Friday Church News Notes
Volume 21, Issue 6 - February 7, 2020
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.
SUPER BOWL IDOLATRY (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The Super Bowl is one of modern America’s gods. Viewership peaked at 115 million in 2014, but it still remains at about 100 million. It is not just a football game, it is a forum for the promotion of moral wickedness and humanistic philosophy. It is purposefully held on Sunday, a brash affront to the God who designated Sunday as “the Lord’s Day.” For many years, the halftime show has been “essentially a celebration of gay pride.” This year, one of the commercial spots featured “pro-homosexual drag queens bent on indoctrinating your children into a pro-LGBTQ lifestyle” (whereas an anti-abortion commercial was deemed inappropriate). The game is primarily about greed, but the environment is permeated with foul speech, drinking, gambling, half-nakedness, rock & roll sensuality, a “live as you please” philosophy (with a thin veneer of “Jesus is my buddy and he helped me win” Christianity). Fox made $412 million in advertising revenue this year, and the host city, Miami, received a $500 million economic impact. The price of a single ticket is more than $6,000. Anheuser-Busch has spent $441 million on Super Bowl advertising since 2006. Super Bowl fans consume 52 million cases of beer. About 23 million people (7% of the population) place wagers on the game, totaling $6.8 BILLION. The Super Bowl does not stir up righteous affections. It’s all about “inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). A pastor who stopped watching Super Bowl in 2008 said, “It has become an intensified concentration of vulgarity and ego, with enough athletics in the game and cleverness in the commercials to trick me into watching. It’s simply not what I’m living for.” To that we say, Amen. We would like to know how one can obey the following Scripture while participating in the Super Bowl. “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Ephesians 5:11).
SUPER BOWL HALF TIME: JENNIFER LOPEZ REPLACES JESUS ON CROSS, WORSHIPED AS SEX GODDESS (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excepted from “Christians Clap and Cheer,” Reformation Charlotte, Feb. 3, 2020: “The Super Bowl Halftime Show during the NFL game last night may have been the most blasphemous production ever put on by a major world organization. As the show was riddled with sex--and references to sex--it is clear that Americans have exchanged the true God for a god of lust. ... During the show, Jennifer Lopez put on a pole dance performance and presented herself as a sex object for the world to watch. ... during the performance, it appears she is raised up on what looks like a pose on the cross of Jesus while the surrounding people fall down on their faces in simulated worship. [And there was an obvious depiction of the two crosses that were on either side of Jesus.] Anyone who thinks this wasn’t by design is foolish.”
DEMOCRAT PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDERS ARE A GREAT DANGER TO FIRST AMENDMENT LIBERTIES (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - We don’t spend much time writing about politics, but the Democrat party has become a clear and present danger to religious liberty in America by its 100% support of homosexual rights. Consider two of the top Democrat presidential contenders. Elizabeth Warren promises to fill at least half of her cabinet “by women and non binary people” (transexuals) (Pulpit and Pen, Jan. 27, 2020). She also vows that her nominee for Secretary of Education must be interviewed and approved by a nine-year-old transgender child (“Elizabeth Warren Vows,” The Washington Times, Jan. 30, 2020). Yet she insanely calls her platform “Restoring Integrity and Competence to Government.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden tweets, “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights” (@JoeBiden, Jan. 26, 2020). Of course, there is no such thing as a transgender. One is either male or female, as determined by biology.
BRITISH TEENS ENCOUNTER MORE PORN ON SNAPCHAT THAN PORN SITES; PARENTS IN DENIAL (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - A new study by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) found that “viewing pornography has been normalised among children from their mid-teens onwards, with more encountering it on networks such as Snapchat and WhatsApp than on dedicated pornography sites” (“Porn survey reveals extent of UK teenagers’ viewing habits,” The Guardian, Jan. 31, 2020). “The report’s authors concluded that parents of 16- to 17-year-olds were either in denial or largely unaware of what their child viewed online, with the parents of teenage girls the most likely to be unaware their children were watching pornography. ... While 75% of parents did not believe their children would have watched pornography, the majority of these parents’ children told the researchers that they had viewed adult material.”
PARENTS NEGLECTING CHILDREN FOR SMARTPHONES (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy,” The Globe and Mail, Apr. 10, 2018: “Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and research associate in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, interviewed 1,000 kids between the ages of 4 and 18 for her 2013 book The Big Disconnect. Many of them said they no longer run to the door to greet their parents because the adults are so often on their phones when they get home. And it gets worse once they’re through the door. One of the smartphone’s terrible, mysterious powers, from a child’s perspective, is its ability ‘to pull you away instantly, anywhere, anytime,’ Dr. Steiner-Adair writes. Because what’s happening on the smartphone screen is inscrutable to others, parents often seem to have simply gotten sucked into another dimension, leaving their kid behind. ‘To children, the feeling is often one of endless frustration, fatigue and loss.’”
