High Caste Hindus who Embrace Jesus

My name is Ventakesh and my home is India. I was brought up in a strict, high caste Hindu family, and we had our own pooja room where we had daily prayers to the Hindu gods. We maintained all the Hindu festivals and were very diligent to fulfill all the requirements of our Hindu faith and religion.

My father was a highly-placed government official and very orthodox in all his practices. He treated with disdain the religion of the Christians because of their habits of smoking, drinking and dancing. He viewed them as unclean. His overall impression of the Christianity of the West was molded by what he saw in the Western movies, especially from America.

When I returned to the USA, I met another Hindu man who told me that he followed Jesus. He was not a practicing Christian who went to church, but he maintained his own Hindu culture and social habits, and he loved Jesus and read the Bible and he knew it very well. He explained to me that he was a Hindu by his first birth and was proud of this heritage which was from God and showed me Acts 17:26, where God is explained as the one who determines where and when we are born. Then he explained how he had experienced a second birth, when he became one of God’s children and a member of His kingdom. This second birth was not a physical birth but a spiritual birth and as God’s Spirit lived in us we would gradually become very attractive people who cared for others and helped them in their troubles. He showed me John 1:12 "Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God" - and so I decided to believe in Jesus. As a result I became one of His children and knew that my past was forgiven and that I had a great hope after I died.

Immediately I Skyped my sister in India and told her what was happening to me. She too has now experienced Jesus in her life and no longer prays to the Hindu gods. The changes in her attitude have touched my mother and father, who are now showing a lot of interest.

I have since returned to India, and I am very much part of our Hindu community. I am engaged in all the activities of our family and extended family. There are many discussions about Jesus, and I am sharing the Bible with many people in our community. Because of my academic qualifications and the good job I now have, I have a very good standing in our community, and so people listen to me. I continually explain to them that I am not trying to “convert” them to Christianity but to “convert” them to Jesus as they live out their lives in the Hindu community. Now I have quite a few friends who are also following Jesus, and we meet regularly to pray together and share the Scriptures and to encourage each other. We sense that God is going to cause many people in our community to know and love Him. We are claiming the verse Isaiah 60:22 that a little one shall become a thousand and that a small one will become a mighty nation and that God will hasten all this in His time. This is already beginning to happen.

(excerpted from K. Venkatesh, Living and Discipling in the Hindu World, Mission Frontiers May-June 2011)

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Roberta Winter Institute: fighting Satan on the battlelines of disease

"Our mission: To champion the cause of disease eradication for the glory of God."

As a result of his belief in an intelligent evil having a destructive influence on God's good creation, and in honor of his first wife who died of cancer in 2001, Ralph Winter founded the Roberta Winter Institute to advance the cause of disease eradication. Ralph devoted much of the final decade of his life to the RWI, seeing disease eradication and our response to evil in general as overlooked frontiers in mission. The institute seeks to mobilize believers to fight the origins of disease, thereby defeating the works of Satan and glorifying God.

For more info, see http://robertawinterinstitute.org/.

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Darwin admitted that Natural Selection is a false term!

After 150 years, Darwin’s sacred imposter—natural selection—is presented in most schools as absolutely true in spite of its ill-defined basis, its invisible operation, and the fact that there is no real “selector”—because attributes inherent to organisms actually do all the work. These warnings should influence creation scientists to step back and re-evaluate this convoluted evolutionary idea.

