House Church Talk - Fw: TBC This Week - March 5, 2004

[Claire Bennett]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "The Berean Call" <noreply at thebereancall.org>
To: <updates at lists.thebereancall.org>
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 7:32 PM
Subject: TBC This Week - March 5, 2004


> 
> 
> Mel's Passion
> 
> Confusion (at best) seems to be swirling around "The Passion of the
> Christ." An email was forwarded to me (and probably thousands of other
> believers) months ago asking for prayer for the cast and crew of "The
> Passion of the Christ," who, at the time, were undergoing "heavy
> spiritual warfare." The email originator, Ron Handley, said he was in
> contact with the film's star, James Caviesel, whom he had "discipled"
> when Jim was a student at the University of Wash. He noted Jim's prayer
> request: "This movie has the potential to bring the entire world,
> including the nonreligious, to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ."
> Handley then exhorts the reader to "pray right now for the people you
> need to invite to see the movie with you."
> 
>  
> 
> So where's the "confusion"? The email gives the distinct impression that
> Caviesel is a fellow believer. Really? Does Caviesel have a "saving
> knowledge of Jesus Christ?" His subsequent interviews reveal him to be
> an extraordinarily devout Roman Catholic. There's not even a hint of
> that in the email. Yet Caviesel in other places proclaims his zeal for
> his Catholic faith, his taking the Eucharist daily during the film's
> production, his spiritually arming himself with relics of dead saints
> and "a splinter from Christ's cross," his praying the Rosary throughout
> the shooting of the film, his devotion to the Marian apparition of
> Medjugorje, and his belief that "The Passion of the Christ" was "made by
> Mary for her Son." Pray for James Caviesel's true salvation, and
> especially for discernment for the believers, shepherds, and the sheep
> flocking to this extremely Catholic motion picture.
> 
>  
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
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>  
> 
> Whadaya Expect From A Miraculous Book?
> 
>  
> 
> Translating the tablets found during the excavation of Ebla has
> continued to provide information that shows the reliability of the
> biblical account.
> 
>  
> 
> "In his book, 'The Impact of Ebla,' [Clifford] Wilson notes that Ebla
> tablets date back to around 2300 B.C., or perhaps a hundred years
> earlier (p. 15), one text ascribing to it a population of some 260,000
> (p. 14); that they evidence knowledge of sacrificial systems (p. 19),
> rituals, hymns, with 'all sorts of details about the administration of
> justice' (p. 24), with reference in particular to sex offences in a way
> 'remarkably close' to what is given in Deuteronomy 22:22-30. Further
> customs, names and culture fit to a singular degree with what the Bible
> attests of Abraham, whose date has at times past been challenged with
> routine spiritual effrontery based on ignorance, rationalism and
> possibly evolutionism. In fact, the Bible and its cultural correlates
> are constantly confirmed, and Ebla goes further.
> 
>  
> 
> It even gives names in striking accord with those in the Bible for a
> period of such antiquity, including Eber in the Biblical Table of
> Nations (Genesis 10:24), one which Wilson (op.cit., p. 66) considers to
> "have some ethnic connection with 'Hebrews'". Indeed, as Allbright
> points out - that ancient Table of Nations itself, in Genesis: stands
> absolutely alone in ancient literature without remote parallel even
> among the Greeks' "("Recent Discoveries in Bible Lands," found in
> Young's Analytical Concordance, 22nd edition, p. 30).
> 
>  
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
>  
> 
> Remember Psalm 116:2
> 
>  
> 
> In the year 1875, when seventy years of age, Mr. Mueller was led to
> start on his Missionary Tour, and during the next twenty years preached
> to more than three million people, in forty-two countries of the world.
