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NFL Star’s Facebook Post for Persecuted Christians Goes Viral

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New Orleans Saints tight end Benjamin Watson wasn’t expecting his Facebook post on persecuted Christians to go viral — but it did.

After seeing news of the Islamic State group’s slaughter of Christians in the Iraq, Syria and Libya, the NFL player posted his thoughts on his social media page, which were then shared close to 20,000 times and resulted in an invite to speak with Fox New’s Greta Van Susteren.

Here is the content of Benjamin Watson’s Facebook post:

The images keep flooding our timelines and news feeds. Men being burned alive or beheaded by masked assassins. Stories of families on the run, fleeing their homes while they are pillaged and burned. Their testimonies hold a familiar chord. “Convert, Pay or Die! …

As I sit here in a 21st century United States, I can’t help but wonder when we too will face martyrdom for our faith. On this very day nearly 50 countries have laws that restrict or outlaw Christianity, leading to the harassment, imprisonment and death of those who follow Christ. On this day, in countries like North Korea and China, Christians gather for church underground to avoid being arrested by police. On this day, in Nigeria thousands mourn the deaths of their loved ones killed by Boko Haram in their quest to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state. On this day, in Cuba, Christian ministries continue to risk their freedom as the countries continues to feel the effects of Communist rule.

(Read more about the post about persecuted Christians going viral HERE)
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Benjamin Watson’s Facebook Post

The images keep flooding our timelines and news feeds. Men being burned alive or beheaded by masked assassins. Stories of families on the run, fleeing their homes while they are pillaged and burned. Their testimonies hold a familiar chord. “Convert, Pay or Die!”

The persecution of Christians is not a new concept. As early as the first century we read about the Spirit filled boldness of Christians like Stephen and Paul who proclaimed the gospel through beatings and imprisonment, torture and death. We remember Christ’s disciples, most of whom were killed just like their master. Roman emperors like Nero, executed Christians in the most ghastly ways, using them as torches to light the evening sky.

In spite of all this adversity, Christianity continued to spread because men and woman, empowered by the Holy Spirit stood strong in the face of certain death; some being delivered and others falling. As I sit here in a 21st century United States, I can’t help but wonder when we too will face martyrdom for our faith. On this very day nearly 50 countries have laws that restrict or outlaw Christianity, leading to the harassment, imprisonment and death of those who follow Christ. On this day, in countries like North Korea and China, Christians gather for church underground to avoid being arrested by police. On this day, in Nigeria thousands mourn the deaths of their loved ones killed by Boko Haram in their quest to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state. On this day, in Cuba, Christian ministries continue to risk their freedom as the countries continues to feel the effects of Communist rule.

BUT, on this day, Jesus words in Luke still ring true,

“And I say to you, everyone who confesses Me before men, the Son of Man will confess him also before the angels of God; but he who denies Me before men will be denied before the angels of God.” Luke 12:8

I tremble with fear at the thought of facing such incredible atrocities for the sake of Christ. How could I stand firm, staring down the barrel of a gun, the life of my family in the balance? I shudder, thinking of that day. I feel so inadequate. Rest assured, fellow Americans, if it hasn’t already, our day WILL COME.

Jesus goes on, providing us comfort and hope for this day. He says,

“When they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not worry about how or what you are to speak in your defense, or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.” Luke 12:11,12

My only hope in such trying times is the power of the Holy Spirit. He is the X factor. He will give us the strength, words, and vision when our backs are against the wall. Jesus promised the believer many things. Eternal life, abundant life, peace, purpose and forgiveness to name a few. He also promises that they, like him, WILL be betrayed, hated and persecuted, even to death. (Luke 21:12-19)

The Internet has brought close what used to be foreign. Shocking, disturbing worldwide news is available in the palm of our hands. As we see these videos and images we must remember in prayer our brothers and sisters who are suffering for Christ. We must support them in any way we can for they are being witnesses to their oppressors.

