Retired General Jerry Boykin is no stranger to battles. A 36-year veteran including 13 years in the elite Delta Force, has been involved in situations including the 1980 Iran hostage rescue attempt and the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia.
Yet he sees one of the greatest battles ahead of him: standing up for Christ in a society that is facing a dark spiritual time. A time he believes could bring the end of the nation.
“We’re going to wind up exactly like these other great empires, which only lasted on an average about 200 years,” he said. “We’re going to completely self-destruct. And you see the beginnings of that now.”
Boykin spoke to CBN and said that it’s critical for America to experience another Great Awakening that will bring the nation back to God before it’s too late. He said that the two previous Awakenings led to “extraordinary things” happened in the world.
Boykin said that Christians couldn’t count on politicians to save the country.
“Me plus the Holy Spirit: that’s a majority,” he said.
A group of Senators are stepping up to stand for religious freedom not only in the United States but around the world by calling on the Obama administration to offer political asylum to a Sudanese woman sentenced to death for being a Christian.
Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, the wife of an American citizen, is still facing death because she stands by her Christian faith despite the Sudanese government refusing to admit she had never been a Muslim. The government says that after she gives birth, when that child turns 2 she will be hung to death.
“I am disgusted and appalled by the inhumane verdict Ms. Ibrahim has received, simply for refusing to recant her Christian faith,” said Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
A bipartisan group of Senators introduced a resolution condemning the death sentence for being a Christian. Republican Senators Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Chris Coons of Delaware and Bob Menendez of New Jersey joined Rubio.
“Through our U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, the White House and the State Department have communicated our strong concern to the highest levels of the Government of Sudan over this case,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “We’ve also joined with other embassies in Khartoum to express our concern in a widely distributed public statement. U.S. Embassy officials have been engaged in the case from the earliest days.”
Ibrahim’s husband Daniel Wani is confined to a wheelchair and according to his family “depends on her for all the details of his life.”
Jewish students at Chicago’s DePaul University say the campus is no longer a safe place for them because of a group that is demanding the University withdraw from any companies that work with Israel.
The anti-Semitic group, Students for Justice in Palestine, has been running a campaign called “DePaul Divest” and is trying to get students to vote for a non-binding resolution calling for the University to disconnect with anyone connected to Israel.
“This entire campaign and entire sit-in going on in the SAC (Schmitt Academic Center) is totally unsafe for Jewish students and I have had a lot of Jewish students text me and call me today and tell me they are not comfortable walking through that part of our campus, which is really disheartening,” a student called Rachel told reporters. (Her name has been withheld because of threats.) “About two months ago when SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) started the ‘DePaul Divest’ campaign, I no longer felt safe on this campus and I no longer felt I could be a proud Jewish student.”
Another student said that she feels targeted and is always having to defend her Jewish faith.
“I do kind of feel as a Jewish student that I am being targeted on campus. I feel that a lot of questions are being directed to me and I am constantly on the defensive on campus,” she explained. “I have to defend myself, my Judaism, my pride in Israel every day and it’s getting a little bit exhausting.”
“I’d like to live and go to a university where everybody can have their own opinions and have a diverse community and feel safe.”
The Students for Justice in Palestine has been found to have conducted anti-Semitic actions on campuses across the U.S. At New York University, they slid “Eviction Notices” under the doors of Jewish students and a similar incident at Northeastern University led to SJP being suspended from campus.
SJP would not respond to reporter questions about harassment of Jewish students.
Police in Santa Ana, California have arrested a man who kidnapped a 15-year-old girl ten years ago and then forced her to marry him and have his children.
Isidro Gracia disappeared in 2004 with his live-in girlfriend’s daughter who he had been raping for three months. He then drugged her and kept her addicted to drugs while they moved to a house in Compton, California. He obtained fake IDs for both of them and then kept her locked in a garage until her mid-20s.
He brainwashed her into thinking because she didn’t speak English, she was illegal and would be deported if she contacted police. He then forced her to marry him so she would be “legal” and then have his child so she couldn’t be deported. He said the girl’s family told him they’d given up looking for her and no longer wanted her.
Police discovered the situation when the women found her sister on Facebook and contacted her.
The 41-year-old Garcia is facing charges of kidnapping, rape, false imprisonment and other charges. He is facing life without parole if convicted on all the charges against him.
The woman, who is not being named because she was a minor when taken, has been reunited with her family. She said that she plans to raise her daughter in a loving family environment and to obtain an education.
Pastor Emery White says in his new book “The Rise of the Nones” that secular thinking is driving more Christians to saying they are not affiliated with any Christian church or denomination.
Pastor White said in an interview with Ed Stetzer that America has definitively moved into a “post-Christian” era.
“We are living in a decisively post-Christian culture and I think it’s taking its toll on existing evangelicals and the church in a way that is creating more and more nominal Christians on the way to ‘nones’ who self-described themselves as evangelicals earlier,” White said.
Research conducted by Stetzer showed that over 30 percent of college age Americans who claim to be Christians say they have no affiliation with church or denomination.
White attributed the problem to not only youth but church culture at large where secular thought has become commonplace. White says that because Christians are thinking the way the world thinks, the values of Christ are washed away and that leads to the rise of behaviors and actions that were considered unthinkable just 20 years ago.
