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| Question: What rock ‘n’ roll chica has the rare combination of one of the most unique names in musical history and *mad* guitar skills? If the name Miley Cyrus came to mind, please dismiss that thought immediately…you’re fired. Ladies and Gentlemen, her name is Orianthi Panagaris, her eco-friendly guitar is named “Pepper,” and you probably know her as “that blond chick that sings‘According to You.’” According to you
I’m stupid
I’m useless
I can’t do anything right
According to you
I’m difficult
hard to please
forever changing my mind
I’m a mess in a dress
can’t show up on time
even if it would save my life
According to you, according to you Who is “you”? Apparently it’s the guy she was dating who obviously didn’t have a lot of good things to say to her: According to you
I’m boring
I’m moody
and you can’t take me any place Can anyone out there relate to Orianthi and her unhealthy relationship? I would bet that there are a few voices in your world that would fall under the category of “According to You”…that cause you to feel “stupid” and “useless,” and any other number of things, making you wonder if you mean anything to anyone. Sometimes it’s our parents, teachers, coaches, or even the images and expectations we get from the media that make us feel worthless. But ultimately, those messages come from the one that the Bible calls the enemy of our souls, “the accuser” Satan. Satan accuses you of being worthless, unlovable, incompetent, and hopeless…why? Because if you have trusted Christ, you are God’s child, which means Satan wants nothing more than to steal the joy out of your life, kill your dreams, and destroy your hope of finding God’s amazing plan for your life. In the song “According to You,” Orianthi discovers another voice which she refers to as “According to him”: But according to him
I’m beautiful
incredible
he can’t get me out of his head
According to him
I’m funny
irresistible
everything he ever wanted Aren’t those the words we all want to hear? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a person in our lives who believed in us and saw the best in us even through our flaws? You do have Someone like that. There is a heavenly song playing for all believers in Jesus Christ that started even before the universe existed called “According to Him” - and here are just a few of the lyrics: According to Him* I love you, my people, with an everlasting love.
With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself. According to Him I know the plans I have for you, they are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. According to Him No eye has seen, no ear has heard,
and no mind has imagined
what He has prepared
for those who love him. According to Him His unfailing love toward those who fear him
is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth. According to Him He has removed our sins as far from us
as the east is from the west.
He is like a father to his children,
tender and compassionate to those who fear him. Are you picking up on how God feels about His children? In Christ, we are way beyond “beautiful, incredible”…in fact, according to Him, He chose to die rather than live without us. So now, like Orianthi, you have a choice between two voices. Don’t listen to the accusations of the devil and the world. Instead, tune your soul into the melody of heaven that assures you for eternity that you have the unfailing love of your Father, the forgiveness of Jesus Christ, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. And just like you would pass along a link to an amazing video on YouTube to your friends, get the word out about the Bible’s version of “According to Him.” You have friends that are trapped in the world of negative messages but you have the voice of the gospel that will allow them to choose a different perspective – that they are loved by God the Father when they put their faith and trust in Christ. According to Him… He made you, He loves you, He died for you. *Jeremiah 31:3; 29:11; 1 Corinthians 2:9; Psalm 103:11-13 Dare 2 Share Ministries
Darestries | | |
| (Read WP posts from John Hawkins) | (Read MT posts from John Hawkins)
1) Liberals believe they can change human nature. Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they’re having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side...
...Read more
1) Liberals believe they can change human nature. Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they're having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side of the world. We're just built that way and no amount of sensitivity training, preschool classes, or Michael Moore documentaries is going to "fix" it.
2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies. One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we're good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, "Why do they hate us?" The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don't even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we're nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can't be reasoned with.
3) Liberals don't have enough respect for our culture and traditions: To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism. Unfortunately for them, as a general rule, that's not so and proceeding as if it is, will often lead to exactly the same difficulties that our ancestors already dealt with in times past. No matter how smart we are, as Thomas Sowell would say, our wisdom is often no match for the "distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before." Truly wise people are aware that there is a great deal that they do not know.
4) Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy. Ironically, given all their talk about "shades of gray," liberals have a very Manichean view of the world. They consider their fellow travelers to be on the side of the angels, while the people who disagree with them are treated as evil. This leads to an "anything goes" mentality when dealing with their foes: ignoring the law via a "living constitution," politically based prosecutions, shouting down opposing speakers, and treating lying about their agenda or opponents to be moral. On the other hand, liberals will support other libs, no matter how corrupt, sleazy, or vile they are as long as they're politically useful to the left. See Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, John Murtha, and Robert Byrd for examples of that. In other words, as Margaret Thatcher has said of the Left, "For them, the end always seems to justify the means."
5) Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people. Liberals who're obsessed with money think they're compassionate because they give away other people's tax dollars. They believe they care more about the earth than other people, even as they fly around in private jets, because they babble on about global warming. They can be dumb as a rock, but believe they're smarter than most other people because they're liberals. In other words, in the minds of most liberals, liberalism is an all-purpose substitute for actual virtue instead of just another political philosophy.
6) Liberals have too much faith in government. Even most liberals would admit that government regularly fails the people. If you don't believe that, just ask them about the Bush Administration and they'll give you an earful. However, liberals tend to believe that with the right person in charge, government won't be so slow, stupid, inefficient, and badly run. Human history proves that they're wrong about that.
7) Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not. To most liberals, whether a government program betters people's lives is completely irrelevant to whether they'll support it. A program that doesn't work and costs billions, but sounds compassionate and helps Democrats politically is a huge success in the eyes of the Left. Once you understand that liberals think this way, their baffling support for programs that make no "common sense" is much easier to understand. | | |
| If you're spiritually alive, you're going to love this! If you're spiritually dead, you won't want to read it. If you're spiritually curious, there is still hope!
A Church goer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday... "I've gone for 30 years now," he wrote, "and in that time I have heard something like 203,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can't remember a single one of them. So, I think I'm wasting my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all."
This started a real controversy in the "Letters to the Editor" column, much to the delight of the editor. It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:
"I've been married for 30 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But, for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals. But I do know this.. They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today. Likewise, if I had not gone to church for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!" When you are DOWN to nothing... God is UP to something! Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible! Thank God for our physical AND our spiritual nourishment! | | |
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Daily Beast columnist Christopher Buckley procured an early draft of President Obama’s upcoming State of the Union speech.
My fellow Americans,
Tonight I can report to you that the state of the union, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being excellent, is a 9.8.
Now, you may ask—and I wouldn’t blame you for asking—how I came up with that number. You might be saying to yourself, “Wait a minute. I’ve got no job, no health insurance. My house isn’t worth half the amount of my mortgage, and I just got called up by the National Guard to do a fifth tour in Afghanistan. How the heck did he come up with 9.8?”
So it’s a good and valid question. And the answer is that 9.8 is pretty good, considering the mess my predecessor and the Republicans left me. Fair enough? I think so.
...A year ago, I inspired the nation to have the audacity to hope that I would change the political culture in Washington. Now, a year later, it turns out I’m another hack politician—from Chicago, where, believe you me, we know a thing or two about hack politics.
I was going to set a new standard. Now I’m just a complicit bystander as Harry bribes, among others, a senator from Nebraska who wants his state to get a free pass on Medicare—in return for his vote on a health-care reform bill that would make the Founders weep, or throw up. Or both.
...And now, let me say a word or two about a subject that I have not had time to address much this past year, what with arranging summits between the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police, and aggrieved Harvard professors, to say nothing of flying to and from Scandinavia to pick up gold medals—namely, the economy.
Frankly, the economy is not what it should be, which is why the state of the union is a 9.8 instead of a perfect 10.
I called in the smart folks in my administration, many of them educated at Harvard, and I put it to them directly. I said, “Is this my fault?” And to a person they said, “No, sir! No way!” | | |
| An atheist was walking through the woods.
'What majestic trees, what powerful rivers, what beautiful animals,’ he said to himself.
As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him.
He turned to look and saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge towards him. He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the bear was closing in on him.
He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer. He tripped and fell on the ground.
He rolled over to pick himself up but saw that the bear was right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising his right paw to strike him.
 At that instant the Atheist cried out, 'Oh my God!'
Time stopped.
The bear froze.
The forest was silent.
As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky.
'You deny my existence for all these years, teach others I don't exist and even credit creation to cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?’
The atheist looked directly into the light, 'It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps you could make the BEAR a Christian'?
'Very well,' said the voice.
The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed his head and spoke: 'Lord bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord.
Amen.' | | |
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