Soul winners today should consider the famous saying, "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." America is ignoring the history of other nations who have strayed from the Bible. King David observed in Psalms 9:17: The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.

An Israeli news article in 2007 by Paul E. Marek, brings current events into sharp focus. He remembers a wealthy German who survived World War II describing the situation that led up to Hitler. He said very few of the German common people were actually Nazis. They were quietly going about their lives, considering Hitler's crowd just "a bunch of fools." "So," he said, "The majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories."

Marek goes on to describe how we are told that Islam is a peaceful religion. He says that the "peaceful" Muslims are irrelevant: "The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or execute honor killings. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard, quantifiable fact is that the "peaceful majority" is the "silent majority," and it is cowed and extraneous."

Besides Hitler, the "peaceful majority" slept while the communists took control of Russia and China. Marek further reminds us of history. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us, watching it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Soul winners, we cannot be part of that "silent majority." Too many Christians are like the German common people: going about their lives oblivious of the gathering storm. Americans have been given a freedom to witness that is rare in history. Most Christians over the centuries, have had to hide their faith, or risk imprisonment or death to share it. Today, more than half the world is basically hostile to the gospel. Some have estimated that over 50,000 Christians are martyred every year.

The burning question is: what are we doing with the precious freedom that we have? History tells us that that freedom was bought with blood and lost fortunes. Many Christian leaders are beginning to question how much longer we will have that freedom. Only God knows but His commission still stands to go and make disciples.

Sharing our faith with another person is our top priority as believers. But Satan has us moving so fast that it is difficult to stop long enough to personally share the gospel. But it only takes a second to hand someone a gospel tract or plant it where it will be noticed. We must share the gospel with anyone who will listen, and not forget to put a copy of the good news in their hands if they are too busy to listen.

Persecution of Christians in the Middle East
In the daily drumbeat of Mideast news, there is one story of historic proportion that is nearly unreported: the growing persecution and systematic destruction in the Islamic world of some of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

We hear when a Catholic bishop is murdered in Iraq, when machete-armed fanatics attack Egyptian Copt worshipers, or when churches are torched in Hamas-controlled Gaza. But what about the jailing in Saudi Arabia of foreign workers for holding forbidden Christian prayers? Or the arrest in Pakistan of a Christian man for marrying a Muslim woman? Or the continuing Islamic educational system that teaches the young that Christians (as well as Jews) are “the descendants of apes and pigs”?

The pattern is nearly the same wherever extremist Islam holds sway. From Bangladesh to Darfur, Christians have become regular targets for Islamic thugs and the governments that back them. Just this month, a Pakistani court upheld the kidnapping, conversion and “marriage” to older Moslem men of two Christian sisters, aged 10 and 13.

Yet even in lands that are not under orthodox Sharia law, Christian communities feel the pressure of persecution. In constitutionally secular Turkey, a legally recognized Protestant church in the capital of Ankara is under threat of closure by local Islamist police.

Many Christians in Islamic lands have become subject to such terror that they are fleeing the homelands their ancestors have known almost since the time of Jesus. Iraq’s Christian sects now feel forced to pray in secret. Others simply leave. Although they comprise less than four percent of Iraq’s population, Iraqi Christians now account for 40 per cent of its refugees.

Lebanon’s once politically powerful Christian community has already shrunken almost beyond recognition. Thirty years ago, Lebanon was 60% Christian; today it is barely 25%. The growing political power of Iran-backed Hezbollah is encouraging further departures.

Even in the Holy Land, where Jesus walked, there is an increasing Christian exodus from both the West Bank and Gaza. Part of it surely stems from the continuing Palestinian- Israeli conflict. But much of it results from a growing Islamic campaign to force Christians to sell their property and leave. Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, was once 90% Christian. Today it has a 65% Moslem majority.

The only place in the Mideast where Christian communities continue to grow is in the Jewish State of Israel. Israel’s tolerance is logical. What people of faith knows the dangers of religious persecution better than the people of Israel especially those whose families originated in the Islamic world? Between 1948 and 1956 more than 850,000 Jews were forced to flee the Arab lands where their families had lived for centuries.

Most found new homes in Israel; others settled in Western Europe and the Americas. Today there are almost no Jews in the Arab world. In Egypt, where 180,000 Jews once lived, there are fewer than 80. In Iraq, where Jews once comprised a third of Baghdad, there are possibly ten left. In Libya, there are none.

