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Be Encouraged

By Richard Gunther

 

2 Peter 2:1 "But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily (secretly) shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

2 And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.

3 And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise (through deceptive words they will exploit) you: whose judgment now of a long time lingers not, and their damnation slumbers not."

1 John 4:1 "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world."

Primarily the above scriptures must be taken spiritually, because they are written to Christians (2Pet.1:1) and apply to the many heretical and cultic teachings which have worked their way into Christian fellowships, but there may be another sense in which this severe warning can be applied and that is the media. Now before someone objects with the comment "That’s right, blame the media for everything!" we ought to be very careful about using this word as a cover-all.

By media we do not mean every news report, or every entertainment. We are not blaming the news media as a whole, or television as a whole. Both areas of public information and entertainment are so varied there is hardly any point in throwing such generalisations at them. But we are pointing the finger at certain areas of the media that tend to include and also exclude information with a deliberate bias in only one direction.

Bad news is the best news. This is one of the most prevailent rules of the information sector of the media. Disasters sell newspapers. For some strange reason people would rather read about tradgedy, destruction and woe than all the many wonderful and beautiful things that go on every day. This is why, from the whole vast land mass of India, the only news we get from there one week is an account of a bus crash, and from the enormous wealth of glorious events in Africa we hear about a town that goes under a flood. From Russia we learn of a train wreck, and from China we hear of a factory explosion.Gradually we get the impression that the world is a dangerous place.

A while ago I met two missionaries who had come from Ireland. I asked them what it was like to be living in an area divided by religious tension. They said 99% of Ireland was peaceful and quiet, but the media always highlighted any clash in the larger cities, and consumers of the media thought this was representative of all Ireland. Once again the media had given the world a distorted impression of something – a ‘false teaching’.

I heard, once, that someone decided to bring out a newspaper which had only good news in it, but this publication was not a good seller. It seems that there is an almost insatiable appetite for bad news, and while this may be perfectly fine for most people there is another group which definitely needs to be set free from the media’s tendency to report so much doom and gloom - the Christians.

Imagine you were part of a small army. Your troops are camped on a small hill, with a circle of hills, all slightly higher and all around. Across the valley you can see a vast horde of soldiers, all well-armed and ready for battle, camped all over the hills slightly above and all around you. You are scared. You ask your fellow-soldiers if they have heard any news of the day and they tell you what they have heard. The enemy, they say, has 1000 tanks, and cruise missiles, and a new bomb-hurling device, and new, secret weapons, and their armour is tougher than before . . . the more you hear, the less inclined you feel to join in the battle.

But suppose you asked where all this news – this demoralising news - was coming from? Suppose you discovered that all the news you received came NOT from your own camp commander, but from the enemy’s news service! Suddenly you would fell cheated, angry at the deception, and frustrated that so many of your fellow-soldiers were also being cheated. It would infuriate you even more to discover that the solders in your army were actually PAYING for this imported bad news, and making the enemy rich with the procedes!

I admit the above story is an exaggeration, but there is some truth in there as well. How many Christians feed their minds on Christian media services? Comparatively very few, although with the rise of Christian TV channels and are things the numbers are probably growing. Gradually these alternative services are increasing in their impact, especially through the Internet, but the secular world dominates our heads every waking moment, if we have secular TV or Radio, or watch secular movies, or listen to secular music. There is no escaping the secular or humanist world view, if that is the service we tune into. It is heavily biased towards humanistic values, it is evolution-based, atheist and materialistic. It works for the enemy camp and it sells its wares to the Christians.

Ask yourself this: how many programs on TV, channel 1,2,3 or 4, or Prime, are specifically designed for Christians? How many programs on National Radio are designed specifically for Christians? The answer, as far as we can tell, is almost zero.

The Media would respond, of course, by saying "But we are not a Christian service. We produce material for the majority of New Zealanders!" Exactly. We cannot argue with this. The majority are not Christians, so they should get the largest slice of the material. But what if there was a minority in New Zealand which was doing a huge amount of work and having an impact well-beyond its size, but whose activities were almost never reported? The overall impression by the majority would be that this minority was insignificant, and the minority itself would feel much the same.