In Darwin’s 1872 edition of Origin, he responded to those calls for him to justify use of the word “selection.” Darwin admitted, like all evolutionists will when challenged, that calling the process of how organisms fit environments “selection” was not true. He confided, “In a literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term.”¹

The same disconnect from reality is acknowledged in recent work focused on accurately describing evolution. For example, Harvard’s leading evolutionary authority, Ernst Mayr, in What Evolution Is disclosed the same veiled truth, “The conclusion that these favored individuals had been selected to survive requires an answer to the question, Who does the selecting? In the case of artificial selection, it is indeed the animal or plant breeder….But, strictly speaking, there is no such agent involved in natural selection.”² Then in 2009, Jerry Coyne wrote in Why Evolution Is True, “And while I said that natural selection acts, this is not really accurate. Selection is not a mechanism imposed on a population from outside.”³

Though all of these authorities concede that tying “selection” to some real agent is “false” and “not really accurate,” they still minimize the magnitude of this inaccuracy through persistent use of words describing natural selection as if it really is “a mechanism imposed on a population from outside.”

But the power that selection has to captivate a mind must never be underestimated—as it is only in the mind that this kind of “selection” actually takes place. As a result, they have ascribed intelligence to something inanimate, thereby raising serious scientific and theological implications.

Those who extol the Creator must at some point reject any idea that robs God of His glory.

(excerpted from Randy J. Guliuzza, Darwin's Sacred Imposter: Recognizing Missed Warning Signs, Acts & Facts May 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

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References (selected)

1. Darwin, C. 1872. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th ed. London: Senate, 63.

2. Mayr, E. 2001. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books, 117.

3. Coyne, J. A. 2009. Why Evolution Is True. New York: Viking, 117.

Invited by a dead Muslim saint, or the Son of the Living God?

The music booms over the loudspeakers calling everyone to worship and prayer. The fragrances of jasmine and incense linger in the air as the women make their offerings at the darghas, the shrines of the Muslim saints. In South Asia, women regularly gather together to pray at these sites, which has provided some exciting opportunities for Christar missionaries Jodi* and Louise* to share the gospel. "Women love to chit chat, so given the choice of saying a rote prayer or talking to white ladies, the choice is obvious," said Jodi.

Moira* is just one of the women Jodi and Louise have reached out to at a dargah. She invited them back to her home, where they were able to share with her and where Moira explained that she goes to the tombs when the saints invite her. Jodi then told her about another invitation. She opened a Bible in Moira's language and read John 1:12 to her: "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." Only this time, the invitation was not to worship a dead saint, but to become a child of the living God.

(from Christar "Light to the Least Reached" prayer bulletin, May 2011)

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How did Fish Survive the Tsunamis of Noah's Global Flood?

A question many people have about the Flood is how did both freshwater and saltwater fish survive? The Flood certainly involved tectonically induced tsunamis that traveled at great speeds and pummeled the land with towering walls of water, and fish are very sensitive to shock.



Fish Fossil, left over from the Flood.

 Obviously, fish weren’t taken on board the Ark. So how did they survive? As a matter of fact, most of them didn’t. Over 95 percent of all fossils are marine creatures. They died and are fossilized by the trillions. Many are buried in great fossil graveyards, tightly packed together, choked with sediments, buried before they had time to decay. Obviously, they didn’t live in the environment in which they died. They were transported by rapidly moving water and then buried in sedimentary deposits. But how could any at all have survived?

In the complex of events and conditions that made up the Flood, certainly there were pockets of fresh water at any one time. Remember, it was raining in torrents, and we can expect that the rain water was fairly fresh. Many studies have shown that waters of various temperatures, chemistries, and sediment loads do not tend to mix; they tend to remain segregated in zones. It would be unlikely for any one area to retain such zones for very long during the tumult of the Flood, but on a worldwide scale, some such segregated zones would have existed at any given time.

There is also the possibility that great amounts of vegetation were dislodged from the pre-Flood continents and remained intertwined as floating mats during the Flood. Many creationists feel that the decay and abrasion of these mats are responsible for our major coal seams, but underneath these mats the turbulence of the surface waters would have been lessened. Perhaps many fish found shelter and nutrition under them, as insects may have on the mats themselves.

We can see that there is at least a plausible answer that can be proposed to such questions. There is no reason for Christians to doubt the truth of the great Flood.

(excerpted from John D. Morris, Fish in the Flood, Acts & Facts May 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

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