For much of Islamic history there was relative tolerance of both Jews and Christians. Though never treated as equals to Moslems, they were accepted as Dhimmi protected minorities. Today there seems to be a dangerous tendency in many Muslim nations to neither respect nor try to preserve the historic sanctity of these once sheltered cultures and faiths.

When Afghan fanatics destroyed two ancient statues of Buddha, the world was shocked. But the world should not forgot that between 1948 and 1967, when Islamic forces controlled the Holy City of Jerusalem, there was a systematic campaign to erase the historic Jewish presence. Synagogues were destroyed and ancient Jewish gravestones carted away. Even today, the Palestinian Authority not only denies Israel’s right to consider itself a Jewish state, but denies the historic Jewish connection to Jerusalem. It is an empty effort to enhance the Palestinian political narrative at the expense of others’ hard earned history.

If there is a hope of true peace in the Middle East, extremist Islam must reform its view of others. It cannot go on teaching that non-Islamic history in the Middle East is “fiction.”

There is a sacred opportunity now to take up the call for the Islamic world’s hard-pressed and ever shrinking Christian communities. All people of commitment and tolerance – Christian, Jew, and Moslem – should speak out loudly and forcefully so that the Islamic world’s Christians do not suffer the same fate as its now all but non-existent Jewish communities.
IFCJ

Malaysia Confiscates Bibles, Claiming Allah
and Jehovah are Not the Same.
Issue Date: November/December 2009

The government of the Muslim-majority country of Malaysia has confiscated 15,000 Bibles because they use the word "Allah" for God. Although several western leaders have declared that Jehovah of the Bible and Allah of Islam are the same God, Muslim leaders disagree.

In nations where Islam is a minority, Muslim leaders go along with the false notion that Allah is the same "monotheistic deity" that Christians and Jews worship. However, when they gain sufficient power, they demand that only Allah be worshiped and persecution of Christians and Jews begins.

Chick Publications has been pointing out all along that the Pope and former President Bush were wrong in saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Now we have an example where Muslims agree. In Malaysia, Islam has become the dominant religion, backed by the power of the government. In confiscating only the Bibles that use Allah for the God of the Bible, they are saying: "This word, Allah, applies to our god but not yours."

Author Mohammad Ghazoli stresses this point in his book, Christ, Muhammad and I. He describes how he lived outwardly as a Muslim most of his life and became a successful economist and publisher. His family and teachers had refused to discuss probing questions about Allah when he was in school. So, as he pursued his career he secretly harbored a distrust of Islam and Allah.

When he was given a Bible late in life, he realized that the God of the Bible was nothing like Allah. No way could they be the same god. After placing his trust in the loving God of the Bible, he wrote Christ, Muhammad and I to help other Muslims to see how Allah and Jehovah could not possibly be the same.

Another book published by Chick Publications is called Who is this Allah? by G.J.O. Moshay. He describes in great detail how Allah of the Qur'an and Jehovah of the Bible cannot possibly be the same person. One key difference is that the Qur'an specifically says that Allah does not have a son. Yet Jesus is described in the Bible as the "only begotten of the Father."

To highlight this difference, Chick Publications produced a tract called Allah Had No Son. In an illustrated conversation between a Muslim and a knowledgeable Christian, some of the differences between Allah and Jehovah are explained.

The politically correct view of the West is that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. But Muslim leaders in nations where Islam is in control do what Malaysia has done, strive to eliminate all Bibles and Christians as well. They know that if they don't, their people will discover the loving , merciful, trustworthy God that Ghazoli found. Then the truth about Allah being only an ancient Arabic moon god will come out.

It is almost impossible to get the gospel into a country where Islam is in control. But toleration has allowed millions of Muslims to immigrate to the West. Soul winners have a window of opportunity to reach Muslims right in our neighborhoods. Like Ghazoli, many are uncomfortable with their impersonal, unknowable god. If we take the time to show them the God of the Bible, some will come to trust Him just as he did.

Issue Date: November/December 2009


One after another, the "mainline" churches are ignoring the Bible to follow politically correct paths that the Bible calls sin. The Episcopal church is experiencing a major split over the installation of a practicing homosexual bishop. Individual congregations are forced to decide whether to obey the Bible or follow the denominational leaders.

