Posted on 03/21/2011 5:09:22 PM PDT by Quix
INDEED.
All the worse when we could have gasoline from our own oil within our own borders at 60 cents a gallon—fairly quickly and easily.
I don’t think your comprehension is that bad.
AG was speaking of others of us on FR’s Rel Forum.
I’ve unwittingly ingested some pretty awful stuff over the years—and been none the worse for wear.
And, I’ve prayed for folks who were healed.
Yes, Holy Spirit distributes as HE will.
True about the extreme positions, but to be honest to pentecostals, most I have met both in real life and on this forum do not say the latter. Even the Oneness Pentecostals (and there is a deep in faith Oneness Pentecostal in Zuriel) do not make it to be "omnipresent".
I think we non-Pentecostals may be misled by articles posted on the net that give us the gory idea of Pentecostals (just as many are misled by propaganda pieces against Methodists, Catholics, even Baptists)
THX for your kind words.
Beyond that your implications are absurd and deserve no recognition.
Some of us have noticed that pattern for a very long time.
I pointed out in post 180
I am gratified to have my faith in you restored as you say applies to all people regardless of their beliefs, e.g. Catholic, Jew, Orthodox, Methodist, Mormon, Muslim, Atheist - whatever.Apologies, AG, for misjudging you, but we've had quite a few knee-jerk haters here who aim to get Christians to fight and despite my warnings to others about these I fell for their tactics too.Thank you for that. Catholics,Methodists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Orthodox, Presbyterians, Copts etc do share the belief in Jesus Christ, our Lord, God and Savior, part of the ONE Triune God, Father-Son-Holy Spirit
Blessings in Christ,
Cronos
The other post was merely a ditto of two previous posts none of which are targeted to any particular belief:
Roamer_1: Neither is it effective. LOL!
Me: Indeed, it may have the reverse effect, i.e. the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Thank you both, dear brothers in Christ, for your encouragements!
And you for your cool cup of the water of truth and sanity
in a hot and dusty land.
If one reads the Old Testament, for example, there are plenty of miracles - but spread over about 1200+ years of history. The norm is not for everyone to do miracles.
In the New Testament, the Apostles were marked as Apostles in no small part by miracles. No one would pay attention to what they wrote, otherwise.
Do I believe in anointing with oil, and praying for healing? Yes. It is scriptural. Do I believe that God sometimes chooses to do miracles to spread the Gospel, etc? Yes!
Do I believe every church has prophets predicting the future, or people healing the sick? Nope. Do I handle snakes? Nope.
And many gifts are both very valuable for the church, yet not spectacular.
“4For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.” - Romans 12
I would not reject the gift of tongues, if it was given to me, but the gifts above seem more valuable for spreading the Gospel. And yes, I have met Pentecostals who have told me that if I do not speak in tongues, I’ll go to hell. But then, I’ve met Baptists who have told me I’ll be damned for drinking a glass of wine with dinner, so we can’t blame blame bad doctrine for creating jerks...
Exactly -- there are nuts among every group. Perhaps we are the nuts too, in a way :)
I just meant to say that Pentecostals are not the monolithic "Talk in tongues or you are not saved" that we see portrayed on many blogs or on the MSM
Talking on the MSM -- have you guys noticed the uptick on anti-Christian articles lately and the rise of secularism as a means?
Remember the BBC "poll" that showed that Atheism was on the rise in the UK?
ever wonder why? Well, the timing was just before a nationwide census....
Also, the "poll" was an internet poll of "representative" groups -- if you read the details it was not very scientific at all
I can personally vouch that the churches in the UK specifically are on the rebound from their nadir. They're not full, but they are healthy with small, but dedicated Christians
Now, as Quix knows, I don’t completely follow this end-times thing. If God is coming tomorrow or in the next century, what is more important is for me to live today and believe and pray as a good Christian ought
We Christians each have received gifts of the Spirit:
The first time I went to Rome in the early 2000s, there was this big bloke from the mid-west who was asking the guide about the articles from Dan Brown;s book
What was stupid was that there was so much of REAL history around, yet he believed that crummy novel
The Main stream media distorts the message or deliberately lies - like a good communist propagandist does. What is sad is that many Christians jump on this -- many of the most strident adopted Dan Brown as they thought it was good stuff.
