Friday Church News Notes
Volume 19, Issue 7 - February 16, 2018
Graphical Edition
The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, though this does not imply an endorsement.
Fulton Sheen
Fulton Sheen
CATHOLIC DIOCESES STILL FIGHTING OVER FULTON SHEEN’S BODY (Friday Church News Notes, February 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Catholic Archbishop Fulton Sheen died in 1979, but two dioceses are still fighting over his body. Currently it is interred at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, but the diocese of Peoria, Illinois, has been fighting to have it moved there since Peoria Bishop Daniel Jenky began sponsoring Sheen’s sainthood. Jenky claims that he was promised by previous New York ecclesiastical authorities that Peoria could have the body, but that is disputed by the current authorities. Sheen’s closest living relative, a niece, Joan Cunningham, proposes that the body be divided into “relics” for interment in multiple locations (“Archbishop Sheen’s Body,” The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2018). Fulton Sheen was an effective promoter of Roman Catholicism through his writings and television broadcast Life Is Worth Living, and he was a great venerator of the Catholic Mary. Sheen devoted an entire chapter of his biography to Mary. “When I was ordained, I took a resolution to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist every Saturday to the Blessed Mother ... All this makes me very certain that when I go before the Judgment Seat of Christ, He will say to me in His Mercy: ‘I heard My Mother speak of you.’ During my life I have made about thirty pilgrimages to the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes and about ten to her shrine in Fatima” (Fulton Sheen, Treasure in Clay, p. 317). By his own testimony, Fulton Sheen’s hope of salvation was his devotion to Mary. Yet Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham venerates Sheen. They first met in 1944, three years before Graham’s first citywide crusade. In his 1997 autobiography, Graham described that first meeting. He says he was traveling on a train from Washington to New York and was just drifting off to sleep when Sheen knocked on the sleeping compartment and asked to “come in for a chat and a prayer” (Graham, Just As I Am, p. 692). Graham says, “We talked about our ministries and our common commitment to evangelism, and I told him how grateful I was for his ministry and his focus on Christ. … We talked further and we prayed; and by the time he left, I felt as if I had known him all my life.” (For more about this see Billy Graham’s Sad Disobedience, available as a free eBook from www.wayoflife.org.)

TUVALU ISLANDS EXPANDING DESPITE GLOBAL WARMING DOOMSDAY ALARMS (Friday Church News Notes, February 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Since the 1990s, global warming alarmists have been saying that the Tuvalu Islands in the South Pacific will be inundated by a rising ocean. The islands stand only a few feet above sea level. A 1996 climate change study warned that “Tuvalu is particularly susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change and in particular rising sea level.” Believing the hype and convinced that they will drown because of “excessive carbon dioxide emissions” in other parts of the world, the residents of Tuvalu threatened to sue the U.S. and Australia. In 2003, Tuvalu’s Prime Minister told the United Nations that global-warming is “a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us” (“Will Tuvalu Disappear Beneath the Sea?” Smithsonian Magazine, Aug. 2004). The latest research finds, though, that the islands are growing in size. Since 1970, they have added 181 acres of new land. Paul Kench, a co-author of the new study at the University of Aukland, says, “We tend to think of Pacific atolls as static landforms that will simply be inundated as sea levels rise but there is growing evidence these islands are geologically dynamic and are constantly changing” (“Tuvalu Is Growing,” UPI, Feb. 9, 2018).

CA COURT: FORCED COMPLIANCE VIOLATES 1ST AMENDMENT (Friday Church News Notes, February 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “CA Court,” OneNewsNow, Feb. 7, 2018: “It’s a familiar sounding story: a lesbian couple walks into the bakery of a cake-artist known for having Christian beliefs, then sues when the baker refuses to make a custom cake for their same-sex ‘wedding.’ But this case is not in Colorado, but ultra-liberal California. ... Like Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop, the state took Cathy Miller [owner of Tastries Bakery of Bakersfield] to court. She says she prepared for the inevitable string of defeats from left-leaning state judges. But in the first court action on the case--on a motion for preliminary injunction--Kern County Superior Court Judge David Lampe issued a strongly worded denial to the state, which wanted to immediately stop Miller from making any more cakes. ‘The State cannot succeed on the facts presented as a matter of law. The right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment outweighs the State’s interest in ensuring a freely accessible marketplace,’ Lampe wrote in his ruling on Monday. ‘The right of freedom of thought guaranteed by the First Amendment includes the right to speak, and the right to refrain from speaking. Sometimes the most profound protest is silence.’ The ruling, according to Bakersfield.com, only leaves Miller alone until the full case comes to trial, which is set for June. But that doesn’t dampen Miller's spirit. ‘We just were so excited that God won and that we could stand for our religious freedom and freedom of speech,’ she tells OneNewsNow. Monday’s ruling gives voice to one of the arguments heard in favor of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, whose case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court: ‘The difference here is that the cake in question is not yet baked,’ Judge Lampe wrote. ‘The State is not petitioning the court to order defendants to sell a cake. The State asked this court to compel Miller to use her talents to design and create a cake she has not yet conceived with the knowledge that her work will be displayed in celebration of a marital union her religion forbids. For this court to force such compliance would do violence to the essentials of Free Speech guaranteed under the First Amendment.’”

