‘Prompting of the Holy Spirit’: Georgia church baptizes 400 in one weekend.
A megachurch in Georgia baptized 400 people across their three campuses over the course of their worship services held on a single weekend.
Sunday, March 22, 2026
This Blogger Witnessed A Preach on Melchizedek Prepared In Three Minutes By AI Used As An Example For Our Doubts.
We were three longstanding preachers together and could find no fault.
We all doubted that we could have prepared anything to better it.
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Tinubu Visit.
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A coalition of Christian and human rights organisations has called on the UK government to use President Bola Tinubu’s state visit to Britain to press for stronger protections for Christians and other vulnerable communities in Nigeria, amid continuing concern over deadly attacks and weak accountability. VCT.
Resident Alien.
On being a resident alien.
(Photo: Getty/iStock)Jewish academic and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster explains how Jews view Abraham and why he comes to regard himself as a 'resident alien'.
A new book on Abraham has succinctly outlined the existential fate of Jews in diaspora. Anthony Julius (the lawyer who successfully defended Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin publishers in the case taken against them by the convicted antisemite, David Irving) has now written a profound exposition on ‘Abraham: The First Jew’ (Yale University Press 2025).
Even this title is controversial. Some Muslims dispute that Abraham is the first Jew, as they argue incorrectly that the first religion was Islam (actually dating from 700 CE). Some also dispute the claim for different reasons, including that Abraham couldn’t have been Jewish, as he didn’t keep all the commandments, which hadn’t yet been given. However, from the Jewish perspective Abraham was the first Jew because he defined what it is to be Jewish.
Julius divides Abraham’s life into two parts. During part one of his life Abraham lived comfortably with his father and family under King Nimrod in Ur of the Chaldees. His father sold idols for a living. Gradually however Abraham reached the state of ‘impertinent disquiet’. This probably means that Abraham was beginning to think the unthinkable and was on the brink of doing something about it. Is this maybe what chutzpah is all about?
Abraham is no longer happy with his comfortable life. But is thought enough, or do we sometimes have to break away from our old life and become a new person? Abraham takes action. He destroys his father’s idols and is brought before Nimrod. According to midrash (in a story that is not recorded in the Hebrew Bible itself), Abraham is tossed into a fiery furnace and survives.
Abraham then leaves Ur with his wife Sarai and nephew, Lot, on the road to the Promised Land. Abraham 1 has now become Abraham 2. After a number of adventures, in Genesis 18 Abraham is circumcised as a sign of his covenant with G-d and, while resting in the heat of the day, he encounters three guests.
Abraham treats these guests hospitably and immediately encounters Sodom where nephew Lot is in danger. Sodom is a place which outlaws hospitality and G-d wants to punish Sodom. Abraham argues with G-d regarding the impending destruction of Sodom and loses. Not even 10 righteous men could be found and Sodom is therefore destroyed. However, Abraham ‘had held G-d to His own standards’, thus setting a precedent for all Jews as ‘G-d-arguers.’ Being a G-d-arguer is described as being in a covenantal relationship with G-d. The relationship between G-d and Abraham combines both ‘openness to G-d’ and ‘absorption in G-d.’
In addition, Abraham now creates an ‘elective national family’ named ‘Israel’, composed of a mixture of family and fellow citizens. This is a ‘counter community’ because it is not ‘constituted by blood.’ Israel is ‘particularist but non exclusivist’ and is ‘inaugurated by the covenant of circumcision.’ Conversion is where ‘soul-perfecting and nation-forming meet.’ Abraham himself is a convert, a ‘convert from Ur’s conformity of spirit and slavishness.’
The most significant event for Abraham after the Sodom encounter is known as the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). This is not a ‘sacrifice’, but a test. On arrival in Haifa at Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) 2006, I was invited to join a women’s discussion group frequented by the wife of the Chief Rabbi. The first experience of this group, meeting at the end of the 2nd Lebanon War, was their lambasting (in rapid Hebrew) of Abraham for (in their opinion) passively surrendering to G-d’s request that Abraham should bind his son. What about wife Sarah who in the Jewish interpretation died on hearing the news. It appeared even 20 years ago therefore that a number of rabbis and Jewishly observant female scholars were highly critical of Abraham, who, in their view, had been prepared to argue with G-d on behalf of Sodom, but was not prepared to argue for the life of his own son!