The reason I began this essay was to collect a few items of news which the soldiers in the small army on the hill should have been told, but the enemy army has consistently and methodically blocked this news out, and sent its own news instead. As a result there are thousands of Christians in New Zealand who feel demoralised, weak, small and powerless in the face of what they THINK is an overwhelmingly large army. They feel surrounded. They feel as if their efforts for Christ are futile and useless. What can they do in the face of such overwhelming odds? Not much.

But what if they learned that their ranks were actually full of mighty champions, men and women and even children who were accomplishing great things, driving back the enemy like Joshua and the Midianites, putting giants to flight and cutting down the opposition with fiery swords? What if they could see themselves as part of an army of supernatural superbeings, whose prayers were reaching ehaven, and whose small efforts were being multiplied and extended throughout the world with increasing power? That is the reality – but the secular media will never report it because it does not suit its agenda, so Christians hardly ever see what is really going on.

"And when the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, behold, an host compassed the city both with horses and chariots. And his servant said unto him, Alas, my master! how shall we do?" 2 Kings 6:15

"And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha." 2 Kings 6:17

The items which follow were not selected in any particular order and the number of items is incomplete - many more could be added. Readers are welcome to add to them if they wish, or Email them to me.

Be encouraged!

Blockbuster movies?

‘Hollywood’ is good at self-promotion. It likes to give the world the impression that it is doing well, and it often promotes its movies as if they are the best ever, but if ticket-sales are anything to go by (and they are) Hollywood keeps bombing out. Take this typical Hollowood promotion, for the movie ‘Brokeback Mountain’, a story in which contains two men who ‘fall in love’.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich, thinks that the movie will do well in the "heartland," of America, an area where Christian values are generally upheld, and that this, in turn, will signal an increased acceptance of same-sex relationships.

As USA Today summarized it, the film will change "how Hollywood portrays gay characters [and] also how gay men and lesbians are accepted by mainstream America."

Well, it turns out that the media reports were greatly exaggerated. While admittedly, Brokeback did well at the box office, its audience was exactly whom you would have predicted all along: people in the Northeast and on the West Coast of America. The film made far more money in Canada than in the Great Plains or the Rocky Mountain States.

There's nothing new in this pattern.

As Mickey Kaus of Slate pointed out, it was the same pattern we saw with Fahrenheit 9/11, the anti-Bush documentary. Then, as now, reports about the film's alleged popularity in middle-America were treated as harbingers of a cultural shift. Then, as now, these reports were shown to be equal parts wishful thinking, spin, and propaganda.

But even if we concede that Brokeback's $70 million-plus at the box office "is a sign of American mainstream status," we are still left with another question. "What is $288 million or even . . . $370 million" a sign of?

This question was posed by columnist Terry Mattingly. The numbers he's citing are the comparable box-office takes for The Chronicles of Narnia and The Passion of the Christ, respectively. These films not only made many times what Brokeback did, they did well in every part of the country.

The insular worldview of Mr. Rich and others like him is why the "Best Picture" nominees are, as the Los Angeles Times put it, "five movies most people haven't seen." This year's Oscars are a celebration of one particular group's ideals and tell us little about what constitutes mainstream American attitudes.

·         Drawn from Breakpoint article, by Charles Colson, 2006.

 

Pro-Abortionists beginning to retreat.

The appointment of two new conservative judges to the US Supreme Court has intensified the legal battle over abortion.

New laws regulating abortion, like those passed in South Dakota outlawing abortion except in cases in which the mother's life is threatened, have prompted a host of legal challenges that are expected to work their way to the Supreme Court. In the coming months and years the court will hear a number of important abortion cases. The next major abortion case on the high court's docket concerns the constitutionality of the federal partial-birth abortion ban.

Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, prohibiting the partial-birth abortion procedure except when necessary to save the life of the mother. The ban, however, does not include exemptions for the "health" of the mother. On these grounds, several pro-abortion groups have challenged the law in court and it has since been taken up by the Supreme Court.

