CULTS
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons)

The sources for Mormon belief are; The Book of Mormon and the Bible. They also use the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, which they believe are authoritative, and Joseph Smith is their primary prophet of the faith. The Holy Bible is the only authority in the Christian faith, and Joseph Smith is not recognized as a prophet.
The Mormon church sees God as the supreme being in the universe. However, The Mormon god is made of flesh and bones. He reached his position by living a righteous life. The Christian Church proclaims God as eternal today as always.
As for the nature of man, the Mormon church teaches and believes that we are spirit beings before birth. At birth the spirit beings are given physical bodies, and have the freedom of choice as to how they live their lives. If they live according to the church and perform temple obligations satisfactorily, that person has the opportunity to become a god of another planet. This person can also produce ‘spirit children’ to populate his new world, like God did on the earth. (what a great ego appeal!). Of course, the Christian church does not teach that we are spirits before birth, and cannot attain godhead of another planet, or even populate another world with spirit children.
Let’s take a look at how the Mormons see Jesus. The church (Mormon), believes that Jesus and Satan are spiritual brothers. God put a plan of salvation, and Satan also put forth a plan. Jesus accepted God’s plan and agreed to take on a physical form from Mary. He was crucified on a Roman cross, rose in three days and established his deity. The life and position of Jesus is attainable by any Mormon who performs at a righteous level.
The Christian church teaches that Jesus existed eternally as the Son of God, the second part of the Trinity. Jesus came to the earth by a physical birth by way of the virgin Mary. He was crucified on a Roman cross, rose three days later and established His deity. (This is a common way Mormons try to convince people that they are Christians.)
The Mormon church teaches and believes that Jesus died on the cross, and rose again guarantees salvation to all mankind. Spiritual death can only be avoided by obedience to God’s commandments, and forgiveness of sins requires faith, repentance and baptism by an approved Mormon priest. They also engage in the baptism for the dead. This would include those people who did not have a proper Mormon baptism while they were alive.
The Christian church teaches that we are unable to live a life righteous enough to meet God’s holy standard. We establish a relationship with God by faith in what Jesus accomplished for us at the cross, not by our own works. Baptism and good deeds are acts of obedience, not a method of gaining eternal salvation.
The Mormon church teaches that although there may be temporary punishment for the most wicked, all will end up in some degree of heaven, through a series of different levels depending on your (goodness) position.
Next month: Christian Scientist
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The Smell of Rain
A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. She was still groggy from surgery. Her husband, David, held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news.
That afternoon of March 10,1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency Cesarean to deliver couple's new daughter, Dana Lu Blessing. At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature.
Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs.
"I don't think she's going to make it," he said, as kindly as he could.
"There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one" Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Dana would likely face if she survived.
She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.
"No! No!" was all Diana could say.
She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana. Because Dana's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw', the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love. All they could do, as Dana struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl.
There was never a moment when Dana suddenly grew stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce
of strength there. At last, when Dana turned
two months old. her parent were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time. And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal
life, were next to zero, Dana went home from the hospital, just as her mother had predicted.
Five years later, when Dana was a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She showed no signs whatsoever of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she was everything a little girl can be and more. But that happy ending is far from the end of her story.
One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Dana was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ball park where her brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing. As always, Dana was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other
adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent.
Hugging her arms across her chest, little Dana asked, "Do you smell that?"
Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied,
"Yes, it smells like rain."
Dana closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you smell that?"
Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think we're about to get wet. It smells like rain."
Still caught in the moment, Dana shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced,
"No, it smells like Him. It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest."
Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Dana happily hopped down to play with the other children. Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along.
During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Dana on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.
"I can do all things in Him who strengthens me."
The love of God is like the ocean, you can see its beginning, but not its end.

ANGELS EXIST but some times, since they don't all have wings, we call them FRIENDS.

