Saturday, April 25, 2009

Tamara Lowe: Motivational DNA

Tamara Lowe: Motivational DNA

By Heather Salon
The 700 Club

CBN.com – LIFE-CHANGING MOTIVATION
Tamara Lowe grew up on the streets of New Orleans. At age 10, she was taking drugs.  She became a drug dealer at 12 and dropped out of school in the eighth grade. For the next decade, she went from one drug-induced high to the next. Then, Tamara had a life-changing transition - she got motivated. 
She got off of drugs, earned her high school equivalency diploma, and went to college.  She decided to spend her life helping the people she felt she knew the best – drug addicts, alcoholics, the poor, the homeless, and the abused. To her surprise, she ended up working with five U.S. presidents (Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush, and Bill Clinton), numerous world leaders (British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev), politicians, heads of state, business leaders, professional athletes, Hollywood celebrities and other influential people (including Billy Graham, Colin Powell, Joe Montana, George Foreman, Goldie Hawn, Charlton Heston, Bill Cosby, Christopher Reeve, Rudy Giuliani, Mary Lou Retton, and Mother Teresa). 
Through the Get Motivated Seminars, more than two million people have been taught to advance in their careers, have more fulfilling relationships, achieve their goals and make more money. Holding these seminars isn’t just a business to Tamara, it’s her calling.
During each seminar there is a straightforward, unapologetic, non-religious presentation for the gospel to the more than 200,000 annual attendees. Every year, Tamara hosts about 30 of these seminars in America’s biggest arenas, with tens of thousands of people at each meeting. 
The Washington Post has called her seminars “the Superbowl of Success.” Time Magazine has called Tamara and her group “the motivational Dream Team.” The New York Times says they “rouse sales reps, entrepreneurs and executives to higher levels of performance.” The Wall Street Journal calls the meetings “a barnstorming feel-good tour de force.”
TAMARA’S TESTIMONY
When Tamara looks back at the spiritual dimension of her success, she remembers that she was put off by religion. Her mother was Jewish and her father was Catholic, and neither one of them regularly attended weekly worship services. Tamara was not interested in God, the Bible, or organized religion as a child or a teenager.
At 17, someone gave her a Bible as a Christmas present. She thought it was not a very good gift, considering she was a drug addict. Knowing that the gift giver would ask if she had read the Bible, and not wanting to lie, Tamara figured she would read a few sentences from the New Testament so she would be telling the truth. She assumed the Bible was an old-fashioned book that was hard to understand and irrelevant. However, she found when she started reading it, she couldn’t put it down.
Tamara read the parts about Jesus and found herself addicted to the Bible. She finished reading the New Testament in about three weeks. Through reading the Bible, she found her life radically changed and she had a new motivation in life. It was not religion that changed her life, but a personal encounter with Jesus. Her faith is a great motivator for everything she does. In her 28 years of being a Christian, she has read the Bible from cover to cover many times over and still gets excited. Applying its words and wisdom is the secret to her success.

Source: http://www.cbn.com/700club/guests/bios/tamara_lowe042309.aspx

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Hearing God


Reading te begining guide to Hearing God by James W.Goll. H have similar experience. The keyword is availability to Him and two ways communication.

The Beginner's Guide to Hearing God sends the message that everyone, no matter how long they've been a believer and no matter what their position in the Church, can listen and speak to God! Jim Goll leads readers to overcome personal obstacles that can block God's voice and avoid being misled by words that aren't from God. This manual is presented in a straightforward manner so that anyone who desires to communicate with the Father will have learned how to converse intimately with Him. God speaks to us in many ways and Jim Goll explains them all! --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Come Holy Spirit

Come Holy Spirit

'Holy Spirit' by Nate Sallie (with beautiful graphics)

The Closeness of Holy Spirit

The mystery of the spiritual world is beyond our imagination. Holy spirit is a personal God who can empower and be with us constantly, Holy Spirit is a person who can protect us, talk to us, love us and be loved, and provide us appropriate help.

This time I sense that have to go back to Kuala Lumpur. A busy life with certain mission.

I ove my wife because God has provide me a way to.