In the partial-birth abortion procedure, birth is induced and the child is partially born, feet first, before being killed and fully removed from the birth canal. Partial-birth abortions are generally performed on infants in their third trimester (3^rd month) of development. When the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act passed this last time, it did so with a large bipartisan majority vote in both houses. Congress has repeatedly heard extensive hearings on the matter and has become knowledgeable on all sides of the issue over several years through expert testimony and evidence.

In the final version of the bill, Congress states, "There exists substantial record evidence upon which Congress has reached its conclusion that a ban on partial-birth abortion is not required to contain a 'health' exception, because the facts indicate that a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to preserve the health of a woman, poses serious risks to a woman's health, and lies outside the standard of medical care."

The ban concludes that, "Congress finds that partial-birth abortion is never medically indicated to preserve the health of the mother; is in fact unrecognized as a valid abortion procedure by the mainstream medical community; poses additional health risks to the mother; blurs the line between abortion and infanticide in the killing of a partially-born child just inches from birth; and confuses the role of the physician in childbirth and should, therefore, be banned."

In the 33 years since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade - the landmark case that granted women the constitutional right to have an abortion - there have been approximately 45 million abortions in the United States. This year one out of every four pregnancies in the US will end in an abortion.

Gradually pro-lifers are making progress, helping to bring in more laws to protect the unborn and defeat the abortionists. We can expect to see more progress in the coming years, and possibly even see the complete ban on abortion throughout the Western world. The battle is by no means lost.

·         Drawn from Koinonia House newsletter, by Chuck Missler, 2006

South Korean Missionaries.

Samuel Kang, at age 39,and his wife, Sarah, left South Korea for Nigeria. When they departed in 1980, there were only 93 Korean missionaries worldwide.

During the next 11 years, Samuel and Sarah Kang raised a family, planted Nigerian churches, and started a Bible college for Nigerian pastors. Kang's eyes sparkle as he recalls his days in Africa. "The Lord gave me this wonderful opportunity to serve him," he says. "If God gives me another life, may I give it to him as a missionary."

Kang doesn't look backward very often. Now 64 years old, with silvery hair and a gentle smile, he is leading an ambitious 25-year plan to help South Korea send out more missionaries than any other country.

Kang is chief executive director of the Korean World Mission Association and dean of the Graduate School of World Mission at Seoul's influential Chongshin University. He has helped move South Korean missions into a place never before imagined: South Korea today sends out more missionaries than any other country except the United States. In terms of missionaries per congregation, Korea sends one missionary for every 4.2 congregations, which places it 11th in the world. (The U.S. does not rank in the top 10.)

In 1973, CT (Christianity Today) reported there were at least 3,411 non-Western, crosscultural missionaries in the world. That number has now exploded to 103,000, according to reliable estimates, though figures are difficult to determine in the majority world.

That total nearly equals the number of U.S. and Canadian Protestant mission personnel, which stands at about 112,000.

As the Western mission movement matures and slows down, majority-world missions are expanding. South Korea sends more than 1,100 new missionaries annually. That means Korea alone sends out as many new missionaries each year as all of the countries of the West combined.

This rocketing rate of growth is historic. When Kang returned to his home in 1991, South Korea had sent more than 1,200 missionaries, up from 80 just 11 years before. Today, almost 13,000 South Koreans are serving as longterm missionaries in countries around the world.

·         Drawn from Christianity Today article, 2006.

 

 

Christian websites in the Middle East are receiving nearly nine million hits a month, according to the Strategic Resource Group (SRG).

One Christian organisation that hosts chat rooms for Arabic-speaking web users estimates that more than 42,000 people visit those sites every day. More than 2000 Bibles in the Arabic language are being downloaded from the internet each month, according to Paul Schultheis, SRG founder.

One organisation reports that 20 people each month are converting to Christianity as a result of learning about the Christian faith on these Christian internet sites.

Although some Islamic governments attempt to block these web-sites, generally the internet knows no borders.

More than half of the population in the Middle East is 25 years old or under. Many young people own computers or have access to computers at internet cafes, schools or through friends. Christian internet sites feature Christian music, Bible study materials, sermons and researched articles and information from Christian scholars on why they believe the Christian faith is true.

