57 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 6-5-19”

  1. Morning all, welcome to my day. We got some rain this evening. Hoping that it was enough to fill some water tanks. Went to a birthday dinner for someone, good fellowship.

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  2. Good morning, Jo. Glad to hear it about the rain. We had rain last night also. So unusual for this time of year.

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  4. Am I the only one here who remembers Pearl Harbor day?.
    I was at the American Theater in Charleston watching Gene Tierney in Belle Star.
    When I got home we were at war.
    I’ve told this before because I remember saying.
    “I always thought I would be in that war.”

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  5. OK ladies and gents.

    Now that I know there was an issue with my email here at the blog, I’ve now received the backlog that wasn’t getting thru because I hadn’t updated to new Microsoft terms of service.

    So Kim, Janice, Donna, and Cheryl, my apologies, they just weren’t getting thru. Now that they have, I’ll get them up in order received over the rest of the week.

    Thanks for your understanding. 🙂

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  10. Morning! Looks like a fun book signing event up there?
    It is a cool overcast morning in the forest with some thunderstorms predicted for us this afternoon. Thus far the storms have stayed to the south and east of us but today is supposed to be our day for rain and perhaps some hail….

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  12. Good morning! It’s ladies’ church meeting day. Got to get in gear for that.i picked up some brownies,two varieties, at Publix. I will enjoy hearing the speaker, a former missionary, who recently joined our church.

    I feel pretty tired lately. I need to get on a better diet. Brownies today won’t help. Tomorrow is the better day to think about the diet.

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  14. Yesterday while I was driving to teach Bible study, I was listening to the Eric Metaxas show, as usual. I love hearing the stories Ken Fish tells. He’s with Kingdom Fire ministries–which is a deliverance ministry.

    He and Eric were discussing Lazarus raised from the dead. (And how ironic, the Lazarus story was my reading this morning!).

    Eric commented, “The corpse was rotting, four days in the tomb, and yet Jesus raised him.”

    Ken said he knew of a story just like that.

    It starts in this video at about 1 hour 4 minutes. (The interview on the podcast was three different episodes; this story is at the start of the third episode for those who listen on Metaxas Super).

    Stunning. Ken told two stories of people raised from the dead.

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  15. What is a deliverance ministry?

    Nice photo, looks like you had fun. I heard something about the ship recently, not related to the book, but I can’t remember what.

    Pearl Harbor was the milestone event in my parents’ lives, historically speaking. My dad went off to the Navy and my mom (this was before they met and married) wound up in Long Beach, California with her girlfriend working as ‘Rosie the Riveters’ in the local factories. They shared an upstairs apartment on Daisy Street that had a very tiny, itty-bitty glimpse out the kitchen window of the ocean.

    I pass by Daisy Street on my way into my new office now, but it’s been cut off around the spot where their apartment used to be — lots of high-rises, a big new City Hall, etc.

    But Pearl Harbor was often talked about as I was growing up. My uncle was also in the Navy, on a ship in that harbor, and survived the attack.

    I’m off for a meeting with editors/reporters and representatives of a local refinery regarding coverage issues. I’m strictly backup on doing refinery stories but they wanted me in the meeting as well. This is my frst day not working from home in 2-3 weeks, I think.

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  16. Our community held a gay pride flag raising late yesterday (and the rainbow flags now fly throughout the town for the month of June); we covered it with photos and I wrote an advance copy block. It’s become interesting to me how quickly that issue has become monolithically accepted by all the proper people in power, from the chamber of commerce & biz leaders to the electeds to recognized community leaders, and, well, just about everybody from the looks of it. Everyone wants to be seen waving the flags and in the forefront of that issue. There is no other argument to be made (other than “hate”).

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  17. A beautiful morning here. I had a lovely walk this morning, and saw that there are still some tadpoles in the ditch by the bull pen. Then back in time to do my morning chores and a half hour of scything. Trying to build up before it is time to really tackle things. I love this time of year.

    Daughter asked me to make her lunches for her. I like to insert a note with some Scripture. She reads them and posts them on her bathroom mirror. She appreciates that her sandwiches are cut. I thank her for letting us help in this adventure.

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  25. DJ, my parents-in-law’s lives ran parallel to your parents’. My FIL was also in the Navy during WWII. My MIL (and her mother, sister, and sister-in-law) were Rosies at the Willow Run bomber factory not far from here. They did not meet until after the war.

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  26. I think the I is for Intersex (an actual physical condition) and the A is for Asexual (not interested in sex with anyone).

    As for WWII, my parents were too young to be involved in any way, but Hubby’s dad was in the war in Europe (you may remember me mentioning he brought home a knife with a swastika that he took off a dead German soldier), and his mom joined the Marines and worked on building or repairing airplanes or jeeps or something like that, in Cherry Hill, N.C.