FATHER OF TEXAS BOY WHOSE MOTHER WANTED TO “TRANSITION” HIM TO A GIRL WINS IN COURT (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Father of 7-Year-Old,” Daily Wire, Feb. 1, 2020: “On Thursday, a Texas court ruled in favor of Jeff Younger, the father of James Younger, the seven-year-old whose pediatrician mother was attempting to medically transition her son into a girl. Dallas Judge Mary Brown upheld an October decision that gave both parents conservatorship over their child and denied the mother’s request that the case revert to the October 21 11-1 jury decision that gave her sole managing conservatorship. That decision was later overruled by Judge Kim Cooks, who ruled that conservatorship would be split evenly between both parents. ... Jeff Younger said Georgulas had been pushing their son to transition after their divorce. He claimed that when his son was three years old, his mother locked him in his bedroom and told him, ‘monsters only eat boys.’ He also said she had forced James to wear dresses.”
FRANKLIN GRAHAM BANNED FROM VENUES IN ENGLAND, WALES, SCOTLAND FOR “HATE SPEECH” ON PRESSURE FROM HOMOSEXUAL ACTIVISTS (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from Pulpit & Pen, Jan. 27, 2020: “[A] prominent Liverpool venue just canceled American evangelist, Franklin Graham, for preaching ‘hate.’ By ‘hate,’ the ACC Liverpool venue means Graham’s preaching of the Bible when it comes to various sin issues like homosexuality. [ACC Liverpool tweeted,] ‘Over the past few days we have been made aware of a number of statements which we consider to be incompatible with our values.’ [BBC reported,] ‘Franklin Graham has repeatedly publicly promoted his homophobic beliefs including, but not limited to, branding homosexuality a sin, claiming Satan was the architect of same-sex marriage and LGBT rights, claiming gay people existing are causing a moral 9/11, declared that gay people are the enemy of civilization and advocates for the highly damaging abusive practice of gay conversion therapy.’ The mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, took to Twitter to rub it in. ‘Our City is a diverse City and proud of our LGBTQ+ community and always will be. We can not allow hatred and intolerance to go unchallenged by anyone including by religious groups or sects. It’s right we have banned from the M&S Arena Franklin Graham. #Love conquers hatred always.’” NOTE: Graham has also been banned from the International Convention Centre Wales in Newport, Glasgow SEC, and Sheffield City Trust.
URANIUM-LEAD DATING (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from creationmoments.com, January 16, 2020: “Many people assume that carbon dating is used to date rocks and fossils. It is not. Carbon dating is specifically used to provide a date for material which was previously part of a living organism, and even if such ages were possible, does not give an age of over 100,000 years. Many geologists will rely on uranium-lead dating to find the age of a rock. This technique involves measuring the amount of the uranium isotope U-238 in a rock and also the stable isotope lead-206, into which U-238 decays. It is important to emphasize that neither this technique, nor any other, actually directly measures the age of the rock. Rather, the age is calculated from the measured amounts of uranium and lead, using three assumptions: 1. It is assumed that all of the lead present in the rock originally came from uranium. But why should this be the case? Could not the rock have been formed with lead in it? 2. None of the lead produced has been lost. But since lead compounds are partially soluble in water, it is unlikely that millions-of-year-old rocks would have escaped water erosion. 3. It is assumed that the half-life of uranium-238 has never changed over the lifetime of the rock. Half-life gives us the rate at which uranium turns into lead, but we now know that this value can change a great deal. So all three assumptions under-girding uranium-lead dating are suspect. Better to trust the Bible’s account of where rock came from. Ref: Snelling, A., Radiometric Dating.”
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).
SUPER BOWL HALF TIME: JENNIFER LOPEZ REPLACES JESUS ON CROSS, WORSHIPED AS SEX GODDESS (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excepted from “Christians Clap and Cheer,” Reformation Charlotte, Feb. 3, 2020: “The Super Bowl Halftime Show during the NFL game last night may have been the most blasphemous production ever put on by a major world organization. As the show was riddled with sex--and references to sex--it is clear that Americans have exchanged the true God for a god of lust. ... During the show, Jennifer Lopez put on a pole dance performance and presented herself as a sex object for the world to watch. ... during the performance, it appears she is raised up on what looks like a pose on the cross of Jesus while the surrounding people fall down on their faces in simulated worship. [And there was an obvious depiction of the two crosses that were on either side of Jesus.] Anyone who thinks this wasn’t by design is foolish.”
DEMOCRAT PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDERS ARE A GREAT DANGER TO FIRST AMENDMENT LIBERTIES (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - We don’t spend much time writing about politics, but the Democrat party has become a clear and present danger to religious liberty in America by its 100% support of homosexual rights. Consider two of the top Democrat presidential contenders. Elizabeth Warren promises to fill at least half of her cabinet “by women and non binary people” (transexuals) (Pulpit and Pen, Jan. 27, 2020). She also vows that her nominee for Secretary of Education must be interviewed and approved by a nine-year-old transgender child (“Elizabeth Warren Vows,” The Washington Times, Jan. 30, 2020). Yet she insanely calls her platform “Restoring Integrity and Competence to Government.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden tweets, “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights” (@JoeBiden, Jan. 26, 2020). Of course, there is no such thing as a transgender. One is either male or female, as determined by biology.
