, and reverend divine, in such a situation, that he, with a sum of money, redeemed him from his bloody tormentors’. Before this he had asked the Court, ‘What law of God or man had he broken, that his back must be given to the tormentors for it, or he be despoiled of his goods to the amount of 20 pounds sterling?’ To the which Endicott replied, ‘You have denied infant baptism and deserve death, going up and down, and secretly insinuating into them that be weak, but cannot maintain it before our ministers’.
Clarke tells us that ‘indulgent and tenderhearted friends, without my consent and contrary to my judgment, paid the fine’. Thus somenone paid the fine of Clarke and Crandall, and proposed to pay that of Holmes. The first two were released, whether they assented or not, but Holmes who was a man of learning, and who afterward succeeded Dr. Clarke as pastor of the Newport Church, would not consent to the paying of his fine, and because he refused, he was whipped thirty stripes, September 6, 1651. He said that he ‘durst not accept of deliverance in such a way’.
He was found guilty of ‘hearing a sermon in a private manner…and for suspicion of their having their hands in rebaptizing of one or more’. Bancroft [historian] says that he was whipped ‘unmercifully’, and ‘that for many days, if no some weeks, he could take no rest but upon his knees and elbows, not being able to sufferany part of his body to touch the bed whereon he lay’.
While enduring his torture, he joined his Lord on the cross and Stephen in praying that this sin might not be laid to the charge of his persecutors; and when his lacerated flesh quivered and blood streamed from his body, so powerfully did the Grace of the Crucified sustain him that he cheerfully said to his tormentors:
YOU HAVE STRUCK ME AS WITH ROSES!
The History of Baptists in America
Posted by wagardner - 11/05/08 at 09:05:23 pmRoger Williams founded the first Baptist church that we know of in America. Williams was welcomed to America by Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts on February 5, 1631. Williams came to America escaping the persecution of William Laud and the Church of England.
In America Williams found that the Puritans still held to many of the same beliefs as the church of England and principally that the government had to insure the church financially and even more importantly protect the church from error. They claimed that the Scriptures were their sole authority but looked to the elders of the church to interpret the Scriptures for them. Since the church and state were so intermingled there were lost people in the church—actually forced to be part of the church. When the church in Boston called Williams to be the pastor he refused because he would not pastor an un-separated church.
In Salem Williams found a church of independent thinkers like himself. They refused to accept public control over their conscience and worship. Williams became their pastor. He believed and taught that it was even wrong to force people to be members of a church or attend the services. He also took the gospel to the Indians and this caused many problems with the religious leaders of the day. He tried to win the Indians to Christ. He also found out that the Puritans had mistreated the Indian in the way that they paid for the land. He felt that the Indians had been swindled.
He was so harassed in Salem that he left and went to Plymouth and lived among the Pilgrims. While in Plymouth Williams made a treaty with the Indians. Since the Pilgrims also believed that the government should support the church Williams could not be happy there either and soon withdrew to Salem again.
IN Salem he thundered out that men should be given complete freedom in all spiritual things. This again caused problems. On October 8, 1635 Williams was put on trial and then banished from the territory since he refused to recant. He was given 6 weeks to leave. He received word that they were on the way to his house to arrest him and went out into the wilderness in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. The Indians he had befriended were the ones who saved his life.
While in exile he decided to form his own colony. Williams purchased land from the Indian and founded Providence. He was excited to watch the new experiment unfold, religious freedom in action. IN March Ezekiel Holliman baptized Williams. Then Holliman baptized Williams. Te church was open to all who desired to be faithful members just as the colony was.
Williams refused to allow the colony to make laws concerning religion. There were no Sunday blue laws, the Seventh Day Baptist were even allowed to hold their services when they desired.
Williams is credited with having started the fist Baptist church in America. But of course did not continue as pastor and so we proceed to the fist permanent Baptist church in America.
In 1640 John Clark and several others went to Roger Williams who helped them purchase land from the Indians. They then organized the First Baptist Church of Newport. Clark would be pastor there for the next 36 years. At first they seem not to have believed or practiced believers baptism until a brother arrived from England who had been immersed
Later John Clarke, Obadiah Holmes, and John Crandall returned to Massachusetts to visit a brother who was blind, aged and Baptist. Upon hearing that they had entered the colony John Cotton wanted them punished. They were seized put on trial and Cotton himself came to accuse them. He claimed that they were guilty of murder even though it be soul murder since they denied infant baptism and therefore salvation to these infants. They had been holding a service without permission. They agreed that they had been in service but in a private home with the doors closed and so the law had no right to enter into the home and take them prisoner. The judge agreed and decided to only fine them and if they refused they would be whipped and they were to immediately leave the province.
Friends raised the money to pay the fines. Crandall was released. As Clark approached to be whipped someone gave the money to the official and he was released. Others wanted to help Holmes also but he adamantly refused saying that to pay the fine was to admit that he had done something wrong. He was willing to be whipped.
They so whipped him that he was able only to sleep on his knees and elbows for 20 days and nights.
Churches continued to be started and to grow. In Philadelphia 1707 there were 5 churches already in existence and they began to fellowship together. There fellowship was only to see how they could aid one another. They would send messengers but the Association could make no rules over the churches since each had to be autonomous.
Quote from Roosevelt
Posted by wagardner - 11/05/08 at 06:05:31 amIts not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who does actually try to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checked by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
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