Category: Culture

SUNDAY SONGS: The God Who Stays (Matthew West)

If you’ve ever discovered somebody you thought was a friend you could depend upon wasn’t, or a spouse who would always be there had left, or that you were hopelessly lost in an addiction, Matthew West wrote and sings this song for you.

Listen to the music below, then read through the lyrics reprint after the video. And think about the friend who never leaves your side, who never lacks the grace you need, who loves you with an eternal love. You’re thinking about Jesus, my friend. He will change you and your life forever if you follow Him as your Lord:

If I were You I would’ve given up on me by now
I would’ve labeled me a lost cause
‘Cause I feel just like a lost cause
If I were You I would’ve turned around and walked away
I would’ve labeled me beyond repair
‘Cause I feel like I’m beyond repair
Oh, but somehow You don’t see me like I do
Somehow You’re still here
You’re the God who stays
You’re the God who stays
You’re the one who runs in my direction
When the whole world walks away
You’re the God who stands
With wide open arms
And You tell me nothing I have ever done can separate my heart
From the God who stays
I used to hide
Every time I thought I let You down
I always thought I had to earn my way
But I’m learning You don’t work that way, no
‘Cause somehow You don’t see me like I do
Somehow You’re still here
You’re the God who stays
You’re the God who stays
You’re the one who runs in my direction
When the whole world walks away
You’re the God who stands
With wide open arms
And You tell me nothing I have ever done can separate my heart
From the God who stays
My shame can’t separate
My guilt can’t separate
My past can’t separate
I’m Yours forever
My sin can’t separate
My scars can’t separate
My failures can’t separate
I’m Yours forever
No enemy can separate
No power of hell can take away
Your love for me will never change
I’m Yours forever
‘Cause you’re the God who stays
You’re the God who stays
You’re the one who runs in my direction
When the whole world walks away
You’re the God who stands
With wide open arms
And You tell me nothing I have ever done can separate my heart
From the God who stays
You’re the God who stays
You’re the one who runs in my direction
When the whole world walks away
You’re the God who stands
With wide open arms
And You tell me nothing I have ever done can separate my heart
From the God who stays

Now It’s Covid Cancel Christians Culture (CCCC) As New Orleans Mayor Nixes Lauren Daigle

An award-winning Christian and cross-over recording artist performed without a mask at a worship protest earlier this year in the French Quarter, so New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell wants to ban Lauren Daigle from the Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve show.

Lauren Daigle (Screenshot from her website).

Daigle, who is from Lafayette, Louisiana,  performed mask-less during Sean Feucht’s “Let Us Worship” protest in November in New Orleans’ Jackson Square. Hundreds of people attended the event that was held without an official permit.

She is not scheduled to be among the featured performers in the annual Dick Clark entertainment, part of which will originate from New Orleans. Continue reading “Now It’s Covid Cancel Christians Culture (CCCC) As New Orleans Mayor Nixes Lauren Daigle”

Weekly Church Goers Only Group With Improved Mental Health In Latest Gallup Survey

Regular church attenders were the sole major group surveyed in the 2020 Gallup Poll Americans’ Assessment of Their Mental Health to show a positive increase, compared to 2019.

The increase was only four percent, from 42 percent of respondents claiming to attend weekly church services who rated their mental health condition as excellent in 2019, to 46 percent in the year of the Covid Pandemic and continued lockdowns in most states.

Every other major demographic measured by Gallup showed declines, including several with double-digit drops. Those who describe themselves as “nearly weekly/monthly” church attenders, for example, showed a 12 percent decline, while those who “seldom/never” attend church reported a 13 percent decline. Continue reading “Weekly Church Goers Only Group With Improved Mental Health In Latest Gallup Survey”

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: Is The Christmas Season Just A Pagan Holiday?

You may have heard that Christmas is little more than the early Christians’ co-opting a bunch of pagan holiday traditions and practices in order to not be left out of all the fun. It’s often presented as a snarky way of more generally discrediting Christianity.

Shane Morris of the Colson Center takes the snark apart with three common sense and well-researched reasons why it makes little sense to dismiss Christmas on that basis:

 

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: Are We Morally Advanced Compared To Previous Generations?

Work on Capitol Hill and sooner or later (most likely sooner) you will be confronted with a response to the effect that your views are obsolete or “out of date” or even “reactionary.”

