David from Family Room Media recounts an unusual encounter of a lady from North Carolina; an encounter that challenged her theology.

She was visiting a recreational area where she had just turned aside from admiring the view when she spotted a man examining some steep cliffs with a pair of binoculars. She sensed Father urging her to approach him, so she walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. The man lowered his binoculars and looked intently at her when she said “God just wants you to know that he loves you and cares for you.” The stranger turned, put his forehead on the hood of his car a wept. He finally told her that she had saved his life, that he had just lost his wife and was planning to take his own by casting himself from the cliffs. He eagerly accepted her offer to pray with him and hungrily received the words of life she shared with him. A few moments later she left him to get something she needed in the tourist facilities which had large glass windows providing a unhindered view of the natural beauty without. As she left the facility to return to her vehicle, she noticed the man she had prayed with wandering through the parking area as if looking for something. Once more, she felt prompted to go to him. When she reached him, he was kneeling in a puddle of muddy water. “Please baptize me!” he said. A myriad of objecting thoughts crowded her mind, thoughts about a woman baptizing a man in a mud puddle where he couldn’t be fully immersed, by what authority, etc., etc. But she was sensitive enough to the Holy Spirit that the inaudible voice urging her to “just do it!” overrode her religious scruples.

So a lone woman baptized a male stranger in a mud puddle as an amazed audience stared at the spectacle through windows made especially for viewing.

God 1
Religion 0

David Fredrickson

When I left the institutional church, I wasn't bitter or hurt. We had our share of letdowns and painful events while in that system, but our leaving had nothing to do with that. I had merely come to a point in my life where I was so sick and tired of Church, I never wanted to go back.

After being away from the institution for about six months, I started to see how deeply it affected me. I felt like a tiger born in captivity, growing up in a zoo, and one day, someone left the cage door open. I walked through it innocently and unknowingly. Once I was out of the cage and in the wild, I began to discover that, for my entire life, I hadn't been a tiger. I was just a stuffed animal on the shelf. It wasn't until I was in the wild that I found the true meaning of "Tiger." In my freedom, I learned that the very essence of who I was created to be had been stolen from me by the institution.

I think we spend a lot of time trying to make "church" better and more tolerable. Every year, there are more and more conferences presenting new, improved ways to "do Church." It reminds me of zoo-keepers who decorate the tiger's cage to look as much like the tigers' natural habitat as possible. Thick trees, a pond, grass and a cave for privacy, are all lovingly placed around the pit so the tiger won't know the difference. The one ingredient, however, that cannot be given to the tiger is freedom. Sadly, this is what makes him a tiger. You can't cage something that was intended to be wild. When you do, the TIGER inside the tiger dies and all you have is a lazy stuffed animal with matted fur and a hollow, far-away look in its eyes.

In the wild, a herd of zebras may stop to drink at a watering hole. If you're on an African safari and witness that, it's an amazing sight. That doesn't mean that by catching ten zebras, putting them in a pen, and sticking a bucket of water in front of them, we can rightfully say, "Oh look - a herd of zebras has stopped to drink from a watering hole." That's a lie! This is exactly what we do with what we call "church." We capture a group of Christians, put them in the same room and say, "Oh look - a bunch of Christians gathering for fellowship." It's a lie! What is sad is that we justify it by telling ourselves that we are not to forsake the gathering at the water hole. The very thing that would have happened naturally becomes scheduled, mapped-out and dictated.

Christians who have the living love of God in their hearts will naturally connect with people and have relationship. They don't need to be monitored and dictated by a hierarchy. Things that happen naturally don't need any help or assistance from an outside source in order to make sure they continue. Any form of assistance on the part of humans will inevitably kill the essence of a natural thing.

It's that "NATURAL" part that I want to get at. When I talk about living in the wild as a Christian, some people immediately associate that with some sort of vicious, drooling beast that lives alone in a cave and lashes out, mauling everything crossing its path. Wild does not mean rabid. It's simply means free. Free to be what you will. Even a flower can be wild. I cannot stress the importance of this in the life of a Christian. Institutionalism has done everything to insure that this freedom is never realized in the heart of one Christian. That wild essence must be strangled because the heart in which it dwells will naturally demand freedom. Know this: Until a Christian is free from organized and planned religion, he or she will never really know what it means to be a Christian. They'll just sit in their pews week after week, like stuffed humans with matted fur and a hollow look in their eyes. Many will not even know that they're missing anything. They'll drink when they're told and they'll eat and fellowship upon command without having the slightest idea what true Christianity is all about. This caging of the natural is perhaps most heartbreaking of all.

