For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to right teaching. They will follow their own desires & will look for teachers who will tell them whatever they want to hear.
Q: How do you sink a submarine full of UNC grads? A: Knock on the door.
*************************
One of the reasons for the success of the internet is its open, peer-to-peer nature. All computers on the internet are equal, and in the past it hasn't mattered whether your computer is a 386 in Nguru on the end of a satellite phone or a big monster in a New York rack. If that ever changes, I think we will lose part of the essential, vital character of the internet. (Doug Winter)
************************* "How to Be Sure You're a REAL Christian" 1-888-NEED-HIM (24/7 - free call) *************************
Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best of minds. Men and women live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter and with their hand on the door latch they die outside. - - GK Chesterton
*************************
Please forward this newspaper to your colleagues, friends, and family, and let them know they can subscribe.
************************* Trust in yourself and you are doomed to disappointment; trust in money and you may have it taken from you; but trust in God, and you are never to be confounded in time or eternity. - D.L. Moody
*************************
"This probably isn't really "SPAM", somebody you probably know signed you up for this and the newsletter..."
"Broadband Reports" responding to a 'T & H' Critic 11/2/2 Issue
*************************
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. -Robert Frost
*************************
Donald MacDonald from the Isle of Mann went to study at an English university and was living in the hall of residence with all the other students there.
After he had been there a month, his mother came to visit him.
"And how do you find the English students, Donald?" she asked.
"Mother," he replied, "they're such terrible, noisy people. The one on that side keeps banging his head on the wall and won't stop. The one on the other side screams and screams all night."
"Oh Donald! How do you manage to put up with these awful noisy English neighbors?"
"Mother, I do nothing. I just ignore them. I just stay here quietly, playing my bagpipes."
*************************
Scottish author George MacDonald once stated, "The one principle of hell is—'I am my own.'" (Footnote 1: C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology, (San Francisco: Harper, 1973), p. 103.)
This is a deceptive principle, deceptive like the snake in the Garden. He promised Adam and Eve that they could become like God, and the first principle of hell promises the same. I am my own, it shouts. I am in control. I will determine my life, my aims, my ends. In short, it promises the supremacy of our will—that our will, will be. This is nothing less than promising that we will be like God.
But what if the principle could be fully realized? If your will would be done? If you were God? What then? Do you have the resources within you to love? Do you have the resources within you to care? Do you have the resources within you to bring happiness? To bring peace? If your will would be done, what would be done?
Contrary to modern optimism, human history tells the story of our will being done. Our hypothetical question has been answered by history time and again. Genocide, war, racism, these are just a few of our stripes. But we need not open a history book to see these stripes. If we open our own hearts, our stripes are plain to see. Reflect on your own heart, and you will see that I am telling the truth.
Isaiah tells of stripes of another kind that are intimately related to our own stripes. He tells of the stripes that marked Christ's back in His passion. Isaiah paradoxically proclaimed, by Christ's stripes, by Christ's wounds, we are healed. (Footnote 2: Isaiah 53:5) In essence, His pain is our balm.
Jesus, just before He was to go through the hell of the cross expressed the antithesis to the one principle of hell. He expressed the one principle of heaven: not my will but thine. Just as paradoxically his stripes heal our stripes, so paradoxically surrendering our will does not impoverish us but rather enriches us—for it opens us up to his resources of love, his resources of care, his resources of peace. You see, the principle of heaven opens us up to God's power, and the principle of hell closes us off to it.
Let us seek to unleash the power of the one principle of heaven and so squelch the power of the one principle of hell. (Keith Cox)
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously [February 21, 2006] that a small congregation in New Mexico may use hallucinogenic tea as part of a four-hour ritual intended to connect with God.
Justices, in their first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts, moved decisively to keep the government out of a church's religious practice. Federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the hoasca tea of the Brazil-based church, Roberts wrote in the decision.
The tea, which contains an illegal drug known as DMT, is considered sacred to members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, which has a blend of Christian beliefs and South American traditions. Members believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea, which is consumed twice a month at four-hour ceremonies.
[TBC: While the use of illicit drugs to contact God is counterproductive to finding the truth, one might also ask why someone would settle for a deity which is only accessible twice a month.]