For all you Christians who say your life group is loving, accepting, and encouraging.
Ask everyone to share their annual income.
Then watch how fast the openness disappears.
Honestly, I had never considered this until recently but it obviously is very challenging.
Could it be that the issue isn’t so much that someone would dare to ask the question
but that most identities are too wrapped up in how much they make.
Francis Schaeffer stated, “The ignorance of the Church is more dangerous for a culture than the decadence of the world.”
So, if you’re going to one of those churches that is silent on cultural issues (i.e. the decadence of the Democratic party platform), leave and go elsewhere!
Anyone who is objecting to ICE doing their job needs to read this, titled “The Hard Truth About the Sanctuary Movement”
https://impri
The Hard Truth About the Sanctuary Movement
Kate Steinle (2015, San Francisco)
32-year-old Kathryn “Kate” Steinle was shot and killed on July 1, 2015, while walking with her father on Pier 14. The shooter, José Inez García Zárate (also known as Juan Francisco López-Sánchez), an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had been deported multiple times, fired a single .40-caliber round that ricocheted off the pier and struck her in the back. He claimed he found the stolen gun and it discharged accidentally. A San Francisco jury later acquitted him of murder and manslaughter charges but convicted him on a firearm possession count (later overturned on appeal). He had been released by local authorities despite an ICE detainer.
Laken Riley (2024, Athens, Georgia)
22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley was attacked and murdered on February 22, 2024, while jogging near the University of Georgia campus. She died from blunt-force trauma and asphyxiation. José Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan national who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 near El Paso and was released into the country, was convicted in a 2024 bench trial of malice murder, felony murder, kidnapping, and aggravated assault with intent to rape. He was sentenced to life without parole. Prosecutors said he targeted her while “hunting for females.
Jocelyn Nungaray (2024, Houston, Texas)
12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death on June 16, 2024. Her body was found the next morning under a bridge in a creek. Two Venezuelan illegal immigrants—Johan José Martínez-Rangel (apprehended and released by Border Patrol in March 2024) and Franklin José Peña Ramos (apprehended and released in May 2024)—were charged with capital murder. Authorities allege they lured her, bound her, assaulted her, and dumped her body. Both face capital murder charges.
Juan Ramón-Vásquez (Philadelphia example of a repeat offender shielded by sanctuary policy)
An illegal immigrant from Honduras previously deported, he was in Philadelphia custody in 2014 when ICE lodged a detainer. Local authorities released him under sanctuary policies. After release, he repeatedly raped a young child (his girlfriend’s daughter) over an extended period. He later received a lengthy state prison sentence for the sexual assaults plus additional federal time for illegal reentry. U.S. prosecutors explicitly linked the failure to honor the detainer to the subsequent crimes.
Video – Non-effective Church monologues
If discipleship is important to most churches, and I think it is, why is it that pastors continue to use a very non-effective way of teaching their congregants?
Since when are long monologues the best way to teach and train anyone?
What if, in schools, all the teachers did was give long monologues and never asked questions of the students and never allowed the students to ask questions of them?
How well would they learn?
The same applies to the church, correct?
Interactive dialogue is normally considered far more effective than long monologues.
Interactive dialogue would be the same type of learning you would have with one-on-one tutoring which I would say is universally accepted as way more effective than listening to a long monologue.
Do the pew-sitters have any responsibility to call their leadership into account when their leadership is sitting silently by and watching a God-given republic be lost?
During the Holocaust of the 1940s, as trains went by the churches carrying Jews to the gas chambers, should the pew-sitters have said something to their silent leadership?
Why is it that most pew-sitters sit idly by as they watch their leadership be silent, knowing full well that there are many people sitting in their pews who brainlessly continue to vote for the party that supports and endorses communist socialist principles and candidates?
Will the pew-sitters and leadership in this country ever wake up?
Do struggles make us better than life always going smoothly?
Do disagreements make us better than never arguing?
What good is a friend if all they do is agree with everything we say and do?
Bryce Crawford is trying to do whatever it takes to reach the lost and teaching others to do the same.
Going to his website and watching some of his video clips could be beneficial to all.
Letter to the American Church by Eric Metaxas
The following is a link to an interview with Eric Metaxus and Pastor Alan Jackson (pastor of World Outreach Church? since 1989).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfr7u5pvEpo
Here are a few take away points from this very informative interview:
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.
Click on the link below to watch an excellent summary of the book of Job.
25 minute summary of the book of Job
Below I listed some worthwhile takeaway points from the video.
Every time someone suffers we are looking for answers.
Can a person love God when God gives them nothing?
Job loses everything.
In real life when suffering arrives you do not get the explanation either.
Job’s friends thought this: Suffering is Punishment, Innocent people don’t suffer like this, Therefore Job is NOT innocent.
God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked – not wrong in general terms, but does not apply to Job.
Job is not walking away, he insists in bringing his case directly to God.
Faith that stays in the room even when the room is unbearable.
This is not faithlessness.
Job is not a man who has lost his faith, but a man furious at the silence.
In the middle of all the anguish Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
What makes Job’s faith extraordinary?
God’s silence is not equal to God’s absence.
Suffering can be where God is most actively present even when it cannot be felt.
The answer to suffering in Job is not an explanation but an encounter.
Job asks, “Where are you?” God answers, “I am here, I have always been here”
The encounter changed something a comfortable life never could have changed.
Job does not say, “Now I understand why this happened”. He says, “Now I have seen you”.
Job was angry and honest.
Job’s friends had correct theology and beautiful speeches but not the truth.
Two things about the restoration
Job never gets the explanation. Neither do we.
Does Job fear God for nothing?
He answers it by staying, by arguing, by saying “I wish to speak to the Almighy”
He refused to let go of the relationship even though the relationship was giving him nothing he wanted.
He finds that at the bottom of the pit his redeemer lives.
The friends gave God beautiful speech’s, Job gave God himself.
Your anger at God is not faithlessness
Job was still in the room, still in relationship. refusing to pretend what he did do not feel.
What Job did that the friends did not do was to talk to God directly and honestly, without managing how it sounds.
Not the prayer that SOUNDS faithful but the prayer that IS honest.