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  27. Michelle, my radar goes off at the raised-from-the-dead stories, as from what I hear they have never been verifiable when someone seeks to research one.

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  29. Understandably, Cheryl.

    The first raising from the dead took place many years ago in a Mexican village. The woman was young and with an undertaker, was put on ice. After four days, they built a funeral pyre, poured on the gasoline, the people gathered around to pray and sing a hymn. As they sang, the woman coughed and sat up.

    Half the people fainted, the other half ran away and perplexed, she climbed off the pyre.

    Fish met her years later when he attended Princeton with her daughter.

    She’s now died a second time.

    The second story, however, was Fish himself.

    He was asked to visit a woman in the ICU near Melbourne, Australia several years ago. She wasn’t quite dead yet, but close to death and the doctors had asked everyone to come in for their goodbyes.

    Her heartbeat was irregular and extremely slow, her face was gray and she had shriveled into herself.

    He shook his head, laid hands and began to pray.

    A jolt went through him, into her and she began to shake wildly, the EKG went crazy and the ICU nurses and doctors rushed in.

    Soon, her heartbeat regulated and she opened her eyes.

    She went home that night and he saw her recently. She thanked him for bringing her back to life.

    Fish is very careful about the healings. Where possible, information is carefully taken down, along with medical records and sent to a Baylor Medical School professor/practicing physician for evaluation.

    They’re documenting and keeping track of verified miracles.

    FYI.

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  30. Am I the only one who finds the A to be ironical in its inclusion with the others?

    My father was in the Navy and mother worked a civilian position in Army base support. Similar, but not a Rosie.

    The ladies’ group meeting was great. The woman who spoke was a nurse turned missionary in the Philippines. It was very interesting hearing all about her ministry there. She has been involved in a lot of prayer walking.

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  32. Aj @ 2:35 A cute animal can stop the action, but a cute baby trumps them all.
    (No pun intended here.)

    My dad was too old, and had a bad knee, so he wasn’t in the service. He was an electrician at a steel mill. That was more important to the recruiters at Fort Jackson.

    Elvera had two brothers in the service. One, a soldier in France, another a Marine who was at Iwo Jima.
    I think I told you before about Elvera[s bro-in-law who was in the Battle of the Bulge.
    Long after the war, even after I met Elvera. The Army discovered that he disserved a bronze star and sent it in the mail. Someone (not me) asked why he ha hadn’t said something to them before. He said:
    “I didn’t care about no medals, I just wanted to get the war over and go home.”
    I expect he spoke for millions.

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  33. So in the first story, the body was put on ice, and the second, the woman’s heartbeat had not stopped – so, not just like Lazarus then.

    A deliverance ministry, for the record, specializes in casting out demons in order to deliver people from specific problems, for instance, casting out ‘the spirit of anger’ in someone with an anger issue: https://www.gotquestions.org/deliverance-ministry.html. A person who goes around claiming that anger, which is a problem of self control, is caused by a demon, they are clearly not very discerning. James said that temptation to sin comes from within (James 1:13-15) – it does not take a demon to provoke someone to anger. I am sometimes surprised at Metaxas having such people on his show, but then I recall that the Greek Orthodox Church has a wide streak of mysticism and superstition running through it.

    Neil Anderson, author of the popular Bondage Breakers book has a deliverance ministry. Gothard dabbled in deliverance ministry type ideas – Bondage Breakers was a part the materials hawked through ATI – and Gothard talked in his seminars about things like ‘a spirit of rebellion’ and the need to ‘tear down strongholds of Satan’ in the soul, essentially suggesting it was possible to be under Satan’s control even if one was a Christian. It was Pastor A’s invaluable teaching on the work of the Holy Spirit that made me realize that Gothard and Anderson were both dead wrong in such teaching, because where the Spirit of God is, Satan cannot come (Mark 3:22-30, John 16:13, Ephesians 1:13-14).

    The deliverance ministry model is extremely harmful when dealing with genuine mental illness, as deliverance ministers have repeatedly failed to recognize the difference between mental illnesses and spiritual oppression, and the number of schizophrenics and bipolar patients – who are very vulnerable to offers of quick cure – who have been told by deliverance ministries that their demons need casting out and then they will be healed, is legion. The schizophrenics and bipolar, after being exorcised, then stop their medication, leading to dangerous and deadly results – not to mention the fact that the medication for schizophrenia loses its effectiveness when repeatedly started and stopped.

