Building the Church is the first stage in building the Kingdom of God

      Anyone who is an observer of things would certainly tell that we are definitely coming close to the end of the ages. There is an unprecedented battle that is underway for the souls of nations.

    In the UK, we have seen the move of an aggressive secularism that wants to take the worship of God out of public life. We have seen our leaders embarrassed and forced to resign simply because of their faith. We have seen and see an attempt by another faith to wrest control of the nation, to seize the soul of the nation. We have seen churches closed: on the last account 500 churches in and around London closed and 480 mosques were planted in their stead. We have seen laws that are so ungodly passed. Policies that we know are so ungodly passed. It is impossible to imagine that such things can happen. We are now dealing with the issue of genders and transgenders. It’s being taken out of a lot of our literature the reference to male and female, because it is assumed that there is some middle ground that is neither male nor female. And that is official. Things are dark in the UK.

         But then, I wouldn’t say it’s any different from here. It might not be the same expression, but when we look round at the state of things here in Nigeria, we see the rabid corruption. We see the blatant use of the government’s machinery in some places to advance the agenda of one faith over another.  We read about how our curriculum for our children has been hijacked so that any reference to the deity of Christ has been removed. We look around at some parts of the Church and we marvel that this is the Church of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We hear about the killing that is taking place in some parts of the country. The persecution of Christians. The kidnapping of young girls and them being forced to convert to other faith.

        And I can go on and on and on, but you get the picture. What I’m trying to say is that it’s no different here.  It’s no different in the Middle East.  It’s no different in North America. It is no different in South America.  It is clear that the kingdom of darkness is marching on and has an agenda, and the agenda is to push back the Church, and to seize the high ground.

        How did we find ourselves in this state? We find ourselves in this place because while men slept, the enemy came and sowed tares. We ended up here because we played Church. We became politicians of an ecclesiastical nature. We specialized and majored in pettiness and distractions.  We built empires, we said we were building churches. And maybe we did, but we didn’t understand that to build a church is the first stage in building the Kingdom of God.

    If we stay in our churches and clap hands, and sing songs, the enemy will arrive at the door of our churches.  The whole essence of Church is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry.  The work of the ministry is not just the pulpit. Of course the Pastor can be President. A Pastor can be President of the Senate. Why shouldn’t ministers be heads of banks? Of course, they can!     Agu  Irukwu

Egypt Sentences ISIS members to Death for the Beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya

Remember this chilling picture? Justice has caught up with seven members of the ISIS terror group responsible for the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya in February 2015. (see Vol 18 Qtr 3).  An Egyptian court on 16^th September sentenced them to death, three of them in absentia. Thirteen others are on trial in the same case, and rulings for them are scheduled to be delivered on Nov. 25.  During the two-year anniversary of the beheadings earlier in the year, a widow of one of the martyrs told the International Christian Concern that she was proud of his husband for having kept the faith.  “He has lifted our heads up and honoured us and all the Christians."  Similarly the children of the martyrs praised the courage their fathers showed the world by refusing to renounce their faith, even in the face of certain death. For details, see  http://www.christianpost.com/news/egypt-sentences-isis-killers-to-death-for-beheading-of-21-coptic-christians-in-libya-199575/

Islamic-inspired terror no longer news material

     Islamic-inspired terror has reached such a proportion that unless they happen in locations such as Europe or United States, they hardly get reported anymore. The world owes Robert Spencer and his team a ton of gratitude for helping us to a least keep track of these virtually countless atrocities visited on fellow humans by people claiming to be full of zeal for the cause of Islam.  Citing location and date, The Religion of Peace (TROP) website lists cases of Islam-inspired killing and maiming since 11^th September 2001.  So far, in the year 2017, (as at 3^rd October) TROP has catalogued 1,600 Islamic attacks in 55 countries, in which 10,904 people were killed and 11,225 injured. Most of these incidents are terror attacks.  A handful are honor killings or Sharia executions.  

      TROP is a non-partisan, fact-based site which examines the ideological threat that Islam poses to human dignity and freedom.   In the month of September, 806 people were killed and 688 injured in 131 attacks carried out across 20 countries. 14 of these occurred in Nigeria and are listed in the Table below.

Date	Location	Details
30-Sept	Bama	One person is killed during a Boko Haram attack.
27-Sept	Guzamala	Islamists kill three villagers and burn over 100 homes.
27-Sept	Dikwa	At least two people along a highway die from a Boko Haram bomb blast.
26-Sept	Dikwa	A female suicide bomber storms a rival mosque and sends five souls to Allah.
20-Sept	Daima	At least nine innocents are slaughtered when Boko Haram attack a peaceful farming community.
18-Sept	Mashalari	Two female suicide bombers attack an aid distribution station, slaughtering over fifteen needy people.
17-Sept	Kurmiri	Five villagers are murdered by Boko Haram
8-Sept	Ancha	Six women and six children are among nineteen Christian villagers butchered by Fulani terrorists.
8-Sept	Ngala	Islamists pour machine-gun fire into a displaced person camp, picking apart seven refugees.
8-Sept	Muna Garage	Two refugees are blown to bits in the camp by a Boko Haram suicide blast.
8-Sept	Mallan	Two farmers are gunned down by Islamists.
6-Sept	Mallan	Three young people are shot to death by Boko Haram.
6-Sept	Kesa Kura	Advocates for a Sharia state murder three villagers.
5-Sept	Bulamari	Boko Haram murder four farmers in a drive-by shooting

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Meanwhile, a new groundbreaking regulation proscribing full-face Muslim veils in public spaces became effective in Austria as from October 1.  Similar laws requiring the face to be completely visible in all public spaces , including bus, rail, air and sea transport  are already in operation in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.  The Austrian version also prohibits Islamic radicals from distributing the Koran

Yellowstone: The World prepares for the Mother of All Natural Disasters, but only few are paying attention

        It might be difficult to imagine Hurricane Harvey to be relatively not more than a storm in the tea cup, but scientists are all agreed that far more devastating catastrophes await planet earth.  It’s only a matter of time.  One of these anticipated disasters is the chance of some asteroid colliding with planet earth (see CA! Vol 16 Q1).  But as the NASA involved itself in brainstorming on how best to prepare against such hazard from outer space, it recognized that there is an even more urgent, and much more potentially devastating hazard right here on the planet: Eruptions of super volcanoes.

 There are clear records of just what fair-sized volcanic eruptions can cause.  Known examples include the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in the year 79 and Mt St Helen, more recently in May 1980.  The eruption of a supervolcano, such as Yellowstone National Park, in Wyoming, US, will dwarf all these catastrophes (See 1400-Quake Swarm Prompts Question “If Yellowstone Erupted, What Would Be Left?”)   What is amazing is that, despite the reports of increasing activities at the supervolcano Yellowstone, the world should still devote virtually all attention and resources debating “global warming” while leaving unaddressed the fire on the roof.

Not that the issue is entirely left unaddressed.  The NASA is currently tinkering with a number of game-plans  to avert, or at least delay, the coming eruption from Yellowstone.  The easiest of these plans, so far, is designed to run for some hundred thousand years!  Ridiculous as that may sound, it’s the best plan to date. The real complication is that Yellowstone is reckoned to erupt every 600.000 years (according to conventional dating techniques). And by those same reckoning, the last eruption occurred some 600.000 years ago, meaning another one is due literally any time from now.  And with ongoing rumbles in the volcano, the handwriting on the wall is clear enough. The real problem is that most people are simply unaware that this grave problem exists at all! http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-19/nasa-unveils-plan-stop-world-ending-supervolcano-eruptiontheres-just-one-catch