According to Julius, the command to ‘bind’ Isaac ‘ruptures’ Abraham’s knowledge of G-d. He has to choose between alienation from family and alienation from G-d. He chooses alienation from family. The Akedah ‘is an episode of radical and destructive violence.’ It proves traumatic for Abraham. ‘He has an experience of G-d-forsakenness’. His entire system of reference has collapsed. He is more than hopeless: ‘he is in spiritual disarray.’ According to Jewish interpretation, Sarah dies immediately after and doesn’t speak to Abraham or Isaac again.
Perhaps the most striking point made by Julius is that on purchasing the plot of land to bury his wife, Abraham describes himself as a ‘resident alien’ (‘stranger and sojourner’ in the King James), ‘ger toshav’ in Hebrew (Genesis 23). Usually this phrase is taken to be a technical term to describe a person living in an area but who does not (yet) belong to the group who already lives there. But Julius turns this technical term into a description of existential angst within Abraham himself. What does it mean to be a human being alive on this earth? We may be here living on earth, but actually we are not of the earth. We are therefore aliens in our own home.
Therefore, when Abraham, ‘the first Jew’, dies, he dies ‘homeless,’ i.e. ‘far from his place of birth, among strangers.’ G-d’s promise in respect of the Land had not yet been fulfilled. It is in this sense that Jews regard Abraham not only as the first Jew but the first homeless Jew - and why this has been the default position of the Jew for the last 4,000 years of Jewish history. CT
Colossians 3 - Forgiveness.
12) Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13) Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14) And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Saturday, March 21, 2026
Civilisation OR Barbarism? - There Is No Middle Ground!
The Iran war is clarifying who is for civilisation against barbarism — and who is not.
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The war against Iran is having a most clarifying effect. It’s shining a light on those who are prepared to stand with civilisation against barbarism and flushing out those who are not.
The usual suspects — those who hate Israel, despise America and stick pins into effigies of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — are willing Iran to win, or more to the point, willing Trump and Netanyahu to lose.
Those who get news of the war only from mainstream media outlets in America and Britain have little idea of what’s actually happening.
Many have no idea that throughout the years, hundreds of American soldiers were killed by Iranian proxies in Iraq and in repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. bases. They are ignorant of the thousands of missiles amassed by Hezbollah, which is currently firing hundreds of them at Israeli citizens from Lebanon every day.
All they know from media outlets like The New York Times or the BBC is that the war was always going to be a disaster, it’s becoming a quagmire, it’s going to destroy the world’s economy, Trump is incompetent, he hasn’t got a strategy, and Iran is winning.
In an article on Unherd, Sohrab Ahmari has complained that Trump betrayed his promise as a “war-weary populist” to become “a chaos agent,” failing to display a proper “aversion to wanton bloodshed and destruction”.
To characterise this war as “wanton bloodshed and destruction” is not only wantonly to dismiss Iran’s bloody record and the mortal threat it has increasingly posed to America, Israel and the West. It also grossly misrepresents as “chaos” the astoundingly precise, targeted, steady destruction of Iran’s entire military machine and apparatus of internal repression.
By the start of this week, Iranian ballistic-missile and drone launches had fallen by more than 90 per cent and 75 per cent respectively.
Much of Iran’s regular navy is lying at the bottom of the sea, while its fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defenses have been largely obliterated so that America’s non-stealth B-1 bombers are generally flying unimpeded over Iranian airspace.
Yes, Iran’s extortion racket in the Straits of Hormuz is causing a major problem. But that can be addressed by eliminating Iran’s ability to hit shipping.
And if the regime is totally defanged in accordance with the aims of this war, the oil weapon at this infamous maritime choke-point won’t be used ever again — a hitherto unthinkable boon that would be very much worth the short-term pain.
As for Tehran’s gambit of bombing the Gulf states to make them pressurise Trump to end the war, that’s spectacularly blown up in its face. The Gulfies are so appalled by the Iranian attacks that they are putting huge pressure on Trump to finish the job of bringing the regime down.
None of this is to be at all Pollyanna-ish about the war. This week, Israel was still being barraged by missiles, including illegal cluster munitions, as a result of which Iran succeeded in murdering at least two Israelis and four West Bank Arabs. And obviously, there’s no telling how this war will end.
But it has demonstrated with savage clarity the cowardice of Britain and Europe, which have refused to join this fight against one of the great evils of the world. Trump’s blunt language may not be to everyone’s taste, but he is entirely correct to be furious at their response.
Iran is a menace not just to Israel and America, but to Europe and the rest of the world. As the biggest state sponsor of terrorism, it has left a bloody trail of innocent victims and has been poised to achieve a nuclear-weapons arsenal.
