laura

[Skudgett]

In Christianity, God gives man everything. His indwelling Holy Spirit embraces him in a wonderful way even to the extent of total union between God and man in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ (John 17). As a matter of fact, God in Christianity is not a remote, silent God but He is a caring, loving God who united Himself with us through Jesus Christ. Christ is known as the Son of God as well as the Son of Man. In taking on "the likeness of men" (Phil 2:7), He became fully man and fully God. Through His Spirit, man is able to experience a glorious life and every day, he can enjoy personal, inner fellowship with God, man's heavenly Father.

[Skudgett]

Day after day as he grows in grace and knowledge, the Christian experiences more power in his life and becomes able to express and convey love to all those around him. The life of holiness and purity becomes his normal pattern of life as well as having genuine love and inexpressible joy, even amidst all situations and hardships (II Peter 1:3,4).

[lau_lauz]

no ive not stopped
im alive and well, jusgot out the hospital saw god on tha way back, he told me to release to u

[Skudgett]

Day after day as he grows in grace and knowledge, the Christian experiences more power in his life and becomes able to express and convey love to all those around him. The life of holiness and purity becomes his normal pattern of life as well as having genuine love and inexpressible joy, even amidst all situations and hardships (II Peter 1:3,4).

[Skudgett]

The Cross

In fact, the cross is not merely a historic event but it is the purpose for which Christ came to our world as He mentioned frequently, "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:28). So, the cross is the key to understanding the books of the Old Testament which are full of prophecies about the cross which were written thousands of years before Christ—such as Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.

[Skudgett]

It is well known that David's psalms and the Pentateuch were available to many people in different parts of the world long before the coming of Christ. In Christ, the prophecies were fulfilled, including all those concerning His crucifixion.

"But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:

[Skudgett]

Verses From the Bible

It is time now for us to conclude this book with verses from the Bible so that the reader may realize that there is no other book deeper or sweeter than the Bible. The Bible is the sole and only revelation of God in our world. Unlike all other books, the Bible has spread to all parts of the world in all the languages of mankind.

"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23).

"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 6:23).

"For God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:.

"That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" (Rom. 10:9

[lau_lauz]

*crys*
i dont know who u r sophie jones but god sed the devil will get me if i dont tlk 2 u
guide me thru
plezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
plzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
i beg ov u help they're afta me
im bleeding

[Skudgett]

Peace, Joy and Pleasure Are Found in God

"In Your presence is fullness of joy; At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore" (Ps. 16:11).

"I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, My soul shall be joyful in my God; for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation, He has covered me with the robe of righteousness" (Isa. 61:10).

"Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" (Phil. 4:4-7).

"My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials" (James 1:2).

[Skudgett]

A Life of Love

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven" (Matt. 5:43-45).

"By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth" (I Jn. 3:16, 18).

[lau_lauz]

helppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp they're here[:O]

[Skudgett]

Prayer and Fasting

"And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the comers of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door. pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly" (Matt. 6:5,6).

"When you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting" (Matt. 6:16).

[Skudgett]

A Life of Holiness

"As He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, 'Be holy for I am holy"' (I Peter 1:15,16).

"And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit" (Eph. 5:18).

"Whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matt. 5:28).

"The women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation" (I Tim. 2:9).

[Skudgett]

God's Providence

"The very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matt. 10:30).

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters, He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name's sake" Psalm 23: 1-3).

With these words of this beautiful psalm, we conclude this book. May God bless you.

[Skudgett]

hiya

[Skudgett]

What if the sky should fall?

by Neil Earle

What a year this has been. And it's not even half over yet! 'Anxiety' has been the dominant mood in 2003 - another Gulf war; a new killer disease; weapons of mass destruction; terrorists attacks. What next? Where next?

The world as we have known seems to be falling apart. Far-away places with strange-sounding names don't call us these days. Instead, they threaten us and raise our stress levels. We can't get away from anxiety. As Marshall McLuhan once said: `We don't have eyelids anymore.' So where do we look for stability? Where do we go for a sense of perspective?

Ancient peoples had similar thoughts. 3,000 years ago, King David of Israel wrote: `When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?'1

It's a good question, isn't it? The answer, or at least part of it, is to ask yourself three more questions. They are:

What is the worst that can happen?
What can I do to improve on the worst?
Can I accept the worst if it happens?
This isn't pop psychology, or `pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps'. Jesus Christ had moments of anxiety. He set us an example of facing trouble in a positive and constructive way. Look at those three questions again from his perspective.