In fact, that response is derived in great part from 18th and 19th century thinkers who believed the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that preceded them represented the onset of a steady progress toward the good society.

But, as Shane Morris of the Colson Center explains in the following “What Would You Say” series video, there are at least three good reasons such thinking is disconnected from reality, particularly on this side of the bloody 20th century!

DON’T MAKE US SUBPOENA YOU!!!

COMING IN JANUARY 2021

WHO: NBC “Dateline” cold-case detective J. Warner Wallace
(Click Here For Video Message From Wallace)

WHAT: Eight 1-hour weekly Zoom video sessions, led by HillFaith’s Mark Tapscott

WHY: Because the proof of God’s existence isn’t “out there,” it’s right here in “God’s Crime Scene”

WHERE: STAY TUNED!
Email Your Name and Address to mt.hillfaith@gmail.com

If You’d Like To Know When Registration Opens

 

Pastor Rob McCoy: ‘This Is Insane … Take Off The Masks!’

Pastor Rob McCoy, who describes himself as a “pro-life Democrat,” recently converted his church, Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California, into a strip club.

Yes, you read that correctly, a strip club. McCoy acted in response to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decree that church congregations cannot assemble to worship God but strip clubs and numerous other kinds of establishments can remain open.

So, McCoy did a quick strip (of his tie, people, nothing more, this is church, remember?!??), accompanied by the 1960s show tune, “The Stripper.”

And then he delivered a sermon that is yet another sign of a gathering spirit of liberty sparked by oppressive “public health measures” decreed by Newsom and other government figures across the country in response to the Covid Pandemic. Continue reading “Pastor Rob McCoy: ‘This Is Insane … Take Off The Masks!’”

Survey Finds Gen Z Most Likely To View Faith As VIP In Pandemic

Three-fourths (74 percent) of Gen Zers surveyed recently by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty view religious faith are either somewhat or extremely important to them in dealing with the Covid-19 Pandemic.

“Surprisingly, Gen Z respondents, who across polls tend to be less religious and least at risk during the pandemic, were also much more likely than the average to say faith and religion had been extremely or very important,” the Becket survey said in its summary.

Gen Z individuals were born between 1997 and 2012, meaning the oldest member of the generation is now 23 years of age.

Gen Xers at 56 percent were the least likely to say their religious faith was somewhat or extremely important to them in coping with the Pandemic. Continue reading “Survey Finds Gen Z Most Likely To View Faith As VIP In Pandemic”

Archeologists Discover King David-Era Fort Of The Old Testament’s Geshurites

There is a reference in I Samuel 27 to David raiding towns and villages of the Geshurites, among others, during the year and four months in which he lived among the Philistines to escape the wrath of King Saul.

The Old Testament was for centuries the only ancient reference to the Geshurites, but that appears to have changed recently with the discovery of a fort that dates from the Davidic era and that may have been a Geshurite facility, according to The Times of Israel.

“Dating to around the time of King David 3,000 years ago, what may be the earliest fortified settlement in the Golan Heights was recently discovered during salvage excavations ahead of the construction of a new neighborhood,” according to the Times.

“Incredible rock etchings of two figures holding their arms aloft — possibly at prayer with what could be a moon — were uncovered inside the unique fort, which was dated to circa 11th-9th century BCE.

“The striking find is being tentatively linked to the Geshurite people, whose capital is recorded in the Bible as having been located nearby, to the north of the Sea of Galilee.

 

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: How Could God Be Good If He Ordered Old Testament Genocide?

They are among the most troubling of Old Testament passages for contemporary minds. I am referring to verses like Deuteronomy 2:34 and I Samuel 15:2-3 in which God ordered every Amalekite and Canaanite man, woman, child, cow, goat, etc. etc. utterly destroyed.

Doesn’t sound like justice, does it? Well, maybe there’s more to these verses than is commonly assumed, especially when there is a lack of  understanding of the ancient contexts in which they were composed.

The Colson Center’s Brook McIntyre digs deep into the facts about how ancient literature portrayed things like military victories, as well as the horrific truths about the pagan culture that was dominant in what the Old Testament referred to as the “Promised Land” for Israel:

 

China Converting Christian Churches To Factories, Indoctrination Centers

Christian churches in China that decline to convert into propaganda tools for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are being destroyed, or converted into factories or “cultural centers” controlled by the government.

