The Next Step by Jack T Chick

"Help new believers grow spiritually 
When you received the Lord Jesus Christ as your own personal Saviour, you made the most important decision of your life. To help you be more effective in your Christian walk, The Next Step will be most helpful. Though it is not meant to take the place of your Bible, it will teach you the basic steps to a strong and healthy Christian life. It's an excellent discipleship tool to give to those you lead to the Lord.

Each chapter introduces a different aspect to growth which Christians need to understand:
1. Birth Of The Bible 
How the Scriptures came to be, the inspiration by God, the authority of His Word, and how Satan has attacked it for almost 1,500 years.
2. Don't Read That Book 
You won't last long without food, and neither will any Christian last long without the Word of God. Here is a Bible reading program that will give you a balanced diet of spiritual food, every day of your life. But it will cost you something!
3. Prayer 
Do you want to get RESULTS when you pray? Here are the keys to effective prayer, and how to deal with the things that Satan uses to stop you.
4. Love 
Some people are very hard to love. Yet the story in this chapter shows that for some people, real love is the only way to reach them.
5. The Enemy 
Every Christian has a mortal enemy. His goal? He wants you dead and in hell. Learn some of his many faces, and how he attacks Christians. He hates us all, because he knows that there is a day coming, when he will be cast into hell.
6. Pitfalls 
Be careful! The things that can destroy your Christian testimony can be small, or unexpected.
7. Called Out
Okay, so now you're a Christian. That doesn't mean you're better than everyone else. It means you're forgiven. But you can't be the same as everyone else, either. God wants you to live in a way that makes you different, so you can have the same result as the Christian in this chapter.
8. Warn Them 
Everyone who hasn't accepted Christ is on their way to hell, just like you were. Now that you have forgiveness, it's up to you warn your friends. If witnessing chokes you up, or you don't think you know enough of the Bible yet, here is a simple plan to help you be a real witness. Remember, you can't save anyone ... Jesus will! Here's an easy way to tell them."

Credit: Amazon

*The guy that wrote the book is, from what I have seen, a bit close minded.May want to stay away from this book unless you want to learn how "Conservative Christians" think

Mormon:The Doctrine and Covenants

"Where did this Mormon book of scripture come from and of what value is it?
Answer: The Doctrine and Covenants, abbreviated to D&C, is a book of modern scriptures. These revelations and inspired documents were given of the Lord to His chosen prophets as part of the restoration of His church- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "

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@About (dot) com

More info...

1. Read the doctrine

Questions Young People Ask. Answers That Work

"It's 39 chapters answer many questions, such as: How can I cope with peer pressure? Should I quit school? How can I say no to premarital sex? Why say no to drugs?"

*Note:Has "old" views about things such as masturbation (which is healthy) so this may not be the best advice book to read. Posting about because this is an education blog that (tries) to not be biased. Plus, I have the book and want to use this blog as a "record" type of thing.

More Info...

1. Buy
2. PDF:

Questions Young People Ask Watchtower by Woahh Lotta Infoo

yp2_E by Woahh Lotta Infoo

Charles Stanley

"Charles Frazier Stanley (born September 25, 1932) is the senior pastor of First Baptist Church, a megachurch in northern Atlanta, Georgia. He is the founder and president of In Touch Ministries. Stanley also served two one-year terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1984 to 1986. Stanley has an evangelical, fundamentalist, dispensationalist theology."

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@Wikipedia

Cracking The Da Vinci Code

"1. The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction?


What is The Da Vinci Code?
The Da Vinci Code is a novel. Its publisher, Doubleday, released it with much fanfare in March 2003 and heavily promoted it. As a result, it debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and has remained on it since, selling millions of copies. The publisher claims that it is "the bestselling adult novel of all time within a one-year period."

So popular has The Da Vinci Code become that it has created a marketing boom for books related to the novel, and it has become the subject of a major motion picture scheduled to be released in 2005.

What is The Da Vinci Code About?
It is a thriller story involving secret societies, conspiracies, the Catholic Church, and the fictional "truth" about Jesus Christ. Here is the author's own summary:

A renowned Harvard symbologist is summoned to the Louvre Museum to examine a series of cryptic symbols relating to Da Vinci's artwork. In decrypting the code, he uncovers the key to one of the greatest mysteries of all time . . . and he becomes a hunted man.1

During the course of the novel it is alleged that the Catholic Church is perpetuating a major, centuries-long conspiracy to hide the "truth" about Jesus Christ from the public, and it or its agents are willing to stop at nothing, including murder, to do so.

