In some respects the meaning of faith is so simple. It means to just believe God, to trust and rely on Him. But because we are human and sinful, faith becomes so hard for us. Hence, we seem to need to dissect it and to look at it from different angles, in order to get the meaning of faith that pleases us or that helps us to understand it. And I think that’s good. We need to do that.
In my reading on faith I have come across numerous descriptions. Here are a few I have put together. I hope these will help you understand faith. Perhaps from these you will come up with your own description.
1. Faith is a work of God’s Spirit in the heart.
Andrew Murray wrote, “Faith is completely the work of God’s Spirit through His Word in the prepared heart of the…
I think there is no better source than Dinesh D’Souza’s books to lay out the history of racism and Fascism, and to expose its roots. In this blog I am picking out a few quotes from his book The Big Lie, which I just finished reading. In these first quotes he really hits the Democrat Party hard, and we will also see them blaming their racism and fascism of the right wing—incredible!
Robert Paxton stated in his, The Anatomy of Fascism: “It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan.” D’Souza writes that the Klan was the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.
The racism of the Democratic Partyin America not only preceded the racism of the Nazis, it lasted for longer—more than a century compared to the twelve years of Nazi rule in Germany.
The Democratic Party’s racism after the Civil War was preceded by the Democratic Party’s defense of slavery and its support of policies for the relocation and extermination of American Indians. What term other than genocide can we use to describe Democratic President Andrew Jackson’s mass relocation of the Indians?
D’Souza compares the Nazi camps to the slave plantations. He states, “What is the slave plantation if not a special type of concentration camp?” He writes that both were work camps, both were forced labor, both were treated harshly with little regard for the lives of the workers, and in both cases the workers were considered inferior and even subhuman. And who were the bosses? Nazis and Democrats!
D’Souza writes, “Margaret Sanger and her fellow progressive eugenicists didn’t get their ideas for killing off undesirables—or preventing their births—from the Nazis; the Nazis got them from their American counterparts who dominated the field of international eugenics.”
Woodrow Wilson was a racist who was almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan… According to historian, Robert Paxton, the Klan is the closest American precursor to a Nazi movement.
FDR came after Wilson, and he was a racist too. Hitler saw FDR as a kindred spirit and his New Deal was widely praised as an American form of fascism in the Nazi Party’s official newspaper.
After World War II the progressive Left started blaming their own atrocities on the Right. D’Souza writes,
After World War II, the progressives [of the Left] recognized how crushing it would be if Americans knew about the actual record of progressivism and the Democrat Party…So progressives decided to tell a new story…Left-wing phenomena now got moved into the right-wing column. Suddenly Mussolini and Hitler became ‘right-wingers,’ and the people who supposedly brought them to power became ‘conservatives. The Left, then, became the glorious resisters of fascism and Nazism.
I don’t think that anyone can say how many unredeemed there will be on the earth during the Tribulation compared to the redeemed. As I already stated, there will be a great revival on the earth during the Tribulation and many will be saved. So, that hopefully will cut down the number of the unredeemed substantially. Also, because of so much death on the earth due to the great Tribulation, the number of the unredeemed will progressively decrease until all are gone just before the beginning of the new kingdom. In my study of this topic, I found the following seven points on the unredeemed.
1. They will follow after the beast (Antichrist), and they will worship both the beast and the dragon, or Satan (Rev. 13:3-8). I think that even during the first half of the Tribulation, before it is revealed who the Antichrist really is, the world will…
God has revealed Himself to us by His Word and through His Spirit; and by these He works in us to tell us who He is and what His will is; and He urges us and leads us according to His will. Thus, these are, generally, the three foundation stones that we build our faith on: knowledge of His will, knowledge of His character, and whether we experience the urging of His Spirit.
Three Foundation Stones that we Build Our Faith On
1. Knowledge of God’s will
The Bible tells us that “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God (Rom. 10:17). Hence, the will of God (concerning a certain thing) that comes to us in our ears, by His Spirit, and through our diligent study of the Word, builds in us a basis for our faith (in obtaining that certain thing). This…
Undoubtedly, the greatest revival in the history of mankind will be during the Tribulation. John tells us that in his vision he beheld “a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes” (Rev. 7:9). That passage goes on for a few more verses (verses 9-14), and it is clear that this great multitude are believers that were martyred during the Tribulation and are now rejoicing in victory in heaven and are worshipping God and Jesus the Lamb.
