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This prayer was really spoken before the Kansas State legislators; we should elect the pastor.

When Pastor Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual politically correct generalities.

But, what they heard instead was a stirring prayer, passionately calling our country to repentance and righteousness. The response was immediate and a number of legislators walked out during the prayer. In six short weeks, The Central Christian Church had logged more than 5,000 phone calls, with only 47 of those calls responding negatively. Commentator Paul Harvey aired the prayer on the radio and received a larger response to this program than any other program he has ever aired. The Central Christian Church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India, Africa, and Korea. Pastor Joe's prayer is reprinted here as an encouragement and challenge for each of us.

We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word and called it pluralism.
We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism.
We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn children and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem.
We have abused power and called it political savvy.
We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted our air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

Search us, O God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent this great state. Grant them the wisdom to rule, and may their decisions direct us to the center of Your will. I ask it in the name of Your Son, the Living Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen."

The Pope's decision to revive the aberrant practice of the "indulgences" has stirred quite a bit of controversy withins the Catholic Church as well. It seems that many Catholics are embarassed by this return to the Dark Ages. We are returning on this argument because it one of the worst devices of deception ever invented.

Through indulgences, the sins of Roman Catholics, both those who are alive and those in Purgatory, can supposedly be forgiven:

Here is the Catholic Catechism's definition of an indulgence:

I include an e-mail commentary I received this week.

Categories of sins?
"To understand this doctrine (Indulgences) and practice of the Catholic Church, it is necessary to understand that sin has a double consequence." Pg. 370, #1472

But the Bible consistently reveals that all sin has the same consequence:
"For the wages of sin is death..." Romans 6:23

"Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." James 1:15

The final result of sin is always death, no matter how minor we may think a particular sin is. Catholics try to pay for sins through indulgences, but Christ already paid for every sin:
"For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;" 1 Corinthians 15:3

While it is true that God does want His children to perform good works, those works are not a requirement for salvation, they are a result of salvation. Paul teaches:
"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." Ephesians 2:8, 10

Once one is saved by grace, good works should follow. But good works are never a requirement for salvation. Neither are they a requirement for forgiveness of sins after salvation.
The New Testament bulges with examples of Jesus forgiving sins, but He never demanded good works as a condition of forgiveness.

Can the living help the dead?

Catholicism also purports that indulgences help those who have already died:
"Since the faithful departed now being purified are also members of the same communion of saints, one way we can help them is to obtain indulgences for them, so that the temporal punishments due for their sins may be remitted." Pg. 371-372, #1479

Here is another load of man-made traditions. You will never find any of this taught in the Word of God. As we have mentioned previously, the time to have your sins remitted is while you are still alive.

In this doctrine, three recurring themes come to the surface again:

1. Another divine attribute of Jesus is minimized. The Bible declares that only Christ's work can bring about the forgiveness of sins. Catholicism, though, claims that sins can be forgiven through the good works of any ordinary Catholic.

2. Indulgences keep people in bondage to the Catholic church. Rather than going to God for forgiveness, Catholics must toil and strive, performing good deeds through the Catholic church for forgiveness of their sins. It is noteworthy to ponder that the "good works" of Catholicism differ from the good works of the Bible. Biblical good works are deeds done for other people, while Catholicism' s good works revolve primarily around performing rituals of the church (Masses, saying rosaries, Catholic prayers, lighting candles, etc.). God intended good works to benefit others, not to bring people into bondage to a church.

3. Indulgences are a form of spiritual blackmail, forcing members to remain faithful to the church, so they can someday help their loved ones reach heaven.

Conclusion
Is this system of good works from God? Read what God records in His Holy Word on the subject, then decide for yourself:

"Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us..." Titus 3:5

At times, we get letters that accuse us of being unfair or against a particular religious denomination. In our replies, we stress the fact that we are not against anybody, but that we are for Somebody, namely, Jesus Christ. All those who call themselves Christians, and that includes us, MUST be measured by the Word of our Lord Jesus Christ, or else the word Christian is meaningless and generic. Unfortunately, the world is full of generic and meaningless "Christians," who, with all the outward appearences of religiosity, go about deceiving and being deceived.

