Generation Like

We live in a social media world. Almost all brands and products are tapping into social media. But who are they targeting? Who are the ones fanning the fire? The youth of today. We now have the first ever generation becoming teenagers that do not have any understanding of living life without social media. I am 24 and can remember time without social media. But now, it’s everywhere. I would encourage anyone to watch this documentary put out by PBS called Generation Like (PG rating) here: Generation Like

This documentary left me uncomfortable. I like social media and how it connects people and so forth, but as a Christian and with my identity in Christ, it opened my eyes to the growing trend in our youth today. Youth, and others, whole identity’s are found in social media. Depending on how many likes or shares or comments an individual receives on a photo, tweet, or video, this can change the mood, decisions, lifestyles, or beliefs of that individual or their “followers.” If you watch the documentary you will see how youth are becoming major important tools for brands and products. And the more and more social media moves along, the more and more youth are willing to do anything to become noticed, as you will see in the doc. Money, for them, is becoming second, as the currency of likes, shares, or comments continues to become more valuable.

I know this issue of social media is a “first world problem” but this is a serious issue as youth are finding their entire identity in social media. They are finding their identity in the world, which is far from Christ.

Sola Scriptura ~ Sola Fide

Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide are the two most fundamental marks of the Evangelical church. These two marks are all but destroyed in North America today. For some reason we have decided to all but abandon these marks. All churches in North America are not guilty of this but it seems, especially in my generation, that a lot of churches are disregarding these two crucial marks of  the Church. I praise God for the churches that have not bee persuaded by the culture to bow the knee of compromise. R.C Sproul talks about these two crucial issues in his book, What is the Church?:

“The two major points of unity in historic and classical Evangelicalism were two key solas of the Reformation— sola scriptura and sola fide. Sola scriptura reflects the fact that all the different Protestant parties believed that the Bible was the final authority for matters of faith and practice. They all believed in the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible. And second, they agreed on the cardinal issue of the sixteenth century, namely, the doctrine of justification by faith alone, that is, sola fide. Wherever else they differed (such as over the sacraments and other doctrines), at least they had the cement of what they did hold in common that bound Protestants together.”

Sproul also adds something said by Martin Luther as well:

“Toward the end of his life, Luther observed that the light of the gospel had broken through in his day and lightened the darkness. Remember the motto of the Reformation: Post tenebras lux, that is, “After darkness, light.” Luther said that it was inevitable that before long, the truth of the gospel would be hidden once more in obscurity. The reason he gave was that where the gospel is preached, it divides and controversy ensues .”

Sproul goes onto to talk about peace, which is something my generation seems to be obsessed with but forgets this too easily:

“People don’t want ongoing controversy. We want peace. The message of the false prophets of Israel was one of peace. But their peace was an illusion . They preached peace when there was no peace, or what Luther called a carnal peace. Luther said that when the gospel is preached with passion and with accuracy, it does not bring peace. In fact, our Lord Himself said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10: 34). That does not mean that we are called to use weapons of military combat to further the extension of the kingdom. We are to be peacemakers. We are to be tolerant, kind, and patient people. But if you look at the record of history, the true prophets of Israel contended for the truth, and every time they did, controversy emerged. Probably no human being has engendered as much controversy as Jesus Christ did. People were galvanized either for Him or against Him. The record of the Apostolic church in the book of Acts is the record of ongoing and unabated controversy. The controversy focused on the preaching of the gospel. So controversial was the preaching of the gospel that the religious establishment of the Jewish community forbade the Apostles from preaching the gospel at all because it was controversial and because it divided people. In our generation we’ve been told that the highest virtue is peace. We’ve lived in the age of the atomic bomb. We’ve seen widespread warfare. We’re tired of disputes , tired of people fighting and killing each other. It is by God’s grace that churches aren’t burning people at the stake or putting them on torture racks as was done in earlier centuries . We’ve learned to coexist with people with whom we disagree. We value that peace. But I’m afraid the danger is that we value it so much that we’re willing to obscure the gospel itself. We have to be careful of speaking about unity when we really don’t have it. At times I think we believe we have more unity than we actually have.”

R.C Sproul ~ What is the Church?