What does Leonardo da Vinci have to do with the story?
Da Vinci is portrayed as a former head of the conspiracy guarding the "truth" about Jesus Christ. In the novel he is said to have planted various codes and secret symbols in his work, particularly in his painting of the Last Supper. According to the novel, this painting depicts Jesus' alleged wife, Mary Magdalene, next to him as a symbol of her prominence in his true teaching. In reality, the figure that Dan Brown identifies as Mary Magdalene is John the Evangelist, who traditionally has been regarded as the youngest of the apostles and so is often pictured in medieval art without a beard.

Why should a Catholic be concerned about the novel?
Although a work of fiction, the book claims to be meticulously researched, and it goes to great lengths to convey the impression that it is based on fact. It even has a "fact" page at the front of the book underscoring the claim of factuality for particular ideas within the book. As a result, many readers-both Catholic and non-Catholic-are taking the book's ideas seriously.

The problem is that many of the ideas that the book promotes are anything but fact, and they go directly to the heart of the Catholic faith. For example, the book promotes these ideas:

Jesus is not God; he was only a man.
Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
She is to be worshiped as a goddess.
Jesus got her pregnant, and the two had a daughter.
That daughter gave rise to a prominent family line that is still present in Europe today.
The Bible was put together by a pagan Roman emperor.
Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was deified by the emperor Constantine.
The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.
In the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church.
There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and is trying to keep the truth alive.
The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed. It often has committed murder to do so.
The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing."

See more
@ Catholic Answers

Contrary, Heavenly, and Cardinal Virtues

"In this world of iniquity, they are a few gleams of hope in the mire of our shameful indulgences. Various formulations of Virtue have been proposed over the ages.
 
The Cardinal Virtues:
prudence, temperance, courage, justice
Classical Greek philosophers considered the foremost virtues to be prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. Early Christian Church theologians adopted these virtues and considered them to be equally important to all people, whether they were Christian or not.
 
The Theological Virtues:
love, hope, faith
St. Paul defined the three chief virtues as love, which was the essential nature of God, hope, and faith. Christian Church authorities called them the three theological virtues because they believed the virtues were not natural to man in his fallen state, but were conferred at Baptism.
 
The Seven Contrary Virtues:
humility, kindness, abstinence, chastity, patience, liberality, diligence
The Contrary Virtues were derived from the Psychomachia ("Battle for the Soul"), an epic poem written by Prudentius (c. 410). Practicing these virtues is alledged to protect one against temptation toward the Seven Deadly Sins: humility against pride, kindness against envy, abstinence against gluttony, chastity against lust, patience against anger, liberality against greed, and diligence against sloth.
 
The Seven Heavenly Virtues:
faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence
The Heavenly Virtues combine the four Cardinal Virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude -- or courage, and justice, with a variation of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. I'm still researching the origins and popular usage of this formulation.
 
The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy
Continuing the numerological mysticism of Seven, the Christian Church assembled a list of seven good works that was included in medieval catechisms. They are: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, give shelter to strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, minister to prisoners, and bury the dead."


Credit

7 Roman Catholic Sacraments

*Click pic to enlarge

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7 Sacraments of the Orthodox Church

*Click pic to enlarge

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C Peter Wagner

"Charles Peter Wagner (born 1930) is a Christian theologian, missiologist, missionary, writer, teacher, and church growth specialist best known for his controversial writings on spiritual warfare.

Wagner served as a missionary in Bolivia under the South American Mission and Andes Evangelical Mission (now SIM International) from 1956 to 1971. He then served for 30 years (1971 to 2001) as Professor of Church Growth at the Fuller Theological Seminary's School of World Missions until his retirement in 2001. He is the author of more than 70 books. He was the president of Global Harvest Ministries from 1993 to 2011 and is currently the chancellor emeritus of Wagner Leadership Institute, which serves to train leaders to join in a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, an organization Wagner also helped to found. He is currently the vice president of Global Spheres, Inc....

Spiritual Warfare..

