Quote - George Herbert

"The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition." George Herbert

A Christian Search Engine - www.seekfind.org

Are you ever concerned about what will pop up when you do a search on a computer search engine? Have you ever wanted to limit your search to trustworthy Christian resources? Check out http://www.seekfind.org/

Here is a little about it from its own website:

"The mission of SeekFind.org is to provide God-honoring, biblically-based, and theologically-sound Christian search engine results in a highly accurate and well-organized format."

"SeekFind.org is a unique “Christian-content-only” search engine. The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves often produce quality results for searches related to Christian terms. However, mixed in with these search results will be results from pages attacking the Christian faith and/or presenting unbiblical views. For example, a search for “Jesus Christ” at Google will result in page 1 listings from the Mormon church, a genealogical service, and a secular history of views about Jesus.

There are several Christian Search Engines on the internet as well. Good examples are ChristianStart, CrossSearch, and ChristSites. While these are good websites with some great tools – they are not as discerning as they should be in regards to what kind of content they allow in their listings. Further, most Christian Search Engines only index the front page of a website. As a result, all of the great content on inside pages of websites gets missed entirely.

SeekFind.org avoids these problems by only indexing websites that are Biblically-based, theologically-sound, and in agreement with our Statement of Faith. That way, you can have confidence that you will find content which will be God-honoring and spiritually encouraging. Further, the SeekFind.org “spider” crawls every page of the websites in our index – giving you the most complete and most accurate results possible."

Christian Quotes - The Church - Part 1

"The bible knows nothing of solitary religion." John Wesley "Church attendance is a vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man." D.L. Moody "One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organization do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always." A.W. Tozer "The true man of God is heartsick, grieved at the worldliness of the Church...grieved at the toleration of sin in the Church, grieved at the prayerlessness in the Church. He is disturbed that the corporate prayer of the Church no longer pulls down the strongholds of the devil." Leonard Ravenhill “Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshippers meeting together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become unity conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship. Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified. The body becomes stronger as its members become healthier. The whole church of God gains when the members that compose it begin to seek a better and a higher life." A.W. Tozer From: http://christianquotes.org

Quote - Owen Feltham

"All men will be Peters in their bragging tongue, and most men will be Peters in their base denial; but few men will be Peters in their quick repentance." Owen Feltham

Ecclesiastes 5:2

Ecclesiastes 5:2 "Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few."

Christians & Pornography - A Growing Problem

How big of a problem is pornography in America? Among Christians? The below statistics are unsettling: Some statistics from the North American Missions Board of the Southern Baptist Convention:

• Sixty percent of Christian men have sought out some form of pornography.
• At one Promise Keepers event, 50% of those in attendance said they had checked out pornographic material within the past week.
• Fifty-nine percent of married Christian men regularly fantasize about sexual relations with someone other than their spouse.
• Ninety-one percent of men raised in Christian homes were exposed to pornography while growing up (compared to 98% of those not raised in a Christian home).
• Fifty-one percent of pastors admit that pornography is a possible temptation
• Thirty-seven percent of pastors say that pornography is a struggle
• A survey conducted by Christianity Today of its readership in August 2000 revealed that…33% of clergy have visited a sexually explicit Internet site at least once within the past year, of which 53% have done so “a few times.”
• A survey conducted by Leadership magazine in 2000, showed that 40% of pastors have visited a pornographic Internet site, with over 33% doing so within the last 12 months. According to a study done by MSNBC…
• as many as 25 million Americans spend 1-10 hours per week viewing Internet pornography
• as many as 4.7 million people spend over 11 hours per week viewing Internet pornography
• Sixty percent of websites visited on the Internet are sexual in nature.
• Seventy percent of Internet porn traffic occurs during normal work hours (between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.).
• There are more outlets for hard-core pornography in the United States than McDonald's restaurants.

