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“One of the clearest lessons we can learn from church history is that strong biblical preaching is absolutely vital to the health and vitality of the church. From the birth of the New Testament church until today, every significant phase of authentic revival, reformation, missionary expansion, or robust church growth has also been an era of biblical preaching.”
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John MacArthur
This is what St. Clair County and specifically Ashville wants for its area and its citizens?
What Walker County has?
Bingo pallors, Quick Loan shops, Pawn shops, and crime.
Electronic bingo still a thorn for Walker County
Sen. Charles Bishop, R-Jasper, also sees the opportunity for corruption with several million dollars being generated through what he thinks is “illegal gambling.”
He added that history teaches that large amounts of cash, which are almost impossible to track, create corruption.
“You need not look any further back than Phenix City,” Bishop said, referring to the city’s rampant crime, corruption, gambling and prostitution of the 1940s and early 1950s. “In the end, there were even people that got killed there. Walker County, to me, is awfully close to being another Phenix City. … It’s not a pretty site.”
…
In the mean time, Bishop, Rizzo, Taylor and other area leaders plan to continue fighting the bingo halls they say are hurting families and business throughout the county.
“It’s a joke what’s going on in this county,” Bishop said. “Fast-loan places and pawn shops are the only new industries we are getting. It’s tearing the county apart.”
Taylor asks that Christians in Alabama make this a matter of prayer.
Bingo proceeds in Walker County, Alabama, aren’t being accounted for
As The News’ readers learned Sunday, most of Walker County’s electronic bingo operations aren’t reporting their finances every year to the sheriff as required by law. That means authorities haven’t a clue how much money these businesses are bringing in and what portion of it is going to the so-called beneficiaries.
…
“We may be getting 5 percent. We may be getting 20 percent … Nobody knows but them,” said Harold Beasley, who gets bingo money for the charity he set up in memory of his son.
At least one charity is in litigation with a bingo operator over this issue. The Yerkwood Volunteer Fire Department says the bingo operators are claiming unreasonable expenses that diminish the cut going to charities. It says it has been denied access to the financial information.
See also:
Bingo in Ashville, Alabama
Bingo in Other Counties in Alabama
The City Council in the small town of Ashville, Alabama has voted to allow a Bingo Parlor to be built. This is a town that several years ago voted to not allow a Wal-Mart because it would destroy the town’s character and appeal!
This is not just a simple place selling Bingo cards that is being planned. This is a multi-million dollar facility with 2,500 electronic Bingo Games.
Listed below are people and their numbers that you can call and voice your opinion about bingo coming to Ashville, Alabama:
Robert McKay, Mayor 594-5972
Bobbie Bowling 594-7171
Mike Sheffield 205-410-2808
Willie B. Turner 594-4286
Charles Williams 594-5762
David Thompson 594-7493
Richard Minor, St. Clair County District Attorney 205-338-9429 or 594-2180
richard.minor@alabamada.gov
Terry Surles, Sheriff of St. Clair County 205-884-6840 or 594-2140
Mail your letters to:
Ashville City Hall
P.O. Box 70
Ashville, AL 35953
See also:
Bingo in Ashville, Alabama
Bingo in Other Counties in Alabama
Berean Husband is presently reading Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine by Wayne Grudem.
Wayne Grudem is professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinitiy Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He holds degrees from Harvard (B.A.), Westminster Seminary (M.Div.), and Cambridge (Ph.D.). He is the co-editor of Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is also a member of the Translation Oversight Committee for the English Standard Version of the Bible.
This book isn’t something that everyone will agree with everything, but it is a good thought provoker and it will encourage you to think about why you might disagree with a position.
The gist of the reviews I have read is that even if there is a disagreement in some portions of the book, it is one of the clearest and most easily grasped systematic theology books written today and it covers issues that are affecting the church in our time.
I also found where you can listen to Wayne Grudem teaching his book Systematic Theology.
Listen to Dr. Wayne Grudem’s lessons!
This isn’t a book to fall asleep reading because it would hurt hitting you in the face, 1300 pages is not light reading. :-D
Romans 6:13
13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. (ESV)
My home is filled with musical instruments. As I sit here at the computer in our study, I can look behind me and there is a table the size of a dining room table filled with musical instruments, and several more sitting on the floor around me: violins, guitars, a flute, a harp, a piano. Fortunately, they are all quiet now at 6:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day. And why are they all quiet? Because there is no one around to play them. There is no danger that I am going to pick up one of these instruments and play it. I have compassion on the other people in this house.
