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Half-price sale on two of our signature DVDs.
See below.
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Pat's Paragraphs
February 2017
Dear LLT Friends,
For the second year, Christians have been named the most persecuted group in the world. According to a study done by the Center for Studies on New Religions, nearly 90,000 Christians were killed for their faith in 2016, and as many as 600 million were prevented from practicing their faith through intimidation, forced conversions, bodily harm or even death.
“There are many places on earth where being a Christian is the most dangerous thing you can be,” says Robert Nicholson of the Philos Project, an advocacy group for Christianity in the Middle East.
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(Map source: https://www.opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/world-watch-list/)
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But the Middle East is not the only place where Christians are in trouble. India, Pakistan, Mexico, Columbia are seeing increases in Christian persecution, even in some areas where Christianity is the most practiced religion.
This world is becoming more and more dangerous for people like you and me. Which isn’t surprising, considering what the prophets Daniel and John the Revelator tell us.
I could talk about the potential dangers facing us here in the land of the free, but we have time to wait and see (and I don’t want to add to the extreme and reactionary rhetoric flooding the media waves).
Truth is, God’s followers in many places are not free to share their faith or even to admit their love for Jesus. But you and I still have complete freedom to live and share our faith. Now is the time for us to share Jesus. Now is the time for us to make His Him known.
Do you believe there are aspects of the character of God that are uniquely important for this time in history? I do. That He is a God of love speaks volumes to a world of people who see God as harsh, rigid, controlling, spiteful. That He has compassion on the poor, the vulnerable, the fatherless and widows, stands out to a world that sees no problem in killing the unborn and kidnapping young people who don’t conform to their beliefs. That God allows the dead to sleep, oblivious to all that goes on in the universe, and promises to raise them in newness of life at the end of the age, reveals His wisdom, compassion and power.
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That last characteristic is what our focus is. Our script for the second topic in the “state of the dead” series is underway – immortality (the first topic is “the soul”). The Bible tells us that God only has immortality (1 Tim 6;15,16), and that the saved receive immortality at the resurrection (1 Cor 15:51-55). Yet many folks are confused, and therefore vulnerable to “lying spirits and doctrines of devils” (1 Tim 4:1). It’s a confusion orchestrated by the enemy of souls.
We aim, with this series, to help clear up that confusion.
Thank you so very much for your support and prayers – you are part of this mission!
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Resurrection: Our Destiny!
Englishman John Polkinghorne was knighted in 1997. He was one of 20th-century England’s greatest minds in the fields of mathematical physics and quantum mechanics, so the knighthood was well deserved. But Polkinghorne refuses to be called “Sir John” because, at the age of 48, he resigned his professorship at Cambridge and entered seminary in preparation for a new career as an Anglican pastor. As a theologian and a scientist, his numerous books and articles are a marriage of science and the Bible.
While most of us would not agree with many of his ideas, we can appreciate his exquisite arguments for the literal, bodily resurrection of Christ. He talks about the “human embodiment” of the resurrected Savior in a transformed kind of “corporeal presence.” The disciples who witnessed the living Jesus after His resurrection were not simply sharing a mutual vision or seeing a ghost. They were engaging with a super-natural physical person. What’s more, the post-resurrection Jesus was not a new or different Jesus. He was the same Jesus they had known during the span of their relationship with Him.[1]
Polkinghorne sees the resurrection of those who are sleeping in Jesus in the same way. The saints will be raised with new, transformed physical bodies. They will not be essentially new or different beings that simply appear to be the real persons who believed in Jesus in this present life.
According to traditional “immortal soulism,” the resurrection is described as the re-embodiment of the immortal soul. In other words, the soul that was set free at death and has been enjoying life on a spiritual plain, is captive again, this time within a new and better physical body. It is this immortal soul that provides the personal continuity from the previous life to the new, resurrected life.
John Polkinghorne disagrees with that view. He does not believe in the immortal soul in the traditional sense. Instead, he talks about “the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ (memories, character, etc.) carried...by the matter of my body. That ‘pattern’ is the soul and, though it will dissolve with the decay of my body, it is a perfectly sensible hope that the faithful God will not allow it to be lost but will preserve it in the divine memory in order to restore its embodiment in the great divine act of resurrection.”[2]
Our great hope is not that our souls are immortal and thus we can never truly die. “Our destiny,” writes Polkinghorne, “is resurrection.”[3]
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[1] http://biologos.org/blogs/ted-davis-reading-the-book-of-nature/motivated-belief-john-polkinghorne-on-the-resurrection-part-4
[2] http://www.franciscans.org.uk/franciscan/franciscan-september-2012/a-destiny-beyond-death-heaven-john-polkinghorne
[3] Ibid.
--Jim Wood
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Save 50% this month when you purchase either or both
of these high-impact movies on DVD.
The Wandering Day
reveals the forgotten history of how Calendar Reform at the League of Nations threatened Sabbath observance. It highlights the champions of freedom who fought back this challenge to religious liberty.
Hell and Mr. Fudge is based on the true story of Edward Fudge, an evangelical scholar
who faced prejudice and injustice as he confronted long-established traditions and narrow-minded critics.
Order from our online catalog using this link:
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