This is nothing new, since it goes way back to the days of the New Testament. However, in these last days, the trend is speeding up exceedingly, and though even this evenience was also prophesied, undoubtless, what is happening leaves one breathless.

We try not to get too personal when pointing out departures from the "sound doctrine" once delivered to the Church, and this, to focus on the problem rather than on the denomination. But sometimes it is impossible to disassociate one from the other. The Catholic Church is a case in point.

Martin Luther, a Catholic, initiated the "Protestant" movement, motivated mainly by his disgust for the nepotism, simony and commerce going on in the Catholic church of his days an particularly for the sale of " indulgences " by the church.
"Indulgences," as the word suggests, were written documents which people could buy from the church at a certain price, and which entitled them to have their sins "forgiven." There were variations to the formula: one could buy several "indulgences" and then sin, knowing that they were "covered." Sometimes the "indulgence" was assigned after a pilgrimage to a particular place, or after saying so many prayers, or after doing "good deeds." The "indulgence" allowed them to "indulge."

Of course, this squallid practice has nothing to do with Christianity, and it actually stands against it. Hundreds of years later, we note, sadly, that the Catholic church has changed little of her aberrant and unbiblical ways. Case in point, the Year 2000 Jubilee , declared by the Pope, to "celebrate" 2000 years of Christianity, a global event which the Catholic church is strategically preparing for the turn of the century. The focus of the celebrations will be Rome, with the Holy Land given recently some partecipation. So, in the year 2000, millions of Catholic will converge to Rome (50 millions expected) because of a special "indulgence" being assigned to all the Catholics who will visit the Vatican, during the Jubilee year.

Moreover, this last week, the Pope announcing officially the Jubilee year, extended "indulgences" to those Catholics who will do without cigarettes and alcohol " for -a-day ." Sounds very ridiculous but it is also very true. As I was hearing the various media reports about it, I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

Presented as a "spiritual" event, the Jubilee is just another big occasion for business and power grabbing. The Italian Government has assigned hundred millions $ to provide support infrastructures to the city of Rome, and the sorrounding regions for the expected invasion. Souvenir makers are gearing up their production of cheap and-not-so cheap kitch objects while retailers are enlarging their shelves to accomodate them. The Vatican has its logo for the event, which offers under license. The hotel and restauration industry is expecting a golden year. Rome city hall is offering licenses and training courses to Romans with rooms to spare, so that they too can get part of the falling bonanza by hosting pilgrims, since accomodations will be at a premium. Rome is getting a special facelift with new traffic and mass transit facilities.

Now imagine all these Catholics heading for Rome, hoping to get their indulgence. Sorry, but we denounce this event, and what it stands for. Dear Catholics, before you get mad with us, find out if what you accept blindly from your church is in line with the Word of God, then mail us. Is your faith based upon the traditions of the Catholic church or upon the Bible? You should not be offended, but rather challenged to find out what God has to say about it. Or is your priest or Pope more important than God? I don't think you really believe this.

The Bible is God's written Word and It will live and abide forever . The traditions of men are just that, traditions, which will change or fade away, as time goes by.

This week I have had no time to write this column. So I will treat you to a story which I have in my archive. This happened quite a few years ago (during the Vietnam war) and is a true story. Enjoy!

The young man had that dead sureness that cover adolescent insecurity. "I don't believe in God!" he roared as he strode into my office unannounced.
"Want a cup of coffee?"
I got it for him without is approval.
"Sit down. Tell me what sort of God you don't believe in. Maybe I don't believe in that sort of God, either".
He stepped on my lines. "I don't believe in a god who allows child molestation - like that McMartin school deal, or a Christopher Bernard Wilder kidnapping, murdering and raping that 16-year-old, a god who allows wars, El Salvador...".
"Cream and sugar?"
"Cream only, thanks... and world hunger, and, and, just all this hopeless mishmash."

I gave him his cup and looked out the window: people, seas of them, milling in the streets of this concrete wilderness called Los Angeles. My mind went back to the days of tea and crumpets at Oxford, that lovely summer just after the war. I remembered C.S: Lewis, the Oxford don, telling of his conversation to Christianity and the thought processes that led to it. I thought of a conversation with a fine young friend who went to Vietnam, never to return.

