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James Smith

My Brother Passed the Fireman Recruitment Process - 1 views

My brother is so happy because he passed the fire service recruitment process. He said he would never have made it were it not for Fire-Service-Recruitment UK. They helped him pass all the recruitm...

Fire-Service-Recruitment UK

started by James Smith on 11 Oct 11 no follow-up yet
J. B.

God Is Still Holy and What You Learned in Sunday School Is Still True: A Review of "Lov... - 0 views

  • Bell asks a lot of questions (350 by one count), we should not write off the provocative theology as mere question-raising. Bell did not write an entire book because he was looking for some good resources on heaven and hell.
  • As Bell himself writes, “But this isn’t a book of questions. It’s a book of responses to these questions” (19).
  • Bad theology usually sneaks in under the guise of familiar language.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Judgmentalism is not the same as making judgments. The same Jesus who said “do not judge” in Matthew 7:1 calls his opponents dogs and pigs in Matthew 7:6. Paul pronounces an anathema on those who preach a false gospel (Gal. 1:8). Disagreement among professing Christians is not a plague on the church. In fact, it is sometimes necessary.
  • This is a book for people like Bell, people who grew up in an evangelical environment and don’t want to leave it completely, but want to change it, grow up out of it, and transcend it. The emerging church is not an evangelistic strategy. It is the last rung for evangelicals falling off the ladder into liberalism or unbelief. Over and over, Bell refers to the “staggering number” of people just like him, people who can’t believe the message they used to believe, people who want nothing to do with traditional Christianity, people who don’t want to leave the faith but can’t live in the faith they once embraced.
  • Others—and they are in the worse position—will opt for liberalism, which has always seen itself as a halfway house between conservative orthodoxy and secular disbelief.
  • This is misguided, toxic, and ultimately subverts
    • J. B.
       