Dr. Robert Gagnon: The Bible and Homosexual practice-Part 1

If you have not heard of Dr. Robert Gagnon, the time is now to become familiar with his work. Dr. Gagnon is by far Christianity’s leading scholar when it comes to homosexuality and the Bible. Currently he is the Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He has written multiple books on the subject of homosexuality and numerous speaking engagements. You can check out his website here: Rob Gagnon. On his website you can check out different questions he has been asked and different things that have caught his interest. In the age of compromise, Dr. Gagnon does not back down and is a voice that needs to be heard especially when it comes to the compromise of homosexuality.

Just recently, Dr. Gagnon has developed a series of videos that go through the Bible and explore what it has to say about homosexuality. I have only watched the first video, so I will be only posting one video. There are seven in total.

 

 

Hell

Claim: God is unjust because some who go to hell never had a chance to hear or understand the gospel.

The trouble with this charge is that it is based on a faulty presupposition. Since it claims that God is unfair in setting things up in the way that He has, it presupposes that God was somehow obligated to set it up so as to give each person the opportunity to be saved. But it is just wrong to think that God owes us salvation or even that He owes us a shot at it . Since salvation is an utterly unmerited gift, we can think of the situation along the lines of the following analogy. A rich philanthropist visits a homeless shelter. This philanthropist walks around a bit and then picks out three individuals and tells them that he will gladly buy them the house of their choosing. And away they go. Now those who were not picked might be saddened by the fact that they were not among those selected. But it would be sheer folly for any of these to claim that the philanthropist acted unfairly. He wasn’t obligated to house any of them. He certainly cannot be faulted for not housing all of them. Likewise, God owes non of his fallen creatures salvation. And thus He cannot be criticized as somehow unfair for failing to save all of them, or even for failing to offer all of them an equal shot at salvation.

Michael J. Murray- Heaven and Hell.

116 Clique: Gospel Music (Romans)

It’s the Book of Romans right here, y’all
Here we go

I’m not ashamed of the gospel y’all,
It’s the power of God, which can save us all
In the gospel the righteousness of God’s revealed,
And who lives by faith, the righteous will.

Awake from your slumber eyes
A letter from the wise
The book of Romans
The Christian faith summarized
By Paul upon serving the Christ Jesus
Called to be an apostle
Set apart from the gospel
Chapter 1:16 and 17 is the thesis
Cuz our sins are colossal
Hearts are harder than fossils
That’s everybodys plight
Can’t solve it, Goodnight
How do sinners get right
In a holy God’s sight
Amazing is the answer, see
Romans states it candidly
The first three chapters
God’s case against humanity
Whether it’s idolatry
Or religious hypocrisy
No one can possibly
See the charges and say it’s not for me.
Everybody’s guilty
Everybody’s filthy
Before God on judgment
Is where everybody will be
For those who believe in Jesus
Who suffered and died
Yo it feels so good to be justified Yeah

Yo, at the cross
The wrath of God was spent on Jesus
On behalf of all who repent and believe this
We receive his
Perfect righteousness (by faith)
In exchange, believers cursed lives are his
Behold the blessedness
For Earth’s cold residence
Chapter 4, Paul defends it from the Old Testament
Up to this point we saw the need for justification
In Chapter 5, and following we see its implications
In service, in purity we yearn for maturity
And powered by Christ who gives eternal security
Slowly but surely he removes every vice
Raised to newness of life
Through our union with Christ
But Chapter 7 finds us
Struggling with sin
Its bugging us within
But he loves us ’til the end
Even with complications
Through sins occupation
For Gods concentrated
There’s no condemnation
The Holy Spirit inside
He comforts like no other
He convinces us we’re God’s children
Even when we suffer
Nothing in creation
Could ever separate us (never)
From the love of God
In Christ Jesus who saved us
In Chapter 9, we see God is sovereign in his mercy
His dealings with Israel shows he’s working out his purpose
By the end of 11 it’s Jew and Gentile together
United in Christ to his glory forever (forever)

Yo so in view of Gods mercies
We remove our worldly uniforms and throw on crucified jerseys
Holy and acceptable, Ruled by the divine
Jesus, being transformed by the renewal of the mind
Yes, you was designed, obedience to the scriptures
With love as the key ingredient in the mixture
The Godly man’s picture, under the new covenant
Mindful of God, we submit to the government
Not passing judgment, on weaker brothers
Instead we spread love to ’em to keep ’em from stumbling
When we do this, God will truly then smile
Because Christ is glorified through Jew and Gentile
The God of peace, at his judgment seat
Will soon crush Satan under our feet (No Doubt)
This is just an overview, go and read Romans through
And I pray the God of Romans will grab a hold of you

http://www.lyricsmania.com

Ezra Levant: Why has no one heard of Kermit Gosnell?