[Skudgett]

[|)]What is the worst that can happen?
As a physical human being Jesus Christ knew that he might have to die a horrible, gruesome death - which he did. But, as horrible as death by crucifixion was, Jesus knew something worse could happen - he could fail in his mission to be the intercessor between God and man, the One on whom the burden of human sin would fall. That was a fate worse than a painful, physical death.

What can be done to improve the worst?
The Bible tells us that 'While he lived on earth, anticipating death, Jesus cried out in pain and wept in sorrow as he offered up priestly prayers to God. Because he honoured God, God answered him.'2

Jesus prayed; and we can pray. The Bible tells us God is more willing to answer us than we are to pray. The Gospel writer, Matthew, shows us Jesus praying just before his crucifixion. But Jesus did more than pray. He asked his friends to pray with him. In the dark crisis of his life Jesus wanted his friends by his side.3 There's an old saying: `A trouble shared is a trouble halved.' This is why support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous set up recovering addicts with a sponsor, a friend they can call when they are in trouble or under severe temptation. It works!

A friend is someone who knows all about you but likes you anyway. In times of distress and peril we need friends. They can steady us in ways we cannot even imagine when we are in the grip of frightening fears and demoralizing anxieties.

There are practical things we can do. If we can't control the world we can at least put our own house in order.4

The greatest stress-reliever known to man is to hug your wife a little more, grab your children just a little bit closer, and do a kind deed for someone else. We can clean out our garage, work on our health, and exercise regularly. Does this advice sound trite? Ask any mental health counsellor or physical therapist if this is not the best place to start.

[|)]

[Skudgett]

Be prepared for the worst
The ancients had another saying: 'When a man is willing and ready, heaven joins in with him.' Jesus Christ stared down his deathly fear: 'Rise, let us go. Here comes my betrayer!' said Jesus to his friends, when he knew his arrest and crucifixion were imminent.5 Jesus knew there was no way out of this trial except through it. He had calculated the worst that might happen - something even worse than his own painful death. He took action to improve on the worse and he calmly faced his fears.

Are you aware that God has promised not to let anything come our way that is impossible for us to handle? That promise is found in 1 Corinthians 10:13: 'No test or temptation that comes your way is beyond the course of what others have had to face. All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; he'll never let you be pushed past your limit; he'll always be there to help you come through it.' Armed with this knowledge we can face our fears. We can stay sane in this worrying new world of uncertainty.

About the author:
Neil Earle is a freelance journalist and pastor in Los Angeles, California.

1 Psalm 11:3
2 Hebrews 5:7 (Message version)
3 Matthew 26:38
4 2 Kings 20:1
5 Matthew 26:45-46

[lau_lauz]

so like how can i b prepared?

[Skudgett]

Professors Say It Is True
Phibber personally knows two full professors in British universities and at least a dozen doctors nearly every one of which believes the Bible is true. Apparently there are thousands more! Since there must be millions of scientists in the world it is encouraging that only a small percentage of them think like Phibber, believing that a super being, God, came to earth under the pseudonym of God's Son to save us all from His own punishment, that dead men can be returned to life and that other supernatural events can happen contrary to the laws of nature that God himself invented. It is difficult for me to understand how a man can believe in the supernatural and still be a scientist. But I am jumping the gun!

Phibber tells us that science explains to us how things happen but the Bible tells us why they happen. Why? is of course the ultimate question and if you believe the Bible gives you the answer that is your delusion. The answer is, I presume, that God willed it. But as any child knows that is only an answer for the deluded because it begs the question: Why is there a God?

Phibber tells us that the Bible tells us why we die. It is because of sin. Without sin we would live forever and we can do by believing in Christ. Well forever is a long time so, as a scientist, Phibber might have thought: here is a real chance to prove my beliefs. Let us take a sample of men, some chosen for their sinful lives and some chosen for their holy lives, and see whether the distribution is skewed meaningfully toward the holy people.

Of course we have problems at once because sinful lives can mean dissolute lives and holy lives can incorporate healthy lives. But by choosing the sample carefully it ought to be possible to allow for such factors and since forever is an infinite amount of time even small differences in holiness should make huge differences in lifespan. Curious that Jesus, who was perfect, should die at 33 and Hitler should live to 56 but we scientists know this is not a scientific sample.

Oh! Do I hear Christians protesting that they are not talking about physical life but spiritual life. So sin is not why physical death has entered the world. I'm getting confused again. The goalposts are shifting once more.

[Skudgett]

Conflict
To return to Dr Ernest Phibber, he agrees that sometimes the Bible and science come into conflict. Needless to say, when they do, it is science that is wrong! Nevertheless we must do this [look at the conflict] in a spirit of reasonableness. (Cough! Sorry!)