Now, why all this talk about musical instruments in a blog about Romans? In Romans 6:13 Paul writes “Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.” (ESV) The Greek word translated “instruments” in this verse is “hoplon”, which means “an implement, utensil, or tool”, and is especially related to weapons of warfare. And what is a primary characteristic of an instrument? It does nothing on its own. None of the musical instruments behind me are suddenly go to start playing Bach by themselves. Swords do not kill people by themselves. Hammers do not drive nails by themselves. All of these instruments require an active force using them before they can do anything.
So, what is the point? Every one of us carries around an instrument with us everywhere we go. In Romans 6:13, this instrument is called our “members”. Collectively, our members get together to form our body. It goes everywhere we go. And how is our body an instrument? Once again, Paul writes in Romans 6:13 that either sin can use our body to play a song called “Unrighteousness”, or God can use our body to play a song called “Righteousness”. And notice that we have a part to play in the choice of which song is played. In Romans 6:13, Paul writes “Do not present…but present”. These are both active and imperative commands. The tense of “do not present” indicates an action which had been done in the past but needs to be stopped immediately. And the tense of the second “present” indicates something which needs to be done immediately. I like the word the KJV uses instead of the word “present” in these verses. The KJV uses the word “yield.”
Is it a hard choice to make? For me it is. I find myself yielding my body to sin to play a song of unrighteousness far more than I should. But it should not be a hard choice to make. Look back at the preceding two verses in Romans chapter 6:
11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. (ESV)
As Christians, our old self was crucified to sin along with Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary. And our new self was resurrected with Jesus Christ on Easter morning. Sin should no longer reign in our bodies. We have a new Lord, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. I would much rather hear a song of righteousness being played through my body by the hands of the Maestro Jesus Christ instead of hearing the cacophony of the song of unrighteousness that sin plays every time it gets hold of the instrument of my body.
By Berean Husband
Christians called to abandon public education
Voddie Baucham, Jr., author of “Family Driven Faith,” noted children spend about 14,000 hours in public schools.
“Whoever controls those 14,000 hours controls our children’s worldview,” he said, citing Charles Francis Potter, a signer of the Humanist Manifesto. He wrote, “What can theistic Sunday school meeting for an hour once a week do to stem the tide of a five day program of humanist teaching?”
“The left knows that whoever controls the children owns the future. That’s why so many ’60s radicals like Bill Ayers went into education. Now they effectively control the government school system and its curriculum. But worse, we give them our children,” Shortt said.
Public Schools Have Big Impact on Evangelical Kids
Putting your Christian kids in a hard core secularist environment for 35 hours a week in school is a bad idea. Another way to put it is, letting the Assyrians of humanism train your child’s thinking will produce more Assyrians of humanism.
Children from religious, intact families fare better, study says
“An intact two-parent family and regular church attendance are each associated with fewer problem behaviors, more positive social development, and fewer parental concerns about the child’s learning and achievement,” Zill and Fletcher wrote. “Taken together, the two home-environment factors have an additive relationship with child well-being. That is, children who live in an intact family and attend religious services regularly generally come out best on child development measures, while children who do neither come out worst. Children with one factor in their favor, but not the other, fall in between ….”
It seems almost inconceivable to believe that there was life before television. As good as the medium is for some things, it is an instrument of death to conversation in most families. Add computers, a personal CD player, and speed-eating and we’ve successfully killed off the last remnants of conversation in most families. Frankly, most families have no meaningful conversation at all. Days and weeks pass, if not months and years, without the skimpiest morsel of a good conversation. When I think about this, I almost weep for the magnitude of the loss. A mudslide of media has pushed our families into a cold ravine. We exist together for as long as we can make it, but we don’t know each other. Without face-to-face communication, the home has become an electronic desert.
The ESV Bible website has several different devotional formats. The neat feature that I like about it is that you can choose a daily Bible reading format and subscribe to the RSS feed. The RSS feed is the ESV text in full plus a link to the audio of that day’s Bible reading.
My new toy for Christmas was a iPod Nano from Berean Husband. Turns out iPods will get a daily podcast each day when synced. When Berean Son took the ESV Bible RSS feed address and added it to my daily podcasts, I am then able to get the daily Bible reading audio on the iPod also.
