God Can Do Things In Prayer That Are Just So Cool!

God can do things in prayer that are just so cool...

Just this morning, I was praying for a friend of mine and his wife, Kenneth and Glynis Kintsel...a missionary couple who have a ministry to Latin America.  I knew that they were flying out of Miami sometime today to enter a country south of Miami to minister to the church there.  (I'm not going to name the country, but you probably can figure out an island nation that is not very hospitable to Christians.) As I was praying for them, I felt that I should text them to let them know that I was praying for them as they enter a potentially dangerous situation.  After I texted him, I felt compelled to add to my prayer that there not be any problems in customs as they bring important religious material into this country.  I hadn't thought of that (which may seem rather obvious, but it just hadn't occurred to me until that moment.) until I sent the text.

Less than a minute later, my friend called me.  He thanked me for praying for him, and told me that they would be boarding the plane in about ten minutes. He then asked for an additional prayer request...that I pray that they not have any problems in customs with the religious material they were taking to the people of this country!  Exactly what God had just put on my heart to pray for! Wow!  I told him, "Brother, I just prayed this for you seconds ago!"  God is working!

I asked if I could pray with him briefly, and we had a short but sweet time in prayer together.  The Lord brought to my mind an incident in Corrie Ten Boom's account  "The Hiding Place", in which she and her family were taken to concentration camps in Germany during World War II for harboring Jews from the Nazis.  She wanted to bring a Bible into the camp desperately, but had no way of getting it in except that God would simply close the eyes of the guards as she passed by.  So that's what she did.  She prayed and trusted God.  Well...as she was going through the inspection line with her Bible under her thin shirt, there was a big ruckus in front of her as they interrogated another prisoner.  Their attention was drawn to the prisoner, and she just walked through without being touched!  She would use this Bible to bring many to Christ and bring hope to those suffering in wretched conditions at Ravensbrook.

So...I haven't heard yet, but I feel confident that Jesus made the way for them to get the materials in that they needed.

These are not isolated incidents.  I know for a fact that God can do incredible things through prayer that can't be done any other way.  I know this from my own personal experience, and I know it from the experience of many others.

P.S. Please pray for this couple as they minister in this Latin country for the next couple of weeks. Bro. Ken and Sis. Glynis have an awesome ministry that I know that they would love for you to be a part of.  You can follow them on Facebook and Twitter by clicking on the links below:

Kenneth Kintsel's Facebook Page
Glynis Kintsel's Facebook Page
Kintsel's Twitter Account

For an inspirational lift, check out my new book, "Grace In Shoe Leather." It's an amazing story of grace and forgiveness that has made a difference in the lives of so many. You can download it here: http://amzn.to/1wLL5Mw  P.S. IT'S ON SALE TODAY - JUST 99 CENTS!!!!

Oklahoma Beheading: Let's Call It What It Is!

 I was at work yesterday waiting on customers in what was an unusually slow day.  During one break, I checked my Twitter feed and began to see all these tweets about a woman being beheaded in Oklahoma.  Wow!  This must be a huge story!

So I pop over to the home page of CNN...Nothing

Fox...nothing yet.

ABC, CBS, NBC...Nothing

Must have just happened...

We got busy and I checked back a few hours later...

Well, there it is front page on Fox...fairly detailed article.

CNN...Crickets (you've got to be kidding me!)

ABC, CBS, NBC...Well, there it is...but you have to look for it.

After reading and watching multiple news reports the facts are that a man named Alton Nolen, a 30-year old who recently converted to Islam and who had just been fired from his job, walked into his workplace, attacked a woman with a knife, decapitated her, then began stabbing a second woman.  The second woman no doubt would have been killed except for the heroic effort of company COO Mark Vaughan, who is a reserve county deputy.  Mr. Vaughan was armed (gun control advocates, take notice!) and shot Mr. Nolen several times.

I've noticed three things about the coverage of this story:

• the slowness of the national media to cover this story
• the scantness of the coverage that is being provided by everyone but Fox (who, to their credit, was all over it last night),
• the way it is being covered by the mainstream media (as well as the way that the FBI is handling it.)

One report said that authorities stated that terrorism was not suspected.  Really?

Erin Burnett on CNN asked an Oklahoma authority: "Do you believe it is possible that this is an ISIS copycat attack?" Emphasis was on the word "possible", as if this would be a real stretch to think such a thing.  Really?

Here's something hardly anyone is saying...

Last Sunday, ISIS issued a statement calling on Muslims worldwide to kill civilians of nations who are joining the fight against the Islamic State.  Below is part of that statement, courtesy of The Blaze:

“If you can kill a disbelieving American or European, especially the spiteful and filthy French, or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that joined a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be,” he said.

So, let's try to connect the dots here...

1. Radical Islamic theology teaches that Muslims are to try to convert "infidels" to Islam.  If they will not be converted, they are to be killed.
2. Just last Sunday, ISIS commands all Muslims to kill Americans (and other coalition members) in any way they can.  They don't have to have a direct order from ISIS. Just go and kill.
3. The entire world now knows that ISIS' preferred method of execution is beheading.
4. A recent convert to Islam in Oklahoma recently changes his name to Jah' Keem Israel on his Facebook page and states that "Amerika...is going to flames" on that page.
5. News reports say that Nolen has been trying to convert his coworkers to Islam (see #1 above)
6. When he cannot convert any of his coworkers, Nolen then goes into his former place of business and randomly attacks a woman, beheads her, and then attacks another woman. Certainly the second woman would have been beheaded if not for Mr. Vaughan's actions.

