Dear friends and family in Christ, 1) You may click the following link to read an article with RUAP National President Daniel Nalliah that recently appeared in The Australian Women’s…
By John Stonestreet, Christian Post Guest Columnist
May 22, 2014|7:26 am
When it comes to same-sex “marriage,” our culture just like our president, has definitely evolved. After all, it was only in 2008 that a strong majority in California-yes, California-passed Proposition 8 which defined marriage as between one man and one woman.
But when our president changed his mind a few months before the 2012 election, the cultural floodgates opened, particularly in the American workplace. Later that summer, Chick-fil-A faced angry boycotts when CEO Dan Cathy’s views and donations in favor of traditional marriage became public knowledge.
The workplace pressure has only continued. Christian bakers and photographers who do not want to participate in what they consider to be a sin have been fined and faced being shut down. Attempts to protect their religious liberty, such as Arizona’s State Bill 1062, have been crushed through threats of economic boycotts and media shaming.
More high-profile voices have also faced this smash-mouth, brass-knuckle treatment. Just weeks ago Brendan Eich, the accomplished founder and CEO of search-engine company Mozilla, was forced to resign when he was “outed” for donating all of $1,000 to Proposition 8 eight years ago.
The Christian Post – Michael Gryboski
The Rev. Franklin Graham told a large gathering of pastors on Thursday to address controversial issues from the pulpit, declaring that “God hates cowards.”
Graham, president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, based his remarks on Revelation 21:8, wherein God lists eight groups of people who will be “in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
Of groups like murderers, idolaters, unbelievers, and others, the first group of persons listed were the cowardly. It was this first group that Graham focused on for his speech, titled “Standing Strong on the Controversial Issues,” at the Thursday evening session for the 2014 Watchmen on the Wall National Briefing.
“The definition of a coward: a coward will not confront an issue that needs to be confronted due to fear. That is a coward,” said Graham.
26 May 2014 | Cath Martin – Christian Today
Pakistani Christian woman Asia Bibi is due to have an appeal hearing on her death sentence for blasphemy on Tuesday, but will it be cancelled again?
A hearing has been scheduled on four previous occasions only to be cancelled at the last minute by the court.
The last time, it was reportedly postponed when the counsel for the complainant did not turn up.
Bibi, a mother of five, has been in prison since being sentenced to death for blasphemy in 2010. The accusation followed a heated dispute with Muslim colleagues.
Blasphemy is a serious crime in Muslim-majority Pakistan and carries the death sentence, but human rights groups say the charges are often trumped up as a means of settling personal scores and vendettas.
May 14th, 2014 – via SyndiGate.info
Women in Iran have been posting pictures of themselves after ‘stealthily’ taking their hijabs off in public, in a country where it is illegal for a female to leave the house without wearing a headscarf under Islamic law.
Over 150 photos have been posted to the Stealthy Freedoms of Iranian Women Facebook page which has amassed more than 140,000 likes since it was created just a week ago by the Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad.
Ms Alinejad, who left Iran to pursue her studies in the UK in 2009, told The Independent the page began when she posted a photograph of herself driving down a road in the country without wearing a headscarf.
The image was captioned with: “Hijab is being forced on women not only by the Morality Police, but also out of consideration for family, through wanting to keep a job and because of fear of judgment from others.”
“I wrote that I had experienced all of these pressures too,” she explained. “I was sure that most Iranian women who don’t believe in the forced hijab have enjoyed freedom in secret, [so] I asked them if they wished to share this moment of stealth freedom.”
Dear friends & family in Christ, 1) This Pentecost Sunday 8th June beginning at 7:30pm Pr Daniel will be speaking on a must watch live webcast right here at www.reformationharvestfire.com…
Sunday 18 May 2014 – Patrick Cockburn
Earlier this month, Saudi liberal activist Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes, 10 years in prison and a heavy fine for insulting Islam. In fact, his crime was to establish an online discussion forum where people were free to speak about religion and criticise religious scholars.
He had been charged with “apostasy” in 2012, because of his writings and for hosting discussion on his Saudi Arabian Liberals website, and was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes but on appeal a heavier sentence was imposed.
Mr Badawi will appeal against the verdict, but it is complicated by the fact that his lawyer and brother-in-law, Waleed Abulkhair, is himself in jail. He was detained without explanation last month when on trial for damaging the image of the kingdom and breaking his allegiance to the king. Under Saudi Arabia’s harsh Sharia code, almost any critical word or deed makes a person liable to severe punishment.
Lashings and beheadings generally get little publicity except where a foreigner is involved. The local media is muzzled and foreign press for the most part excluded. This contrasts with the blanket coverage of the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, the al-Qa’ida type movement in northern Nigeria.
Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, recently revealed that his family goes to Catholic Church while also admitting his doubts about God.
“The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We’ve raised our kids in a religious way; they’ve gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in,” Gates said in an interview with Rolling Stone for the March 27 issue. “I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.”
