Prayer–America’s Hope
This article is being sent out early because today is the 58th Annual National Day of Prayer.
I ask you to make special prayer today for a nation-changing revival in the United States. We are in a very precarious state as a nation. Morally, we are floundering by turning away from God’s commandments and principles. Economically, we have debauched our currency, enslaved ourselves to debt and fiscal irresponsibility, and are heading quickly toward the misery of fascism/socialism. Militarily, we are beginning to disarm ourselves in a violent, unpredictable world, while accepting and rewarding those who desire to kill us. We are abandoning our friends and encouraging our enemies. There really is:
1. No political solution that can save us
2. No human being or political party that can deliver us.
3. No hope for the future without God’s intervention in our national life.
The wisest and most important thing we can do today is to humble our hearts, and seek the face of the God of the Universe for national repentance, healing, reconciliation, rebirth, and spiritual and moral renewal.
All across the United States families will be praying, churches will be gathering, and thousands of special events will be used to turn our attention toward God. I will be in Washington DC with our son Ryan for a prayer service in the Cannon Building in the morning, and a city-wide prayer gathering in the afternoon and evening on the west steps of the US Capitol Building.
If you can’t be here, you can be somewhere lifting up this nation in prayer. Please visit the National Day of Prayer website to encourage your heart and find out how you can participate. As you pray, remember Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation of a National Day of Fasting & Prayer whose words are as true today as when they were spoken some one hundred and forty-six years ago:
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown.”
“But we have forgotten God.”
“We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! “
“It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
The Call 2 Fall
Another important day of prayer is being planned just sixty days from now on Sunday, July 5, 2009. Thousands of churches will be inviting their people to get down on their knees the day after Independence Day to affirm our dependence on Almighty God. It’s called the “Call 2 Fall.”
I am working with a group of national spiritual leaders on this second vital prayer thrust. Here’s the vision:
“The headlines of any given day reveal the depth and breadth of the cultural and political challenges facing America. The threats to our nation and the threats in our nation are real.”
“While Americans are dying on foreign fields of battle to defend the ideals of freedom, pastors are jailed here at home for exercising their freedom of speech in defense of the unborn. While the courts continue on the march to redefine marriage, the state of the American family appears to grow weaker under the cultural and social pressures. And whether responding to this evidence or simply seizing an opportunity, commentators have gleefully pronounced the “Decline and Fall of Christian America.”
“From a human perspective the future does not look promising. It is becoming evident that there are no political solutions to what our nation is facing today. But that could mean we are at the point of our greatest hope. If we as Christians will take responsibility for the state of the Church and the nation, and then follow God’s prescription for real change – there is hope.”
“The Family Research Council is joining with other Christian ministries in issuing a nationwide “Call to Fall” on our knees before the Lord on July 5th, 2009, urging a day of humility and repentance for America. We are asking pastors and churches to engage in a singular act of corporate humility, taking at a minimum 3 to 5 minutes during the Sunday morning worship for the entire congregation to fall to their knees, calling upon God to forgive our sins and heal our land (Joel 2).”
“The ‘Call to Fall’ is nothing new for America. When the First Continental Congress called for a day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer, throughout the Colonies on July 20th, 1775, James Warren wrote Samuel Adams saying,
‘Three millions of people on their knees at once, supplicating the aid of Heaven, is a striking circumstance, and a very singular one in America. May the blessings of Heaven follow in answer to our prayers…’
“That is what we are praying for – a unified effort that crosses all denominational, cultural, and ethnic barriers among God’s people that will hopefully result in God’s hand of judgment being stayed and in His blessings being renewed on our lives and on our land.”
Please visit www.Call2Fall.com to sign the Declaration and to answer the “Call to Fall.” Here is the Declaration:
I will answer God’s call to fall on my knees in humility and seek His face in repentance, so that He might forgive my sins and heal our land.
Thanks for praying today, and for joining us on our knees Sunday, July 5.May God hear us from heaven and revive America for his glory (2 Chronicles 7:14).
A Disastrous First Hundred Days
“You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16)
On September 8, 2008 I shared with you one hundred reasons I would not vote for Barack Obama. That article brought wide-spread response from around the world–some of it very critical of my views.