Secondly, we must WAKE UP from our slumber, be on guard and stand firm. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Spiritual unity in the body will help us weather the coming storms. We must REMEMBER that as terrible as things are and will become, they are simply signs pointing to one thing; His Imminent Return.

“When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Luke 21:28

Lord be with us.

(to like and share Benjamin Watson’s post, click HERE)

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Christians Growing in Niger Despite Brutal Assaults by Muslims

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Photo Credit: Christian Today The faith of the Christians in Niger continue to grow despite a series of violent attacks from January 16 to 18 that left more than 70 churches in ruins.

The attacks were perpetrated by Muslims who were angry at the latest Charlie Hebdo cartoon that depicted Mohammad carrying a sign expressing solidarity with the victims of the attack on their editorial offices earlier this month.

Now, Christians are holding meetings and services in their own homes under the protection of the Niger police.

“Last night the church members met for prayer as the pastor, who lost everything, encouraged them by flashlight to not only stand strong, but to move forward and to know that this attack will grow the church,” Christian Headlines quoted a letter from a missionary couple in the Niger. “The room was dark on the outside but illuminated by the fire in the hearts of His people, even as stones were being thrown on the roof.”

The violence began in the city of Zinder on January 16. By January 18, the destruction and attacks have spread to the capital city of Niamey. The perpetrators specifically targeted Christian buildings and properties, leading Mahamadou Issoufou to condemn the attacks on live TV. (Read more about the Christians growing in numbers HERE)

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Gospel Music Pioneer Andraé Crouch Dies at 72

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Photo Credit: USA Today
Andraé Crouch, a gospel musician who bridged the worlds of church and mainstream music for more than 50 years, died Thursday afternoon. The 72-year-old singer, songwriter and choir director had been hospitalized since Saturday at Northridge Hospital Medical Center in the Los Angeles area after suffering a heart attack.

Crouch, sometimes called “the father of modern gospel music,” led the choirs that sang on such hits as Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror and Madonna’s Like a Prayer. As a songwriter, he wrote several gospel favorites, most notably The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power, My Tribute (To God Be the Glory) and Soon and Very Soon, a song sung at Jackson’s public memorial service.

A San Francisco native who grew up in the Church of God in Christ, Crouch wrote his first gospel tune at age 14. By 1960, he had formed the Church of God in Christ Singers, a group that featured Billy Preston on keyboards.

He started another group, Andraé Crouch & the Disciples, in 1965, eventually signing to a contemporary Christian label, Light Records. Crouch brought a contemporary pop and R&B melodic sensibility to gospel, making him uniquely suited to appeal to both black and white audiences during the early days of the countercultural “Jesus movement” and also bringing him attention beyond the church. (Read more from story “Andraé Crouch Dies at 72” HERE)

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Devoted Christian Alice Cooper: “The World Belongs to Satan” (+video)

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Photo Credit: CNS News
Alice Cooper, the shock-rock megastar who makes Marilyn Manson look like a choir boy, stopped his hard-partying ways and returned to his Bible Christian roots in the late 1980s and today, still hugely popular and touring, says he isn’t shy about discussing his faith, says his early songs always warned against choosing evil, and contends that the world we live in “doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to Satan.”

“The world doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to Satan,” said Alice Cooper. “We’re living with that. We’re bombarded with that every day.”

“[A]lmost everything I wrote was good and evil,” he said. “Don’t pick evil. Even when I wasn’t Christian, I was saying that. God and the Devil. Don’t pick the Devil. It’s a bad idea.”

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier) shot to mega-stardom in the 1970s and early 1980s with hits such as “I’m 18,” ‘Schools’ Out” and the 1973 album, Billion Dollar Babies. He also was notorious for his demonic makeup and costumes and macabre theatrics on stage, which included simulated suicide and the decapitation of baby-dolls, among other dark antics.

