That's my King

I haven't blogged in a while, though I do have a couple of links to articles I'm going to share shortly. My laptop computer was acting flaky over the summer, so I decided to break down and get a new computer. I got a new desktop (AMD phenom triple-core with 2 gb of ram, it's fast!!); installed linux CentOS 5.3 as well as Fedora 11; about a month ago. I got it with no operating system installed, so that made it easier and a bit less expensive. Last weekend I spent updating the eft-sw website to the newest version of Drupal (6.14) as well as updating a few modules.

I just signed onto the International Association of Theophostic Prayer Ministry website, and they had the video below as a featured inspirational video -- I really liked it so I thought I'd share it here. More later. Enjoy!

A License to Sin · is that what the grace of God is about?

A very good message on the Free Believers Network blog, it's a bit long but very good. Here are a couple paragraphs that I particularly liked, but you may resonate with other parts of it.

For any relationship to be authentic, it must start with a forever covenant of eternal security. Unfortunately, today, most relationships don’t have this one foundational element and they are plagued with secrecy, uncertainty, and shallowness. I think that more than anything, today’s relationships are saturated with control. I have found that control is humanity's antidote to insecurity. This is where the heart of today’s Christian thinking exists.

Teachings about accountability partners, spiritual leaders, submitting to authority and church covering are widely accepted with little or no resistance. When a loving God is made to look unpredictable and not so loving, people submit to someone who they think might know better than them. They lose confidence in themselves and their ability to please an unpleaseable God, so they put themselves under the care and control of others in an effort to find security again.

It doesn’t surprise me that when the grace message is preached today, the first thing that comes to mind with the average Christian is sin. The grace message is spoken of as a “license to sin” and the mere thought of that scares people to death. It goes againstlicenseeverything they think the Christian life is about. Finding out that God loves you whether you sin or not, is a bit scary because people aren’t sure what they’ll do.

Part of giving someone freedom, is giving them their choice back. Christianity today has stripped us of our choice to sin. When we are told that sin separates us from God and we will be punished, our choice in the matter is taken away. We have an entire generation of people who quit sinning because of the outer voice of their religion rather than the inner personal voice of their heart. In other words, their quitting didn’t come from their heart; it came from their head. The grace message gives people back their right to sin, and it provides an atmosphere in which they can grow spiritually right and find truth in the center of themselves rather than in a system. A license to sin is not an encouragement to sin, but it’s the right to sin. Take away that right, and you take away relationship altogether.

"Everything is permissible for me"—but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"—but I will not be mastered by anything." --Paul--

Without a license to sin, I don’t believe people will ever know their own heart, much less the Heart of God. The problem is that in the process of molding themselves to fit religion'sknow self requirements, a person learns to deny any and all inner emotions of the heart that might cause them to sin. Things like anger, passion, lust and greed are shut down and the result is that they lose contact with self and eventually forget who they are altogether. Sadly, Christians today stand adamantly against sin, but they have no idea why. They don’t feel a thing in their hearts about sin, other than the memorized knowledge that “it’s wrong.” They believe it’s wrong, not because their heart sings that truth, but because that’s what they’ve been taught. When you shut down some aspects of the heart, you end up shutting down ALL aspects of the heart.

The EFT and SW website has a new look!

I guess it's been a while since I've posted anything here, hasn't it? Time flies when you're trying to figure out new software! During my switch from Win to Linux, and searching various message boards for answers, I discovered there is software that is also 'open source' like Linux for the purpose of website content management, called CMS. (CMS = content management software).

Since my previous web pages were mostly plain html pages, I didn't think they looked terribly professional. But I don't have the budget to pay a web-designer so I've tried to dress things up as well as I can as I learn how to do various things in html. Then when I discovered CMS, and did a little research and decided to try Drupal. I realized I should probably figure out how to use it and configure layouts and that sort of thing on my home computer before I sent it to the web hosting server. I spent 2-3 weeks just learning a bit of Mysql and installing server software and then installing and configuring Drupal.



Then when I did upload it all to the web hosting server a week ago, things didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd hoped; mostly because Drupal is written primarily to run on Linux (Apache) server software and my web hosting is using Windows server software. I couldn't get the theme and colors I wanted to show up; and my pictures weren't showing either. Thanks to information I found on the drupal forums, I think it's finally presentable -- though there are probably a few more tweaks and changes I'll make in the future.