First consider miracles. Phibber confesses: We scientists are just as human as anyone else. We make the same foolish mistakes, and we suffer from vanity, impatience and prejudice, just like the rest of mankind. No! Not you, Ernest!

After confession we now get a little philosophy of science. A scientist who declares that miracles cannot happen is merely expressing his own prejudice and not a fact of science. To prove it he quotes lengthily from some fellow that nobody ever heard of. His argument is that the scientist begins with the belief that events which cannot be explained by natural law cannot happen. Since he has already excluded them, the scientist cannot legitimately claim to prove they are impossible. That is the argument.

The scientist is concerned with investigating the physical universe. A constantly growing wealth of experience shows that by assuming that nature is governed by recoverable laws we are able to explain what is happening. Everything begins by being unknown but gradually it is fitted into one or other category or law and resides there happily because when an event is repeated we can trace the law or category that explains it. When something happens that cannot be so explained—and everything has been in that category once upon a time—the scientist tries to formulate laws that will bring it into the book of the explained.

Thus from our growing experience and our ability to formulate rules we become able to predict what will happen when a certain concatenation of events occurs. Scientists use the laws of nature to predict what will happen.

If you have followed this so far you will appreciate that miracles cannot occur because anything that occurs that our present knowledge is unable to explain becomes the subject of investigation precisely so that the laws which govern it can be brought within the realm of the known.

Now it is obvious that some events occur only extremely rarely because the conditions under which they occur are rare. If such an event, though rare, is spectacular it will be noticed and yet will not be subject to investigation. Such an event might be called a miracle by a gullible person but scientists would say: If only ... They want to measure it, count it, record the conditions, and so on but are unable to do so because the event is rare and unpredictable until its laws have been formulated and it is hard to formulate them because it is rare and unpredictable. So ghosts, UFOs, aliens, ball lightning, foo-fighters, and miracles prove hard to investigate. Since scientists, like anyone else, have a living to earn they find something easier to look at.

So Phibber is right when he says that scientists do not believe in miracles. If it happened in this concrete world in which we all live, it is by definition natural and not miraculous. It is by definition capable of investigation though it might be too difficult in practice. No doubt we are in the realm of semantics here but it defeats me how any scientist could believe in miracles in principle. What are the criteria that Phibber, who claims to be a scientist uses to decide that something is in the realm of the natural or in the realm of the supernatural?

The truth is that, in practice there are no criteria. The scientist must be ready to investigate anything that has happened in the world. He might be forced to lay it aside as too difficult to investigate at present but that would not mean it was a miracle unless the meaning of miracle is expanded from the meaning of a supernatural event to the meaning of a rare event—the meaning used perhaps by most people.

Oddly enough Phibber accepts this. He confesses again: it is reasonable and necessary for every scientist to say to himself, 'I shall assume that miracles are not occurring in my laboratory today'. One might add, or in my field work today since scientists do not only make observations in their laboratories. But Phibber wants both ends of the candle. He asserts that scientists cannot say miracles never have occurred, anywhere, and never will. Such a statement is absurd. Therefore, Phibber concludes, the miracles in the Bible could have occurred.

[Skudgett]

Miracles
Phibber turns science on its head even by his own account. He has told us that in practice the scientist must disregard the occurrence of miracles but then goes on to say that if they are attested in the past and particularly in the Bible then we must be ready to accept them. Most scientist would say the exact opposite. Since we have not been able to investigate them we must regard them as likely to be delusions, illusions or indeed frauds, all of which are far more likely to have occurred than a genuinely rare event of nature and infinitely more likely to have happened than an event which is unnatural.

So, is it likely that biblical miracles happened? Phibber begins to persuade us. Miracles are what you would expect in the Bible, he tells us. The whole of Christianity is a miracle, its inspired Bible, its saviour god, Jesus, his resurrection, the Christian reward of eternal life, God hearing a prayer. All are miracles. Hence a few more miracles in the stories of Jesus and the apostles should not be surprising to us. They provide an internal consistency that any valid scientific hypothesis needs to be acceptable.

One could use arguments like this about Hans Anderson's book of fairy tales. We are back with Phibber's usual self-delusion: scientists must not make any assumptions but it is not only all right for Christians but it is required if you are to follow the argument. I do not believe that Christianity is a miracle, or the Bible or the supernatural saviour, the resurrection, that we shall have eternal life or even that God answers prayers. The only internal consistency that I see is that Christians delude themselves into believing a lot of things that ten year olds would reject if they were offered to them as the fairy stories that they really are. And Phibber presents this as an argument!