I had studied the career of then Senator Obama for nearly two years and and concluded he was a radical, ambitious far left politician who would lead America away from its Christian moorings. I warned you to look past the warm smile, soaring eloquence, and big crowds and take a measure of the man’s true worldview, values and beliefs.
In my heart, I hoped and prayed that I was wrong. Though Barack Obama appeared to be a committed secular liberal (with a smile), I hoped at the least, that he would be somewhat restrained like Bill Clinton and govern from the center-left. Because he was our first elected African American president, I wanted him to succeed by doing what is right for our nation.
Now his first one hundred days are history–and they have been disastrous. Yes, disaster , meaning “an unforeseen mischance bringing with it destruction of life or property or utter defeat” (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). Barack Obama’s leadership has been far worse than even I imagined–denigrating faith and our Christian heritage, undermining the family values we hold dear, devastating the economy with Big Government centralized control, weakening and slashing our military forces, and cozying up to tyrants and terrorists–all at a warp speed pace that has been astonishing to behold. He has certainly not let a “good crisis go to waste.”
There’s no more need to wonder about Barack Obama. It was Jesus who said “You will know them by their fruits.” The fruits of his first one hundred days in office reveal that Barack Obama is the most anti-Christian president in the history of the United States. If you voted for him, it’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses, repent of your lack of judgment, and join the cause of real American restoration. We have sinned–put our trust in wrong things and poor leaders–and could face a disastrous or terminal societal judgment if we proceed down our current path.
When I ran for public office in 2006, I based my campaign on the three biblical and historically American values that brought incredible blessing to our nation for the past two-hundred and thirty-three years. They are faith, family and freedom. How can I honestly say that Barack Obama is an anti-Christ leader? Because in these three vital areas, the vast majority of the bills he’s signed and policies he’s promoted since January 20th have been strongly anti-faith, anti-family, and anti-freedom. Here’s the record.
Anti-Faith
Our new president calls himself a Christian and knows how to use religious language in certain settings. I will not profess to judge his heart. Only God knows whether he has saving faith or not. But as Jimmy Carter before him, Barack Obama does not possess a Christian worldview that guides his decision-making and governmental policies. In worldview, Obama is a secularist. That is why he has stated that “we are not a Christian nation.” He does not want us to be a Christian-based society. He believes we are bigoted, narrow, intolerant and backward. He wants us to be a secular nation with secular values. His demand to cover up the Christian symbols at Notre Dame University before giving the commencement address was the clearest evidence of his disrespect for our faith foundations.
Barack Obama does not want us to be one nation under God. He wants us to become a secular and spiritually diverse nation under men (Big Government). Under his watch, Christianity will shrink and be persecuted, and atheism will grow. That’s the “real change” he offers. Is that what you want?
Anti-Family
On April 28, 2009, Focus on the Family chronicled for us just a few of the Obama Administration anti-family policies of the first one hundred days. Barack Obama has:
- Signed an executive order allowing taxpayer funding to go to international groups that promote or provide abortions. The “Mexico City Policy,” as it’s known, also was rescinded by President Bill Clinton and then reinstated by President George W. Bush.
- Opened the door for more human embryos to be destroyed for unethical stem-cell research despite science showing that adult stem cells provide cures; to date, embryonic stem cells have not.
- Begun the process of rescinding the Bush health care provider conscience regulations. This move comes at a time when the U.S. is experiencing a shortage of practicing physicians, a drop one senator described as reaching “crisis proportions.” Making it easier for hospitals and medical schools to discriminate against physicians based on their moral or religious beliefs will only drive more of them out of the profession.
- Lifted a seven-year ban on taxpayer funding of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which is linked to forced abortion programs.
- Nominated Hillary Clinton as secretary of State. Clinton is an ardent pro-abortion politician who recently accepted Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award. During her acceptance speech, Clinton praised the eugenicist Sanger as a great Americans.
- Nominated Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services. She has accepted campaign contributions from notorious late-term abortionist George Tiller and welcomed him into the governor’s mansion. Sebelius is one of the most pro-abortion governors in the country.
- Nominated Dawn Johnsen, former legal director of NARAL Pro-Choice America, to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. Johnsen has called motherhood “involuntary servitude” and has said that restrictions on abortion make women nothing more than “fetal containers.”
- Attacked charitable giving by proposing a reduced tax deduction for gifts to nonprofits. If it becomes law, it will have a major impact on faith-based ministry giving and other nonprofits.