> 
>  
> 
> "On August 8th, 1882," Mr. Mueller says, "we began our ninth Missionary
> Tour....we went, by way of Calais and Brussels, to Dusseldorf on the
> Rhine, where I preached many times six years before. During this visit,
> I spoke there in public eight times. Regarding my stay at Dusseldorf,
> for the encouragement of the reader, I relate the following
> circumstance. During our first visit to that city, in the year 1876, a
> godly City Missionary came to me one day, greatly tried, because he had
> six sons, for whose conversion he had been praying many years, and yet
> they remained unconcerned about their souls, and he desired me to tell
> him what to do. My reply was, 'Continue to pray for your sons, and
> expect an answer to your prayer, and you will have to praise God.' Now,
> when after six years I was again in the same city, this dear man came to
> me and said he was surprised he had not seen before himself what he
> ought to do, and that he had resolved to take my advice and more
> earnestly than ever give himself to prayer. Two months after he saw me,
> five of his six sons were converted within eight days, and have for six
> years now walked in the ways of the Lord, and he had hope that the sixth
> son was beginning to be concerned about his state before God. May the
> Christian reader be encouraged by this, should his prayers not at once
> be answered; and, instead of ceasing to pray, wait upon God all the more
> earnestly and perseveringly, and expect answers to his petitions."
> 
>  
> 
> George Mueller, "Answers to Prayer," Moody Press, pp. 72-73
> 
>  
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
>  
> 
> "No Doubt We're In The Last Days" News
> 
>  
> 
> 2-8-2004 The Observer, Guardian Unlimited network
> 
> It's rap, jihad-style. A music video with blood-curdling images, fronted
> by a young British Muslim rapper brandishing a gun and a Koran is the
> latest hit in radical Islamic circles.
> 
>  
> 
> The rap song is called 'Dirty Kuffar' - Arabic for dirty non-believer -
> and it praises Osama bin Laden and the attack on the World Trade Centre
> in New York. 
> 
>  
> 
> The video has recently been posted on the British website run by the
> Islamic extremist Mohammed al-Massari, the UK-based Saudi Arabian
> dissident who has lived in Britain since 1994. Al-Massari claims that
> the video has been selling in large quantities at mosques to the younger
> generation and is in heavy demand overseas.
> 
>  
> 
> The rapper fronting the video calls himself Sheikh Terra and the Soul
> Salah Crew - a take on the rap group So Solid Crew. 'Salah' is Arabic
> for faith.
> 
>  
> 
> The song starts with images of US marines in Iraq cheering as one of
> them shoots a wounded Iraqi lying on the floor. At the end of the video,
> it features shots of the hijacked planes flying into the Twin Towers
> with sounds of the rappers laughing. There is then a list of 56
> countries they claim have been the 'victims of American aggression'
> since 1945.
> 
>  
> 
> The four-minute rap is essentially a repeated diatribe against the
> 'dirty non-believers' Tony Blair and George Bush, urging listeners to
> 'throw them on the fire'. 
> 
>  
> 
> One of the most brutal images shows a jihadist fighter in Chechnya
> riddling a captured Russian soldier with a Kalashnikov. Another image
> labels Pakistan president General Pervez Musharraf a traitor and shows
> photographs of Colin Powell and Condeleezza Rice with the words 'still
> slaves' superimposed across their bodies.
> 
>  
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
>  
> 
> Be Not Conformed to This World
> 
>  
> 
> "And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took
> Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he
> prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was
> white and glistening." (Luke 9:28-29)
> 
>  
> 
> We say, "No cross, no crown"; in the life of our Lord the crown of the
> glory of the Transfiguration came before the Cross. You never know Jesus
> Christ, and Him crucified unless you have seen Him transfigured in all
> His transcendent majesty and glory; the Cross to you is nothing but the
> cross of a martyr. If you have seen Jesus glorified, you know that the
> Cross is the revelation of God's judgment on sin, that on the Cross our
> Lord bore the whole massed sin of the human race. "For he hath made him
> to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the
> righteousness of God in him" (1 Corinthians 5:21)....Beware of the
> teaching that makes out that Jesus Christ suffered because He was so
> noble, so pure, so far beyond the age in which He lived, that men put
> Him to death; it is not true. No martyr ever said what He said-"I lay it
> [My life] down of myself." As workers, you will find that people like to
> listen as long as you talk about the holiness of Jesus and exalt Him as
> a marvelous character; but immediately you speak of His death and say
> that He became identified with sin that we might be delivered from it,
> you find resentment. In the New Testament everything centers on the
> Cross. The Cross did not "happen" to Jesus: He came on purpose for it.
> 
>  
> 
> ----Oswald Chambers, "The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers" (Discovery
> House Publishers 2000), p. 230
> 
>  
> 
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