Most of the websites avoid a Western approach when presenting the Christian faith. Instead, they present the teachings and life of Jesus Christ in words and visuals that relate to people from Middle Eastern cultures. Jesus, of course, lived in the Middle East more than 2000 years ago.

-Drawn from a news report from a Maryland (USA) news service.

 

House Churches on the rise

As a non-denominational Christian library and research centre, the Christian Heritage Center has hosted believers of all stripes - Pentecostals, fundamentalists, orthodox, mainline and everyone in between. Among those using the centre's 25,000 books, videos, DVDs, and CDs, as well as its 2500-book archive of works dating back to the early 1500s, are Christians who worship in house churches.

To mark the importance of house churches - which have been a part of Christianity since the earliest days after Pentecost - the centre has proclaimed March as House Church Month.

While many view the house church as a modern-day phenomenon, in reality it dates back to the days of Peter, Paul, and John.

"The house church was one of the primary meeting places used by the church for the first few centuries," says Greg Humphries, founder of the centre. "They were there at the beginning and they're here now. We believe it is important to honour their contribution to the advancement of the Gospel over the past 2000 years."

Mr Humphries said the New Testament bore out the existence of early house churches.

"Solomon's Porch, the synagogues and the marketplace were all used for evangelism but the meeting place for the believers was in a home. In fact, the very first meeting of the Church took place in»-a house, in the upper room as told in Acts I."

Today it is estimated by the Barna Group that there are up to 30,000 house churches in the United States, and possibly a million worldwide. One ministry alone in India has planted more than 3000 house churches numbering some 50,000 believers. It is believed that about 50 million Christians are fellowshipping in homes in China.

What has caused the phenomenal growth of house churches around the world?

"These are people who are less interested in attending church than in being the Church," says George Barna, author of the book ‘Revolution’.

The Christian Heritage Centre has set aside a section in its library specifically dealing with house churches and cell groups. Its website is: www.ChristianHeritageCentre.com

·         Drawn from a news item from Staunton, Virginia.

 

More Bible translations’

Scripture translation is making progress. Last year a further four language groups received the full Bible in their mother tongue for the first time. This brings the number of languages in which the complete Old and New Testament exists, to 426. The latest Scripture Language Report published by the United Bible Societies in Reading, England, also reveals that the New Testament was made available for the first time in a further 39 languages, making a total of 1115. Along with the 826 languages in which Bible portions exist, at least some part of God's Word is now available to speakers of 2403 languages.

·         Drawn from a news item from Reading, England.

 

PSSM growing in influence for Christ.

Over the last 12 months PSSM Bible Discovery has sent out approximately 30,000 'Discovery' magazines and 35,000 monthly Bible correspondence lessons. Roughly half were sent to people in New Zealand and half overseas to around 20 countries, with the largest groups in Fiji, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea.

- Information supplied by Lloyd Vivian, NZ PSSM spokesperson

The PSSM (Postal Sunday School Movement) is just one of many Christian publications, all of which reach out with their particular style and format. Others include the Investigate, and the Above Rubies, the Salvation Army War Cry magazines, to name but a tiny few. The outpouring of Christian literature is vast.

 

The secular and the Christian views of Narnia.

A debate in the mainstream press has arisen over the Christian messages in Disney's movie ‘The Chronicles of Namia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, based on the popular books by C.S. Lewis, the acclaimed Christian Oxford professor.

The criticism has been unremitting from the liberal elite. The books have been derided for their positive depiction of Christian spirituality and Western virtues. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Laura Miller called Lewis' insertion of Christian metaphors in his Narnia books "a terrible betrayal".

In a review of the movie, Carina Chocano, of the Los Angeles Times, made snide comments about the movie and the book's Christian metaphors, calling it "a medieval vision of Christianity for another dark age".

The Left has extended its argument into the life of C.S. Lewis and continued its obsession of seeing derelict sexual morality in all those celebrated as heroic.

The New York Times published a piece in its magazine that attacked Lewis' personal morality, muttering dark allusions to sexual indiscretion based on nothing more than the fact that Lewis cared for the mother of a fallen war-time comrade for decades.