      Clearly Bell thinks this must be a very important issue. If Bell is right, then the vast majority of Christians throughout Christian history have been teaching a misguided, toxic, and subverting gospel.... in effect, it looks like we are teaching a different gospel altogether.
  • It’s a cheap view of the world because it’s a cheap view of God. It’s a shriveled imagination
  • This bold claim flies in the face of Richard Bauckham’s historical survey: Until the nineteenth century almost all Christian theologians taught the reality of eternal torment in hell. Here and there, outside the theological mainstream, were some who believed that the wicked would be finally annihilated. . . . Even fewer were the advocates of universal salvation, though these few included some major theologians of the early church. Eternal punishment was firmly asserted in official creeds and confessions of the churches. It must have seemed as indispensable a part of the universal Christian belief as the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. (“Universalism: A Historical Survey,” Themelios 4.2 [September 1978]: 47–54)
  • Universalism has been around a long time. But so has every other heresy. Arius rejected the full deity of Christ and many people followed him. This hardly makes Arianism part of the wide, diverse stream of Christian orthodoxy. Every point of Christian doctrine has been contested, but some have been deemed heterodox. Universalism, traditionally, was considered one of those points. True, many recent liberal theologians have argued for versions of universalism—and this is where Bell stands, not in the center of the historic Christian tradition.
  • Universalism (though in a different form than Bell’s and for different reasons) has been present in the church since Origen, but it was never in the center of the tradition.
  • some of these are promises to God’s people, some are general promises about the nations coming to God, and others are about the universal acknowledgement (not to be equated with saving faith) on the last day that Jesus Christ is Lord. Not one of his texts supports his conclusion.
  • Even a cursory glance at John 14 shows that the through in verse 16 refers to faith. The chapter begins by saying, “Believe in God; believe also in me.” Verse seven talks about knowing the Father. Verse nine and ten explain that we see and know the Father by believing that Jesus is in the Father and the Father in him. Verses 11 and 12 touch on belief yet again. Coming to the Father through Christ means through faith in Christ. This is in keeping with the overall purpose of John’s gospel (John 20:31).
  • Bell cites Jesus’ words in John 3:17 that he “did not come to judge the world but to save it” (160). This Jesus, Bell says, is a “vast, expansive, generous mystery” leading us to conclude hopefully that “Heaven is, after all, full of surprises.” Bell’s lean into universalism here would be significantly muted had he gone on to Jesus’ words in verse 18: “Whoever believes in him [i.e., the Son] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” Likewise, according to John 3:36, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”
  • The Greek word for “unite” is a long one: anakephalaiōsasthai. It means to sum up, to bring together to a main point, to gather together. It is like an author finishing the last chapter of his book or a conductor bringing the symphony from cacophony to harmony. It’s a glorious promise, already begun in some ways by the word of Christ.
  • The uniting of all things does not entail the salvation of all people. It means that everything in the universe, heaven and earth, the spiritual world and the physical world, will finally submit to the lordship of Christ, some in joyful worship of their beloved Savior and others in just punishment for their wretched treason. In the end, God wins.
  • If you don’t accept God’s story about the world and resist his love, heaven will be hell for you, a hell you create for yourself. We are supposed to see this in Luke 15 where both brothers are invited to the same feast but one can’t enjoy it. Heaven and hell at the same party (176).
  • The result is a simplistic formula: “God wants all people to be saved. God gets what he wants. Therefore, all people will eventually be saved.” This is a case of poor theologizing beholden to mistaken logic. If it is “the will of God” that Christians “abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thess. 4:3), does that mean God’s greatness is diminished by our impurity?
  • If he’s right, most of church history has been wrong. If he’s wrong, a staggering number of people are hearing “peace, peace” where there is no peace.
  • Bell figures God won’t say “sorry, too late” to those in hell who are humble and broken for their sins. But where does the Bible teach the damned are truly humble or penitent? For that matter, where does the Bible talk about growing and maturing in the afterlife or getting a second chance after death? Why does the Bible make such a big deal about repenting “today” (Heb. 3:13), about being found blameless on the day of Christ (2 Pet. 3:14), about not neglecting such a great salvation (Heb. 2:3) if we have all sorts of time to figure things out in the next life? Why warn about not inheriting the kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9–10), about what a fearful thing it is to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31), or about the vengeance of our coming King (2 Thess. 1:5–12) if hell is just what we make of heaven? Bell does nothing to answer these questions, or even ask them in the first place.
  • Some Jesuses should be rejected, Bell says, like the ones that are “anti-science” and “anti-gay” and use bullhorns on the street (8). But wherever we find “grace, peace, love, acceptance, healing, forgiveness” we’ve found the creative life source that we call Jesus (156, 159).
  • At the very heart of this controversy, and one of the reasons the blogosphere exploded over this book, is that we really do have two different Gods. The stakes are that high. If Bell is right, then historic orthodoxy is toxic and terrible. But if the traditional view of heaven and hell are right, Bell is blaspheming. I do not use the word lightly, just like Bell probably chose “toxic” quite deliberately. Both sides cannot be right. As much as some voices in evangelicalism will suggest that we should all get along and learn from each other and listen for the Spirit speaking in our midst, the fact is we have two irreconcilable views of God.
  • Bell’s god may be all love, but it is a love rooted in our modern Western sensibilities more than careful biblical reflection. It is a love that threatens to swallow up God’s glory and holiness. But, you may reply, the Bible says God is love (1 John 4:16). True, but if you want to weigh divine attributes by sentence construction, you have to mention God is spirit (John 4:24), God is light (1 John 1:5), and God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). The verb “is” does not establish a priority of attributes. If anything, one might mention that the only thrice-repeated attribute is “holy, holy, holy.” And yet this is the one thing Bell’s god is not.
  • What’s missing is not only a full-orbed view of sins, but a deeper understanding of sin itself. In Bell’s telling of the story, there is no sense of the vertical dimension of our evil. Yes, Bell admits several times that we can resist or reject God’s love. But there’s never any discussion of the way we’ve offended God, no suggestion that ultimately all our failings are a failure to worship God as we should. God is not simply disappointed with our choices or angry for the way we judge others. He is angry at the way we judge him. He cannot stand to look upon our uncleanness. His nostrils flare at iniquity. He hates our ingratitude, our impurity, our God-complexes, our self-centeredness, our disobedience, our despising of his holy law. Only when we see God’s eye-covering holiness will we grasp the magnitude of our traitorous rebellion, and only then will we marvel at the incomprehensible love that purchased our deliverance on the cross.
  • The pain of hell is our fault. But it’s also God’s doing. Hell is not what we make for ourselves or gladly choose. It’s what a holy God justly gives to those who exchange the truth of God for a lie. The bowls of wrath in Revelation are poured out by God; they are not swum in by sinners. The ten plagues were sent by God, they were not the product of some Egyptian spell gone wrong. God’s wrath burns against the impenitent and unbelieving; they do not walk into the fire by themselves. Bell’s god is wholly passive toward sin. He hates some of it and says no to it in the next life, but he does not actively judge it. There’s no way to make sense of Nadab and Abihu or Perrez-Uzzah or Gehazi or Achan’s or Korah’s rebellion or the flood or the exodus or the Babylonian captivity or the preaching of John the Baptist or the visions of Revelation or the admonitions of Paul or the warnings of Hebrews or Calvary’s cross apart from a God who hates sin, judges sin, and pour out his wrath—sometimes now, always later—on the accursed things and peoples of this world.
  • Love Wins assures people that everyone’s eternity ends up as heaven eventually. The second chances are good not just for this life, but for the next. And what if they aren’t? What if Jesus says on the day of judgment, “Depart from me, I never knew you” (Matt. 7:23)? What if at the end of the age the wicked and unbelieving cry out, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb” (Rev. 6:16)? What if outside the walls of the New Jerusalem “are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:15)? What if there really is only one name “under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12)? And what if the wrath of God really remains on those who do not believe in the Son (John 3:18, 36)?
  • Bad theology hurts real people.
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    A thorough critical review of Rob Bell's book "Love Wins" by Kevin Deyoung. MUST READ.
chakiry95