- Signed a bill that kills the District of Columbia’s successful school-choice program. The program benefits low-income families by providing private-school scholarships. Approximately 3,500 students have benefited from this program.
- Nominated David Hamilton to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hamilton has been a board member for the ACLU and a fundraiser for ACORN. He has ordered the Indiana legislature to end its historic practice of beginning each session with a prayer, and has written an opinion in opposition to abortion clinics providing information to women about alternatives.
- Appointed Ellen Moran to a major communications post at the White House. Moran is the former executive director of the pro-abortion EMILY’s List.
- Nominated David Ogden, Tom Perrelli, Elena Kagan and Harold Koh to top Department of Justice and State Department posts. Ogden has been a legal advocate for pornography producers; Perelli helped lead the legal fight to remove the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo; Kagan supported denying military recruiters access to law schools; and Koh strongly advocates mixing foreign law into important U.S. constitutional debates.
- Expressed support for hate-crimes legislation and will sign if it reaches his desk. The House will vote on the measure April 29. The legislation creates a special class of crime based on the victim’s sexual orientation. Those accused of “inducing” a federal hate crime could be held responsible for the actions of another person. For example, pastors preaching against homosexuality could be charged with a crime if someone listening committed a “hate crime” against a gay individual.
- Ordered a legal review of hiring-and-firing standards instituted by faith-based groups that receive federal funding.
- Released a Department of Homeland Security “watch list” that included pro-life Americans.
Barack Obama is the most anti-life president in history. He even favors infanticide. Think about that. He doesn’t mind medical professionals killing eight-month old “accidentally born” babies as a result of botched abortions. That type of thinking is Nazi-like. He is also stridently pro-homosexual and trans-sexual rights. When homosexual marriage is legal in enough states, the open persecution of pastors and Bible-believing churches could begin under this president. It would be cloaked in the language of tolerance and being anti-discriminatory–but it would send parents who object in the schools and pastors who condemn homosexuality from the pulpits to jail. This is the next wave of anti-Christ persecution.
Anti-Freedom
The biblical concept of freedom is greatly under attack by the current administration. For hundreds of years, true liberty has meant freedom from sin, strong moral foundations, self-government, limited civil government, low taxation, good stewardship of resources, and little debt (which is slavery). Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17). As Barack Obama speeds up the purging of Christianity from our culture, freedom is evaporating on every side.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich gives this sober assessment of the Barack Obama’s assault on freedom in a recent Newt Gingrich Letter:
“At home, in everything from his economic policy to his energy policy to his just-announced science policy, President Obama has successfully moved the country from a traditional American model of entrepreneurship and private initiative to a European model of regulation and government control. Abroad, he has succeeded in his apparent goal to be the un-George W. Bush; replacing aggressive, if sometimes flawed, American leadership with a humbled, weakened America on the world stage.”
“The Obama record in the first 100 days includes three instances of spectacular political impunity:
Under the guise of “economic stimulus” he was able to pass a $787 billion gift for his liberal special interest base. And he did it so quickly that no member of Congress was able to read it before they voted.After campaigning on a pledge to end earmarks, he signed an appropriations bill loaded with 8,000 earmarks – and paid no political penalty.President Obama has kept congressional Democrats marching with him in lockstep. House Democrats tow the party line an amazing 94 percent of the time and Senate Democrats vote Democratic 91 percent of the time.”
“In these first 100 days, the Obama Administration has achieved two historic bureaucratic power grabs:
President Obama has transformed the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) into giant engines of unsupervised spending. Together, they’ve spent the equivalent of the entire federal budget for 2007, without having to disclose where the money went.”
“Just two weeks ago, the President presided over an unprecedented bureaucratic power grab when his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruled that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. This seemingly innocuous decision opens the door to wholesale regulation of American life by government. The threat is so great that politicians and activists are using the specter of an out-of-control EPA to force Congress to pass a $1 trillion to $2 trillion energy tax in the form of cap-and-trade legislation.”
“The Obama 100 days record also includes remarkable weakness and self-delusion overseas:
In an attempt to overcome anti-Americanism abroad by agreeing with it, President Obama has gone on a global apology tour, labeling America as “arrogant, dismissive and derisive” in front of foreign audiences. President Obama has unleashed a domestic war over the meaning of guilt by caving in to the anti-American left and leaving the door open to prosecuting Bush Administration officials over the interrogation of terrorists who plotted to kill Americans.”