“We only care about our own needs being met because a spiritual narcissism has invaded the church,” White said. “There is a consumer mindset that has crept into the church and it’s not megachurches selling out the culture. The consumer mindset, the narcissism is within the believer, so you hear things like, ‘I need to go where I am being fed’ as opposed to feeding ourselves or maybe feeding someone else. We talk about ‘I need to go where I am ministered to’ as if that’s the goal of the church instead of you being the minister. We talk about, ‘Well, I just walked out of a worship service and I didn’t get anything out of it,’ which is heresy because the worship service has nothing to do with what you get out of it, the question is did God get anything out of it?”
White said anyone who refuses to die to themselves on these consumer ways would never be able to change the church, society or truly reach someone with the gospel of Christ.
“Until we get closer to the heart of the issue, which is the heart of the believer,” White said, “I think we are just going to be just putting band aids on a terminal disease.”
The president of the National Organization for Women is promoting abortion by saying that killing babies before their born can help reduce the “heartbreak of infant mortality.”
“From a public health point of view, abortion care, no less than contraception, is an essential measure to prevent the heartbreak of infant mortality, and to prevent another tragedy as well – maternal death,” Terry O’Neill wrote in a column for the Washington Post.
The pro-abortionist says that 30 infants in the United States die each day from some kind of natural cause and that America has the highest first-day infant mortality rate of any country in the industrialized world. O’Neill says because of those figures, it only makes sense to abort babies rather than have them born and risk them dying shortly after birth.
O’Neill said that any person who believes in allowing a child with a severe birth defect to be born cannot be truly “pro-life” because the child will eventually die young from the defect.
She also said that many of these children are born to teen mothers who do not have adequate access to pre-natal care and thus have an increased risk of a child dying right after birth.
An expert in the field of addiction to pornography says that pornography in America has reached the level of a public health crisis.
Dr. Sharon Cooper said that the impact that pornography has on the development of children who are routinely exposed to the sexual images. The images that they see are hampering their ability to form healthy connections to sexuality and the proper role of men and women in relationships.
“It’s a very severe issue in our country,” Dr. Cooper told The Christian Post.
Dr. Cooper was speaking at a summit of the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation. The event, sponsored by the anti-porn groups Morality in Media and Pornharms.com, was aimed at raising the awareness of the harm of pornography on youth.
Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College, spoke about performers who are considered “mainstream” in America like Miley Cyrus or Beyonce whose performances contain elements of adult entertainment. She said the ease by which those performances are accepted by Christians helps create the highly sexualized culture that harms youth.
Dines also says the problem is now so large that it cannot be stopped on an individual basis.
“There’s nothing you can do on an individual level really. The idea of it being a public health issue is that you have to come together collectively as a group,” said Dines.
“This has become such a public health crisis that we have to bring together groups who normally would not come together to figure out what does a public health approach look like in dealing with the harms of pornography.”
Doctors say tests on an Illinois man who contracted the deadly MERS virus from an Indiana man who was the United States’ first victim of the virus is not able to spread the disease to others.
“The second round of test results from oral and nasal swabs show the Illinois resident is not infectious,” Dr. LaMar Hasbrouck of the Illinois Department of Public Health. “What this means is, although the resident was infected at one time, if he sneezes or coughs, the virus is not in his nose or mouth and therefore cannot be spread to others.”
Health officials say the Illinois man likely contracted the virus from the Indiana patient during a 40-minute business meeting where the two shared nothing more than a single handshake. It is the first person-to-person transmission of the virus confirmed in the United States.
Dr. Hasbrouck said the virus is still so new that it’s not known all the ways the virus can be transmitted. He said that many other people also had contact with the Indiana patient and all of them have tested negative for MERS.
The Broward County School District has finally backed down from their ban of the Bible being read by students during “free reading” time.
The school had backed the teacher who told a student that he could not read the Bible in her classroom despite being contacted by multiple legal groups informing the district of the student’s Constitutional right to possess the Bible in the classroom and to read it when students were told to read a book of their choice.
The school then tried to say the problem was that the reading was part of the school’s “Accelerated Reader Program” time and the Bible wasn’t approved. The school was later found to have been lying because all 66 books of the Bible were approved for ARP.
Now, School Board Deputy General Counsel Marylin Batista-McNamara has informed the Liberty Institute that not only is the Bible approved to be read during the ARP time but also that staff has undergone training regarding the First Amendment rights of students.
The Liberty Institute says they will continue to monitor the situation to make sure the teacher who initiated the problems does not try to repeat their actions.
A pastor who was arrested for preaching the gospel at a train station has been found not guilty of defiant trespassing.
Pastor Robert Parker has been preaching at the Princeton Junction train station for five years. The station, part of the New Jersey Transit situation, is in the public transportation system and thus public space.
In June 2012, two officers confronted Parker and fellow evangelist Don Karns after the men had finished preaching for the day. The officers, Sergeant Kathleen Shanahan and Officer Sandy Crowe, also forced Karns and Parker to stop recording the incident on their cell phones in violation of New Jersey law.
The two police officers kept yelling at the preachers that they were potential terrorists. Parker was arrested when he refused to provide ID and asked the officer what law he had been breaking.
Sergeant Shanahan even told officers to place one of the preachers in a cell “with a pervert” when they brought them into the station. Shanahan then claimed in court that she had just taken a terrorist class and the men looked like a terrorist threat because they had backpacks and a bulge in their pants pocket.
Superior Court of New Jersey Judge Mark Flemming ruled Friday that the state failed to prove any crime beyond a reasonable doubt.