This August, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) also voted to lift a ban on homosexual clergy. Already, ELCA congregations are forming another denominational alliance claiming that the ELCA has "departed from the teaching of the Bible as understood by Christians for 2,000 years."

One reader of an internet article on this vote observed that the root of this controversy began in the 1970s. Branches of the Lutherans in the U.S. took two different views of the Bible. One, led by the Missouri Synod, took the position that the whole Bible is the word of God.

The others proposed that the Bible only "contained the word of God." The reader notes, "If the Bible only contains the Word of God, you can pick and choose what is of God and what is of men."

This "picking and choosing" began a long time before 1970, according the author and linguist, David W. Daniels. He has written extensively of another time when proud men made arbitrary decisions as to what should be in the Bible.

His book, Did the Catholic Church Give us the Bible?, gives a detailed history of one stream of manuscripts that contains thousands of examples of this "picking and choosing" by men. He describes how early copies of scripture arrived in Alexandria, Egypt to be studied by world-class "scholars" of that time. Because they did not believe Jesus was God and were infected with Greek philosophy, they began altering the text to fit their disbelief.

Those polluted manuscripts were the ones picked up by Westcott and Hort as the foundation Greek for the modern Bible versions. Since then, the "translators" of these modern versions took the same liberties based on the "pick and choose" philosophy that the Bible only contains the word of God. This has produced several dozen versions today, which omit and change hundreds of verses. They disagree among themselves and in some cases even contradict each other.

Daniels traces another stream of manuscripts that flowed from the original apostles in Jerusalem up through Antioch. Copies were preserved in Europe during the dark ages, sometimes in caves to avoid destruction. Ultimately, these faithful copies were used by the Reformers to give us God's preserved words in English, the King James Bible.

In another book called Look What's Missing, Daniels examines 40 of the most popular modern versions to show that they are missing hundreds of words, phrases and whole verses that were preserved for us in the King James Bible.

It is understandable that these denominations have lost their way when they are reading Bibles that are so corrupted that they do not believe that they have God's word. No wonder they "pick and choose" verses that support what they want to believe, rather than trusting the Bible for what it says.

We have a classic example of this confusion when dealing with homosexuals. In some cases where the KJV uses the clear word "sodomites," the modern versions read "temple prostitutes."

Homosexuals look at this and say, "We are not temple prostitutes, so the Bible is not talking about us." No wonder there is such confusion in these denominations when they are relying on these defective Bibles.

*Twas the month before Christmas*



*When all through our land,*



*Not a Christian was praying*



*Nor taking a stand.*



*See the PC Police had taken away,*



*The reason for Christmas - no one could say.*



*The children were told by their schools not to sing,*



*About Shepherds and Wise Men and Angels and things.*



*It might hurt people's feelings, the teachers would say*



* December 25th is just a ' Holiday '.*



*Yet the shoppers were ready with cash, checks and credit*



*Pushing folks down to the floor just to get it!*



*CDs from Madonna, an X BOX, an I-pod*



*Something was changing, something quite odd! *



*Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanzaa*



*In hopes to sell books by Franken & Fonda.*



*As Targets were hanging their trees upside down*



* At Lowe's the word Christmas - was no where to be found.*



*At K-Mart and Staples and Penny's and Sears*



*You won't hear the word Christmas; it won't touch your ears.*



*Inclusive, sensitive, Di-ver-si-ty*



*Are words that were used to intimidate me.*



*Now Daschle, Now Darden, Now Sharpton, Wolf Blitzen*



*On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry, on Clinton !*



*At the top of the Senate, there arose such a clatter*



*To eliminate Jesus, in all public matter.*



*And we spoke not a word, as they took away our faith*



* Forbidden to speak of salvation and grace*



*The true Gift of Christmas was exchanged and discarded*



*The reason for the season, stopped before it started.*



*So as you celebrate 'Winter Break' under your 'Dream Tree'*



*Sipping your Starbucks, listen to me.*



*Choose your words carefully, choose what you say*



*Shout MERRY CHRISTMAS ,



not Happy Holiday !*



Please, all Christians join together and



wish everyone you meet



MERRY CHRISTMAS



Christ is The Reason' for the Christ-mas Season!