The ongoing livestream Asbury student services are deeply moving. Worth watching and reposting on this Ash Wednesday.
Asbury student revival continuing streaming online
Remembering the two Jacks
The God of the Broken
Are you willing to be broken by God?
The following post is a chapter from The Elisha Code by Dr. Ed Hird and David Kitz.
And He said,
“Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel;
for you have struggled with God and with men,
and have prevailed.”
(Genesis 32:28, NKJV)
The people whom God uses to change the world have first been radically changed by the Spirit of God. Often, these world changers have experienced major setbacks. We might even say they have been broken by God, but they have come through those experiences transformed and empowered by the Spirit.
There is a pattern that emerges as we look back at the lives of the three revivalists we have examined thus far. Each of them reached a breaking point.
A. B. Simpson was a successful minister who through much hard work, built a large church but he experienced burnout and a physical…
View original post 1,750 more words
Breaking the Gambling Addiction in Canada
Facing our growing Canadian gambling addiction
Posted by Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird | Feb 8, 2023 | The Neighbourhood
Neighbourhood ~
Facing our growing Canadian gambling addiction
By Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird
You can bet that the increase in gambling is harming many Canadian families. We have personally seen many marriages break up. Wives are not happy to lose their houses to their husband’s gambling addiction. The Bible in 1 Tim 6:9 warns against falling into the trap of temptation, and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.
A devastating earthquake struck southeast Turkey on February 6, killing more than 5,000 people. Turkish Christian Fellowship, partnered with Intercede International, has put together a plan to help earthquake survivors in that region.
Since the COVID restrictions were implemented in 2020, those gambling four or more times a week has increased from 23 percent to 32 percent. Online gambling has gone from 62 percent to 78 percent for gamblers. Ruin & destruction for many has been multiplied through these online gambling apps.
Many gambling addictions begin in the teenage period when the brain is not fully developed. Young adults aged 18 to 24 are more likely to take part in risky gambling behaviour. College students have a much higher gambling rate than the general population. Imagine the debt load that many college students incur on their student loans from online gambling. The most popular form of Canadian gambling is lottery tickets, seen by many as relatively harmless.
Since Pierre Trudeau legalized gambling in 1969, the provincial governments have been annually making billions from gambling. No wonder that it has been called another tax grab on the poor and most vulnerable.
Female gamblers average $15,000 of debt. The average debt generated by men addicted to gambling ranges from $55,000 to $90,000. With so many young men indebted to shady loan sharks, it is no wonder that property theft is on the rise.
We have been numbed in our country to the evils of gambling addiction. As it says in 1 Timothy 6:10, the love of money is the root of evil. We have personally seen gambling cause people to wander from the faith and pierce themselves with many griefs. Many in the Christian program Celebrate Recovery often credit the power of the Holy Spirit as vital to getting free from their uncontrollable obsession with gambling. As well, Gamblers Anonymous has helped many get free from this intense craving.
One of the most important books for helping people understand the gambling addiction is Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. Ironically, he wrote it because he needed to pay his gambling debts and avoid losing control over publishing future books through a crooked publisher. His Christian faith helped him eventually break an all-consuming roulette habit that was bankrupting his family. Roulette has been a huge problem in Russia, particularly in the military. Could Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine be seen as his playing Russian roulette with the West?
Alexei, the protagonist in The Gambler, was on a roll at the Roulettenburg Casino. He commented: “My brows were damp with sweat, and my hands were shaking.”
Gambling gives a buzz similar to cutting oneself, disconnecting oneself temporarily from one’s intense psychological pain. As Alexei also said:
“There arose in me a strange sensation as of a challenge to Fate – as of a wish to deal her a blow on the cheek, and to put out my tongue at her.”
The character Alexei saw this addiction as a madness that seemed to come upon him. Perhaps that is why Step 2 in Gamblers Anonymous talks about a Power greater than our selves restoring us to a normal way of thinking and living. Compulsive gambling is stinking thinking.
To Alexei, this strange gambling sensation was a fearful pleasure, leaving him obsessed with a desire to take risks. The two hundred thousand francs ($6.6 million dollars in today’s money) that he won quickly sprouted wings, and flew off to the sky like an eagle. (Proverbs 23:5) Quicker than the prodigal son, Alexei squandered his wealth in Paris with wine, women, and song. Get-rich-schemes never end well. His initial gaming success did not make him happy:
“My life had broken in two, and yesterday had infected me with a habit of staking my all upon a card.”
Serving two masters is a double-minded hell. (Matthew 6:24) Gambling was a living death for Dostoevsky and his character Alexei. Dostoevsky tried for many years before he finally broke his gambling desire. His character in the novel also longed to be free: “When that hour comes, you will see me arise from the dead.” Alexei longed to set things right and be born again!
Our prayer is that many Canadians will come into a new freedom in Christ from the devastation of chronic gambling.
________________________________________________________________________
Author: Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird
Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird are the co-authors of Blue Sky, a novel, For Better, For Worse: Discovering the keys to a Lasting Relationship
Broken
E Stanley Jones:, Conversion, P.201 “Hope for the backslider? There is special hope, for you can become strongest in the place you are weakest. When a bone is broken, nature makes the broken place especially strong, that it might not be broken again –it is stronger than the unbroken places”
The Grieving Scots in Lochaber No More
♫ Scottish Music – Lochaber No More ♫ LYRICS
I find this a very moving song mentioned by Robert Louis Stevenson in his novel Kidnapped when the grieving Scots were going to North America.
