Featured today is a teaching on the pre-Tribulation Rapture of believers by prophecy expert Mondo Gonzales speaking on the Jan Markell radio program.
For those who disagree with this stance but who are at least willing to take another look at the evidence provided, perhaps you will be encouraged and comforted, too. – pbn
Phyllis Beveridge Nissila
Essentially, I am an encourager in the Body of Christ. We each have a role.
Although we love encouragement, it is a two-sided coin: one, the usual, positive kind, the other, however, the warning kind.
These days, given the situations in the world and in the Church, both filled with ever-expanding deception, distraction, and division (as prophesied), being human, we need all the positive encouragement we can get as the warnings increase, gaining volume and speed.
And in all our individual “ministries” we need each other–arguably more so than ever before.
Thus in what ways I can, I try to do my bit.
Here is another take on encouragement for you (perhaps just now weary) fellow worker in Christ’s Great Commission–for such a time as this:
For The Workers Late in the Field
Do not forsake your furrows,
for wheat is nigh to mills,
the tares are near black-tipped,
and merchants wait their tills.
Do not abandon harvest,
though sky is bruised with storm,
though winds sweep up the branches,
and rain in torrents forms.
Don’t fret to hear the mockingbird,
discourager or cad,
or noisome howling spirits,
your pain but makes them glad.
But know the night is close,
the owner, riding fast
to see your face at twilight
and gather in at last.
Carry on.
Love,
pbn
(from “For the Workers Late in the Field
Poems of Encouragement for Such a Time as This”)
Phyllis Beveridge Nissila
–I read this today: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/columbia-university-protests-pro-palestinian-gaza-cease-fire-day-5/
–Also saw this (excerpted from https://www.hallindsey.com/ww-4-21-2024/ “An Ancient Evil Reborn in Today’s America”):
At the beginning of this millennium, most people, including Jewish Americans, thought antisemitism had mostly been banished from the land. But after 9/11, against all reason, it started growing again. Today it manifests itself everywhere. Young people speak antisemitic slogans as a bizarre form of virtue signaling.
We can see it in the signs and hear it in the chants on campuses and in the streets. Young people, most born after 9/11/2001, today sing out the ideologies of our 2001 enemy — “Death to America!” … “There is only one Solution, Intifada. Revolution!” … “Long live Hamas!” … “Death to Jews!” They compare those who disagree with them to the Ku Klux Klan. But who would agree more with the chant, “Death to Jews!” than the KKK? These pitiful children have become the thing they decry.
But perhaps this last presentation from a previous era when students grappled with their own wars and rumors of wars, puts it most clearly:
All three featured above tell, in each their own way, what might be summed up thus: war breaks not only bodies, minds, and souls, but can extend out to families, friends, people groups, and nations as well.
Usually minds are the first in harm’s way. Case in point. As one young pro-Hamas/Palestinian protestor put it last week, “”Resistance is glorious.” (source, first feature).
To put it bluntly and honestly to all who run after today’s popular campus tribes and vibes: the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” of new (college) freedoms, thrills, and privileges may soon fade–but if your vitriol bleeds out into the real world, encouraged by all the Daddies Warbucks of this era, there will be any number of disabled–and dead–to follow.
Not so glorious.
Additionally, it could very well be that many of you, too, now of prime military age, will be left on today’s literal battlegrounds.
Your posters and street theater are impressive, but when powerful warmongers chart the inevitable course to conflagration, ordnance drowns out oratory. It’s just the way it is in a flawed world where brotherhood is all too often shattered by the kind of lethal rage that beckons the big guns…
But I would ask you to resist in another way in order to stop enriching the undertakers, to harken back to Starr’s lyrics.
Resist being part of that history that, tragically, repeats itself. And find cohorts of like mind.
Make some new history.
Make it good.
But note, however–like all others in this kind of resistance, you may have to stand alone for a little while. And some other things. So count the cost.
Also note: the above is not necessarily a call to arms but, you might say, it is a call to real virtue–which takes real courage, the kind of courage that helps keep the machinery of civilization building up, not tearing down, in order to keep the human race as free and cohesive as we can be, despite the odds, in mind, body, and soul; family, friends, and communities.
Even in such a time as this.
Like the heroes we truly admire.
We know their names now, if not so much then.*
If the reader needs to be inspired by a college student who opposed the real Nazi regime and was part of a non-violent resistance group during World War II called the White Rose, here is her memorable story. She paid a big price, however, even for merely speaking out against the war.
Sophia Magdalena Scholl[a] (9 May 1921 – 22 February 1943) was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany.[1][2]
She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich (LMU) with her brother, Hans. For her actions, she was executed by guillotine. Since the 1960s, Scholl has been extensively commemorated for her anti-Nazi resistance work. continue reading…
Documentary:
Getting closer to the bone from a politician with whom I would respectfully disagree on many things, but not on this (although I might use other character descriptors):
Fetterman no filter:
"If you show up in a Starbucks with a bullhorn and start yelling at people, that doesn't make you noble, It just makes you an asshole."
pic.twitter.com/uHisWdA8PZ— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) April 23, 2024
https://www.lightsource.com/ministry/understanding-the-times/
“Jan Markell spends the hour with Michele Bachmann. We may be in the most prophetic hour of our lifetime. Our U.S. Administration is on “team Iran” and not “team Israel.” This has terrible consequences for America. It places both Israel—and America—in the center of the storm today.” – show promo
Other topics discussed Continue reading →
While we all still can, have a look :
Sasha Latypova with Katherine Watt: SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 is a US DOD Military Prototype Project
See what you think, critically.
Pray for their protection.
Share.
Watch and listen to the end where very practical, regular-people protective actions are explained and suggested.
Here are substack sites for the speakers who are, in my opinion, two of the most brilliant researchers on the topics cited above and other topics as well:
Katherine Watt: https://substack.com/@bailiwicknews
Sasha Latypova: https://substack.com/@sashalatypova
And, above all, carry on, critical thinkers.
-pbn
Phyllis Beveridge Nissila
Bereans Then
Perhaps many believers think little more of the Bereans mentioned in Acts 17 than their commendable “nobility” (as in noble-minded) evidenced by their reception of the Apostle Paul’s presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
But they were also commended for Continue reading →
This is one of the best presentations I have come across post my recently completed, year-long investigative assignment (report here) of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) which includes brief summaries of a few of my own experiences over twenty-years with elements of this fast-growing, multi-part, global movement, in local churches as well as in the lives of several friends some of whom still follow NAR leaders and/or teachings.
Interviewee Dawn Hill is a former, nearly two-decades-long NAR VIP who now ministers to others either beginning their own investigations or choosing to come out of its brand of theology and practices altogether. This can be a frustrating, lonely time, but as Hill says, “we are not alone.” – pbn Continue reading →
I know I just featured Roby Duke’s “Lay It Down” for a Valentine’s Day post last month, but Jesus (Encourager of encouragers) never leaves us nor forsakes us, so have another “valentine” if you need one today, too, holiday or not. – pbn Continue reading →
pnissila
What Does Bill Johnson of Bethel Church, Redding CA, Really Teach About Jesus? Includes a Bonus Video Found Later this Same Day of Posting
Phyllis Beveridge Nissila
After a deep dive into the New Apostolic Reformation featuring several of its front men and women and their doctrines, I was duly impressed with some of the most clever, subtle, word-smithing and subject-deflecting mechanisms used by a prominant leader in that modern movement, Bill Johnson (Sr. Pastor, Bethel Church, Redding, CA) to try to get listeners to believe he didn’t teach what he, in fact, has and does teach, about Jesus–a false Jesus. Continue reading →