In addition to the cleaner and more professional look and layout, it has a built-in ability to have people leave comments on articles, so I don't have to use the Google 'friend connect' gadget. One thing I didn't like about that gadget is that unlike the comments on the blog; it doesn't give me an option to have an email notice sent about new comments so I had to remember to log onto the friend connect page to see if any comments have been left and I keep forgetting to go over there. Another feature about drupal that I liked was the built-in option for people to sign in using OpenID. Yet another feature is a built-in user discussion forum, which is nice to have even if it doesn't get used by most visitors.

So please stop by and say hi, and feel free to leave a comment or suggestion over there or on here

Elijah and the Charismatics - FBN blog post

I just added some RSS blog feeds to Thunderbird, (e-mail program) so I'm reading some of the messages that came in on the feed. This one from the Free Believers Network blog touched on some of what this blog and my ministry is all about. It's a year old, but very good, by Darin Hufford. A few paragraphs are below:

Baal worship was about emotionalism.

The evidence is in the emotionalism. They are certain that God showed up because they got emotional and others did, as well. People were crying and sobbing with their hands in the air. After all, this is the normal human response to the Spirit of God. When God's Spirit begins to move, everyone in the room begins to break down and cry. I must have heard my Pastor over a thousand times speak the words, "The Spirit of God is in this room tonight - people are literally crying and sobbing." This has become a common understanding among Christians in America. When the Spirit moves, people get emotional. As a preacher, you can see the moment the Spirit enters the service because tears begin to stream down people's faces.

The irony is that I haven't found one account in all of Scripture where this was the human reaction to the presence of God. I don't recall anyone sobbing and crying the moment the Holy Spirit touched them in the New Testament, yet today we act as if the sobbing and crying is evidence of His presence. No one laughed uncontrollably either for that matter and believe it or not, in the almost 8000 year span of scripture from Adam and Eve to the Apostle Paul there wasn't one single person who "twitched" under the power of the Holy Spirit. No one was "Slain in the Spirit," no one's hands shook violently and thank God no one barked like a dog. I have come to the conclusion that modern day Charismatic emotionalism is nothing more than the resurrection of the Baal religion of the Old Testament times. I know for a fact that not every Charismatic behaves this way or believes like this. I know I don't. There are thousands of others however, who are in serious bondage to outright Baal worship and they don't even know it.

Many Christians today are caught in a ‘Prophets-of-Baal' mindset. I'm not saying that it's wrong to become emotional while in the presence of God. I am stating, however, that it's wrong to think that just because you get emotional, it is evidence of the presence of God, or that getting yourself worked up into an emotional frenzy is the same as creating an atmosphere where God will "show up." I have five children and trust me in this. When they get emotional, I CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH THEM. In fact, that's about the only time when communication with them is impossible.

It's the straight-faced times that I long to share with them. That's exactly how your Father in heaven is with you. If you feel that God's dealings with you will always result in emotionalism you are basically missing out on an entire life with him. Unless you are suffering with chronic depression and feeling emotional ALL the time you won't have a daily walk with your Father. God cannot be conjured up. The act of trying to conjure Him up is Baal worship. New Testament Christians need to understand that He doesn't "show up" to our services. He lives inside of us always whether we feel Him or not. That's what faith is.

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such things there is no law. (Gal 5:22-23 ESV)

Switching to Linux - the saga

This is going to be a somewhat long post -- I'll keep it as brief as I can. Before I decided to switch to Linux, I decided to see if there were any books on the topic at my local library. They had 1 (one) whole book about Linux, that being the 4th edition of Learning Red Hat Enterprise Linux & Fedora, by Bill McCarty . It's 4th edition copyright was 2004; and there were 2 installation CD's enclosed. It explained some basics, which helped me decide to go ahead and make the switch. And of course, I also backed up a lot of important files to CD as well as to an external USB hard drive I got a few months ago.

I had a good idea there was probably something more recent available at a book store, so the following week I bought a Ubuntu linux book at Barnes & Noble that had an installation CD and DVD included. I tried out the live dvd, and it was slow due to having to access the DVD drive, but it came up eventually and I decided to go ahead with the install, after reading the instructions.

The Ubuntu install didn't work, when I used the text install option to see what the hang-up was, I got a message about a kernel panic. I'm not sure how a computer or a kernel can panic, and it's impossible to reason with a kernel that wants to panic; so I went online and read some things that suggested that it needed disk space for the install, it didn't know it was going to get the whole hard drive. So I spent much time defragmenting the 20 gig drive (which had 4 partitions), tried installing again, then got the same error message.