BRITISH TEENS ENCOUNTER MORE PORN ON SNAPCHAT THAN PORN SITES; PARENTS IN DENIAL (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - A new study by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) found that “viewing pornography has been normalised among children from their mid-teens onwards, with more encountering it on networks such as Snapchat and WhatsApp than on dedicated pornography sites” (“Porn survey reveals extent of UK teenagers’ viewing habits,” The Guardian, Jan. 31, 2020). “The report’s authors concluded that parents of 16- to 17-year-olds were either in denial or largely unaware of what their child viewed online, with the parents of teenage girls the most likely to be unaware their children were watching pornography. ... While 75% of parents did not believe their children would have watched pornography, the majority of these parents’ children told the researchers that they had viewed adult material.”
PARENTS NEGLECTING CHILDREN FOR SMARTPHONES (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy,” The Globe and Mail, Apr. 10, 2018: “Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and research associate in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, interviewed 1,000 kids between the ages of 4 and 18 for her 2013 book The Big Disconnect. Many of them said they no longer run to the door to greet their parents because the adults are so often on their phones when they get home. And it gets worse once they’re through the door. One of the smartphone’s terrible, mysterious powers, from a child’s perspective, is its ability ‘to pull you away instantly, anywhere, anytime,’ Dr. Steiner-Adair writes. Because what’s happening on the smartphone screen is inscrutable to others, parents often seem to have simply gotten sucked into another dimension, leaving their kid behind. ‘To children, the feeling is often one of endless frustration, fatigue and loss.’”
FATHER OF TEXAS BOY WHOSE MOTHER WANTED TO “TRANSITION” HIM TO A GIRL WINS IN COURT (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Father of 7-Year-Old,” Daily Wire, Feb. 1, 2020: “On Thursday, a Texas court ruled in favor of Jeff Younger, the father of James Younger, the seven-year-old whose pediatrician mother was attempting to medically transition her son into a girl. Dallas Judge Mary Brown upheld an October decision that gave both parents conservatorship over their child and denied the mother’s request that the case revert to the October 21 11-1 jury decision that gave her sole managing conservatorship. That decision was later overruled by Judge Kim Cooks, who ruled that conservatorship would be split evenly between both parents. ... Jeff Younger said Georgulas had been pushing their son to transition after their divorce. He claimed that when his son was three years old, his mother locked him in his bedroom and told him, ‘monsters only eat boys.’ He also said she had forced James to wear dresses.”
FRANKLIN GRAHAM BANNED FROM VENUES IN ENGLAND, WALES, SCOTLAND FOR “HATE SPEECH” ON PRESSURE FROM HOMOSEXUAL ACTIVISTS (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from Pulpit & Pen, Jan. 27, 2020: “[A] prominent Liverpool venue just canceled American evangelist, Franklin Graham, for preaching ‘hate.’ By ‘hate,’ the ACC Liverpool venue means Graham’s preaching of the Bible when it comes to various sin issues like homosexuality. [ACC Liverpool tweeted,] ‘Over the past few days we have been made aware of a number of statements which we consider to be incompatible with our values.’ [BBC reported,] ‘Franklin Graham has repeatedly publicly promoted his homophobic beliefs including, but not limited to, branding homosexuality a sin, claiming Satan was the architect of same-sex marriage and LGBT rights, claiming gay people existing are causing a moral 9/11, declared that gay people are the enemy of civilization and advocates for the highly damaging abusive practice of gay conversion therapy.’ The mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, took to Twitter to rub it in. ‘Our City is a diverse City and proud of our LGBTQ+ community and always will be. We can not allow hatred and intolerance to go unchallenged by anyone including by religious groups or sects. It’s right we have banned from the M&S Arena Franklin Graham. #Love conquers hatred always.’” NOTE: Graham has also been banned from the International Convention Centre Wales in Newport, Glasgow SEC, and Sheffield City Trust.
URANIUM-LEAD DATING (Friday Church News Notes, February 7, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from creationmoments.com, January 16, 2020: “Many people assume that carbon dating is used to date rocks and fossils. It is not. Carbon dating is specifically used to provide a date for material which was previously part of a living organism, and even if such ages were possible, does not give an age of over 100,000 years. Many geologists will rely on uranium-lead dating to find the age of a rock. This technique involves measuring the amount of the uranium isotope U-238 in a rock and also the stable isotope lead-206, into which U-238 decays. It is important to emphasize that neither this technique, nor any other, actually directly measures the age of the rock. Rather, the age is calculated from the measured amounts of uranium and lead, using three assumptions: 1. It is assumed that all of the lead present in the rock originally came from uranium. But why should this be the case? Could not the rock have been formed with lead in it? 2. None of the lead produced has been lost. But since lead compounds are partially soluble in water, it is unlikely that millions-of-year-old rocks would have escaped water erosion. 3. It is assumed that the half-life of uranium-238 has never changed over the lifetime of the rock. Half-life gives us the rate at which uranium turns into lead, but we now know that this value can change a great deal. So all three assumptions under-girding uranium-lead dating are suspect. Better to trust the Bible’s account of where rock came from. Ref: Snelling, A., Radiometric Dating.”
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).
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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.
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