The nice feature about that is that each day’s Bible audio is available to listen to and when finished listening to them they are removed from the iPod automatically. This is much simpler than my old method of moving files into a PDA folder to synchronize onto the PDA and then having to remove the old ones and add new.
I’m sure this is old technology to everyone else, but it is new to me. 
There is another resource I found for daily Bible readings.
Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s daily Bible reading calendar
There is no audio but you can also get RSS feeds of the daily Bible reading plan with a link to Bible Gateway which does have audio.
1 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?
3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (ESV)
In Romans 6:1-5, Paul describes the relationship which exists between the believer and sin. The believer is dead to sin. Before we were converted, we were dead in our trespasses and sins. Ephesians 2:1-3 says “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience — among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” (ESV) But when we became alive in Jesus Christ, we became dead to our sin. When Jesus Christ was crucified, our old self was crucified along with Him. And when Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, our new self was raised along with Him.
But I hear an objection to this idea. And that objection is coming from me. I don’t feel like I am dead to sin. I feel like sin is still alive and well within me. There is not a day which goes past during which I do not sin multiple times over. Does that mean that I am not a Christian since I struggle so with sin? No, that is not the case, because, if it were true, then there would be no Christians. I am not the only Christian who struggles with sin. The key to gain a better understanding is in Romans 6:2 “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (ESV) The Christian no longer lives in sin. That does not preclude the Christian from sinning on occasion, but it does preclude a Christian who still lives in sin. The Apostle John put it this way in 1 John 2:1 “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” (ESV) And again in 1 John 3:6 “No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.” (ESV)
Therefore, belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ not only imputes righteousness, it also gives the power to live a life of righteousness. In Romans 6:4 we read “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (ESV) This is not talking about what we will be like after we are resurrected. This is talking about a here-and-now fact of life of being a Christian. Here are a couple of more passages from the Apostle Paul, which speak to this idea of walking in the newness of life.
Ephesians 4:20-24
20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!—
21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus,
22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,
23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,
24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (ESV)
2 Corinthians 5:17
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (ESV)
So, then, if I am indeed dead to sin, and if I indeed have been raised to walk in newness of life, why do I still struggle with sin so much? Paul is going to answer this question for us in detail in Romans 7:7-25. Here is an excerpt from this passage:
Romans 7:14-20
14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin.
15 I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good.
17 So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. (ESV)
No, I admit that I may be way off base in the next comment, but I’m going to write it anyway. I may be dead to sin, but my sin is not dead to me. As long as I live in this body of flesh, sin still wants to have control over this corrupted body. Therefore, there is a constant struggle, a constant war, going on between my new self and the sin which wants to gain control over my old body which I am still dragging around. After all, my old body used to belong to sin – it was rightfully the possession of sin. Sin wants nothing more than to regain control over what used to be its rightful possession.
By Berean Husband
Moore To The Point has a guest post about clothing, children and the attitudes involved. It is very thought provoking.
Clothing and the Character of the Child
The jeans that are long enough for Hannah’s ever-lengthening legs seem to have gained this extra length by trimming too many inches off the top. The sweatpants that fit her best have “PINK” emblazoned across the backside. And the messages that glitter on the chests of several otherwise-appropriate shirts lead to immediate vetoes from our household’s executive branch: “I Want What I Want Now,” one hoodie declares, while a nearby t-shirt boasts, “I Have an Attitude and I Know How to Use It.” “Sooner or Later I’ll Get What I Want,” another sweatshirt announces. Interestingly, the brand names on the tags are “Personal Identity” and “Self Esteem”—almost as if Erik Erikson and Sigmund Freud crept in during the manufacturing process and retagged the clothes to resolve adolescent girls’ supposed identity crises. To Hannah’s credit, she takes it all in good humor, knowing from past experience that, once a veto has been declared, her father will not budge.
Modesty ‘irrelevant’ at Univ. of Chicago
The university announced the decision to parents in a letter that was sent in mid-December. The change in boarding rules will allow students of the opposite sex to reside in the same room, and the school says the decision was born from a student-led initiative. Students who wish to have a coed roommate will not need parental consent.
Laurie Higgins, the director of the division of school advocacy with the Illinois Family Institute, calls the decision troubling, but not surprising. “I think it reflects a number of troubling assumptions: One is that sex differences are irrelevant, that modesty is irrelevant — and modesty is not equivalent to prudery — that parental values and beliefs are irrelevant,” she notes.
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