Since Ubuntu isn't the only linux distro, and since I had the RHE Linux and Fedora book with 2 disks, I decided to try to install Fedora instead. It went without a hitch. But then I discovered that I couldn't get online, since I'm using a usb - ethernet adapter for my DSL modem, and/or a Linksys cardbus (pcmcia) wireless adapter -- Fedora core didn't recognize either of them. That just wasn't going to work. Now I was ready to panic, since Win2k was no longer on my computer. I thought I'd see if I could find something newer at another book store.

I found a Fedora 7 'bible' at another store, and that installed just fine. And it did recognize my DSL modem connection, so I could get online. (While the software itself is 'free' -- these books sure aren't! Both books were about $50/each, which wasn't exactly in my budget, but it's nice to have them as reference. I'd actually recommend having at least one.)

Then I ran into the issue of getting Flashplayer installed and working, as well as getting my Linksys wireless cardbus adapter working, all of which required more research since that wasn't covered very well in the book I'd gotten. Thankfully there are a lot of good instructions online, you just have to be able to find it. For the wireless it took several attempts, trying different drivers, but eventually I got it working. Yay!

By now I found out that Fedora 7 was an 'old' version (it's only 2 years old, much newer than Windows 2000! But Fedora pushes out a new release about every 6 months, and they recently released Fedora 11.) I tried twice to install F11, using 2 different methods and it didn't work. So I had to re-install Fedora 7 twice. And F7 runs rather well on my laptop, I just thought it would be nice to use the newest version. It's also running the newest version of Firefox (3.5) just fine, too.

After relating some of the issues I had installing F11 on the Fedora Forums (here), someone agreed with me that my laptop configuration was at the lower edge of what is expected to work with F11 and then suggested I may want to look into Puppy Linux. I looked at it and since it's only about 100mb for the CD, I downloaded it, and tried it 'live' (meaning it'll boot from the CD and run in RAM, without disturbing your hard drive), which also had some issues. I discovered I could use the boot command option of 'acpi=force' to get it to boot, and it did run pretty fast. Since my 2nd (3rd?) installation of Fedora 7 used what they call a 'logical volume manager' I couldn't install Puppy on the hard drive with LVM.

I didn't really want the LVM anyway -- it's probably a good thing if you're running servers and need to add or remove drives while everything else keeps running, but for a single home computer, I didn't think it performed as well as using it without the LVM. So back to re-installing F7 yet again, with a free partition so I could install Puppy, too. I actually ended up installing a puppy derivative called 'Slaxer-Pup' because it recognized my wireless adapter, loads the drivers and everything -- which wouldn't work with Puppy 4.2.1 because the 'acpi=force' option disabled the IRQ that the wireless device uses.

One of the reasons I wanted to get Puppy Linux working was because I also have a 9 year old desktop PC that only has 64mb of RAM. I may decide to add more RAM, but if Puppy will run on it as it is, all the better! I'm not going to attempt that for at least a couple of weeks though. I suspect that if I had a newer computer, in the range of 2-5 years old, instead of a 10+ year old laptop, everything may have gone smoother. Some people install Linux and 'it just works', with a few tweaks here and there. I've certainly learned a lot, and I'm happy with my setup of a dual-boot of Fedora 7 and Puppy Linux.

One thing I noticed while visiting various websites, is that pictures and graphics seem to be sharper and crisper under Linux than they were in Windows(tm); I'm not sure why. I also noticed that some websites were un-readable, due to font issues. I did some research on that, and found some 'web core fonts' as well as some other fonts to install (in /usr/share/fonts); and during my several re-installations of F7, I always had a copy of those to put back on the system, so now everything looks good.

During the several weeks I was doing all of that, I also managed to listen to a couple of online radio programs about the new EFT 'open hand policy', and I'll do a post about that in the next few days or so.

Why I switched to Linux

I haven't posted much to the blog for the past few weeks, mainly because I've been spending a good amount of time switching the operating system of my used laptop to Linux, replacing Windows 2000. Why did I switch to linux? That's what this post will
answer.