Sometimes I feel like the tiger who escaped captivity and tasted freedom for the first time. Now I'm back at the zoo trying to convince the other tigers to leave with me. The problem is that the tiger in them is comatose, so they neither have the will nor the desire to experience the wild. They're not even sure I'm telling the truth and everything within them suspects that I'm not. They are slothfully satisfied in their captivity. The thought of having to hunt for their own food sounds too much like work. They wouldn't even know where to begin. The zoo has made life easy for them. Why leave? The zoo has convinced them that their cage IS the wild.

Read more:  Free Believers Network

Grains of truths are often expanded into dictums which spawn entire industries that tout their brandings and products.

Those that wield real power often give it away!

Innovation and creativity cannot be ordered nor regulated.

Victories are only birthed out of conflicts! The greater the conflict the sweeter the victory!

There is no fool-proof system!

The essential is usually invisible to the naked eye!

Even impossibles are possible to the possible!

Thoughts:  Ravi Philemon

"It is to your advantage that I go away!"

Our fascination with celebrities often becomes personality cult.  One of the things which I simply do not understand about  American politics is the messianic fervor which seems to flow through the presidential process.  Can one person really solve the problems of a nation?  That leadership cult also flows through the church.  So much teaching on leadership seems to have as its goal the creation of dependency!  We have our own versions of the celebrity, personality, leadership cults!

In John 16:7,  Jesus is telling the disciples that  "It is to your advantage that I go away".  After three years with Jesus, after all the miracles and after all the dreams of the Kingdom it comes to this?  How could it possibly be better without Jesus?  How could it possibly be better without the moment by moment flesh and blood presence of Jesus?

We know the rest of the verse!  "For if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you: but if I depart, I will send Him to you."  

Jesus, the best, wisest, most anointed leader who ever walked on the face of the earth was leaving the men he had discipled for three years.  Earlier He had called them "friends" and destroyed the possibility of any hierarchical system truly representing His kingdom but now he takes it all one step further!  He is leaving the scene! 

It is better that they know His indwelling presence by the Holy Spirit than for them to have His physical presence!  It is better that His friends walk as He walked by inward revelation of the Father and His voice than by outward command!  Jesus was so confident of the ability of the Holy Spirit to lead into all truth, to reveal His person and to reveal His Father that He was willing to leave.   He was willing to trust His friends to the Holy Spirit!  And we think we are needed?

Healthy leadership disciplines towards trust and release energized by love!  Unhealthy leadership controls towards dependence and is driven by fear.  True leadership knows the time  to go and leave the friends to the Holy Spirit!  If you do not demonstrate your trust in the Holy Spirit in your friends, they never will learn to do so either! 

Do we have the same trust in the Holy Spirit that Jesus has?
How are you relating to others? 
Do you have friends or servants?
Is Jesus free to build?

From the Leadership Files:  STEVE HILL

British philosopher Flew has long been something of an evangelist for atheism, debating theologians in front of enormous crowds. So-called 'new' atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have stood on his shoulders in debunking the existence of God. But Professor Antony Flew's thinking has recently been turned upside down - or maybe right side up! He now believes in a Creator. Antony Flew engaged in debate with C.S. Lewis at the Oxford University Socratic Club in 1950, when he presented a paper called Theology and Falsification. This became the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century. The Socratic principle emphasised by this club - of following the evidence wherever it may lead - became a guiding principle throughout Flew's career.

In 2004, breathless news reports announced that the nonagenarian had changed his mind. His new book's title declares: THERE IS NO GOD - but the 'NO' is scribbled out and replaced by an 'A'. And the subtitle adds, How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind. This book tells why. 