Wagner wrote about spiritual warfare, in books including Confronting the Powers: How the New Testament Church Experienced the Power of Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare and Engaging the Enemy. In Confronting the Powers, Wagner breaks down spiritual warfare as having three levels: "Ground Level: Person-to-person, praying for each other's personal needs. Occult Level: deals with demonic forces released through activities related to Satanism, witchcraft, astrology and many other forms of structured occultism. Strategic-Level or Cosmic-Level: To bind and bring down spiritual principalities and powers that rule over governments." "Strategic-level intercession" uses "spiritual mapping" and "tearing down strongholds" to engage in spiritual warfare against "territorial spirits"

According to Wagner, these methods "were virtually unknown to the majority of Christians before the 1990s”.The premise of Engaging the Enemy is that Satan and his demons are literally in the world, that Satan's territorial spirit-demons may be identified by name, and that Christians are to engage in spiritual warfare with them.

In Hard-Core Idolatry: Facing the Facts, Wagner asserts that Catholic saints bring honor to the spirits of darkness, and promotes the burning of their statues in Argentina. Wagner asserts that the Holy Spirit came to his associate, Cindy Jacobs (a "prophet" in Wagner’s Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders) and "told her that in [the Argentinian city of] Resistencia they must burn the idols, like the magicians did in Ephesus." (Wikipedia)

Why Shouldn’t Christians Accept Millions of Years?

"There is an intensifying controversy in the church all over the world regarding the age of the earth. For the first 18 centuries of church history, the almost universal belief of Christians was that God created the world in six literal days roughly 4,000 years before Christ and destroyed the world with a global Flood at the time of Noah.

But about 200 years ago some scientists developed new theories of earth history, which proposed that the earth and universe are millions of years old. Over the past 200 years Christian leaders have made various attempts to fit the millions of years into the Bible. These include the day-age view, gap theory, local flood view, framework hypothesis, theistic evolution, and progressive creation.
Biblical compromises

A growing number of Christians (now called young-earth creationists), including many scientists, hold to the traditional view, believing it to be the only view that is truly faithful to Scripture and that fits the scientific evidence far better than the reigning old-earth evolutionary theory.

Many Christians say that the age of the earth is an unimportant and divisive side issue that hinders the proclamation of the gospel. But is that really the case? Answers in Genesis and many other creationist organizations think not.

In this chapter, I want to introduce you to some of the reasons we think that Christians cannot accept the millions of years without doing great damage to the church and her witness in the world. Other chapters in this book will go into much more detail on these issues.

    The Bible clearly teaches that God created in six literal, 24-hour days a few thousand years ago. The Hebrew word for day in Genesis 1 is yom. In the vast majority of its uses in the Old Testament it means a literal day; and where it doesn’t, the context makes this clear.
    The context of Genesis 1 clearly shows that the days of creation were literal days. First, yom is defined the first time it is used in the Bible (Genesis 1:4–5) in its two literal senses: the light portion of the light/dark cycle and the whole light/dark cycle. Second, yom is used with “evening” and “morning.” Everywhere these two words are used in the Old Testament, either together or separately and with or without yom in the context, they always mean a literal evening or morning of a literal day. Third, yom is modified with a number: one day, second day, third day, etc., which everywhere else in the Old Testament indicates literal days. Fourth, yom is defined literally in Genesis 1:14 in relation to the heavenly bodies.

    When is a day a day?
    The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 make it clear that the creation days happened only about 6,000 years ago. It is transparent from the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 (which give very detailed chronological information, unlike the clearly abbreviated genealogy in Matthew 1 and other chronological information in the Bible that the Creation Week took place only about 6,000 years ago.
    Exodus 20:9–11 blocks all attempts to fit millions of years into Genesis 1. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:9-11).

    This passage gives the reason for God’s command to Israel to work six days and then take a sabbath rest. Yom is used in both parts of the commandment. If God meant that the Jews were to work six days because He created over six long periods of time, He could have said that using one of three indefinite Hebrew time words. He chose the only word that means a literal day, and the Jews understood it literally (until the idea of millions of years developed in the early nineteenth century). For this reason, the day-age view or framework hypothesis must be rejected. The gap theory or any other attempt to put millions of years before the six days are also false because God says that in six days He made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. So He made everything in those six literal days and nothing before the first day.