Many of them will no doubt come to salvation because of the shocking disappearances of the Rapture. Then, when the two witnesses and the 144,000 evangelists are put in place at the beginning of the Tribulation, many will be converted through their witness. Likewise, I imagine that many will also be saved by the witness of people all around them who heard the gospel message from others, even from angels. And of course, the Holy Spirit will be always working to convict and to convert any who are chosen to be saved.
As for those who are martyred (the “great multitude”), we may place the blame squarely on the Antichrist and the harlot (the false religious system). And this follows squarely, after so many years, to what happened in ancient Rome with the Roman emperors, and then with what happened with the evil Roman Catholic church. So, it will be repeated in the revived Roman empire. But I think it will be reversed: the Great Harlot will be the first to martyr the Christians, as we see in Revelation 17:6; then, when the Harlot is destroyed and the Antichrist is given full power (at the midpoint of the Tribulation), he will be the one to martyr the Christians. As we see in Daniel 7:21, and also in Revelation 13:7, “It will be given to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them.”
Please note what it says in Revelation 13:7; “It was given to him to make war with the saints…” (bold italic for emphasis). This indicates clearly that God will allow the Antichrist to martyr the saints, and thus to be in control.
Another interesting couple of verses that shows us this control is in Revelation 6:10-11. Here the martyred and resurrected saints were asking God, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, wilt Thou refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” And He told them that the time of killing (by the Antichrist) would go on “until the number of their fellow servants… should be completed.” In other words, God is in control. He will not allow anyone to be martyred beyond what he has predestined.
Please note also (from Revelation 7:10-14, 14:13-14, and 15:2-4), that God in the end will greatly bless the resurrected martyrs and give them victory and a song of joy and worship to God forever.
Faith is the avenue through which every believer became a Christian; and it is the way every Christian should live. I’m sure most believers would say that they desire to have a stronger faith. I sure do. Well I have 8 different blog posts ready to go on this subject, which are excerpts from my book Prayer A to Z. This first one is most basic and what we need to know in order to begin this study. I want to ask you right from the start if you would consider making some comments. So, when you read this, think of that you want to contribute.
The Definition of Faith
Vines dictionary defines faith (pistis) as “firm persuasion, a conviction based on hearing.” The verb of faith (pisteuo), translated as believe, is defined as: “to believe, to be persuaded of, to place confidence in, to…
It is amazing to learn that most Russians have no idea what is happening in Ukraine. As reported in my Pioneer Press newspaper, “[They] refuse to believe that Russian soldiers could bomb innocent people or even that a war is taking place at all.” The Russian position is that Putin’s army is conducting a limited operation with the honorable mission of de-Nazifying Ukraine (I have no idea what that implies). Of course, Russian television is highly censored. They don’t show any of the terrible things going on in Ukraine; and they also have banned Facebook and Twitter.
I hope you know that this censorship is also happening in America; maybe not with Ukraine, but with other things that the media from people. But as soon as this country is taken over by socialism, believe me, we will be in the dark much like Russia is. But I hope and pray not.
It is interesting that Putin is now saying that He will jail anyone who is propagating fake news. He means the news about what is really going on in Ukraine. This is the inverted big lie—as I have previously written about. It is a classical Hitler move, when they lie to cover up their lies. We see this all the time among Democrats. Very sad for America.
The harlot is not a person, but is a false religious system. And she is called great, I suppose, because she is able to influence and control so many people. One may think that the false prophet is the leader of this false religious system, but I don’t think so. Though he will no doubt have some influence and interaction with her, Scripture makes no mention of any connection. In fact, since the false prophet seems to show up just when the harlot is put out of commission (at the mid-point of the Tribulation), he may be her replacement. Here are four points pertaining to the Great Harlot.
The Great Harlot’s Identity
She is called a great harlot because she “sits on many waters,” which means that she reigns over many “peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues” (Rev. 17:1, 15). And she is also called “the great city, which…
Here are the last seven reason why our prayers fail, beginning with our neglect of the Word of God.
Teachings on Prayer – We don’t let the Bible teach us how to pray. Everything in the Bible was written for our instruction (Rom. 15:14). All the prayers of the Bible and all the teachings on prayer, all the stories of how people prayed and how they had faith to pray (Heb. 13:7) are our teachers on how to pray. If we fail to read the Bible and heed it’s teachings about prayer, we can’t expect to know how to pray; therefore, we will certainly fail in prayer.
Unity – We lack unity. Prayers will always fail when there is no unity in the body of Christ. For where there is no unity in the body of Christ there is also no unity with Christ. And where there…
Stephen Nielsen 