Monday, August 4, 2008

derek vreeland's blog: The Holy Spirit as a divine person

The Holy Spirit as a divine person

In my previous post I expressed my dislike for the age-old theological position that the Father and Son have this great relationship and the Spirit is merely the bond of love between them. I think this depersonalizes who the Holy Spirit is.

Both the Scripture and tradition hold to the full personhood of the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit is not like Yoda's force. He is not a divine energy. He is not merely the power of God. He is not the bond of love between the Father and the Son (even though I have great respect for Augustine, who made the point orginally).

The Holy Spirit is God.

"Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." (2 Cor. 3:17 ESV)

"We believe...in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified." (Nicene Creed 381AD)

The Holy Spirit is a mystery....a sacred mystery....

Below is my half of an email conversation with a friend on this subject.

Most of the theological world lacks in developing a solid, historical
biblical pneumatology that lays out the true personhood of the Holy Spirit.

And I agree that persona (person) cannot be defined in modern
terms. We need to step back and let the Church Father translate that word for
us. It seems from my limited review on the subject that the Western Fathers
including our friend Augustine – focused more on the Spirit as the love. The
Eastern (Greek) Fathers have written more on the personhood other
Spirit.

While I have not looked at this book, Colin Guton’s The Promise of Trinitarian Theology is supposed to deal with that subject. I have yet to tackle Gunton.

The best book I have read on the Holy Spirit / pneumatology is Come Creator Spirit by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa.

http://www.amazon.com/Come-Creator-Spirit-Meditations-Veni/dp/0814628710/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6694551-4086467?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184249074&sr=1-1

RC was the preacher of the papal household and theology professor. He has also been apart of the Catholic charismatic renewal for years. He is still writing
in the area of charismatic theology. "Come Creator Spirit" is the only hymn sung by both Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians. It is a hymn sung to the
Holy Spirit.

RC took the hymn and used it as a guideline to lay out his pneumatology. The reason I like the book is that it is not only theological but it has a liturgical (worshipful) rhythm to it. I was re-reading parts of it last night. Here are some excerpts…I would add commentary, but I got to get back to sermon prep.

Liturgical rhythm…sacred mysteries…

________________________________________________________

Come Creator Spirit
by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa
(Translated by Denis and Marlene Barrett)
Pgs. 69-73

“Paraclete” is the title that most clearly expresses the personal character of the Holy Spirit. Using that title, the author of the hymn (“Come Creator Spirit”) takes us a decisive step forward in contemplating the Holy Spirit. If by the term “Creator” he affirmed that the Spirit was by nature divine, now by the term “Paraclete” he affirms that the Spirit is also a divine person.


In John, the relationship of the Spirti to Jesus is modeled on the relationship of Jesus to the Father. The Father is the one who testifies to the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the one who testifies to Jesus (John 15:26)… On this point Paul is in total agreement with John, and we cannot afford not to listen to his testimony as well. For him too, the Spirit is nor merely an action but also an agent, that is, a principle endowed with intellect and will, who knows what he is doing and chooses freely
to do it.


These terms (“person” or “hypostatsis”) mean something distinct from “substance,” they did not exist in any culture until Christian thinkers began reflecting on what Jesus had revealed of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and discovering what this revelation implied….The Greek Fathers would later give expression to this discovery of faith, saying that the Holy Spirit was not merely a “divine energy,” but an “active substance” or a “substantial agent” possessing will and intellect.


When we use the term “person” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we have to be careful to free the word of the meaning we commonly give it. Applied to the Holy Spirit, the term “person” does not mean a center of action complete in itself, an agent independently conscious of self, in the modern sense; it signifies only the relationships-of-origin that “contrast” or distinguish the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as among themselves….if a person in the Trinity is not simply an autonomous center of action and of will, he does participate nevertheless in that unique center common to the Three Persons, and in that sense is capable of acting and willing.


What a wonderful mystery, a sacred mystery...in a world where "not much is really sacred."

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

Bob Dylan 1965

Source: http://www.derekvreeland.com/2007/07/holy-spirit-as-divine-person.html

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