"This war to which I'm going makes no sense. Life makes no sense. The world is totally irrational."
I looked him squarely in the eye.
"Bill, you just made a rational statement and that fact eliminates the idea that this world is totally irrational. If it were totally irrational, who would know it? From where do you think that rationality came?"

I turned and posed the same question to my young coffee-drinking friend.
"That logic won't hold with me, I'm an atheist."
He was the fifth teen-age atheist I had met this week. It is a psychological experience more than an intellectual conclusion.
"Logic usually doesn't set too well with an atheist - nor facts, "I said to him. "The term atheist means that you know there is no God. To say you know there is no God means that you have learned all the truth there is in the universe and there is no God. Have you learned all there is to know, or is your atheism, like my Christianity, a statement of faith?"
He turned toward to me in the chair.
I continued: "In one of our previous conversations, you told me faith was the last resort of the stupid. Now, here you are making a statement of faith about your atheism... or do you know everything?"
"Of course not."
He was beginning to get a little angry with me.
"If you don't know everything, then how do you know God doesn't exist outside your learning and experience?"
"I don't."
"Then you are not an atheist, you are an agnostic."
"Yes, I guess that is what I am."
"What you have just told me is that you don't know what you are."

His steam began to pour out. "Exactly, and what sort of God is it who lets people not know who they are or what they are. How can I know who he is when he won't let me know who I am?"
I asked my friend what he was studying in college. He was in advertising.

"Suppose you owned an ad agency and God wanted you to tell the whole world exactly what he is like. How would you do it?"
He picked up the challenge. Taking a legal pad from my desk, he drew a line down the middle of the page. On one side he wrote "method". On the other, he wrote "problems".

The first method he wrote down on this worldwide God-advertising program was, "Start a religion." Then he scratched it out and wrote, "Divisive. Too many of them already in existence."
Then he inscribed his next suggested method: "Put it in a book." He immediately vetoed that because "half the world can't read."
One after another he wrote, considered the flaws, then marked them out.

Finally, he looked at me and smiled. "My problem is that I can't seem to find a universal oneness, one thing that every human understands, with which he can identify, love and comprehend. If I could discover that, I would know how to advertise God to the multilingual, multiracial world."

Then he picked up his pencil and wrote, "If I wanted to universally advertise what God is like and how he acts, I would recommend that he become a human being."

On the problem side, he wrote "none". Then he laid down his pencil, looked up at me and quietly said, "Jesus Christ makes sense."
He was right.
Jesus Christ is that sense without which all other sense is nonsense. He became what we are as a matter of communication from God as to who he is and what he is doing.
Christians believe God so identified with us that he solved three great questions all science has not been able to fathom:
The problem of sin.
The problem of sorrow.
The problem of death.

What is happening to the financial world? For the past few months, this question has been of paramount importance not only in the financial circles, but at large in society, and worldwide.

Most of us have not lived through the Great Depression, so we do not have a comparison reference. Certainly, there were warnings that things were not going the right way. Warnings which did not get heeded, since the depression did arrive. Today, we are assisting to a similar scenario, and the yo-yo effect of the international markets should speaks volumes, more than any analyst in-the-know forecasts. In my lifetime I have never seen such instability. Instability, that's the keyword. It seems that everything is fluctuating wildly to-and-fro, and nobody knows where it will all end. A simple rumor is able to send international shockwaves throughout the world's stockmarkets. A word from an "authority" is able to send stocks up or down at will.

To discover that the world economy has clay-feet is certainly sobering. To see people frantically searching the "best and safest" way to invest their savings is disquitening at best, especially observing how "security" worries are instead leading people into dubious, shaky and "strange" and in other times, unthinkable ways. Of course, from the other side, there is no lack of offer. Those ingenious financial minds have been working overtime in these pasts months to find new ways to "attract" clients. Some have said that capitalism (advertising) is the art of separating man from his money. Certainly, mankind has tried all forms of self-government only to discover that in the end, none work.

