Noah's Blog

Day 1
Rain.

Day 2
Rain.

Day 3
Rain.

Day 4
Rain.

Day 5
Rain.

Day 6
So I was loading up the last of the animals last week when I walk past my neighbor Roger, the Molech-worshipper. He looks up and says "Hey, looks like rain."

True story

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Man Tired of Being Used in Sermon Illustrations

SOMERSET, Pa. — Dan Felks, a local mechanic, noticed he was getting strange looks and sly comments around town a few months ago.
"People at the grocery store would smile at me and say, ‘I’ve heard about you,’" he says. "Some even talked about things I’d done in my past."
But it wasn’t until he dropped into Pine Grove Christian Fellowship one Sunday that he realized his old college roommate, pastor Pete Lancaster, was using him in sermon illustrations.
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How Long Blues - Eric Clapton & Dr. John

This song is from Clapton's "From The Cradle" CD. This unplugged version is with Dr. John playing the Piano.

God's Fatherly Relationship to Jesus and to Believers

"According to our Lord's own testimony in John's gospel, God's fatherly relation to him implied four things:
First, fatherhood implies authority. The Father commands and disposes; the initiative which he calls his Son to exercise is the initiative of resolute obedience to his Father's will. "I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me." (John 6:38;17:4;5:19;4:34).
Second fatherhood implied affection. "The Father loves the Son." (5:20; 15:9-10).
Third, fatherhood implied fellowship. "I am not alone, for my Father is with me." (16:32; 8:29).
Fourth, fatherhood implied honor. God wills to exalt his Son. "Father.... glorify your Son." (17:1; 5:22-23).
All this extends to God's adopted children. In, through and under Jesus Christ their Lord, they are ruled, loved, companied with and honored by their heavenly Father. As Jesus obeyed God, so must they." J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg 205.

If you are a believer in Christ you must let these truths to sink down into your heart, believe them, embrace them. The love the Father has for the Son is the same love He has for all His children. Authority, affection, fellowship and honor, what privileges belong to God's children, what a testimony to his grace.

Frank Caliendo Does Charles Barkley and Bill Walton

Frank is appearing on the TNT overtime basketball show doing many impressions. He appears with Charles Barkley and impersonates him, very funny.

Making Your Blues Go Away Part 6

Everybody gets the blues they are common to man. In order to make your blues go away you First have to realize that even spiritual people get depressed, second you have to face your emotions, third you have to uncover the root of your depression, forth you have to dethrone your feelings and:
Fifth You have to Remember The Grace Of God

Just like the children of Israel we easily forget God’s delivering grace in our lives. All of a sudden our redeemer becomes our neglector. Instead of singing, “How Great Thou Art” we say, “God Where Art Thou?.” The psalmist remembered God’s grace, “The Lord looked down from His sanctuary on high, from heaven He viewed the earth, to hear the groans of the prisoners and release those condemned to death” (Psalm 102:19-20). The history of Israel is one of God continually delivering his people, being gracious to them.

The apostle Paul reminds us that before we came to faith in Christ we had to “Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). We were completely lost and undone as far away from God as you could be. There was nothing in us that would cause God to save us, we were dead men walking. "But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved." (Ephesians 2:4-5)

It’s good to remember the pit that God brought you out of. It’s good to remember the undeserved grace of God that overshadowed my hell-bound life and made me His child. It’s good to remember that I’m written on the palm of His hand and my name is engraved in the book of life. It’s good to remember that I’ve been given His precious Holy Spirit to indwell me and reveal the Son to me. If the cloud of depression darkens your vision of His present grace, remember His past grace and look for his future grace.

Belief

Motivational Posters For The Post-Evangelical Chaos

The Perfect Father

"The thought of our Maker becoming our perfect parent - faithful in love and care, generous and thoughtful, interested in all we do, respecting our individuality, skillful in training us, wise in guidance, always available, helping us find ourselves in maturity, integrity, and uprightness - is a thought which can have meaning for everybody, whether we come to it by saying, "I had a wonderful Father, and I see that God is like that, only more so," or by saying, "My Father disappointed me here, and here, and here, but God, praise his name, will be very different," or even by saying, "I have never known what it is to have a Father on earth, but thank God I now have one in heaven." The truth is that all of us have a positive ideal of fatherhood by which we judge our own and others' fathers, and it can safely be said that the person for whom the thought of God's perfect fatherhood is meaningless or repellent does not exist." J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg 204

Al Green -Jesus Will Fix It

Another song from The Soul Survivor album. Al starts by preaching about Jesus and how he will help you and then breaks into a great version of Jesus Will Fix It. This is Blues Gospel and if it doesn't get you moving you might be dead. Turn it up loud for greatest enjoyment.