He goes on to add that another reason for accepting the miracles is that they are eminently sensible. They are healings, restoring the dead to life, saving ships from being wrecked and feeding or succouring the needy. Only the cursing of the fig tree seems uncharacteristic. Again Phibber seems to believe that he has an argument, as if cursing someone to death or illness, or willing ships to be wrecked would not be miracles. Whether they were used for good or ill, if they were supernatural, they would be miracles no less. Phibber is being carried away by goodness.

He claims they were all necessary. But why was it necessary to curse the fig tree. Even on the argument of Phibber that it symbolised the rejection of the Jews by God, why was it necessary? God had no need to demonstrate to the gentiles that the Jews had been rejected and by so doing introduce centuries of additional suffering into the world. Why were all the cures necessary? If they were indeed necessary, why were other equally meritorious cases ignored?

[Skudgett]

Gratuitous
Were they just gratuitous demonstrations of God's power? Why was it necessary to raise Lazarus from the dead? The incident is totally irrelevant except as a miracle. Yet Phibber tells us that none of the miracles were intended merely to demonstrate Jesus's power because he refused to do it in Matthew 4:1-10 when tempted by the devil.

In Matthew 12:39 Phibber could have added Jesus refused to give a sign to this evil and adulterous generation while yet giving signs all over the place! Walking on water and silencing storms, feeding four or five thousand all sound like signs to me, and, if they were in truth miraculous, was it necessary for Jesus to be flamboyant about it? If he really was trying to avoid giving signs then why could not all of these miracles have been done by God with no intervention from Jesus. Could it be that the only necessity of all these miracles is to persuade the gullible—scientist or otherwise—to believe that this man was something out of the ordinary? In other words, despite the denial in the Bible, they were nothing less than signs!

Though it is far from what Christians would want to believe the whole nonsense of biblical miracles is explicable. Many of the miracles are coded information! Jesus was a true pretender to the throne of Israel in the sense that he believed he was the messiah sent by God to drive out the foreigner and to set up the kingdom of God on earth. He was a member of the religious sect of Essenes who had entered into a New Covenant with God to preserve a truly holy remnant of Israel. The Essenes saw prophecies in the scriptures and believed that the prophecies applied to the times they lived in. God was about to send his saviour and start the kingdom.

Jesus however differed in one important respect from the everyday Essene. The everyday Essenes considered it necessary to keep a remnant of Israel pure in readiness for the End Time. And they were that pure remnant. Jesus led the sect of Essenes, the Nazarenes, who believed the End Time had come. They determined not to forget the earlier covenant between God and the whole of Israel and believed it was the duty of the remnant, in the last days before the kingdom started, to warn the whole of Israel of the coming visitation and give them the opportunity to repent and therefore be eligible to enter the kingdom.

Pursuing this idea Jesus went about, like John the Baptist, preaching the kingdom and inviting doubters and skeptics to repent and join him. The doubters and skeptics were sick—spiritually sick—and had to be cured. By converting them to a belief in the coming kingdom Jesus was curing them. In those days all sickness, whether spiritual or physical was thought to be caused by demons. So in curing Israel of spiritual sickness he was casting out demons.

Non-healing miracles were coded parables which the gospel writers have disguised as real events. Jesus himself tells us he was speaking in code by using the expression those that have ears to hear. Why did Jesus have to speak in code? Because he was advocating a revolt against Roman rule and he could not let the Romans or their spies know directly what he was calling for. Eventually Jesus was hanged as a pretender to the throne of Israel because that is precisely what he was, even though his motive was not personal gain but was to do the will of God. None of this is far from the Christian story but is much more credible.

To round off, Phibber tells us that the biblical miracles are much more sophisticated than the silly miracles of Tobias, for example, in the Apocrypha. But are they any different from the miracles of Appolonius of Tyana or Simon Magus or those of the Arabian Nights or the Mahabharata or the Legends of King Arthur? Perhaps they are. Precisely because they were not miracles, they seem to be on an altogether more modest plane.

[Skudgett]

Virgin Birth
Before leaving miracles Phibber considers the miracle of the virgin birth. It was necessary like the others, he argues, because without one human parent Jesus could not have had any human feelings. Perhaps you, like me, get confused about the powers of Yehouah. This Creator God can make the universe and everything within it, but is unable to know what it feels like to be human without coming to earth as the son of a human mother.

First the Christian asks me to believe in an absolute god with infinite power then tries to tell me that He does not know what it is like to be a human being. All these millennia He has been making huge demands upon the Chosen People then punishing them for not coming up to standard and all the time He had no idea what their capabilities were! Perhaps His name is not Yehouah but Squeers.