“But all these successful expansions of government at home and retractions of American leadership abroad are merely a prelude to President Obama’s looming crowning achievement: His 2010 budget which remakes our health care system, remakes our energy system, raises taxes and forecasts an amazing $9 trillion increase in the national debt. As I write this, Democrats in Congress are fashioning a deal to pass the budget’s provisions on health care by preventing Republicans and moderate Democrats from having a voice in the debate.”
“Think about that. The Obama-Reid-Pelosi political machine is going to pass legislation that fundamentally affects every single American – as well as 17 percent of our economy – by cutting the elected representatives of half of all Americans out of the process. If they succeed, the budget will be President Obama’s most enduring – and devastating – accomplishment.”
Faith, family & freedom are now under the greatest attack since the founding of the United States. A fearful one-day hundred day anti-Christ, anti-morality, anti-free enterprise tidal wave has been unleashed on America through the presidency of Barack Obama.
In the 1940s Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer tried to awaken the German Church out of its slumber and vigorously oppose the policies of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. He gave his life fighting for the freedom of Germany and the entire world. Many German Christians never saw the forest for the trees.
I pray that your eyes will be opened. A disastrous first one hundred days of the Obama Administration threatens the future of our children, grandchildren, and the world as a whole. We need to pray, fast, get involved, work for revival in the Church and reformation in our culture, and vote for a desperately needed change of direction in 2010 and 2012.
May God turn disaster into deliverance.
“If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sins, and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
“Earth to EPA: Don’t Worry…We’re Chillin'”
I’m working on a book called Truthful World. It focuses on the many “lies” that are prevalent in our world and the need to seek out the facts in numerous areas of life.
One of the lies that troubles me is the constant drumbeat of global warming. We’ve been told with almost epic hysteria by Al Gore and others that unless we make some drastic changes to CO2 output in this century, then massive flooding and human catastrophe will ensue. There is a group of scientists that share this view, but also many that do not. Somewhat like the creation-evolution debate, those on the global warming side have worked hard to squash all dissent and create the impression–a lie at worst and only a possibility at best–that there is only one reasonable view and if you don’t hold it, then you’re crazy.
Last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) joined the one-sided hysteria with this announcement that “the heating of Earth’s climate from fossil fuel use threatens human health and the environment.” The EPA said its finding was based on “rigorous peer-reviewed scientific analysis of six gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.” They stated as a fact that these gases contribute to global warming by trapping heat in the atmosphere and that the effects could be “more droughts, more extreme and more frequent heat waves, more intense storms, rising sea levels and harm to water sources, agriculture, and plants and animals in the wild. The very young, the elderly and those in poor health could suffer the most. Global warming could also “threaten national security if it triggered wars or mass migrations as resources became scarce.”
But it gets worse. The global warming situation has become so dire that Barack Obama‘s chief scientific adviser has raised with the president the possibility of massive-scale technological fixes to alter the climate known as ‘geo-engineering‘. John Holdren, who is a member of the president’s cabinet, said on April 7, 2009 that the drastic measures should not be “off the table” in discussions on how best to tackle climate change. While his office insisted that he was not proposing a dramatic switch in policy, Holdren said geo-engineering could not be ruled out.
“It’s got to be looked at. We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table,” Holdren said in an interview with Associated Press. He made clear these were his personal views. The suite of mega-technological fixes includes everything from placing mirrors in space that reflect sunlight from the Earth, to fertilizing the oceans with iron to encourage the growth of algae that can soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide. Another option is to seed clouds which bounce the sun’s rays back into space so they do not warm the Earth’s surface.
Gadzooks! Sounds like an Environmental Star Wars program where instead of shooting down invading missiles (a good idea) we shoot down carbon emissions (a dumb idea). It sounds like environmental Armageddon is just around the corner. So what should the United States do based on these unalienable rights–oops, I mean facts. Back to the EPA. We should “order the nation’s first mandatory reductions of global warming emissions from a spectrum of sources including motor vehicles, ships, airplanes, power plants, oil refineries, and steel mills and more.”
Note the words order and mandatory. Based on the highly questionable opinion of a number of scientists and environmental hacks, the US government (i.e. Obama administration and a Democratic-controlled Congress), should use force–without choice–to achieve a major reduction in the evil-ozone-busting carcinogens.