Yet Starmer has repeatedly and wrongly declared that the war is illegal under international law, a claim repeated by the Europeans. The European Union’s chief foreign-policy officer, Kaja Kallas, stated: “Iran is not our war.”
But Britain and Europe, which won’t lift a finger to fight this threat to civilisation, rely parasitically on the United States to defend them against all such dangers.
Britain was once a byword for martial grit, loyalty to allies and a bloody-minded refusal to kowtow to tyranny. Trump, who has sentimental ties to Britain, rightly declared that Starmer is “no Winston Churchill”.
But the problem isn’t just that Keir Starmer, a fanatical zealot for international law, is unfortunately Britain’s current prime minister.
Deeper trends have made Britain increasingly irrelevant on the world stage. Its refusal to join the war has camouflaged the embarrassing truth that it doesn’t have warships to send. For decades, it has been steadily emasculating its defenses to feed the voracious and limitless welfare state.
At the same time, Britain has been genuflecting to its increasingly assertive and politically powerful Muslim community, giving into its demands that British society adapts to Islamic precepts in accordance with the Islamist agenda of infiltrating, intimidating and conquering the West. The country is unable to defend itself because it no longer even acknowledges its own historic identity.
However, America, which has been gazing in dismay at the sad decline of the mothership of liberty across the Atlantic, has been having its own clarifying moment during this war.
Joe Kent just resigned as director of the US National Counterterrorism Centre in protest against the war. He falsely claimed that Washington attacked Iran “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
Not only did he further claim that Israel had drawn America into the 2003 Iraq war, even though Israel had actually warned the United States against that campaign. He also claimed that his wife had died “in a war manufactured by Israel,” whereas in fact she had been murdered in 2019 by an Islamic State suicide bomber in America’s war to destroy ISIS.
In other words, Kent outed himself as a profound antisemite — in keeping with his association with the poisonous, Jew-hating MAGA faction led by Tucker Carlson.
It’s a relief that Trump has finally started to speak against this faction. However, US Vice President JD Vance has once again dodged the elephant in the room.
Speaking about Kent’s resignation, Vance said it was fine to disagree, but those working for the Trump administration had to go along with whatever the president decided to do. So it was right for Kent to resign.
This was a wholly inadequate response. What Vance should have said was that Kent’s comments were antisemitic and totally unacceptable, whether made by someone in or out of government office.
Just as he had previously done with antisemitic comments made by Carlson and the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, Vance was again presenting the “big tent” approach for welcoming disagreement over different opinions.
But Jew-hatred can never be acceptable as a mere difference of opinion. It is utterly unacceptable and should be given no house-room in a tent of any size.
If Trump and Vance don’t clearly repudiate and shun the Carlson faction, the Republican Party will be damaged. As a result, America may be thrown to the wolves of a Democratic party in thrall to anti-American, anti-West, anti-white racists, Islamists, antisemites and other cultish ideologues.
The war has now brought this internal threat out into the open. We can all see from Kent’s words that this poison has infected the heart of the Trump administration.
Defeating Iran will transform the whole world for the better and lead to new alliances that support rather than menace civilisation.
If America doesn’t see this through, however, and the butchers of Tehran survive to fight another day, the United States will be catastrophically weakened, and the axis of evil comprising Russia, China and North Korea will accordingly be immeasurably strengthened.
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A Terrific Book.
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Something To Smile About.
Labour will be decimated in May local elections, Unite leader says.
Sharon Graham tells party to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ after ‘shameful’ handling of Birmingham bin strike.
Neha Gohil Midlands correspondent
Fri 20 Mar 2026 07.00 GMTLabour will be “decimated” in the upcoming local elections and should “hang their heads in shame” over the handling of the Birmingham bin strike, Unite’s general secretary has said.
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In a speech to refuse workers near a waste depot in Tyseley on Thursday, Sharon Graham said working people were moving away from Labour in droves and called on the party to “wake up and smell the coffee”.
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“We are in one of the most significant strikes in decades,” she said. “An attack from a Labour council under a Labour government. Labour should hang their heads in shame. They are an absolute disgrace.”
Refuse workers in Birmingham began their industrial action over pay and conditions in January last year, and it escalated into an indefinite all-out strike two months later. Unite argued changes to the city’s waste collection service would cost some members £8,000 a year, a figure the council has disputed.
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The strikes, which could last beyond September, will be a key issue in Birmingham in the May local elections, when all 101 council seats are up for grabs.
Graham said: “In May, the polls tell us that Labour will be decimated. And it’s not hard to see why. This is England’s second city … Look at the mountains of waste and recycling still piling up,” she said. Guardian.
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