Lewis was an unabashed apologist whose faith drove his literary and scholarly endeavours. Lewis says as much in a March 1961 letter.

He makes it clear that Asian, the lion in the Chronicles, is a Christ figure. He confirms that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is about the crucifixion and the resurrection and each of its sequels covers another element of spiritual truth as Lewis saw it. He also proved a devoted lover of the West and its traditional morals. Throughout the pages of his pieces rings the value of Western martial virtue: much of ‘Lion’ is about Peter's rejection of pacifism in the face of the moral need to stand against the Witch's totalitarianism no matter what the cost.

Lewis respected traditional gender roles, including an exhortation in the novel that wars are ugly when women fight. This understanding has been watered down in the film, which depicts female centaurs in battle, but it is common in Lewis' stories and a belief shared by the majority of Americans.

The filmmakers' depiction of the West versus the rest will only become more interesting as they attempt to deal with the subject matter of The Horse and His Boy in a politically correct way, a story about an epic battle between the Namians, arguably the West, and the Calormenes, a dark-skinned, arguably Muslim, people.

The vicious battle we face today might have been predicted by Lewis, but the liberal imperative to pretend no such threat exists, survives in their criticism of his lack of multicultural sensitivity. They could not be more right that Lewis loved the West and Christianity and promoted such ideas through his literature.

The critics could not be more wrong, though, in their view of these loves are a destructive vision that weakened Lewis' literature. It is the secularist contention that Lewis' story would be stronger if he had only omitted the spiritual references, which they argue are unnecessary to a full appreciation of the pieces.

What they fail to recognise is that the spiritual elements are what give Namia its life and make Lewis' books, otherwise utterly unremarkable, profoundly powerful and relevant.Lewis' stories have lived on in popularity because his most powerful character, the Christological lion Asian, speaks spiritual wisdom into the story in ways understandable to people of all faiths or none.

These words have the feel of deep truth like scripture. The conclusion of the stories, with the triumphal entry of the children into heaven, has the feel of a great homecoming powerful enough to elicit tears from the hardened. These indis-putably spiritual elements of sacrifice, salvation and redemption pervade the books. Without them, the books would be hollow and unmemorable.

A comparison with Phillip Pullman's writing might be helpful in concluding that Lewis' spiritual view makes Namia matter. Pullman decries the theology of Namia while promoting his own ideology in story form.

In his fantasy world there is no heaven, just this life and nothing when it ends. In his world, the church tortures children and spreads lies to control the world.

In his work the children find true meaning when engaging in sexual self-discovery, not in the spiritual values that emphasise sacrifice over the lust of pleasure. What solace would a political prisoner, tortured and enchained, enjoy if told that this is her only existence? What truth would a seeker find if told his only source must be his own limited, relative experience? What contentment would an abandoned, pregnant girl discover who had followed Pullman's vision of sexual exploration?

Is it really that difficult to understand why Namia has resonated for 90 million readers, and will continue to do so?

·         Quoted entirely from an article in the Challenge Weekly, March 2006, by Dr. Ted Baehr, who is the publisher of the MOVIEGUIDE, Los Angeles.

Christian statistics: The following list shows the countries with the largest numbers of Christians. Christianity, as defined for the purpose of census and surveys, includes all those who claim to be Christian. This includes varying degrees of religious activity, from essentially non-participating but still-nominal Christians to active full-communicants and life-long clergy. These numbers also include adherents of different divisions within Christianity, including Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-day Saints, African Indigenous Churches and others.

 

Top 10 Largest National Christian Populations

Source for these Christian statistics: Ash, Russell. The Top 10 of Everything, DK Publishing, Inc.: New York (1997), pg. 160-161.

 

Christianity a friend not an enemy to science.

It's one of history's most important questions: Why did Europe and North America embrace democracy and thrive economically while nations elsewhere suffered oppression and stagnation?

Leading American sociologist Rodney Stark says many scholars purposely overlook the obvious answer: It was the spread of Christianity that made possible political and economic freedoms, modem science and resulting Western advancement.

Such is the Baylor University professor's contention in ‘The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success’, published by Random House.