Even for a Christian this must be nonsense. If God is all powerful then He knows what it is like to be a human. He can experience the human state without having to resort to incarnations and virgin births. If He has to resort to such devices then He is not an all powerful god. But once He is seen as not being all powerful we get into a Wizard of Oz situation—where does His power end? Does He have any power? Does He exist at all?

These contradictions are inherent in the Christian farrago Phibber is trying to create. If you are a Christian it is better not to think too much—just accept the miracles and the miraculous religion because, once you start to think about it, the inconsistencies creep in and, with them, the doubts and the disbelief. This is precisely the reason why Christianity, for centuries, advocated ignorance, why it destroyed pagan knowledge built up by millennia of human experience, why it burnt books and libraries, censored buildings, books and artworks and through it created the Dark Ages. Phibber and his Fixers, the Crucifixers, doesn't tell anyone about all this. You have to find it out for yourself.

The alternative to God experiencing the human state directly was to create a new Adam without any human intervention. We know He can do it because the Bible tells us He created the original Adam and therefore the whole human race. Now Adam's descendants were all cursed with original sin but, according to the Christians, God wanted a sinless man to be sacrificed to atone for the sins of the original Adam. Why then did he have to use a human intermediary, Mary? Now Phibber tells us that without one human parent Jesus would never have known what temptation was. It was through his mother that he inherited human failings. Yet the original Adam knew what temptation was and he had no human parents. His only parent was God.

Why then couldn't Jesus have been a new Adam? No doubt the Christian would answer: Because there was no link with the original Adam—again questioning the absolute power they say God possesses. He is incapable of recreating a human being which is exactly the same as the previous ones. All right, I say, then let Him take a few skin cells from another human just to get enough of the original human and make the new one out of those just as He made the original one out of mud.

All these suggestions are impertinent to Phibber. You don't tell God what to do. The virgin birth was, he asserts, absolutely essential to the life and work of Jesus. The resurrection from the dead similarly was absolutely essential. Guess why! Because the Bible (1 Cor 15:12-19) tells us it was!

[Skudgett]

Sun Standing Still
Phibber now moves on to explain that in the miracle in Joshua (when the sun stood still) the biblical language simply records what was observed and makes no attempt to explain how God did it. Scientific objections, for example that the earth had to stop rotating, are fatuous Phibber declares. We cannot understand it, but it happened—it is in the Bible! When Jesus goes up to heaven at his ascension, the up is just biblical language. It does not imply that heaven is above. It could be anywhere—it is a figure of speech.

Interestingly Phibber now has one of his little homilies telling us not to pooh-pooh miracles because they sound unlikely. Scientists are always coming unstuck by doing that, he asserts. Thunderbolts for example were always pooh-poohed when he was a lad. Now they are accepted as ball-lightning.

Phibber the scientist doesn't seem to understand that a miracle—the thunderbolt—has now been explained, at least partly, by science and have been made by high voltage discharges in laboratories. He apparently does not see that his homily justifying miracles actually does the opposite. It goes to show that it does not matter how many letters you have after your name you are still not necessarily intelligent.

Phibber next shows how God can know everything by comparing Him with a strand of DNA which holds immense amounts of information compactly. Though God plainly holds far more information than the DNA, He evidently had to appear on earth as the son of a mortal woman to gather any human feelings, as we saw above. Even then He made a bad choice because of all the women in the world He could have chosen, perfectly normal women with the full gamut of human foibles, He chose the virgin Mary who was the only woman who ever lived born free of sin because she was conceived immaculately, as the church puts it.

Phibber tells us that God knows everything. One wonders why He does not use all this vast learning to show the human race in a more convincing way how He can save them. Indeed, since He cursed us in the first place, why doesn't He just lift the curse. Or if that is too easy for everyone, why doesn't He appear in person to everyone in the world and impress upon them that they must be good. It is all too ridiculous, isn't it?

If we have free will then we are free to choose evil. Apparently God can only stop it by removing the free will from us and making us all do as He wants. in that way we all become holy because we are all aspects of God. A simple solution but we are all robots. God gave the original Adam the choice of being human or being a robot and he chose humanity. Given the choice today most of us would still choose humanity. But why is it impossible for a supreme power simply to abolish evil and leave us with free will?

No doubt Phibber will reply that by doing so, we have had our choice restricted. For free will to work, all choices must be available. Why then does God stop blind people from having the choice of seeing, of white people from having the choice of suffering racial harassment, of poor people from having the choice of being rich? The whole Christian mythology is absurd and explains nothing.