Alice Cooper was nominated for two Grammy Awards and he and his band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. He has played roles in several movies, including Wayne’s World with Mike Myers and Dana Carvey and, perhaps most ironically given his shock-rock music career, Cooper is an avid and skilled golfer. (Read more about the Christian Alice Coopers’ statement HERE)

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UNBROKEN Film Gets My Dad’s Faith Right

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Townhall.com

Townhall.com

By Luke Zamperini

It’s not uncommon to hear someone say, “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this or that story to be made into a movie.”I can’t say that about UNBROKEN, though. I’ve only been waiting 57 years.

I was 4 when the movie rights to my father’s life story were acquired by Hollywood –and finally, on Christmas Day, it will reach the big screen in the new movie directed by Angelina Jolie and starring Jack O’Connell as my Dad, Louis Zamperini.

To say I’m thrilled is an understatement. To say Dad, who passed away over the summer at 97, was thrilled is a bigger understatement.

He got to see the film before he died –Angelina showed it to him on her laptop in his hospital bed –and he was ecstatic at how it portrays his triumphs and tragedies, up till now most famously told in Laura Hillenbrand’s New York Times best-seller also titled UNBROKEN. The remarkable beats of his life are all there: the troubled and troublesome kid who turned to running for a sense of purpose and wound up representing the U.S. in the 1936 Olympics. The World War II bombardier whose plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean in 1943 and who survived for an excruciating 47 days adrift in a life raft with two fellow servicemen; and the prisoner of war who endured unspeakable psychological and physical abuse at the hands of his unusually cruel Japanese captors.

Read more from this story HERE.

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‘Unbroken’ Hero Found Christ at Billy Graham Crusade

By Fox News

The much-anticipated movie “Unbroken” tells the story Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who became a World War II hero after his plane was shot down over the Pacific Ocean.

The film covers Zamperini’s brutal internment in a Japanese POW camp, but it doesn’t chronicle the years after the war, when Zamperini found Christianity after attending a Billy Graham crusade.

In fact, there is a only brief mention of Zamperini’s Christian faith at the very end of the film.

Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, the president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, appeared on “America’s Newsroom” today to react to the decision not to feature Zamperini’s faith more prominently in the film.

Graham said director Angelina Jolie did an amazing job adapting the book, but she only covered 33 chapters out of 39.

Read more from this story HERE.

Exclusive: Christian Magistrate Resigns After Being Ordered to Violate Conscience and Preside Over Homosexual Weddings

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In a case certain to be replayed in judicial chambers throughout the United States, a North Carolina magistrate had to decide this week whether he would violate deeply held religious convictions and submit to the tyranny of the state or lose his job.

His predicament started with a ridiculous ruling from a Bush-appointed federal judge who ordered North Carolina to marry homosexuals despite the fact that such marriages were illegal under state law. The federal judge parroted other activist rulings throughout the country that have commandeered the Constitution’s equal protection and due process clauses to invalidate state voters’ efforts to protect traditional marriage.

Of course, there’s absolutely no way that the drafters of the federal Constitution (and its amendments) ever intended such provisions to mandate homosexual marriage. Every state in the union – until relatively recently – criminalized sodomy.

Not buying the argument that the Constitution intended to protect homosexual marriage, a magistrate refused to marry two homosexual men in Pasquotank County, North Carolina. The state court system reacted swiftly, issuing a memorandum ordering all judicial officers to officiate over such marriages or face termination.

That prompted Rockingham County Magistrate John Kallam, Jr. to resign. The committed Christian stated that when he began work as a judge, there was no expectation that he would preside over homosexual weddings. He also noted that marrying two men, or two women, “would desecrate a holy Institution established by God Himself. Since performing marriages is an integral part of being a Magistrate and in light of recent changes in North Carolina law, I can no longer fulfill my oath of office in good faith.”

He concluded his resignation letter with the words of King David: “‘He that rules over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God’. Where there is no ‘fear of God’ there can be no justice!”