    Noah’s Flood washes away millions of years. The evidence in Genesis 6–9 for a global catastrophic flood is overwhelming. For example, the Flood was intended to destroy not only all sinful people but also all land animals and birds and the surface of the earth, which only a global flood could accomplish. The Ark’s purpose was to save two of every kind of land animal and bird (and seven of some) to repopulate the earth after the Flood. The Ark was totally unnecessary if the Flood was only local. People, animals, and birds could have migrated out of the flood zone before it occurred, or the zone could have been populated from creatures outside the area after the Flood. The catastrophic nature of the Flood is seen in the nonstop rain for at least 40 days, which would have produced massive erosion, mud slides, hurricanes, etc. The Hebrew words translated “the fountains of the great deep burst open” (Genesis 7:11) clearly point to tectonic rupturing of the earth’s surface in many places for 150 days, resulting in volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Noah’s Flood would produce exactly the kind of complex geological record we see worldwide today: thousands of feet of sediments clearly deposited by water and later hardened into rock and containing billions of fossils. If the year-long Flood is responsible for most of the rock layers and fossils, then those rocks and fossils cannot represent the history of the earth over millions of years, as evolutionists claim.

    Jesus was a young-earth creationist. Jesus consistently treated the miracle accounts of the Old Testament as straightforward, truthful, historical accounts (e.g., creation of Adam, Noah and the Flood, Lot and his wife in Sodom, Moses and the manna, and Jonah in the fish). He continually affirmed the authority of Scripture over men’s ideas and traditions (Matthew 15:1–9). In Mark 10:6 we have the clearest (but not the only) statement showing that Jesus was a young-earth creationist. He teaches that Adam and Eve were made at the “beginning of creation,” not billions of years after the beginning, as would be the case if the universe were really billions of years old. So, if Jesus was a young-earth creationist, then how can His faithful followers have any other view?

    Death is very good?

    Belief in millions of years undermines the Bible’s teaching on death and on the character of God. Genesis 1 says six times that God called the creation “good,” and when He finished creation on Day 6, He called everything “very good.” Man and animals and birds were originally vegetarian (Gen. 1:29–30, plants are not “living creatures,” as people and animals are, according to Scripture). But Adam and Eve sinned, resulting in the judgment of God on the whole creation. Instantly Adam and Eve died spiritually, and after God’s curse they began to die physically. The serpent and Eve were changed physically and the ground itself was cursed (Genesis 3:14–19). The whole creation now groans in bondage to corruption, waiting for the final redemption of Christians (Romans 8:19–25) when we will see the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21, Colossians 1:20) to a state similar to the pre-Fall world, when there will be no more carnivorous behavior (Isaiah11:6–9) and no disease, suffering, or death (Revelation 21:3–5) because there will be no more Curse (Revelation 22:3). To accept millions of years of animal death before the creation and Fall of man contradicts and destroys the Bible’s teaching on death and the full redemptive work of Christ. It also makes God into a bumbling, cruel creator who uses (or can’t prevent) disease, natural disasters, and extinctions to mar His creative work, without any moral cause, but still calls it all “very good.”

    The idea of millions of years did not come from the scientific facts. This idea of long ages was developed by deistic and atheistic geologists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These men used antibiblical philosophical and religious assumptions to interpret the geological observations in a way that plainly contradicted the biblical account of creation, the Flood, and the age of the earth. Most church leaders and scholars quickly compromised using the gap theory, day-age view, local flood view, etc. to try to fit “deep time” into the Bible. But they did not understand the geological arguments, and they did not defend their views by careful Bible study. The “deep time” idea flows out of naturalistic assumptions, not scientific observations.

    Radiometric dating methods do not prove millions of years. Radiometric dating was not developed until the early twentieth century, by which time virtually the whole world had already accepted the millions of years. For many years creation scientists have cited numerous examples in the published scientific literature of these dating methods clearly giving erroneous dates (e.g., a date of millions of years for lava flows that occurred in the past few hundred years or even decades). In recent years creationists in the RATE project have done experimental, theoretical, and field research to uncover more such evidence (e.g., diamonds and coal, which the evolutionists say are millions of years old, were dated by carbon-14 to be only thousands of years old) and to show that decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past, which shrinks the millions of years to thousands of years, confirming the Bible."

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