Joel Beeke “Calvin on Prayer”

John Calvin believed that prayer is not an academic problem, but a precious gift and the essence of Christian life. Therefore his theology of prayer is very practical. In his Institutes, Calvin defined prayer: “the communion of men with God by which, having entered the heavenly sanctuary, they appeal to him in person concerning his promises in order to experience… that what they believed was not in vain.” He also said that it is “a communication between God and us whereby we expound to him our desires, our joys, our sighs, in a word, all the thoughts of hearts.” Calvin saw prayer as given for man that he might lay hold of divine riches.

Prayer is part of the means that God has ordained to bring about His plan, so it is not useless in light of God’s sovereignty. It does not change God or His decrees because 1) God is immutable, 2) God’s pleasure governs all things 3) God controls everything, including prayer. However, God anticipates our prayers and responds to them. As someone suggested, prayer is a “divine response to a divine initiative in the elect.”

Calvin offered at least six purposes for prayer: 1) To go to God in every need and find them met in Him 2) to learn to desire what is right 3) to prepare to humbly receive God’s response 4) to meditate on God’s kindness 5) to delight in His response 6) to confirm God’s faithfulness as we see our prayers answered. Scripture shapes, controls, and restrains the content of our prayers as they spring from faith.

Beeke provided four rules of prayer from Calvin: Prayer must maintain a heartfelt sense of 1) reverence 2) need and repentance 3) humility and trust in God and 4) confident hope. “Prayer is given by the Father, is made possible through the Son, and is worked out in the soul by the Spirit, through whom it returns via Christ to the Father.” Our prayers our heard by the Father because of Christ as the Spirit teaches us how to pray.

Christian piety is necessarily dependent upon prayer as it is the channel between us and God. By it we submit all things to God and adore Him, both as individuals and corporately. “The prerequisite of effective corporate praying is effective private prayer.” Those who do not pray neglect a precious treasure and commit idolatry by defrauding God. Calvin saw lack of prayer as a denial that God is the author of all good things.

Beeke concluded, “Ultimately, for Calvin, prayer is a heavenly act, a holy and precious communing with the Triune God in His glorious throne room, grounded in an assured eschatological hope.”

Mere Christianity

The Heart Of The New Testament Message

"The stress of the New Testament is not on the difficulty and danger of drawing near to a holy God, but on the boldness and confidence with which believers may approach him: a boldness that springs directly from faith in Christ, and from the knowledge of his saving work. "In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence" (Eph. 3:12)...To those who are Christ's, the holy God is a loving Father; they belong to his family; they may approach him without fear and always be sure of his fatherly concern and care. This is the heart of the New Testament message." J.I. Packer, Knowing God, Pg 203.

Al Green - Everything's Gonna Be Alright (He's Coming Back)

This song is from Al Green's album "Soul Survivor". On the day Jesus ascended to heaven the disciples saw two angels who told them,"Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus who was taken from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven" Acts 1:11. You need to turn this song up and praise God!

The Porpoise Driven Life

This is awesome! The next wave Christians need to surf. Who knew the fish symbol represented a porpoise! This was revealed by the offspring of the fish that swallowed Jonah, a new revelation from God.

Making Your Blues Go Away Part 5

After you admit your depressed, face your emotions and uncover the root, the next step is:
Fourth You Have To Dethrone Your Feelings

Admit it or not most of us live life under the tyranny of our feelings. If we feel good, life is good, if we feel bad, life is bad. Even the way we treat one another (the quality of our relationships) is often determined by how we feel. We can cause a lot of problems when our feelings are running the show.

Notice what the discouraged Psalmist did after admitting his despair to God, “But you, O Lord, sit enthroned forever; Your renown endures through all generation” (v.12). Can you believe this? To my knowledge his emotion had not changed. He still felt depressed and overwhelmed with life. But he did a strange thing. This discouraged believer stepped over his gloomy feelings and chose to bless the Lord. Was this hypocritical? NO! The psalmist revealed that God “will respond to the prayer of the destitute; He will not despise their plea” (v.17).

God hears the praise of the depressed. He knows our hearts, he feels our pain, he understands our humanness. God never turns away from our praise even when it is filtered through a heavy heart. You have to dethrone your feelings, you cant allow your feelings to rule your life. You have to choose to praise God, you have to choose to offer up a sacrifice of praise. What makes it a sacrifice is that it is an act of the will not based on the emotions.

Forgiving Oneself Is, Quite Frankly Incoherent

And what biblical warrant is there for this easy way many have of talking about “forgiving myself”? In the domain of pop psych, we all know, more or less, what we mean. But in the matrix of Wright’s discussion of what forgiveness is and entails, you have to have two parties to talk about forgiveness: the offender and the offended. Forgiving oneself is, quite frankly, incoherent. One can accept God’s forgiveness, and the forgiveness of others, and press on in various ways. But talk of forgiving oneself merely has the effect of muddying the crispness of the earlier discussion.

-D. A. Carson, review of N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, RBL (April 23, 2007): 7-8 (emphasis added).