Judges in Alaska are now faced with a similar predicament. After a Bush-appointed federal district court judge in Anchorage used the same twisted logic to invalidate the state constitutional amendment approved by an overwhelming number of Alaskans, Governor Sean Parnell asked the judge to stay his order while it was appealed. The activist judge rejected the Governor’s request, even though the Ninth Circuit subsequently granted a hold until the Supreme Court could review it.

Ultimately, Justice Kennedy, on behalf of the Supreme Court, refused to delay implementation of the Anchorage federal judge’s decision. That means, any day, the Alaska Court System – presided over by a justice who previously ordered a privately owned hospital in the valley to abort babies – will likely issue a directive similar to the North Carolina decree. It remains to be seen how magistrates will respond here.

It also remains to be seen how “We the People” will react to the elites’ hijacking of our Constitution and culture. The majority of Americans still believes, despite the endless efforts of Hollywood and judicial activists, that God ordained marriage as between a man and a woman. Given this commitment to God over man, the elites’ dogged efforts to consolidate control and impose their immorality on the rest of the nation may have just hit a massive speed bump.

Blunt on Christian Facing Martyrdom in Sudan: ‘She Is Wife of U.S. Citizen’

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Photo Credit: APSen. Roy Blunt (R.-Mo.) and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R.-N.H.) sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson today flatly asserting that Meriam Ibrahim, who is eight months pregnant and who is imprisoned in Sudan with her 20-month-old son where she awaits martyrdom for refusing to renounce her Christian faith, is in fact the wife of an American citizen.

On Monday, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki would not affirm that Ibrahim’s husband was a U.S. citizen when directly asked about it by CNSNews.com.

“As you are aware, after refusing to recant her Christian faith, Meriam was sentenced to death by hanging in a Sudanese court last week,” Blunt and Ayotte wrote in the letter to Kerry and Johnson. “Meriam, 27, is currently 8-months pregnant and has been imprisoned along with her 20-month-old son since February.

“She is the wife of U.S. Citizen Daniel Wani,” the senators said.

At Monday’s State Department press briefing, CNSNews.com asked spokesperson Jen Psaki about a report in the Morning Star News that said State Department officials at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum had told Daniel Wani he would have to provide DNA evidence to prove he was the father of the 20-month-old boy imprisoned with his wife before the department would help him.

That news report quoted Wani as saying: “I provided wedding documents and the baby’s birth certificate and doors were closed on his face. … I’ve tried to apply for papers to travel to the USA with my wife and child, but the American Embassy in Sudan did not help me. My son is an American citizen living in a difficult situation in prison.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Christian Alternative to ObamaCare Growing Fast as Deadline Nears

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Photo Credit: Natural News With just weeks left to sign up for insurance on HealthCare.gov, a growing number of people are opting to enroll in a Christian alternative to traditional health insurance.

Nationwide networks of fellow believers help share each other’s major medical bills through what’s known as health care sharing ministries.

“It works just like insurance. I have an insurance card. I show it just like anyone else would. I have a deductible. I have a monthly premium that I pay,” explained Eileen Wade, who joined the health care sharing ministry, Medi-Share, in 2011.

The nation’s three largest ministries boast more than 242,000 members, spanning all 50 states, who agree to live so-called biblical lifestyles — meaning regular church attendance; no drugs, tobacco, or sex outside of marriage; and limited alcohol consumption.

This kind of healthier lifestyle helps keep monthly premiums lower than that of other health insurers for most members.

Read more this story HERE.

Christian Group Plans 100-Foot-Tall Jesus Statue in Muslim-Dominated Nazareth

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riojesusAs Christians from across the globe flock to the Holy Land in time for Christmas prayers and ceremonies, some in the community in Nazareth are seeking to reaffirm the historical importance of their town by erecting a statue of Jesus that would tower more than 100 feet above the city.