Do you see any connection here?  

And consider this...

The authorities are saying that they are investigating the possibility that he might have been radicalized. The possibility?

I realize that we can't jump to conclusions on things, and the authorities have to be careful and methodical in the way that they do their jobs.  But sometimes the evidence is right there in front of you.  As in a severed head.  

Is there any possibility at all that he hadn't been radicalized?  Where might he have gotten the idea of beheading a woman?  It couldn't possibly be from the news reports of a certain group overseas that delights in beheading people, could it?

Authorities are not treating this as terrorism (at least not yet), because they have an extremely narrow view of what terrorism is.  To them, if he hadn't received a phone call from ISIS telling him to go behead someone, it's not really terrorism.

Well, it is terrorism.  Let's just call it what it really is.

It's significant to me that the killing was random.  He didn't have a grudge against this woman.  Apparently, he didn't even know her at all.  That's what terrorism is.

I'm not writing this to be an alarmist.  My security is in God, not in man.  And as I've written before, we don't need to go around frightened all the time about what might happen to us in these chaotic times.

However, we do need to be prudent.  We do need to realize that a very powerful Islamic group has issued a statement to all Muslim followers, of which there are many here in the U.S., to kill any way they can.

Our government is not taking this terrorist threat as seriously as it should be taken.

Our national media is not taking this as seriously as it should be taken.

I hope that we don't have to have multiple incidents like this before people will wake up.

One very good report that I heard on this was on Greta Van Susteran's interview last night with Walid Phares.  He makes some of these same points and describes the ISIS guidelines for killing Americans I mentioned above. You can watch it here.

Below are links to other articles I've written recently about ISIS and the growing international threats:

The High Cost of Inaction
Is War In Europe Coming?

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Is War In Europe Coming?

So much has happened since I wrote my last post only six days ago. It seems as though the gruesome video posted by ISIS this week of the beheading of a second American journalist, Steven Sotloff, has captured the attention of the American public and the American press, as nothing else has.  Even many normally "dovish" politicians are beginning to realize the "high cost of inaction including, I hope, our president.  Public sentiment seems to be moving towards a realization (belatedly), that we cannot continue to let these things happen without it eventually coming to the homeland.  However, I am concerned that the only thing that will galvanize public support for a concerted effort to destroy ISIS and other equally dangerous terror groups will be a successful attack on American soil.  I truly hope that's not the case.

 
Meanwhile, though not receiving nearly as much attention here in the U.S., other events in Europe have made war on that continent not unthinkable. Russian President Putin has begun to make moves into Ukraine and has been making provocative statements, such as that he could take Kiev in two weeks if he wanted to.  Someone has stated that not even Adolf Hitler made such blatant provocations before attacking.  War in Europe could be closer than we could imagine.  I have since read a couple of mainstream articles that make this frightfully clear.  They are important and you should read them if you want to understand what's really going on.  One of them is entitled "War In Europe Is Not A Hysterical Idea" written by Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post.  The thing that really got my attention in this article was this quote:

 

In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow.

 
Wow!  She goes on to say that these maps of Novorossiya (or New Russia) include areas of Europe currently not in Russia at all, including all of Ukraine.  This is huge, and it is hardly getting any attention from the mainstream media (except The Washington Post, to their credit). 



 
The other article that caught my attention came out this week in The Wall Street Journal. It is entitled "Deterring A European War."
After writing about the important European NATO summit taking place this year, it recalls the above quote by Vladimir Putin that "if I want, I can take Kiev in two weeks." It then goes on to say this:

 

Such talk may be bluster, but the stealthy seizure of Crimea was supposed to be unthinkable only a few months ago. So was Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine last month. The problem with calling something unthinkable is that it tends to dull the thinking needed to keep it that way. Europeans also thought the world wars of the last century were unthinkable right up until they broke out.

The authors go on to describe the woeful unpreparedness of most of western European armies to meet the challenge of an aggressive Russia. Great Britain, which has one of the largest armies in Europe, only has 157 tanks! Of NATO's 28 states, only four spend as much as 2% on national defense. As degraded as the American military has become under President Obama, we are in far better position than Europe. And to save Europe again, (as we were called to do 75 years ago) and to secure our own freedom, we would almost certainly have to become involved.
The Wall Street Journal Article goes on to conclude with this paragraph:

The temptation of democracies is to believe that autocrats treasure peace and stability as much as we do. Europeans in particular want to believe that their postwar institutions and economic integration have ended their violent history. But autocrats often prosper from disorder, and they need foreign enemies to feed domestic nationalism. This describes Russia under Mr. Putin, who is Europe's new Bonaparte. His goal is to break NATO, and he'll succeed unless the alliance's leaders respond forcefully to his threat.

 

Finally, I want to express my thanks to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Dr. Albert Mohler for bringing both of these articles to my attention in his daily podcast "The Briefing." If you want to know what's going on, not only in foreign affairs but in American cultural life as seen from a Christian worldview, this is extremely useful. I just found out about these podcasts, and I've already found them to be indispensable.

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Want to read more?  Here are links to similar posts:



A Colossal Failure
A Colossal Failure X 2
While America Sleeps

For an inspirational lift, check out my new book, "Grace In Shoe Leather." It's an amazing story of grace and forgiveness that has made a difference in the lives of so many. You can download it here: http://amzn.to/1wLL5Mw 
P.S. IT'S ON SALE TODAY - JUST 99 CENTS!!!!

 

 

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