    I have dealt with genuine demonic oppression, among those were deemed so only after physicial causes were ruled out (one reason for ruling out physical causes was the widespread nature of the phenomenon, among those who had no mutual contacts). I have seen the oppressed writhe in agony and heard them scream. It is ugly to watch, and immensely saddening to see their suffering. These deliverance ministries make it sound like miracles happen whenever we pray and use the name of Jesus. They do not. I listened to a group of Christians try to cast out a demon out of a stroke patient when I was sick and in a city clinic in West Africa. It accomplished nothing, for the simple reason that strokes, contrary to the folk beliefs of both Muslims and Christians in the culture, are not caused by demons, but by blood clots or bleeding in the brain.

    Nor did we attempt to go around casting out demons – indeed, to have done so without invitation would have provoked anger, since the charms they bought and wore had genuine spiritual power attached to them, and it was that spiritual power which would possess the wearer at vulnerable moments (one reason for them not showing deep emotion, such as weeping, was to avoid possession). We would, as the Gadarenes did to Jesus after their swine herds drowned, simply have been perceived as destroying their property. Jesus only healed those who had the faith to be healed (Mark 9:19-29), and our Lord observed that casting out demons without replacing them with anything more powerful, i.e. the Holy Spirit, only leads to worse spiritual oppression (Matthew 12:43-45). As a result, we were very cautious about offering any such quick fixes to those oppressed by demons, rather telling them, when they asked for help, that although we could pray for them, they were the ones who needed to set aside their charms, to which the demons were attached, and follow Jesus Christ.

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  34. By the way, about the story of the body on ice for four days: A coma can be mistaken, for those without specialized medical knowledge and instruments, for death and history is ridden with stories of those who were thought dead and then woke up again. The ice adds another interesting twist. In certain situations, medically induced hypothermia actually increases a patient’s chances of survival after a heart attack:
    “Therapeutic hypothermia (also called targeted temperature management) refers to deliberate reduction of the core body temperature, typically to a range of about 32° to 34° C (89.6° to 93.2° F) in patients who don’t regain consciousness after return of spontaneous circulation following a cardiac arrest.” (https://www.americannursetoday.com/therapeutic-hypothermia-after-cardiac-arrest-what-why-who-and-how/)
    In short, neither of the two stories related establishes the first criteria for a miracle of resurrection, that the person had actually died.

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  36. Roscuro, I once had a housemate listen to a series of tapes by one of those deliverance preachers, though it was more than 20 years ago and I don’t remember who it was. I never directly listened along with her, but for the first tape or two I was doing something in another room and heard parts of the tape, including stories.

    He told one story about a teen girl who hadn’t stopped wetting her bed. She wanted to go to Bible college, but was too ashamed to do so. This preacher man realized Satan was trying to keep her from attending Bible college, and so he intervened and her problem was cured, and Satan was vanquished.

    As I heard the story, I thought the speaker all but declared Satan omnipotent and omniscient. Here he has so much knowledge and so much power in the life of a believer that he could know way back when she was two and old enough to be sleeping dry through the night (yes, boys often continue to wet the bed occasionally for several more years, but girls generally don’t) that someday she would want to go to Bible college, and to come up with a way to stop her.

    After that, when the tapes were in, I made sure I was doing something in another room with the door closed, with enough noise to keep me from hearing the tapes. I just didn’t want that cluttering up my mind. One of the famous delivery ministers was actually a former pastor at a church I attended for years, though I never met him and I didn’t realized till a few years ago that he was considered a deliverance person. That connection with my church may well have been why someone at the church loaned my roommate that set of tapes that was so . . . creepy, for lack of a better word. And I once had a supervisor at a volunteer ministry pray to God, and in the middle of her prayer she raised her voice and started talking to Satan. Not being authorized to pray to Satan, I was quite uneasy about the whole thing, but at the time too young to say anything about it to her. (That particular volunteer situation was not one of the better years of my life, for multiple reasons, mostly involving a director who wasn’t qualified for the role.)

    God has unlimited power. Humans who claim His power often do so wrongly, and people who claim the sign gifts today should be treated with a good amount of caution.

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  37. Oh, and I’ve heard multiple stories of people who were at their own funerals, or even buried, but not actually dead. One notoriously sat up, realized with shock where he or she was, and had a heart attack and actually died. I’m pretty sure none of these situations were miracles, just people who weren’t actually dead.

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  39. It is worth noting that the ability to cast out demons was never the focus of Jesus’ ministry. When he sent out the seventy disciples to minister in Israel, it says that they came back exclaiming about how they had power over demons. Jesus replied, “Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:2).