Heart Attack Victum Goes Unnoticed At Penecostal Revival

MIAMI, Okla. — In the midst of a "Holy Spirit" revival meeting at Full Gospel Temple Saturday night, Barry Munrow, 58, suffered a heart attack and went unnoticed for three hours because dozens of people were "slain in the Spirit" around him.
"I thought he was overcome by the power of God," says associate pastor Kevin Toomey, 35, who saw Munrow fall into the aisle during the visiting evangelist's sixth impassioned altar call. An usher laid a modesty cloth over Munrow and various people prayed for him throughout the evening. The evangelist came by at one point and touched Munrow's forehead and said, "More, Lord. Fill him up."
But at 11 p.m., when the service wound down, people noticed that Munrow had not moved for at least two hours. They also noticed he was blue.
"That's when we knew something was wrong," says pastor Lou Dilbeck, who has known Munrow for twenty years.
They called 911 while people prayed passionately for Munrow's healing but he was "pretty cold by then," says one observer. The ambulance arrived and took him to the county hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Munrow's wife says she will not sue the church, and she takes solace that he "went to his heavenly reward under these circumstances." But as a result of the incident, Dilbeck is adding a crew of "life signs" ushers to work revival meetings alongside regular "catchers" and "modesty cloth drapers." Life signs ushers will carry small mirrors to check if "slain" people are breathing, and they have permission to gently feel for a pulse, if someone appears to be dead.
"We want people to meet with God at our meetings, but not face to face," he says. •

All content © 2003 LarkNews.com. All rights reserved.

Defeat

Increasing success by lowering expectations - Demotivators from Despair.com

A New Relationship

"The whole spirit of Old Testament religion was determined by the thought of God's holiness. The constant emphasis was that human beings, because of their weakness as creatures and their defilement as sinful creatures, must learn to humble themselves and be reverent before God...But in the New Testament we find that things have changed. God and religion are not less than they were; Old Testament revelation of the holiness of God, and its demand for humility in man is presupposed throughout. But something has been added. A new factor has come in. New Testament believers deal with God as their Father. Father is the name by which they call him. Father has now become his covenant name - for the covenant which binds him to his people now stands revealed as a family covenant. Christians are his children, his own sons and daughters, his heirs." J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg. 202-203

Eric Clapton - Standin' Round Crying

C.S. Lewis on Giving

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusement, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our giving does not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say it is too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot because our commitment to giving excludes them” [Mere Christianity; see here].

Making Your Blues Go Away Part 4

We are looking at making your blues go away. The first thing we said was that spiritual people get depressed, this is something that affects everyone. Second you have to face your emotions, they are real and cannot be denied.

Third: You Have To Uncover The Root

Whatever else depression does, it centers “me” on “me.” Notice all the “I’s” in Psalm 102. After you dwell on yourself you can come up with a list of things you are disappointed over. Things you are dissatisfied with, things you feel are unfair (why does this happen to me! or I don’t deserve this!). You start blaming God and then decide to quit (I’m not going to take it anymore). In the words of Pogo: “I met the enemy and it was me.”

My depression is not because God didn’t come through for me, but that I hadn’t come through for myself. God didn’t fail me, I failed me. I had failed to reach some expectation I had set for myself. As long as I control my life, as long as my own expectations remain the measuring rod for my success, as long as everything depends on me, I will be singing the blues.

Not all depressions are self-induced but some are. The more we deify ourselves, the more we focus on ourselves, the more we expect ourselves to be God, the more we open ourselves to be disappointed, discouraged and dejected. Selfish flesh can not help but can only disappoint. You must uncover the root.

The Fatherhood Of God

"Everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. "Father" is the Christian name for God...Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption...The revelation to the believer that God is his Father is in a sense the climax of the Bible, just as it was a final step in the revelatory process which the Bible records."
J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg. 201-202

For movie buffs, "Luke (insert your name here) I am your Father"

Johnny Cash - Personal Jesus

Idaho Mega-Church Effectively Controls State

BOISE — In 12 short years, Christian Family Center, a church of 8,500, has purchased large swaths of cheap Idaho land with surplus tithes and effectively taken control of the state.
"I am largely a figurehead now," the governor concedes. Many state services are now in church control, including state highways, which the church maintains as toll roads. Church members drive for free. Others pay $7-12.
"It's like The Blob or the Borg," says one critic. "While we weren't looking, they took over the state. It's an evangelical Utah."
One liberal watchdog group has launched a "Buy Idaho Back" campaign. For now, one can drive from Oregon to Montana and never leave the church's "Area of Ministry." Road rules are policed by an Usher Force driving new Mustangs. Every billboard bears an IXOYE fish or salvation appeal in addition to the advertisement. All roadside businesses offer Study Bibles in racks near the door.
The church owns so much pastureland it had to hire a full-time pastor to handle grazing requests from ranchers.
"Tithes are up again, so we're heading to Oregon," says pastor Rob Brilmeyer. •
From Lark News