Mores stats from Top 10 Reviews: Internet Filters as compiled by XXXChurch.com

• Men admitting to accessing pornography at work-20%
• U.S. adults who regularly visit Internet pornography websites-40 million
• Christians who said pornography is a major problem in the home-47%
• Internet Pornography Sales-$4.9 billion
• Daily pornographic search engine requests-68 million (25% of total search engine requests)
• Internet users who view porn-42.7%
• 89% of porn is created in the U.S.
• $2.84 billion in revenue was generated from U.S. porn sites in 2006
• Over $3k a second is spent on porn worldwide
• 72% of porn viewers are men.
• 260 new porn sites go online daily

Here are some helpful articles for parents:

10 Signs Your Child Is Breaking the Rules Online

Internet Monitoring Family Game Plan

Uplugging Pornography: Helping Your Teen Break the Trap by Jeffrey Dean, author of The Fight of Your Life: Why Your Teen is at Risk and What You Can Do About It

Marc Driscoll the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington is sometimes criticized for his pointedness and mature level of issues dealt with within his sermons and church meetings. At the same time, he deals with and confronts many of the issues and sins of the day that the majority of churches and pastors choose to leave alone. In his on-line, FREE, short & easy-to read book, Porn-Again Christian: A Frank Discussion on Pornography & Masturbation, Marc Driscoll biblically confronts sins that regularly impact over 50% of the male population each week.

This book is written explicitly for adults and is immersed with Scriptural texts that rebuke and confront a sin that is all-too often tolerated and justified today. If you are a man who has struggled with these sins, or know men who have, you NEED to read this book. Especially helpful are some direct self-evaluation questions on page 21, some Q&A throughout, and an interview transcript between James Dobson and Ted Bundy. If you are a man, you need to read this book and share it with others. If you are a married woman, it may be helpful to you as well if this is something your husband struggles with.

Job 31:1 "I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl."

Romans 6:15-23 "15What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Quote - Augustine

"God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination." Augustine

Anyone Suprised? America is Growing More Secular

It made national news today...some seemed surprised, but for many, the statistics simply confirmed what is so clearly evidenced in many aspects of American society today: America is becoming more secular by the day. Some concerning statistics from the American Religious Identification Survey of 2008:

• "the percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent"
• "Baptists, who constitute the largest non-Catholic Christian tradition, have increased their numbers by two million since 2001, but continue to decline as a proportion of the population"
• "Mormons have increased in numbers enough to hold their own proportionally, at 1.4 percent of the population"
• "The Muslim proportion of the population continues to grow, from .3 percent in 1990 to .5 percent in 2001 to .6 percent in 2008"
• "Only1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God)"
• "The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million"
• "Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death"
• "Adherents of New Religious movements, including Wiccans and self-described pagans, have grown faster this decade than in the 1990s"

What these statistics don't show could even be more concerning. How many of those claiming to be "Christian" in this survey are only classified as such because they were raised that way? Or because it is more culturally acceptable?

It is a clear reminder that we have plenty of people around us who are in dire need of hearing the Gospel message and accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

Isaiah 1:2-4 "2 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the LORD has spoken: 'Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me.3The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib,but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.' 4Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly! They have forsaken the LORD, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged."

1 John 2:19 "They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us. "

Quote - Blaise Pascal

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it." Blaise Pascal

Quote - Mary Booth

"How we have prayed for a Revival - we did not care whether it was old-fashioned or not - what we asked for was that it should be such that would cleanse and revive His children and set them on fire to win others." Mary Booth

Quote - Jonathan Edwards

"The devil can counterfeit all the saving operations and graces of the Spirit of God." Jonathan Edwards

Quote - Matthew Henry

"Some people do not like to hear much of repentance; but I think it is so necessary that if I should die in the pulpit, I would desire to die preaching repentance, and if out of the pulpit I would desire to die practicing it." Matthew Henry

BiblePlaces.com

Although I am partial to all of the Israel photos and videos I will share in the weeks ahead (I took them), the best catalog of photos and resources that I have found is BiblePlaces.com. It has specific descriptions for all of the sites along with amazing photography. They sell their photos as well through several packages, to include labeled photos to assist in using them for teaching purposes. They also have a great blog that keeps up to date with some of the latest biblical archaeology discoveries. They also have an additional site, http://www.lifeintheholyland.com/ that focuses more on photographs from the 19th and the 20th centuries.

About the photographer:

"Todd Bolen is currently on study leave from his position as Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the Israel Bible Extension campus of The Master’s College. Since 1996, he has lived in Israel and taught college and seminary students about the biblical sites and history. His passion for teaching and photography led him to develop the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands. Todd’sphotographs have been published in hundreds of books and magazines and featured on CNN and NationalGeographic.com."