Though Western intellectuals downplay theology, Professor Stark sees Christian beliefs as the key. He says the basis for the West's rise was "an extraordinary faith in reason" resulting from Christianity, which "alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth".

Faith in humanity's reasoning capacity, in turn, stimulated scientific theory-making, democratic theory and individual freedoms. Capitalism applied this to economics, producing an explosion of wealth. Over the past century, Professor Stark writes, intellectuals have claimed the opposite, saying the West surged ahead by overcoming Christianity with its supposed barriers to progress, especially in science.

"Nonsense," says Professor Stark. "The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians."

He asserts that "real science arose only once - in Europe". Only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry and astrology into astronomy, with thinkers moving beyond mere technology into true research.

Professor Stark rejects the century-old scenario of Max Weber that Protestantism underpinned capitalism. He maintains that the main elements were invented by Catholic monks and lay Italians, centuries before the Reformation.

He also thinks it is high time to eradicate "an incredible lie that long disfigured our knowledge of history" - the claim that between the fall of ancient Rome and the secular Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe suffered through so-called "Dark Ages" of "ignorance, superstition and misery".

That is a "hoax", he says, invented by 18th-century intellectuals who hated religion and especially Roman Catholicism. In reality, the centuries before Protestantism and modern secularism saw huge progress in technology, education and human betterment.

Professor Stark's story of inventions that transformed farming, wind and water power, and global sea travel is fascinating indeed.

Whether in ancient or modem times. Professor Stark writes, centralised command economies, slave labor and tyranny always prevent progress, and Christianity helped to defeat all three scourges.

·         Drawn from a news report from Waco, Texas. (Challenge Weekly)

 

Christian book market booming.

Originally published as a general market romance, which sold more than 100,000 copies. Redeeming Love, by Francine Rivers, was re-released by Multnomah Publishers for the Christian market in 1997.

Since that time it has sold nearly 750,000 copies. In addition to its new cover design last year. Redeeming Love now has a six-part study guide, suitable for individual use or group discussion.

Rivers, the award-winning author of more than 20 best-selling novels, claims that more readers' lives have been changed by Redeeming Love than by any of her other novels before or since. And countless reader testimonies affirm the novel's obvious success.

In the time since Redeeming Love was repackaged in May last year, nearly 100,000 copies have sold with a whopping 44 per cent going to CBA, the Christian products retail distribution giant.

Now after more than 68 months on the CBA best-seller list and nearly 750,000 total copies sold, the classic biblically-based novel has rapidly become Multnomah Publishers’ general market bestseller.

Set in the 1880s during the California Gold Rush ‘Redeeming Love’ is the skilful retelling of an unconventional relationship described in the Bible — the marriage of Hosea the prophet with the prostitute Gomer — that graphically illustrates the nature of God's love for each person He has created.

"I want readers to see that Christ is love and that His love is unconditional and all-consuming," Rivers says. "The Lord courts us, marries us, protects us, instructs us and walks beside us to the end."

Rivers has been writing for more than 20 years. From 1976 to 1985 she had a successful writing career in the general market and won numerous awards. After becoming a Christian in 1986, she wrote Redeeming Love as her statement of faith.

Since then, she has published numerous books in the CBA market and has continued to win both industry acclaim and reader loyalty. Her novel The Last Sin Eater won the ECPA Gold Medallion, and three of her books have won the prestigious Romance Writers of America Rita Award.

Rivers uses her writing to draw closer to the Lord, mat through her work she might worship and praise Jesus for all He has done and is doing in her life.

She lives in northern California with her husband. Rick. They are the parents of three married children and grandparents of four. (Sisters, Oregon)

·         Drawn from a review by Micahel Ireland, in theChallenge Weekly, 2006.

Footnote. The CBA, or Christian Booksellers Association is separate from the non-Christian publishing world, although there are times when the two overlap in the world’s market. The Christian music organisation is also separate from theworld’s music publishing system in much the same way.

The effect of having two different outlets for books and music is very misleading to the general public. While artists like Elton John and other famous singers seem to be the most popular and the ones who rake in the most money, the truth is it is the Christian musicians who are actually doing FAR BETTER than their secular counterparts. The same can be said for writers.