DR. KERMIT GOSNELL, 72, IS SHOWN IN THIS COURTROOM ARTIST SKETCH DURING HIS SENTENCING AT PHILADELPHIA COMMON PLEAS COURT IN PHILADELPHIA, PA., ON MAY 15, 2013. Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg

WARNING: THIS COLUMN CONTAINS GRAPHIC CONTENT

Who is the most prolific serial killer in modern history?

Was it Robert Pickton, charged with murdering 26 women, convicted of six, but whose statements suggest he may have killed 49?

Was it Andrei Chikatilo, the Russian convicted of murdering 53 women and children in the 1980s?

Was it Anders Breivik, who killed 77 and injured more than 300 in a shooting spree in Norway?

No, it was none of these. It was an American doctor, named Kermit Gosnell. The exact number of murder victims is not known, but is likely well into the hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000.

Gosnell was a doctor who ran an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. He aborted thousands of babies, but that is not what we’re talking about.

What Gosnell did in that office, over a period of decades, was not limited to abortions. He delivered hundreds of live, healthy babies. But once they were born, he killed them. He murdered baby children.

Gosnell killed a six-pound baby boy, born at 30 weeks. Healthy, premature babies are regularly delivered a month and a half younger than that. He killed an even older baby, for an extra $1,000. He would deliver the babies, and then cut their spinal cord — a procedure he and his staff called “snipping.”

It was murder, over and over again, over decades. Police found a house of horrors in his office — even dead babies stacked in the freezer.

Why haven’t you heard of this monster? He was charged and convicted, as were many of his staff. It was a spectacular trial — a doctor who took the Hippocratic oath to do no harm being a cold-blooded executioner.

Canada was riveted in horror and sorrow for weeks during the trial of Paul Bernardo, convicted of rape and three murders. Pickton’s name is infamous.

Gosnell’s death toll eclipses many other mass murderers combined. Even more diabolical was the factory approach to it, the clinical, scientific assembly line, fully staffed, paid for in part by taxpayers. And the majority of Gosnell’s victims were African American babies.

He was convicted just 12 months ago — it’s not ancient history.

He was convicted of more than 200 offences, including several murders. So again, why the media blackout?

Why isn’t his name as well known as other serial killers? Why has there not been a TV movie about him?

It surely cannot be because of media squeamishness. Hollywood media loves gore; brutal crime shows like CSI, and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, a show that glamorizes rape. Dexter — a show where a serial killer was the hero — ran for eight seasons, won several Emmys, and was a ratings hit.

If there is such demand for brutality and gore in the media, why the blackout on the Gosnell murders?

Why were the benches in the courtroom, set aside for media, nearly empty, week after week?

The answer is obvious: Because the murderer was an abortion doctor, in an abortion clinic, committing hundreds of late-term, partial-birth abortions and full-birth murders, usually of minorities, usually paid for by taxpayers.

That sort of horror story would sell. Too well. Because it would undermine the official narrative that abortions can’t be criticized, that late-term abortions are a myth, that it’s all safe and sound and medically approved and happy. That happy left-wing pro-abortion narrative would be damaged by reports of a multimillionaire abortionist, getting rich off murder, operating in the system for decades.

So, the story itself was aborted.

Enter filmmakers Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney and Magda Segieda. They have decided to do what Big Hollywood won’t: To make a true crime TV movie about Kermit Gosnell.

They’re raising $2.1 million, not from Hollywood studios, but online. They’re crowd-funding it, in thousands of little contributions from ordinary Americans and Canadians.

Do you think this movie should be made? If so, you can help make it. Go to http://www.GosnellMovie.com. It’s a story that must be told.

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/straighttalk/archives/2014/05/20140504-101242.html

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: Debunked

Did Jesus have a wife? From a plain reading of the Bible you will understand that there is no evidence of Jesus having a human wife at all. But back in 2012 a discovery of a Coptic fragment was discovered saying, ” Jesus said to them, “My wife…”” This was then quickly proven false by many, but then in Spring of 2014 there was a resurgence of this Coptic fragment in the Harvard Theological Review. Dr. Christian Askeland answers questions refuting this fragment and showing us that he discovered the “smoking gun”.