The problem is that they unknowingly do the work of the leftist anti-Christians who see Christians is the big target to bring down so they can then attack everyone else. They already destroyed the great Anglican Church and are now attacking the lutherans, presybterians, catholics, methodists etc. -- next on target are baptists, pentecostals etc. if they are not already the target of the main-stream media
I suspect Baptists, Non-denominationals and house churches would be the most difficult to harm - it would be like trying to shoot down a flying giant plastic sheet. If there's no backbone like on a kite there's nothing to break.
It’s not that the gifts fell away, it’s that Christians prefer not to recognize them as gifts for whatever reason. They are there.
I aver that church leaders from early times quashed the recognition of gifts, because they were problematic in operation (1 Cor 12-14, e.g.). The development of clergy didn’t help, either, leaving common people untrained to exercise their senses to discern good and evil.
The fact that my eyes are closed doesn’t mean that something is not going on in the light.
And I was raised in a rabidly cessationist group who steadfastly refused to discuss the Holy Spirit because He is so ‘divisive’. I learned better.
PERHAPS it depends on how you define preaching.
If you read any number of your longer posts . . . in something better than a monotone
you’d be better than a host of preachers.
Perhaps, however, there are different methods used against these -- more invidious. For instance, what happened to the Baptists in the Netherlands? Yes, they were persecuted by the Calvinists, but that was not the reason. The problem is that many were subtly turned slowly and slowly until they no longer retained Christian beliefs
However, the Baptists are right about separation of Church and State -- I'm reading the history of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. This was a country that from its beginnings in the 14th century, until it was partitioned by Russia-Prussia-Austria in the 18th was a multi-religious state.
There were majority Orthodox Ruthenians in the East (in the Duchy of Lithuania), there were Catholics in Royal Polska and later there were Lutherans, Calvinists, Unitarians, etc -- all tolerated even though the majority religion and the religion of the Kings was Catholic
And they did not have any of the religious strifes that wracked Europe and Russia from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
Why? Pragmatism initially because this was a union of Catholics and Orthodox and a large number of Jews. Then it became a factor that a person could proudly say "I am a citizen of Kraków, a member of the Polish state, of the Ruthenian nation, of Jewish extraction because they separated Nation (what we call ethnicity and in Polish is Narodowy) from Citizenship (what we call nationality and in Polish Obywatelstwo) and from Religion
People stuck together because they realised this was the way that they all kept their liberties and didn't intrude on each other
And this is like the USA today: multiple "ethnicities" (not only Italian, etc. etc. but also there is a difference in "culture" between say a conservative from New York and one from Texas), there are multiple religions
And note that the Rzeczpospolita (the Polish-Lithuanian Republic) elected its kings (it was not hereditary) and there was no religious strife of the nature one sees in Calvinist Holland/Geneva, in Catholic France, in Anglican England, in Presbyterian Scotland, in Lutheran Germanic states and Scandanavia
-----------
What brought it down? And what can bring down the US? Two things:
From the 1700s, the Russians and Prussians started playing with this to get their favorites, the Saxon kings elected.
The local lords preferred an outsider to come rather than let one of their own get too powerful. This meant that the outsiders had no power and they had other interests than the Republic.
Now, this had the effect of contrarily strengthening Catholicism in Poland (just as in the 1880s when Bismark launched the Kulturkampf to persecute Catholics, putting half of the pastors in prison for not being a part of the state trying to destroy Catholics actually had the opposite effect of strengthening Catholics and also making German Catholics in Prussia give up their German ethnicity to become Poles) and actually weakening Lutheranism with many converting because it seemed to be the religion of the invaders (I must add in this for our Lutheran brethern - during WWII the small Lutheran community was told by the Nazis that they could be "honorary Germans" and become "Reich Christians" i.e. Nazi Christians -- in Warsaw they all refused and were in fact a part of the Polish Resistance)
The lessons are clear -- outsiders interfering in Presidential elections and actual invasion (now in the US by Moslems) is how the Republic can fall.
Those who do not heed history are bound to repeat it
Thank you for this post.
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