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Vol. 15 / Issue 19 / November 17 2011

Contents of this issue

Editorial

John MacArthur is Wrong! - The Scum! - Part 24

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News Items (Common to all issues) :

Standing in the Gap - Fasting prayer on 8th Dec.. 2015

Download Articles in Handheld Computers

Please Join us in "Peace Prayer Room"

Your Spam Folder

Hindi / Malayalam/Tamil Bible Online

Through the Valley of Death

Free Tutorials for your Kids!

Allah and Elohim - Are they the same God? Book

Free E-Cards

Online Games for you!



Editorial

By Sherly Isaac

There is another young man whose dreams had been dashed and shattered to pieces. His name is Joseph. When Joseph was a small boy, he saw two dreams. The dreams were like this that he and his brothers were binding sheaves in the field. Then his sheaf arose and also stood upright; and indeed the sheaves of his brothers stood all around and bowed down to his sheaf. And his brothers said to him, "Shall you indeed reign over us? Or shall you indeed have dominion over us?" So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words"(Gen. 37:7-8).

Then he dreamed still another dream and told it to his brothers, and said, "Look, I have dreamed another dream. And this time, the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars bowed down to me." So he told it to his father and his brothers; and his father rebuked him and said to him, "What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall your mother and I and your brothers indeed come to bow down to the earth before you?" And his brothers envied him, but his father kept the matter in mind" (Gen 37:9 -11)

Joseph saw these dreams but little did he know what lay before him. Because of his dreams and because his father loved him most, his brothers hated him and wanted to destroy him at any cost. One day as they were in the field and they saw Joseph coming, they plotted an evil plan against him to kill him saying in Gen 37:19-20, "Look, this dreamer is coming! Come therefore, let us now kill him and cast him into some pit; and we shall say, 'Some wild beast has devoured him.' We shall see what will become of his dreams!"

When Joseph came near, they took him and put him in a pit which had no water in it. But later they pulled him from that pit and sold him as a slave. So Joseph was sold as a slave when he was a teenager. You can see that there will be people who want your dreams to be killed and more than that there is devil who wants your dreams to be dashed and shattered forever. They try their best to kill your dreams but look at Joseph who walked with God and because of that God protected his dreams. God kept his dreams alive.

In the eyes of his brothers, his father and also in his own eyes, all the dreams appeared to be shattered as there was no hope for a slave to reach to heights. Even his father was unaware that Joseph was still alive. But there is the mighty and awesome God who can turn our situations around and bring to pass that which is impossible. His name is Jesus! He can turn your situations around. He can bring your dreams to pass. This same God who turned the situations for Joseph can do this for you.

Joseph went as a slave in the land of Egypt. Then he was falsely accused and was thrown in prison. Every time when calamities came one after another in his life, it would have crushed him more and more, all the circumstances would have suggested to him that all his dreams are dead and there is no hope for him. But the almighty and awesome God turned the situations around and brought to pass that which was impossible. The same God who turned the situations for Joseph can do this for you.

My friend, it is possible that your dreams might have been shattered, it is possible that your hopes have been lost forever and you may be thinking that everything is over for you but I want to tell you that the same God who pulled out Joseph from the prison and made him the most powerful man in Egypt can do the same for you. The same God who was with Joseph, the same God who never left him nor allowed his dreams to die down, will do the same for you. Just look to Him, He is ready to make your dreams come true.



John MacArthur is Wrong! - The Scum! - Part 24

By Sherly isaac

To read previous or next parts please click on these links:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29

John MacArthur writes in his book titled, "Hard to Believe: The High Cost and Infinite Value of Following Jesus" (Chapter 3, page 46-48, Title "Truth In A Privy Pot" under subtitle "The Scum") that, "Do you think your self-esteem has taken a pounding so far? There's more to come. In 1 Corinthians 4:6, Paul wrote: "Now these things, brethren, I have figuratively transferred to myself and Apollos for your sakes, that you may learn in us not to think beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up on behalf of one against the others." He had been talking about the fact that he didn't want anybody to consider him anything: "Let a man so consider us a servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God" (v. 1). In other words, "Don't make anything out of me. Don't name cathedrals or cities in Minnesota in my honor. I'm just a servant of Christ, a steward of the mysteries of God. I'm an under-rower, a third-level galley slave; I pull my oat, and that's what I'm supposed to do, nothing worthy of special attention."

In verse 3 he said it didn't matter what we thought about him: "It is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by a human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself." He was saying, "I don't even care what I say about myself. You don't know the truth, and I'm biased in my favor, and neither one of us is likely to be accurate. Don't pass judgment. Let the Lord do that. We can't be thinking about each other in terms of who's more important than the next person. We're all just clay pots."

First Corinthians 4:7: "For who makes you differ from another? And what do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did indeed receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?" He was starting to get little sarcastic. Verse 8: "You are already full! You are already rich! You have reigned as kings without us; and indeed I could wish you did reign, that we also might reign with you!"

And then Paul made this amazing statement in verse 9: "For I think that God has displayed us, the apostles, last, as men condemned to death; for we have been made a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men." Paul considered the apostles the lowest of the low, like criminals on death row whom their captors dragged through the streets on the way to their executions.

In verse 13, he said, "being defamed, we entreat. We have been made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things until now. Another way to translate it is, "We have become the scum of the world and the dregs of all things." Scum? Dregs? This is hardly any way to attract a crowd of followers. Perikatharma is the word for scum. Katharma, related to "Catharsis," is "to cleanse," and peri is the word for encircling or around. The perikatharma is the scum that stays in the bottom of the pot, the residue someone has to scrub thoroughly to remove. People in the ancient world used the word metaphorically to describe the lowest class of criminals that officials offered as human sacrifices to appease the false deities they feared. If you wanted to get your angry god off your back, because you thought he sent a famine or a plague or you lost a war, you found some scum in your society, some filthy nobody that no one would miss and you wanted eliminated anyway, and you put him on an altar as a sacrifice to appease your deity. Paul said that is how the world sees us. We're the scum.