Some Christian writers and musicians make thesecular world’s bestlook like amateurs!

Why do we get the impression that the Christian writers and musicians are not doing so well? Because guess who controls the media? The world. Why would the secular world want to make a big thing of Christian material, unless of course it is too big to ignore? The money ythe world makes from worldly talent is stigma free!

The world practises several methods of control:

1.    Suppression

2.    Exclusion

3.    Ridicule

Christians who work in the field of science are commonly faced with loss of employment, in the university, the firm or wherever if they are working, if they express creationist views. Many have lost promotions, or missed out on awards, many have been refused work because of their biblical point of view. The same can be said of Christian writers – the secular market generally refuses to publish anything overtly Christian or moralistic. In the music world the market sells to unsaved people and gathers income from unsaved advertisers. It is a closed system and Christians are usually unaware of the extreme lengths the world will go to to ‘protect its own’.

The world employs its own writers, and quotes from its own data, when it suits. Theworld has been know to falsify data, lie, cheat, and deliberately deceive – in a way similar to the Piltdown Man hoax. The media happily reports the lies and then, if an apology is required, will publish this in such a small size it is easily missed. For examplethe National Geographic, with a worldwide circulation, has done many articles which supposedly support evolution. Yet, when they were shown up recently, after publishing a hoax fossil (which was made from two pieces of rock glued together) they apologised in small letters on a back page. Hardly anyone noticed, yet their feature article had been large, and glossy. This kind of thing is common and frequent.

The Internet is another area where Christianity is flourishing. There are more than 4 million Christian websites and the numbers are growing at great speed. Some of them are receiving enormous numbers of hits. There are siters where the fundamentals of Christianity are spelled out, Christian computer games, Bible lessons (for example Ray Comfort's Way of the Master series) and thousands of newsletters, the Creation (formerly Answers in Genesis) website is huge, along with several others, all supplying the world with creationist and intelligent design information. For example:

New Christian web portals

A new website has been launched to help New Zealanders keep up with what's happening in the Christian world. ChristianSearch.co.nz is the work of lan Turton, an Ashburton-based itinerant minister who also runs a web hosting company. Mr Turton says the site originated from a desire to have some vehicle to avoid conflicts when people were planning major events in the same cities. A similar service is also offered by Vision Network of New Zealand, but Mr Turton says ChristianSearch is not just an events calendar - it will expand to offering books online, free software, and job vacancies. "It is about serving New Zealand Christians with a one-stop resource for those looking for Christian 'stuff'," he says.

There are also many Christian organisations which are working quietly in the community, reaching out and winning souls, but these hardly ever make it into the secular media. Only big events do, because they are very hard to ignore, like Easterfest – a combined church celebration of Easter, in which up to one sixth of Timaru’s population turns up, or the NZ Parachute Music Festival - with 25,000 people turning up, all paying between $130 and $49 for the priviledge, or Promise Keepers, or Christian Schools- there are dozens in NZ alone, or the Every Boys and Girls Rally, or Christian Camps, which draw in thousands of NZ kids every year, or seemingly insignificant outreaches such as such as Tel-a-story – which actually gets thousands of hits every month throughout NZ . . . the list goes on and on.

How can the Christian press compete with the overwhelming control of the secular media? The statistics are grim. For example, take the Creation magazine, with a circulation of only 80,000 worldwide. Compare this with the National Geographic, which is uncompromisingly evolution-based, and has TV programs and a website as well as a magazine which goes out to 7 million people each month. Or compare this with the Time magazine, which is evolution-based, secular, and usually not interested in presenting biblical Christianity – circulation 5 million ever week! The Scientific American has a circulation of 700,000. Readers Digest, New Scientist and many other publications are on the same track, and into our schools, libraries and bookshops pour a river of books which deny God, blaspheme His name, criticise His Word or totally exclude him from the scene. On top of all this, the secular media on TV and in print pumps out a daily diet of secular news, to the general exclusion of Christian viewpoints.

The fact is, gradually Christians are working their way through the wall of opposition. The secular strongholds are crumbling and falling. The purpose of this essay is to reveal the true state of affairs. Satan is losing his grip and the Church is gaining ground. The biggest thing going on in the world today is not the rise of Islam, not global warming, not pandemics, not pollution .. . it is the growth of God’s Kingdom.