It was his principle of "following the evidence wherever it may lead" which led him to change his mind about God after more than sixty years of atheism and a distinguished career as a philosopher. In a chapter entitled Atheism calmly considered, Flew describes his various debates with theists over the decades. Some were attended by thousands. The professor found himself confronted in debate with increasing evidence of an intelligent designer behind the universe. Big Bang cosmology, implying that the universe had not always existed, had pulled the rug out from under some of his key arguments. Other developments in modern science too seemed to point to a higher Intelligence.

Breakthroughs in science, especially cosmology, also played a part: if the speed or mass of the electron were off just a little, no life could have evolved on this planet. Perhaps the arrogance of the New Atheists also emboldened him, as Flew taunts them for failing to live up to the greatness of atheists of yore. The book concludes with an appendix by New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N.T. Wright, arguing for the coherence of Christian belief in the resurrection. Flew praises Wright, though he maintains some distance still from Christianity.

Asked if recent work on the origin of life indicated creative Intelligence, Flew answered: 'Yes, I now think it does... DNA (investigations have shown)... that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.' Atheists, he explained, were fond of appealling to the idea that given enough time, chance could produce anything, even life. But Schroeder impressed Flew by debunking the so-called 'monkey theorem': that enough monkeys banging away on enough keyboards could eventually produce a Shakespearean sonnet. Or, by analogy, that life could emerge by chance.  Schroeder referred to an experiement conducted by the British National Arts Council, in which six monkeys were put in a cage with a computer. One month and fifty typed pages later, not a single word had been produced by the monkeys. Not even the single-letter words of 'a' or 'I'. Actually, argued Schroeder, the likelihood of getting a one-letter word was one in 27,000. What chance then was there of getting a fourteen-line Shakespearean sonnet by chance? Schroeder did the maths and came up with 10 to the 690th. To get that in perspective, the number of particles in the whole universe-protons, electrons, and neutrons-is a mere 10 to the 80th! For Flew, this was a convincing display that the monkey theorem he and others had often used to discount any intelligent Creator was simply 'rubbish'.

Flew calls his discovery of the Divine a pilgrimage of reason, not of faith. He claims no personal experience of God or any experience of the supernatural or miraculous.  The book's other remarkable appendix is by Flew's collaborator Roy Abraham Varghese. Varghese accuses these 'atheist evangelists' of ignoring the very phenomena relevant to the question of God's existence. These are: rationality, implicit in all our experience of the physical world; life, the capacity to act autonomously; consciousness, the ability to be aware; conceptual thought, the power of articulating and understanding language; and the human self, the 'centre' of consciousness and action. All the evidence we need is in our immediate experience, argues Varghese; only a deliberate refusal to 'look' is responsible for atheism of any variety.

Flew's book is a powerful challenge to all to 'look' and follow the evidence wherever it may lead.

What happens to a nation that squanders its history and suffers the entailments of God's departed glory? This was the sad course of Israel during Ezekiel's life. The prophet witnessed the demise of spiritual leadership and the disobedience of God's people. Ravi Zacharias illuminates Israel's descent -- their turning from God and their misguided appeal for a human king -- and explores the biblical understanding of glory.

  When God Bids Farewell!

A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. What food might this contain? The mouse wondered - he was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap. Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning: There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house! The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, "Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me." " I cannot be bothered by it." The mouse turned to the pig and told him, "There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!" The pig sympathized, but said, I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. "Be assured you are in my prayers." The mouse turned to the cow and said "There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!" The cow said, "Wow, Mr. Mouse. I'm sorry for you, but it's no skin off my nose." So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer's mousetrap alone. That very night a sound was heard throughout the house -- like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey. The farmer's wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer's wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital , and she returned home with a fever. Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup's main ingredient.  But his wife's sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock.  To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig. The farmer's wife did not get well; she died. So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them. The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness. So, the next time you hear someone is facing a problem and think it doesn't concern you, remember -- when one of us is threatened, we are all at risk. We are all involved in this journey called life. We must keep an eye out for one another and make an extra effort to encourage one another.

EACH OF US IS A VITAL THREAD IN ANOTHER PERSON'S TAPESTRY; OUR LIVES ARE WOVEN TOGETHER FOR A REASON.  ONE OF THE BEST THINGS TO HOLD ON TO IN THIS WORLD IS A FRIEND!

Author:  Unknown