    I have come to realize, through my experiences, that humans are the ones who concede power to demons and that one cannot accidentally or unintentionally invoke demonic activity. The earth was created by God and given to humans (Genesis 1:26-28, Hebrew 2:5), not to angels, to have power over. Angels were created to be ministers and messengers of God (Hebrews 1:14, Luke 1:19), and although they are powerful beings, their authority to use that power is limited to the task they are given and not beyond (Jude 9). Even those angels who are rebellious do not have authority to operate without permission, as we see in beginning of the book of Job and also in the way the legion of demons had to beg to be allowed to enter the herd of swine. Satan is the god of this world only because humans have made him to be so, by choosing rebellion against God Almighty. The whole deliverance ministry idea is built around a false attribution of more power to the demons than they possess.

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  41. I se @ 5:30 that a man (person) can be self-identified as anything he wants to be.
    I think I’ll try identifying as Burt Lancaster again and see how that works out.

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  44. Years ago I heard that we believers cannot be possessed by demons but we can be oppressed by them. What do you all think about that? Does that sound possible?

    Also, is it possible that we believers can have spiritual “strongholds” that are caused by the depth of a particular sin in our lives, without it being a matter of a demonic stronghold?

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  46. Sproul’s take:

    https://www.ligonier.org/blog/rc-sproul-demons/

    ________________________________

    In the Bible, we see [demons] possessing people and oppressing people, causing bodily harm, property damage, and all kinds of things. The Christian is always faced with this question: Can I be demon-possessed? I don’t believe so. I believe that people can be demon-possessed, but I don’t think that this is possible for a Christian, because God the Holy Spirit resides in the regenerate person, and the Scriptures tell us, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17). So, no demon can hold us hostage to the power of Satan. Demons can oppress us, they can harass us, they can tempt us, attack us and so on, but thanks be to God, He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4).

    —R.C. Sproul, excerpts from Unseen Realities: Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons

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  48. Kizzie, Satan certainly tries to attack Christians (I Peter 5:8). But, as Pastor A used to quip, he is a toothless lion, as the Lion of the tribe of Judah has already been victorious (Revelation 12:10-11). So often I see Christians attribute any kind of setback to Satanic opposition. Yet during Paul’s missionary journeys, in which he experienced a lot of opposition from people and a lot of sheer physical hardship (II Corinthians 11:23-33), when he tried to go to Asia to preach the Gospel and was not able to, the opposition to his plan came from the Holy Spirit, who eventually revealed to him that he was needed in Macedonia (Acts 16:6-10). When Paul does talk about a “minister of Satan” in his life, his thorn in the flesh, he says it was allowed by God as a disciplinary measure, so that his strength would be in Christ and not in himself (II Corinthians 10:7-10). It is worth considering, if one is experiencing opposition, to ponder why God is allowing it to occur, and whether it might be for discipline or guidance.

    It is also worth noting that Paul, although perfectly capable of performing miracles as an Apostle, did not ‘cast out’ or rail at Satan, but rather prayed and asked God to take the thorn away. Jude said, when warning against false prophet, that not even Michael the archangel did not even rail at the devil when disputing with him, but instead said that the Lord would rebuke him (Jude 8-9). I, like Cheryl, have witnessed railing sessions at Satan by those who claim God’s power, yet neither God’s angels nor Christ’s apostles operated in that way. From what Jude says, the propensity to rail at Satan is actually a sign of being a false prophet (Jude 8). As Jesus said, many would claim to have cast out demons in his name but were actually workers of iniquity (Matthew 7:21-23).

    As for spiritual strongholds, the only place in which the word occurs in the New Testament is II Corinthians 10:4, in the context of warfare against imaginations and thoughts that oppose the knowledge of God. A stronghold in that context is any false reasoning that is depended on in the place of God. Legalism, for example, would be a stronghold. Spiritual forces are not mentioned in the passage, as the war Paul is talking about is against our own fleshly impulses.

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  49. We need rain so badly. I walked across the lawn to water 2 planters and it is turning brown and crispy.

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  53. We’re getting some rain (well, earlier today we did) on and off today, not sure the total amount. (It might not have been very much.) We needed it, and I wouldn’t mind getting more overnight.

    It was really coming down when it was about time to leave for VBS, but during the times they had children outside (sign-in and sports), it didn’t rain at all/

    Mumsee, I’ve mostly been taking photos of dragonflies. We have lots of them, multiple species. They are such pretty insects, though I can’t begin to identify most of them. (With a lot of similar species, male and female often different, and with some species changing color on reaching sexual maturity, they’re a lot trickier than butterflies.)

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  55. It rained in the Springs but totally missed us. We seem to be in what they refer to as the “donut hole”…it is circling all around us but we get zilch! Well we get the dark skies and cool temps but the precipitation…not so much! Praying for rain to find it’s way up to you Kare…
    Peter I will hold onto my first thought of what it might be…and I’ll tell you after Sunday 😏
    Nite all…..

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  57. Uh-oh, looks like I’ll need to find a battery replacement for my camera in a big hurry tomorrow morning.

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