God Centered Dad

 I recently watched a clip from an interview with a man in which he shared a part of his testimony which should serve as a warning to all of us. In this clip, he tells of his experience after an accident that he had in 1979 at which the paramedics proclaimed him as dead. They transported him to the hospital, and some time after he got there, he came back to life. This man was clinically dead for about 15 minutes, and he tells of what he experienced during that time. While he was dead, he had the opportunity to watch the harvest of souls from the earth and see them as they found out their eternal destiny. This man states that in those 15 minutes in 1979, there were 2000 souls that left the earth, and the vast majority of them were met with rejection from Heaven. Only 50 of 2000 people gained access to Heaven; only 2.5%.  That was in 1979, when there was still a significant Christian heritage in this country. We have since wandered far from God as a nation, and that occurs one...

  Picture from Wallpapers.com - twodazza  This is the sixth and the final instalment in my series of articles about the baptism by the Holy Spirit. If you have somehow found yourself here without having read the previous articles, I would encourage you to start with the first article and work your way through so that you will get to follow the entire process by which we have found ourselves here, as this has been an exploratory exercise for me and not just a treatise of what I understood when I started writing these articles. In this series, we have seen that, while a Believer will receive the Holy Spirit upon the confession of faith in Jesus and His gift of salvation, this is an indwelling of the Holy Spirit for guidance and comfort, but this does not seem to include an empowerment of the Believer to perform works to advance the kingdom of God. The receipt of the Holy Spirit is a first experience, while the baptism by the Holy Spirit is a second experience. We see this exam...

  Picture from Wallpapers.com - twodazza This is part five in a series of articles in which I have been exploring what the baptism by the Holy Spirit is, how it comes about and what it looks like. Following is a synopsis of the articles that I have written so far.  In my first article , we looked at how the Bible talks about baptism by the Holy Spirit and we saw that, at Jesus' own water baptism, He experienced a second and separate baptism by the Holy Spirit. In my second article we discovered the idea that there are actually two separate experiences of relationship with the Holy Spirit, based partly on the fact that Jesus experienced those two separate baptisms as well as other Biblical proofs; the first experience is the receipt of the Holy Spirit upon our confession of faith, and the second experience is the Believer living under the influence of the Holy Spirit, which is evidenced by the gifts of the Spirit, which the Bible tells us will empower us in the same ways ...

  Picture from Wallpapers.com - twodazza We will keep moving along, exploring what it means to be baptized by the Holy Spirit. As you can see above, this is my fourth article on this subject, and I encourage you to read the previous three if you haven't already. They provide a foundation on which I will continue building in this article, and if you do not have that foundational knowledge, what I am writing here may not make sense to you. My first article investigated how the the Bible talks about baptism by the Holy Spirit and it included a look at Jesus' own water and Holy Spirit baptisms. My second article presented the evidence that there are actually two separate experiences of relationship with the Holy Spirit; the first being the receipt of the Holy Spirit upon our confession of faith, and the second being living under the influence of the Holy Spirit so that He empowers us with gifts of the Spirit in the same way that Jesus was empowered and was able to act in th...