How To Date any Girl You Want | buzitnow - 0 views

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    What do women want? This is a question that has baffled men since the beginning of time and we men are no closer to understanding women than we were when we huddled around an open fire every night and lived in caves. Why are women so hard to decipher? Simply because we try to understand them from a man's point of view without understanding the basic premise that women think differently from men. In fact, women have completely different wiring than men and we will never be able to understand them on a logical level, which is how we approach most everything.
C L

Miracles in Mozambique: How Mama Heidi Reaches the Abandoned | Christianity Today | A M... - 0 views

  • "I was playing in front of the office," says Sergio Mondlhane, now in church leadership in Pemba. "She approached us, kneeled down, and asked our names. I remember that she smelled good. She gave us candy, and she said she would come to see us again." But the children were skeptical, because they had heard that before. Heidi did return, however. Jacinto Maria Rageje said, "She was the one who led us to Jesus. The biggest thing was, she cared for every single one. We couldn't believe it. We didn't need people to bring stuff. We needed someone to pay attention to us." Baker brought food when she could. She organized repairs for facilities. She befriended the staff and eventually moved into a renovated house on the base.
  • While his wife was sick, Rolland visited the Toronto Airport Vineyard Christian Fellowship (now known as Catch the Fire), where the controversial Toronto Blessing revival of the mid-1990s had broken out. It was marked by ecstatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit, most notably "holy laughter." Hearing his report, Heidi became convinced that she desperately needed to visit Toronto. Against medical advice, she signed herself out of the hospital and took the long flight to North America. While visiting her parents in Laguna Beach, she was rehospitalized. Again, she checked herself out. At the first meeting in Toronto, her lungs opened up. She spent much of the following days draped on the floor, praying and being prayed for. Never before, she says, had she experienced the love of Jesus in such a tangible way.
  • One night, she had a vision of Jesus in which she literally ate his flesh and drank his blood. He spoke to her about the children who so burdened her. "There will always be enough," he said. Heidi took it that they were not to pull back or limit their program. They were to care for every child they encountered and to count on Jesus to provide. As he had cared for her, he would for them.
C L

What about the issue of suffering? Does this prove that there is no God and that we are... - 0 views

  • The issue of suffering is not something the Christian should avoid. It is glaring evidence that man has rejected God; all is not well on board the flight. It works for our cause, not against it. All these things, pain, disease, droughts, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. should cause the thinking person to investigate the claims of the note of God's Word, and see its explanation.
  • However, the ultimate convincing agent is, of course, the unbending Law of God. It is the knowledge of the Law and the fearful consequences of transgressing its precepts that should cause fear to kick in, and hopefully common sense should then cause the sinner to seek after the Savior, who lovingly died and rose again, so that they might be saved.
Ebey Soman

Enemy of Palestine and Israel - 0 views

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    The Arab people and the Israelis must realize who the real enemy is. As long as they do not identify and deal with it, peace can never be achieved in the Middle East and the Palestinian people will only continue to suffer.
Ebey Soman

The Water Tribes of Avatar - 0 views

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    All you need to know about the Water Tribes and their relatively short history, skills, leadership and the future of their tribes. The Story of the Northern Tribe and the Southern Tribe of Water Benders from the show Avatar the Last Airbender - a popular Nickelodeon Anime series.
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