As anyone who uses Windows(tm) and accesses the internet knows, no matter how careful you are, you really need to have a good virus scan or 2 available. I had been using Comodo and AVG scanners for at least a couple of years, both of them are free for home use. (The very first virus-scan software I used was McAfee, which ran on a floppy disk!) At the end of 2008 I was notified that Comodo was changing their software from single-purpose firewalls, virus scanners etc. to a 'suite' where all of those functions would be integrated -- and the minimum (operating) system requirement was Windows XP. My laptop has (only) 256mb of RAM, and if it would run XP it'd be very slow, so that wasn't an option. Spending several hundred dollars to buy a new laptop or desktop computer also wasn't an option. I still had the AVG scanner, but at the beginning of this year they basically went the same route, going to a 'suite' of virus and malware detection with minimum system requirements of Win XP. I did find one anti-virus software that would run in Win 2000, that being ClamAV. Since I'd heard of linux several years ago, I decided to do a bit of research and find out if that would be a viable option.

I discovered that linux has come a long way since I'd first heard about it 10-15 years ago; as far as ease of use, etc. When I heard about it back then, I'd heard it required a lot of programming to get it working, and learning programming wasn't something I wanted to do. I've been using a PC since the early 1990's, back in the DOS days, so I was comfortable with a command line, but it had been several years since I've really used one.

Also, back in the late 1980's / early 1990's or so, IBM and Microsoft had entered into a joint venture to develop a 'multi-tasking' OS -- they called it OS/2. At some point they parted ways, and IBM took over development of OS/2, when they released the version they called 'Warp' in 1994 I got it, and really liked it. It ran Windows 3.1 programs as well as DOS programs and OS/2 programs. There weren't many native OS/2 programs, but it seemed to run Win 3.1 and DOS programs better than they ran on their own. And being able to have more than 1 program running at the same time, back then, was pretty incredible for the DOS platform. It wasn't just a pretty task-switcher, it would really run a report in 1 task while you were writing a letter in the other task-window, while you were downloading your emails in yet another window; all in 8 mb of RAM, which is hard to believe today.

For various reasons, I believe mostly due to marketing agreements with Microsoft, almost no 3rd party software developers were working on or planning OS/2 software releases, and then Win95 came out, and though I thought OS/2 was a superior OS, it basically lost out to newer Microsoft developments. You can read the Wikipedia link above for more of the details. Though I tried at various times over the years to be a fan of Microsoft, I never quite succeeded. So now seemed like the right time to find a viable alternative.

In my quest for a Win2k virus scanner, I did run across a good malware detector that I used for a couple of weeks before I switched to linux -- I'd recommend it to those of you still using Windows. That is WinPatrol, it was nice to have Scotty on patrol for a brief time.

I decided to take the plunge, and part of that story will be in the next blog post.

You Have A Destiny - Article by Andrew Wommack

I really liked this article; below is a few paragraphs:

The word destiny is defined in the America Heritage Dictionary as “the inevitable or necessary fate to which a particular person is destined. A predetermined course of events.” However, I believe that definition is wrong. It implies that your destiny cannot be avoided or prevented. That is not scriptural and therefore just not true.

It’s true that your destiny is preordained, but it is not inevitable. Whenever I teach this, it always brings up questions about the sovereignty of God. There are some who teach the sovereignty of God in a way that leads one to believe everything happens for a reason and that God is behind it all.

If this is true, then you have to be prepared to blame God for every evil and bad thing that happens on the earth. That means every catastrophe, every war, every murder, every rape, or anything else you can name must be God’s will. If that were true, then God has not done a good job of running the world. I believe this teaching is the worst heresy in the body of Christ today. And it’s very destructive because it takes away the will to resist evil.

God does not force His will or His plan upon anyone. So, is He sovereign? Yes, if the correct definition for sovereign is used. Sovereign means supreme in power or rank. We all would agree with this definition, but I totally disagree with the way religion today uses “sovereign.” God does not make His will for our lives come to pass. We have to submit to God and resist the devil (James 4:7). We have responsibility.

God has a destiny for you, and He wants to reveal it. But He is not going to run you down. He is not going to steamroll you or force it upon you. That reminds me of Romans 12:1, which says you are to present yourself as a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice is a volunteer. If God were to force your destiny upon you, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice; it would be slavery.

Once you believe you have a destiny, you must be willing to sacrifice your will for His. Then, you must renew your mind to the Word of God so it can help you separate soul from Spirit, your soulish plans from God’s plans. Once that is in order, you simply do what you want to do. What a deal!

The whole article is very good, certainly worth reading.