“According to Bitter Winter, an outlet that monitors religious liberty violations in China, the restrictive government shuttered an old church in the southeastern province of Jiangxi in April because the congregation was ‘organizing illegal gathering[s]’ and refusing to join the Three-Self Church, a government-backed and endorsed version of the church,” reports Faithwire.

“It was then converted into a ‘Civilization Practice Station for a New Era,’ a project launched by the Chinese Communist Party in July 2018 to encourage citizens to abandon their religious beliefs and follow the ways of the CCP,” Faithwire said.

Go here for the rest of the story from Faithwire.

 

FAMILY: New Study Finds Gender Wage Gap Fading, Fading, Fading …

It’s been a staple of political, economic and sociological analyses for decades that when a working woman marries and has kids, she suffers a loss of income, compared to unmarried peers. It’s the Gender Wage Gap and, while its calculation varies from year to year, there’s little doubt that it’s real, for whatever reasons.

Now along comes a new study that ought to grab the attention of multiple congressional staffers involved in all kinds of policy-making areas, including taxes, wage and benefits discrimination, and numerous others.

Why? Because the Gender Wage Gap is in some key respects becoming a thing of the past, according to “The Declining Earnings Gap Between Young Women and Men in the United States 1979-2018” by John Iceland of Penn State and Ilana Redstone of the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Their study was just published in the journal, Social Science Research.

As Kay Hymowitz, writing for the Institute for Family Studies, puts it: Continue reading “FAMILY: New Study Finds Gender Wage Gap Fading, Fading, Fading …”

Philly Rioters Burn Vietnamese Baptist Church, Pastor Claims A Hard-Drive Miracle

When Vietnam Baptist Church Pastor Philip Pham first learned his congregation’s building was under assault by Philadelphia rioters and that the structure was in flames, his immediate reaction was to ask God to save a hard-drive.

“I prayed right away: ‘God, please protect the hard drives,'” Pham told The Baptist Press (BP). “Other stuff can be recovered. But those files will never be recovered.”

That hard-drive was irreplaceable because it contained years of documents and information from the church’s role as a community resource for immigration issues, taxes and marriage counseling.

“I saw the routers and modems and things surrounding the hard drives all burned, melted,” Pham told The BP. “But that piece of hard drive, no harm. No harm at all. Just two feet above that, all melted. … That is amazing how God knows our needs and answers our prayers. He is an almighty God. He granted our prayer.” Continue reading “Philly Rioters Burn Vietnamese Baptist Church, Pastor Claims A Hard-Drive Miracle”

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY? When Somebody Claims That Voting Just Isn’t Important

If history is any guide, nearly half of all voting-age Americans will fail to vote on election day, November 3, when the country picks its 46th president, a new Congress and scores of other officials for state and local governments.

Colson Center’s Joseph Backholm in ‘What Would You Say?’ (Screenshot from youtube)

But for those working on Capitol Hill, voting might as well be like drinking water, there is no life without it because we do live in a democratic republic in which the people, the voters, are sovereign.

Sadly, there are quite a few folks who think voting is a waste of time because it won’t make any difference, elections are all rigged, politicians never do what they promise, and so on and so on and so on.

In the following Colson Center video, Joseph Backholm provides three excellent responses for the next time somebody lays one of those pathetic excuses for not voting on you in a conversation:

 

Justice Department Sides With Capitol Hill Baptist Church Against Bowser, D.C. Government

Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC) is being unreasonably burdened by District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. government with its anti-Covid regulations that effectively bar members of the congregation from exercising their First Amendment right to religious freedom, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Capitol Hill Baptist Church Senior Pastor Mark Dever (Screenshot from CHBC video).

“Here, Defendants (collectively, the Honorable Muriel Bowser and the District of Columbia) are imposing a substantial burden, within the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), on Plaintiff Capitol Hill Baptist Church’s religious exercise by denying the church the ability to gather as a single body as required by its sincere religious faith,” DOJ said in a Statement of Interest filed Friday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The CHBC, represented by the First Liberty Institute, filed suit in the federal court last week against the regulations.

“This triggers strict scrutiny: Defendants must meet the high burden of showing that their actions support a compelling governmental interest pursued through the least restrictive means. Continue reading “Justice Department Sides With Capitol Hill Baptist Church Against Bowser, D.C. Government”