GLORIA COPELAND SAYS JESUS IS A FLU SHOT (Friday Church News Notes, February 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - On a video posted to Facebook, Gloria Copeland, wife of Pentecostal Word-Faith evangelist Kenneth Copeland, says that there is no flu season for the believer because “Jesus himself gave us the flu shot, he redeemed us from the curse of the flu” (“Televangelist Gloria Copeland,” USA Today, Feb. 7, 2018). Gloria and Kenneth, founders of Believer’s Voice of Victory, teach a wide variety of heresies, including “positive confession.” Kenneth says, “All it takes is (1) Seeing or visualizing whatever you need, whether physical or financial; (2) Staking your claim on Scripture; and (3) Speaking it into existence” (quoted in Christianity in Crisis, p. 80). Copeland even teaches that believers are God. “You’re all God. You don’t have a God living in you; you are one! ... When I read in the Bible where God tells Moses, 'I AM,' I say, 'Yeah, I am too!'” (“The Force of Love,” Believer’s Voice of Victory, 1987, audiotape #02-0028, side 1). Copeland has often spoken false prophecies. His most recent was on September 9, 2017, when he prayed a “word faith” prayer to stop Hurricane Irma, which was approaching the U.S. mainland. In the name of Jesus, he proclaimed that “the hurricane is dead,” but it soon hit the Florida mainland as a powerful category 3 storm and caused damage.

THE PASTEUR EXPERIMENTS (Friday Church News Notes, February 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from Seeing the Non-existent: Evolution’s Myths and Hoaxes, David Cloud, copyright 2011: “The 19th-century experiments of Louis Pasteur proved that life does not spontaneously generate, which is powerful evidence against evolution and for the Bible. In his book The History of Creation, German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel said, ‘If we do not accept the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, then at this one point of the history of development we must have recourse in the miracle of a supernatural creation.’ Many people in Charles Darwin’s day believed that life could generate spontaneously. Called ‘abiogenesis,’ it was thought, for example, that maggots were spontaneously generated in rotting meat or in apples. Evolutionists proposed this process as the answer to how life arose, but Louis Pasteur (1822-95) disproved the hypothesis. In the 1860s, he was assigned by Emperor Louis Napoleon III to find a solution to the problem that the French wine industry was having with the fermentation process. It was thought that fermentation was simply a matter of chemicals combining (grape sugar turning to alcohol and carbonic acid gas) and producing microbes. This would be abiogenesis, but Pasteur disproved it. In experiments lasting two years, he demonstrated that it is yeast, which is a living microbe and a type of fungus, that causes fermentation (Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, p. 177). Unknown to the wine makers, the yeast was introduced into the process on the skins of the grapes. Pasteur also demonstrated that the air naturally contains minute living organisms known as bacteria that can multiply under the right conditions. He invented the process of pasteurization to kill the germs in milk and other liquids by heating. All research since Pasteur has confirmed his conclusion that life does not come into existence from non-life. Such a thing has never been witnessed or demonstrated. Former evolutionist Dr. Arthur Wilder-Smith, who debated various leading scientists throughout the world on this subject, said: ‘The Evolutionary model says that it is not necessary to assume the existence of anything, besides matter and energy, to produce life. That proposition is unscientific. We know perfectly well that if you leave matter to itself, it does not organize itself--in spite of all the efforts in recent years to prove that it does’ (Wilder-Smith, in Willem J.J. Glashouwer and Paul S. Taylor, The Origin of the Universe, 1983).”

CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mat. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:11-14).

_____


Distributed by Way of Life Literature., publisher of Bible Study Materials and reports for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Established in 1974, Way of Life Literature is a fundamental Baptist preaching and publishing ministry based in Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. Brother Cloud lives in South Asia where he has been a church planting missionary since 1979. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY (REPORTS AND FRIDAY NEWS) IS NOT DEVOTIONAL. IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.

David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org

The Way of Life Literature preaching and publishing ministry is based at Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. A mail stop is maintained in Port Huron, Michigan.

Way of Life Literature - www.wayoflife.org
copyright 2018 - Way of Life Literature