When asked if he believed in God, the 58-year-old billionaire said, “I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.”
But he also said he agrees “with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths.”
He explains: “Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm—not all—that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there’s no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view [laughs].”
2/6/2014 J. Lee Grady – Charisma News
In the nation of Colombia, where I ministered last month, a woman is killed by her husband or partner every four days. The problem is so serious that sociologists have coined a new term for it: femicidio, or femicide.
I’ve often quoted the statistics about domestic violence, but when I was in the Colombian city of Barranquilla, I saw the scars up close. The emotional pain I encountered while praying with and counseling women there was excruciating. Some were gang raped as teenagers. Others were sexually molested by relatives. Many had been slapped, punched, choked, kicked or attacked with knives or iron rods by husbands or boyfriends.
Celia (not her real name) had the saddest story. She gave her life to Christ a few years ago, but she maintained an on-again, off-again relationship with a boyfriend whom she admitted was abusive. He screamed at her constantly, he pushed her to the floor on one occasion, and he often told her she was inferior to his other girlfriends.
Yet Celia couldn’t stand it when he stopped calling her. She wanted his attention, even when he called her names and bragged about his sexual conquests with other women.
14 April 2014 | Nasir Saeed, CLAAS UK Forced conversion to Islam of Christian and Hindu girls continues to rise in Pakistan. A recent report launched by the MSP (Movement…
By Stoyan Zaimov , Christian Post Reporter – April 6, 2014|
To mark Monday’s 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, where close to 800,000 people were killed, one survivor working with Operation Christmas Child has shared his personal story of visiting and forgiving the people who murdered his family. He also revealed that the country has experienced remarkable healing and growth in the past couple of decades.
“It was a miracle that God opened up the opportunity for me to meet one of the guys, the guy who killed my uncle, and I was able to share that message of love and forgiveness, and to be able to plant the seeds of hope and love in his life. And [tell him] that Christ also came and died for him, and He loves him just as much as He loves me,” Alex Nsengimana shared with The Christian Post.
“It was probably one of the toughest days of my life, but also one of my most freeing days, because I was able to let go and was able to have the peace that only Jesus Christ can offer.”
Nsengimana was only four years old when he lost his biological mother to HIV in Rwanda. He never knew his father, but had a great relationship with his grandmother, who took care of him, his younger brother and his older sister.
By Nicola Menzie , Christian Post Reporter – May 7, 2014|
Hillsong “takes over” Times Square’s digital billboards in New York City on Thursday, April 24, 2014, by promoting “Jesus” and “No Other Name,” the name of Hillsong Live’s upcoming album and the church’s 2014 conference theme.
Hillsong, a Pentecostal powerhouse with church campuses spanning the globe, recently descended on New York City’s Times Square to declare the name of Jesus before thousands of onlookers while also shooting cover art for a new album that shares its name with the megachurch’s 2014 conference theme.
Instead of flashing the usual ads, news reports or the day’s market results, 21 digital screens played for an hour a looped video comprised of just a few frames flashing repeatedly: “Jesus” and “No Other Name.”
Jay Argaet, Hillsong’s Art and Communications director, told The Christian Post that at least 400 people from Hillsong NYC church joined in the nighttime campaign at Times Square, one of the world’s most sought out tourist destinations.
Times Square, located between 7th Avenue and Broadway from 42nd and 47th Streets, is trafficked by an average of 360,000 pedestrians every day, many of them out-of-towners.
Hillsong “takes over” Times Square’s digital billboards in New York City on Thursday, April 24, 2014, by promoting “Jesus” and “No Other Name,” the name of Hillsong Live’s upcoming album and the church’s 2014 conference theme.
Dear friends & family in Christ,
Here is some very good news.
Geoff Shaw, MP for Frankston in Victoria, a personal friend of Pastor Daniel whose had several meetings with him in the past few months, has just declared publicly that he would be introducing a private members bill against up to 9 months abortion laws in Victoria. Victoria is the only state in Australia where a mother could have her child aborted upto 9 months.
Please do uphold in prayer.
by Ben Johnson – March 26, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com)
The issue of sex-selective abortion is often raised by pro-life speakers, at pro-life rallies, and on pro-life news sites. It is seldom discussed on national late-night television by pro-abortion presidents.
But Tuesday night, former president Jimmy Carter called the issue “the worst human rights abuse on earth” on the Late Show with David Letterman.
The man from Plains told Letterman that “160 million girls are now missing from the face of the earth, because they were murdered at birth by their parents or either selectively aborted when their parents find out that the fetus is a girl. So, that many people are missing, and they’re all girls who are missing.”
Carter called the toll sex-selective abortion has taken “the worst statistic that I know.”
Indeed, the number may be an underestimate. The United Nations has indicated the number of girls selectively aborted due to their sex may number as many as 200 million.
Dear friends & family in Christ, For your prayerful interest, we’re forwarding the following article from the Australian about New South Wales Premier Mike Baird, who is acclaimed to be…