I have recapped the principal ideologies of our century as such:

Communism: the art of envy
Socialism: the art of I-dont-really-care
Capitalism: the art of greed

Any new form of self-government that man invents, is at first a revolution, a fresh start, a new era. The problems come later, since all these forms of self-government seem to forget that the heart of man is incredibly evil and all good plans will sooner or later clash with this reality . Moreover, on paper, any system, including tyranny, may seem to be geared for the good of the people. It is in the practise that the problems start to surface. The Western world, under capitalism has been "probably" the best off compared to other systems, or should I say the lest evil one. Now that the books are open, we know of the millions of people sacrificed to build the "new man" of Communism. While Hitler stands as this century greatest villain, we seem to forget that people like Stalin and Co. have exterminated over 100.000.000 of their own countrymen, and that "GULAG" stands as infamous a word as "CONCENTRATION CAMP."

While Socialism may seem the least innocuous of the three it has forged a strange attitude in its subjects, who, feeling protected by the all-embracing state, have gradually lost initiative and drive, exchanging them for an illusory state of security. It is a fact that top socialist countries like Sweden (probably the best representant of the craddle-to-grave security system), have the highest rate of suicide among its population, and especially among the young. Incredible, isn't it?

Capitalism is also, by its very nature, a closed circle system. Incapable to really restrain itself, and always ready to exploit its next victim. While it has offered the greatest standard of living to its subjects, it is also doomed to failure, despite silly attempts to "humanize" it or to transform it in newagish win-win situational experiences or to adjust it to a particular country needs and culture.

I have noted that all systems have at its core the concentration of power in the hands of a few, whether state burocrats, hereditary nobility or business tycoons. From a Biblical point of view not only makes sense, but it will be driven to its ultimate outcome: all power in the hand of ONE.

Please note that all this bank and business merging frenzy, has a design and it is not-at-all casual. In the past months, we have assisted to the highest and largest merging activity in the history of Capitalism. The Asia crisis falls into this design. Which brings us to the question: which design, and who are the designers?

Conspiracy and facts abound. While I don't deny the fact that secret societies exist, (and some of them very powerful indeed), it is my opinion that we must look elsewhere to understand what is happening. On the physical level, we must observe the "money men," those movers and shakers that are able to really control the monetary mass of entire countries, according to their business logic, and the logic of money is simple, actually. Money calls money, the big fish eats the small fish, and similar are popular proverbs that identify accurately the problem, and while some of these people may have ideals or ideologies to serve, methinks that GREEDis the principal underlying driving factor at the base of it. Again, " the love of money is the root of all evil."

But the real battle is being waged at the spiritual level. Without the Bible it's impossible to understand what is happening on the physical plane. Sure, man has tried to explain his existence in countless ways, and some of his explanations have found an extensive following. But the Bible, explains our physical existence in different and unique terms, and all those who have believed it have had their eyes open as to reality. Non believers will never be able to understand or believe the inner truth which God has reserved to those who love Him unless, by an act of faith, they choose to trust God. Moreover, God does not answer curiosity seekers, but those who have made a commitment of faith

The Bible states clearly that there exist a being called Satan (adversary), whose purpose of existence is to be adored as god. To achieve his aim, he has infected mankind with all kind of evil possible and imaginable, to divert mankind from the REAL GOD and to capture man in his deadly embrace. He will succed, alas for a limited time, in the goal of his carrier, and the Eternal God will allow this to happen, to give man the FULL TASTE of his choices. So, Satan has been manouvering behind the scenes to unify his kingdom. All the ugliness we see on our physical plane is the result of his activity. He will stop at nothing to achive control of the human race. The only Way out from his tentacles is through Jesus Christ. There is absolutely no other way.

In our technological era, this may seem like a medieval tale, a fairy story, phantasy playing, or as an escape from "reality." This is exactly what Satan wants people to believe, so he can keep them under his control, willingly unaware. But the Grace of God, more certain than the rising of the sun, more ready than one's next breath, shines through the lie to any willing soul, to any repentant sinner. This is the Good News, the Gospel, the only hope for man.

In closing, regarding our opening subject, we will see more concentration of power, and more instabilty in the coming days. The Christian should not be confused about it, nor should they bow to the next "egg-nest" proposal in a desperate attempt to safeguard their goods. Sure, one must take care of what one has, but not to exasperation. May I remind my fellow Christians that their real riches are in Heaven, where no thief exists, and where no rust consumes.