Much of the New Testament scholarly world is abuzz with a purportedly ancient Coptic fragment, which has been called The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.  Is it truly an ancient Coptic fragment?  A forgery?  The most recent volume of Harvard Theological Review is devoted to this fragment with articles by Dr Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, who has been the driving force behind the announcement and dissemination of this fragment. Dr Christian Askeland, who earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge University while living at Tyndale House, has recently written what Mark Goodacre calls a ‘devastating’ critique of the authenticity of The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.  Askeland has helpfully summarized the issues.

We asked Askeland a few questions.

What exactly is The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife?

Askeland: It is a Coptic fragment which Karen King of Harvard Divinity School has brought to the attention of the public, first announcing its discovery in 2012. Coptic is the latest form of the Egyptian language.  It is written in the Greek script plus seven additional letters ‘borrowed’ from Demotic, an older form of Egyptian. In the fragment it reads at one point: ‘And Jesus said to them:My wife . .’.  While persons interested in ancient documents are always interested in new discoveries and whether they are authentically ancient, the fact that in this document there is a reference to Jesus having a wife, makes it particularly intriguing.

Why do you consider it to be a forgery?

Askeland: Essentially all specialists in ancient Egyptian material culture concluded that the so-called ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ was a forgery back in 2012.  Francis Watson, Alin Suciu, Hugo Lundhaug and Andrew Bernhard all contributed to a web-based discussion, which explained a string of grammatical anomalies in the fragment, appealing to an internet-based PDF of the Gospel of Thomas (the only surviving version of the Gospel of Thomas is in the Coptic language).  With The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife the forger had cut and pasted sections from the Gospel of Thomas, and in doing so created several grammatically impossible phrases.  In particular, the forger unwittingly included a typo, which marked the particular source. The idea that both texts could include the exact same typographical error (and this kind of typographical error) is statistically highly improbable.  Although the peculiarities of the scribal hand, which had no parallel among other ancient manuscripts, were damning enough, the textual source theory essentially settled the issue.

Now the entire debate has been re-opened with the publication of the April 2014 volume of Harvard Theological Review.

Askeland: Professor King’s recent seven-article resuscitation attempt has certainly been accompanied by something of a frenzy, both within the scholarly world and in the media. However, the radiometric dating actually falsified King’s paleographic dating. The Raman spectroscopy told us what we already knew, that the ink used was soot ink, an ink which is rather easy to make and use today; and the palaeographic analysis could find no clear parallel for the scribal hand.

What is your key insight? Why have you been credited with finding ‘the smoking gun’?

Askeland: I remember sitting at my desk in Tyndale House one day in 2010, finishing my dissertation on the Coptic versions of John, and encountering an old note concerning Codex Qau, the main Lycopolitan witness to John’s gospel; Lycopolitan is a dialect of Coptic. This manuscript was kept down the street at the Cambridge University Library, to which I went immediately. Fast-forward to the present.  Remember, The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife was one of several fragments which were announced by Karen King.  There was also in this group of fragments a fragment of the Gospel of John in Coptic. Just recently, when I gazed upon Karen King’s Coptic John fragment, what I saw was immediately clear.  Not only were the writing tool, ink and hand exactly the same as those of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment, but also the method of composition was the same. As I looked at Karen King’s Gospel of John fragment, I finally saw that it was clearly copied (by the forger) from Herbert Thompson’s 1924 edition of Codex Qau.  Indeed, the Gospel of John fragment had exactly the same line breaks as Codex Qau – a statistical improbability if it were genuine.

Summary of Askeland’s points

(1) when one looks at King’s Gospel of John fragment together with The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, it is clear that they use the same ink and tool, and that they come from the same hand;

(2) it is clear that King’s Gospel of John fragment was copied/forged from the 1924 Herbert Thompson edition of Codex Qau;

(3) Therefore, it is almost certainly the case that The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment is also a forgery.

Finally, isn’t there also an issue of the radiometric dating of The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife?

Askeland: Yes, King’s radiometric dating for the fragment, that is the papyrus which was written upon, not the date the writing occurred, was 7th-9th century.  But the text was written in Lycopolitan, which had disappeared from use centuries earlier.

 

I could not find the author of this article. This article was found at: 

http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/index.php?mact=News%2Ccntnt01%2Cdetail%2C0&cntnt01articleid=97&cntnt01returnid=15&utm_medium=email&utm_campa