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The Human Brain
Your brain makes up two per cent of your body, but twenty per cent of the blood that comes from your heart flows to your brain. Your brain is the most protected organ in your body. The 100- 200 billion cells that
make up your brain are guarded by three different layers, the scalp, the skull, and a set of membranes that envelope the brain and spinal cord called meninges.
The brain has two types of cells, neurons and neuroglia. The neurons transmit information throughout the brain. The neuroglia protect the neurons. You are born with a fixed number of brain cells which you gradually lose. By the age of three, a human has lost half of the brain cells you had at birth, and while that loss rate decreases, the losses occur none-the-less. The brain compensates for these losses by changing its structure, connections between neurons change and become more complex. Different parts of the brain control different functions for us. Sight, hearing, etc., and even memory occurs in its own section of the brain.
We have seen an explosion of knowledge about the brain and how it does all of the things it does. The greater emphasis has been on how our senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and feeling are handled by the brain. May Pines has said it best: We can recognize a friend instantly-full face, in profile, or even by the back of his head. We can distinguish hundreds of colors and possibly as many as 10,000 smells. We can feel a feather as it brushes our skin, hear the faint rustle of a leaf. It all seems so effortless: we open our eyes or ears and let the world stream in. Yet anything we see, hear, feel, smell, or taste requires billions of nerve cells to flash urgent messages along linked pathways and feedback loops in our brains, performing intricate calculations that scientists have only begun to decipher. What we are finding as we start to decipher the brain is that there are incredible differences between various sections of the brain and some incredibly designed sections that fit our life styles. Even the differences tell us a great deal about the designed features of the brain. When you watch a movie at the theater, for example, there are 24 separate pictures being put onto the screen every second. If the subject on the film is moving, your brain interprets the object as a moving object. If the object is
sitting still, you still see it. It does not have to be moving for you to be able to see it and identify it.
A frog, on the other hand, cannot see an object unless it is moving. Place a fly that is immobile in front of a starving frog and it will ignore it. Unless the fly is moving, the frog cannot tell that it is there. If the fly starts to move, then the frog will eat it. Basically, the retina of the frog detects movement while our retina does not--we use our brain to detect motion. Dennis Baylor, of Stanford Medical School, has said it best: "The dumber the animal, the smarter its retina."2 The intricate design features used to allow all living things to survive are still being studied. Our ears can hear and distinguish some 20,000± different frequencies. Comparing the 24 images per second of the eye with the 20,000 of the ear tells us a great deal about how these sections work, but speak even more eloquently about their design. How limited would be our world of sound if only 24 sounds a second could be processed and understood.
We marvel at computers and the people who build them and program them. The human brain is so enormously more complex than any system man has designed. To suggest that this device which builds computers, creates art and music, and expresses the beauty of literature and mathematics could arise by chance defies any logical viewpoint of what we are. The Psalmist said it best when he said "I will praise thee Lord, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made and that my soul knoweth right well" (Psalm 139:14) and the brain is one of the great demonstrations of that statement.
--John N. Clayton

Know when to speak #15

What is faith? This little word has done more to confuse people through the ages than anything else. Faith……Some of the popular beliefs include; ‘I believe in God,’ ‘Yes, Jesus was on the earth,’ “I have a special relationship with God, even though I don’t worship Him or thank Him, or praise Him, or, or, or……’ Do any of these sound familiar? What about the super smart one that tries to hit you with what they think is a conflicting verse when you try to explain that faith is trusting alone in Jesus and transferring all trust to Him? And, they go straight to John 6:47 to try and prove their point. (Verily, verily I say unto you; he who believes has eternal life.) If taken out of context, this verse says all you have to do is believe. Hmmm. Will you buy this one? Of course not! In verses before this and after, Jesus is explaining what He is saying.
As you are clearing the air with this super smart one, you take them to James 2:19, which says: “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.” If believe is all it takes, we are going to have some very undesirable company in heaven.
Now that we’ve thrown a wrench into the works, let’s take a look at what faith is not.
· Faith is not mere head knowledge. Knowing something like a historical event, a poem, a song, that Jesus was on the earth, that He was a good man, etc., does not constitute saving faith.
· Faith is not temporal. Praying to God when you have financial problems, illness, air travel, or any dangerous activity. This is like taking God down off of a shelf when you need Him. This is only temporary faith. …Let’s be more precise here. These are good things to pray about, but when that’s the only reason for prayer, well, this does not constitute saving faith.
When a person puts their trust for eternal life in the payment Jesus provided on the cross, you have saving faith. There is no other way to accomplish this. Works will not do it. Going to church will not do it. Speaking good things about God will not do it. These are all good, but are not saving faith. Let’s look at an illustration. Suppose you are looking at a chair sitting across the room. The question is, ‘will the chair hold you?’ You would probably say, yes. But, how will you know for sure? The only way is to get up and go over and sit in the chair. The same applies to saving faith. You can talk about it all day, but until you actual come to a point in your head and heart to accept Christ as your personal savior, nothing will happen, and you won’t know for sure, will you?
John 14:6 says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” He makes it quite clear and simple. Every other way will not cut it.
Next month we’ll see how to summarize and ask someone if they would like to receive Jesus as their personal savior.
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A Little Humor

I Like Myself

I would never trade my amazing friends, my wonderful life, my loving family for less gray hair or a flatter belly. As I've aged, I've become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself. I've become my own friend.
I don't chide myself for eating that extra cookie, or fornot making my bed, or for buying that silly cement gecko that I didn't need, but looks so avante garde on my patio. I am entitled to a treat, to be messy, to be extravagant. I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging.Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until 4 AM and sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 60 &70's, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love ... I will.I will walk the beach in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body, and will dive into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set. They too will get old.I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And I eventuallyremember the important things. Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody's beloved pet gets hit by a car? But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.
I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don't question myself anymore. I've even earned the right to be wrong.I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. And I shall eat dessert every single day (if I feel like it).
MAY OUR FRIENDSHIP NEVER COME APART ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART!
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Daylight Savings begins March 14th