The idea for the statue comes from Bishara Shlayan, a Christian merchant seaman who lives in Nazareth, the childhood home of Jesus. Shlayan has seen the demographics of Nazareth change considerably in recent years, with the Christian community becoming a minority while the Muslim population has grown to 70 percent of the 80,000 residents of the northern Israeli town.

“Slowly, but surely, the Christian identity in Nazareth is beginning to disappear,” said Shlayan, noting that signs in the main square declare that “There is no power but Allah.”

The plan is for the statue of Jesus to be sit atop Mount Precipice, also known as the Mount of the Leap of the Lord, the promontory where according to Luke 4:29-30, a mob attempted to drive Jesus off the hilltop only for him to pass through them without injury. Shlayan is raising money for the project, but recently got what may be even more important backing: Israel’s Tourism Minister Uzi Landau gave him the green light, saying, “Start it, and we will bless it.”

“I don’t believe in statues, but it is a symbol of love and peace,” Shlayan told The Jerusalem Post. “People who are against it, it comes from jealousy.”

Read more from this story HERE.

The Effects of Living in a Post-Christian Society

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

It is often said that we live in a post-Christian society. That is true, but its meaning is generally misunderstood. A post-Christian society is not merely a society in which agnosticism or atheism is the prevailing fundamental belief. It is a society rooted in the history, culture, and practices of Christianity but in which the religious beliefs of Christianity have been either rejected or, worse, forgotten. In other words a post-Christian society is a particular sort of Christian society. It is quite different, for instance, from a post-Muslim or a post-Buddhist society (if we can imagine such things). At an emotional level, its Christian character explains why many agnostics and atheists nonetheless find Christian hymns suitable and comforting at occasions such as funerals and weddings. Intellectually, its dormant Christian beliefs — notably those about the nature of Man — underpin our ideas on politics and foreign policy, as for instance on human rights. Even the Enlightenment — which strong secularists like to cite as the foundation of Western liberal polities — is an extension of Christianity as much as a rejection of it. In short, though much of what Christianity taught is forgotten, even unknown, by modern Europeans and Americans, they nonetheless act on its teachings every day.

But there are consequences to forgetting truths. One consequence is that while we instinctively want to preserve the morals and manners of the Christian tradition, we cannot quite explain or defend them intellectually. So we find ourselves seeking more contemporary (i.e., in practice, secular) reasons for preserving them or, when they decay completely, inventing regulations to mimic them. When courtesy is abandoned, we invent speech codes, which are blunter in their impact and repress legitimate disagreement along with insults. When female sexual modesty and male sexual restraint are discredited as puritanical, we draw up contractual arrangements to ensure that any sexual contact is voluntary on both sides. This means that sexual relationships (and their consequences) may occur more often but that they do so in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and legal wariness that poisons relations between men and women over the long run. Above all, when we no longer protect and strengthen the family on the grounds that it is a patriarchal institution harmful to the life chances of women, we encourage the family breakdown that leaves women worse off financially, pushes men into an irresponsible life, and damages their children socially and psychologically.

Family breakdown is in fact the largest single social disaster plaguing the post-Christian society. The family is a natural way of regulating and disciplining us and our ambitions in the activities of everyday life. It makes us frugal; it encourages saving, wealth creation, and the deferment of gratification; it compels us to provide for the future; above all it ensures that children are brought up and taught to become self-reliant, and that the weak, the sick, and the elderly have others to succor them. When the family breaks down, we get crime, drug-taking, impoverishment, psychological problems, and much else at the personal level; and we get a cycle of deprivation, the growth of an underclass, spiraling social-welfare costs, over-government, and severe budgetary problems at a national level. The result of family breakdown is that we have to replace the family with regulation after regulation. Our remedies — easier divorce, better financial arrangements for women after divorce, increased welfare for single mothers, bureaucratic agencies to compel men to make child-support payments, laws and regulations that disadvantage natural family relationships in court decisions on child care and adoption, and much else — never work as well as the stable families they replace. Indeed, very often they make the situation worse.

Read more from this story HERE.