Then he said we are the peripsema, the dregs. We just keep falling lower here. You could remove the perikatharma by cleaning thoroughly. This stuff is the caked crud that won't come off until you scrape it off. It is the last, stubborn, utterly useless refuse to cling to the bottom of a pot that you had emptied and cleansed.

Are you beginning to get an idea of the hopelessness of this task? The invitation to salvation makes people literally kill off all their dreams, ambitions, felt needs, and selfish desires. And then we call them to a repentance and faith that is absolutely against the grain of every normal human impulse. To compound our problem, the vast majority of the people who are offering this are scum in the eyes of the world.

If I were devising a plan to make an impact of fallen humanity, this would not be my approach: come up with an impossible message, an impossible invitation, and then market it with the most unimpressive people in the world, the ones others will most likely belittle and demean, if not hate and vilify--and sometimes kill.


It seems that once again MacArthur got confused between the salvation of a soul and the discipleship. Paul is not talking about getting saved through hardship or he did not say that without puffing up you can be saved but he was giving general instructions to his fellow believers in whom some of them were puffed up. If we read the 5th chapter we can see that some of them had immorality among them. He says in 1 Cor 5:2, "And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you."

Yes, they were those who once believed on Jesus and put their trust in Jesus and who wanted to walk with Jesus. Paul is not talking here to non-believers. Paul's audience is not those who needed salvation of their souls but those who were already saved and they fell in sin. They went back to their old sinful habit and Paul is trying to bring them back to the right track.

John MacArthur was thinking that a person needs to become scum or lowest creature on earth then only he/she can get saved but it is a lie from hell. Nobody can get saved by becoming scum or lowest creature. In fact we are sinners by nature and there is nothing we could give to God in order to get saved or get ransom for our souls. Because we were unable to pay ransom for our sins, God Himself came down in this world to rescue us from the sin and sinful nature in which we were fallen. And when a person humbles himself/herself, repents from his/her sins before Jesus and accepts Him as his/her Lord and Savior then only he/she can get saved. There is no other way to salvation of our souls except the blood of Jesus shed on the cruel cross. There is no other way, no matter how much you lower yourself, no matter how much you think that you are a scum or whatever, you will never be able to get saved or get rid of your sins. There is only one way to get saved and that is Jesus Christ alone. But people like John MacArthur are trying to fool people saying that they can be saved by lowering themselves as scum. But this is not the message of the Bible!

In this chapter itself John MacArthur writes that God has chosen poor, unwise and non-influential people. If less fortunate and poor are the one whom God chooses then the people who are in the 3rd world countries are the ones who are more privileged whom God will give salvation and eternal life. Again MacArthur got the message of Bible completely wrong. Bible nowhere tells us so but instead those who have sought God, those who have repented from the bottom of their hearts have gotten forgiveness of their souls and received eternal life. God does not show partiality.

And more than that Paul was not talking about physical poverty but spiritual poverty that we are all spiritually poor and bankrupt and we all need salvation of our souls. John MacArthur has misunderstood about spiritual poverty big time. We have nothing to give to get our salvation but when we just come to Jesus acknowledging our sins before Him, He forgives and forgets our sins and gives us eternal life.

My friend, you may be rich, you may be poor, you may be influential person, you may be in high position in society, you may be in the lowest position in society but it does not matter because God does not look at your material position but He looks at your heart. If you just come to Jesus, He is ready to forgive and forget all your sins and He is ready to give you eternal life. He is ready to make you His own child according to John 1:12-13, "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."

Let no one fool you that eternal life is for only a small group of people, no, it is not! Let no one tell you that to get salvation you need to kill off all your dreams, ambitions, felt needs, and desires. It is a big lie and nobody can get salvation by killing their dreams, ambitions and desires. But any one can come to Jesus and get salvation of their souls. The invitation of salvation is open for every person of this planet. It is up to you to accept it or reject it. What would you do?



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Standing in the Gap - Fasting prayer on 8th Dec.. 2015

As the Bible says in Ezekiel 22:30 "So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it." And also the Bible says in Numbers 16:48, "And he (Aaron) stood between the dead and the living; so the plague was stopped." We have fasting prayer every second Tuesday of each month. Our next fasting prayer meeting will be conducted on 16th Nov. 2015

Download Articles in Handheld Computers

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Please Join us in "Peace Prayer Room"

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Hindi / Malayalam/Tamil Bible Online

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Through the Valley of Death

As many of you know that in the year 2005, our dad was very sick even unto death. God miraculously healed him. We have compiled it in a book form. I sure believe that it will inspire you and encourage you greatly.

This book is available for purchase at JasmineCorp Store

Free Tutorials for your Kids!

Now you can learn Graphics and web designing online. These tutorials are free but you may need to get login ID by registering yourslef. Currently tutorials for Paint Shop Pro, HTML and Dreamweaver/Fireworks are available but in future more tutorials will be added.

Check the tutorials at:http://jasminecorp.net/tutorial

Allah and Elohim - Are they the same God? Book

Now available "Allah and Elohim - Are they the same God" Available at JasmineCorp Store, and "Is Jesus God?" Available at JasmineCorp Store,

Both books compares the Bible and the Quran and read eye opening facts about Jesus, God of the Bible, Allah and Islamic faith. I am sure that you want to read this.

Also read:
Book Title: Is Jesus God?
Author: Sherly Isaac
ISBN: 0759628092
http://insearchofpeace.org/books.htm

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