 

"You saw till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and broke them to pieces.

Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth." (Dan.2:34,35)

The story in Daniel is one of the most stupendous, bits of encouragement a Christian could ever hear! Just consider it for a moment. The vision which the king saw was a picture of successive kingdoms, beginning with Babylon. After Babylon came Medo-Persia with the Elamites, then came Greece, then Rome, then Rome split into two – Eastern and Western, and after that the remaining Roman territories split or fragmented into ‘iron and clay’ pieces, which now comprise the European states and other districts, which have, as the vision depicted, maintained their independence – they have not cleaved together.

Now during these successive kingdoms another kingdom has been growing in power, but it is not a kingdom made with human hands. It is made by God, and it grows steadily until the final part of the vision, when it suddenly smashes down on the feet. Down falls the entire statue and God’s Kingdom, made of solid rock, remains – for ever. Obviously, if we follow the sequence of the vision, we are now living in the final stages of the prophecy, and will probably see the final act of God. Man’s weak kingdoms will crumble and never rise again. We may be the most fortunate generation on Earth!

 

The Bible – its phenomenal circulation.

Every day thousands of Bibles, or portions of Scripture, reach the hands of people thoughout the world. The history of this circulation, from its beginnings as hand-written copies of the Old Testament, through to carefully transcribed copies of the New testament, to the Gutenberg printing press, through to today’s high-speed printers is an interesting one. The story is one of increase, not decrease. God’s Word continues to circulate in more languages and to more people every year.

You would hardly be aware of this if you relied on the secular media!

The Bible has been read by more people and published in more languages than any other book. There have been more copies produced of its entirety and more portions and selections than any other book in history. Some will argue that in a designated month or year more of a certain book was sold. However, over all there is absolutely no book that reaches or even begins to compare to the circulation of the Scriptures. The first major book printed was the Latin Vulgate. It was printed on Gutenberg's press.

Hy Pickering says that about 30 years ago for the British and Foreign Bible Society to meet its demands, it had to publish: "one copy every three seconds day and night; 22 copies every minute day and night; 1369 copies every hour day and night; 32,876 copies every day in the year. And it is deeply interesting to know that this amazing number of Bibles were dispatched to various parts of the world in 4583 cases weighing 490 tons."

The Cambridge History of the Bible, p. 479 says: "No other book has known anything approaching this constant circulation."

Cleland B. McAfee writes in ‘The Greatest English Classic’: "If every Bible in any considerable city were destroyed, the Book could be restored in all its essential parts from the quotations on the shelves of the city public library. There are works, covering almost all the great literary writers, devoted especially to showing how much the Bible has influenced them."

The historian Philip Schaff [The Person of Christ, American Tract Society, 1913) vividly describes its uniqueness along with its Savior:

"This Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon; without science and learning. He shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of schools. He spoke such words of life as were never spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet; without writing a single line. He set more pens in motion, and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art, and songs of praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times."

Bernard Ramm (Protestant Christian Evidences, Moody Press, 1957) adds:

'There are complexities of bibliographical studies that are unparalleled in any other science or department of human knowledge. From the Apostolic Fathers dating from A.D. 95 to the modem times is one great literary river inspired by the Bible—Bible dictionaries, Bible encyclopedias, Bible lexicons, Bible atlases, and Bible geographies. These may be taken as a starter. Then at random, we may mention the vast bibliographies around theology, religious education, hymnology, missions, the biblical languages, church history, religious biography, devotional works, commentaries, philosophy of religion, evidences, apologetics, and on and on. There seems to be an endless number."

Kenneth Scott Latourette (A History of Christianity, Harper and Row, 1953), former Yale historian, says:

"It is evidence of his importance, of the effect that he has had upon history and presumably, of the baffling mystery of his being that no other life ever lived on this planet has evoked so huge a volume of literature among so many peoples and languages, and that, far from ebbing, the flood continues to mount."

We could quote many more such statements, but in conclusion consider this: Almost every year, since the Bible Society in New Zealand