That means your energy bills are going way up, the recession could turn into a Depression, and you may have to give up your car and take the bus.
And all of this for an unproved theory–which is probably a lie.
Why am I calling global warming a lie? Because the facts just don’t support it.
Dennis T. Avery’s book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, shows that global warming and cooling have well-known patterns over thousands of years. In fact, as recently as one thousand years ago, well before the use of fossil fuels, the European continent was significantly warmer and vineyards flourished in Iceland and Greenland.
Avery analyzes the works of more than five hundred scientists, including researchers from many of the world’s top research institutions, such as the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory affiliated with Columbia University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysical Research, the Woods Hole and Scripps Oceanographic Institutes, Sweden’s Upsala University, New Zealand’s Waikato University, South Africa’s Witwatersrand University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. These scientists believe:
1) Most of the recent global warming has been caused by a long, moderate, natural cycle rather than by the burning of fossil fuels;
2) The sun’s varying radiance impacts the Earth’s climate as more or fewer cosmic rays create more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that act as the Earth’s thermostats, deflecting more or less solar heat out into space.
3) Sea levels are not rising rapidly nor are they likely to;
4) Wild species are not being driven to extinction but rather are increasing the biodiversity of our wildlands;
5) Fewer human deaths are likely rather than more as the current warming continues, since cold is far more dangerous and the Earth is always warming or cooling;
6) Food production is likely to thrive during the decades ahead, rather than collapsing due to climate overheating; or
7) Our storms are likely to be fewer and milder as the declining temperature differential between the equator and the poles reduces their power.
8) Climate changes are due to a natural, moderate 1,500 year cycle discovered in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores in the 1980s. Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland discovered the climate cycle, in the first long Greenland ice cores. Claude Lorius of France led the Antarctic team that reported on the first long Antarctic ice core in 1985. Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles have since been found in seabed and lake sediments, ancient tree rings, boreholes, cave stalagmites, glacier movements, and archaeological artifacts all over the world.
9) Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle theory is now supported by hundreds of peer-reviewed research reports, with more than 1,000 authors and co-authors, from research institutions around the world. If you’d like to see the list of five hundred of the researchers, CLICK HERE.
By the way–did you notice a few years ago that the environmentalists quietly changed the term in the global warming debate? They stopped using “global warming” as the phrase of choice and began to substitute “climate change.” Very curious. If they were so convinced the only “climate change” happening was warming, why go back to a phrase that could mean warming, cooling, or change of any type?
I’m glad you asked. It’s because the most recent and reputable research shows that for the past couple of years, the Earth has actually gone into a period of cooling down which could go on for the next three decades.
Don J. Easterbrook is Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University. Bellingham, WA. He has published extensively on issues pertaining to global climate change. He recently published a report with the following conclusions:
“Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over. The minute increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming—it was a continuation of natural cycles that occurred over the past 500 years.
The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.”
Now we know why the language has changed. The Earth is going into a cooling period and the scientists on the other side of the debate want to keep talking and still sound relevant. No wonder we had such a harsh winter in the Pacific Northwest this year! I wasn’t imagining things. “Climate change” is taking place–but that really means that a cooling cycle has begun.
So why do we still still hear about global warming from President Obama, our liberal Congress, the EPA, the radical environmentalists, and the mainstream media?
Because this issue was never about science or honest debate. It was about power through a political agenda:
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That won’t allow America to become energy independent by drilling in our own nation for oil, natural gas, building nuclear plants and clean-coal facilities, and wisely utilizing wind, solar, and renewable sources to meet the energy needs of the 21st century.
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That wants to get Americans out of their cars and onto mass transit, buses, and other forms of collectivist transportation schemes.
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That desires to bring a controlled economy to the United States through high energy costs and a higher degree of national poverty and government dependence.
The global warming rhetoric is not about science–it is about power, control, and ultimately environmental tyranny over the modern world.
Here’s a simple message to the tyrants among us: “Earth to EPA and other government elites: We don’t believe the lies and we won’t allow you to force us into energy slavery.”
And to all: Your liberties are under attack due to a bald-faced lie. Don’t believe it. Be good stewards of the world you occupy and resist the power grab. Do it by sharing the facts.