The Foolishness of God in Dostoevsky’s Idiot
The Foolishness of God in Dostoevsky’s Idiot
By Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird
-an article for the Light Magazine
Have you ever been foolishly attracted to the world, the flesh and the devil? Has your self-centeredness and desire for approval ever harmed your best interests? Why does Christianity often look so foolish to secular people in our hi-tech, frantic world?
In Dostoevsky’s favorite novel The Idiot, we meet Prince Myshkin, a Christ-like person whose goodness, open-heartedness, and genuineness lead people to call him an idiot sixty times in the novel. He saw Myshkin as his best and richest poetic idea. Three times in his notes, Dostoevsky identifies Myshkin as a Christ figure. Like Jesus, he was full of child-like grace and truth. In his blueprints, Dostoevsky refers to Myshkin as “Prince Christ”: “Christ is and always will be the ideal, ours (in Russia) or that of civilized Europe.”
Myshkin had just returned to St. Petersburg, the Russian Capital, after five years away in a Swiss sanitorium for epileptics. In the midst of great corruption, Jesus the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14). So too, Myshkin came to dwell in the midst of a cynical, jaded world. As the epicentre of the Russian political world, St. Petersburg was full of clever pretenders, politicians, and posers who hid in plain view from each other: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.” (1 Corinthians 3:19) Myshkin exposed the nakedness of the ‘kings with no clothes.’ No one could hide from his loving gaze.
Since only the knowledge of the truth can see us free, Myshkin’s speaking truth to power helped a few give up their lies. Most initially clung to their lies, and rejected Myshkin as totally inappropriate and stupidly naïve. His ‘unsuccessful’ encounter with the Russian elite reminds me of John 1:10-11:
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
Just like with Jesus, Myshkin was the wrong kind of messiah, coming in humility rather than as a conqueror. As a quintessential Russian holy fool, he threatened their love of power, money, and sexual conquest. Everything for this highly politicized culture was an elaborate game of deception and manipulation. Like the power-hungry Pontius Pilate, they had become cynical about the possibility of truth. In their childishness, they rejected Myshkin’s strong wisdom as weakness:
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:25)
The French-speaking Russian elite, though clinging to an outward form of religion, had largely become atheistic because of the influence of the French revolution. Even Christianity for these power-brokers became little more than another way to control and subjugate ‘lesser’ people. Dostoevsky believed that western culture was dying because it rejected Jesus: “those who kill God also kill man.”
Dostoevsky drew on the comic figure of Don Quixote in creating his ‘positively good and beautiful’ person:
There’s nothing more difficult than that in the whole world… There’s only one positively beautiful person in the world — Christ, so that the appearance of this measurelessly, infinitely beautiful person is in fact of course an infinite miracle.
He saw Don Quixote as the most complete of beautiful people in Christian literature: “…he is only beautiful because he is ridiculous at the same time…” Don Quixote, like Prince Myshkin, was this strange blend of apparent foolishness, and great wisdom. In their fighting the windmills of secularity, neither made any sense to the sophisticated elite. Outwardly, it looked like a useless failure that only made things worse.
Jesus, like Myshkin and Quixote, is the seemingly ‘foolish’ Prince of fools. Will the real fool stand up? How often are we fooled? 1 Corinthians 2:14 puts it,
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness…
Quixote, Jesus, and Myshkin suffer deeply because they ‘foolishly’ love and serve the unlovable. All three were ridiculed, beaten with stones, and betrayed by their most trusted friends.
One is reminded of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 who was despised and rejected. It reminds us of the apparent foolishness of Jesus’ love on the cross for us:
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (I Corinthians 1:18)
Jesus, the bridegroom, loves his bride, the very broken, often conflicted Church. Similarly, Myshkin loved his potential bride Nastasia who was very beautiful, but deeply wounded in her soul by sexual exploitation. Myshkin helped open Nastasia’s eyes temporarily to her deep worth, but in her shame, she kept running from Myshkin back to those who would mistreat her. The most beautiful often feel the most ugly and unworthy. We too as the wounded bride of Christ often run from his relentless love.
The problem of the existence of God had long tormented Dostoevsky, the intellectual idiot. He came to a deep faith in Christ through much suffering and questioning as a political prisoner in Siberia: “My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.” He struggled with irritability and spite, and had a strong gambling addiction that took him many years to break free. Through the example of other faithful prisoners and in reading the New Testament, Dostoevsky:
accepted Christ back into (his) heart, whom (he) had come to know as a child living with my parents and whom (he) almost lost once, because of turning into a ‘European liberal.’”
Dostoevsky wanted all of us to accept the crucified idiot back into our hearts. Imagine how such a heart transformation might affect the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. Have you ever lost the Prince of Peace through giving into cynicism and negativity? What if you opened our heart and mind up again today?
Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird
Co-authors, God’s Firestarters
Pastor Jack Hayford Finished Well
An amazing man.
In this age of scandal and disappointment, what a blessing it is to see a leader finish well. Pastor Jack Hayford, who was promoted to glory on January 8th, 2023, fought the fight, ran the race, and kept the faith.
Pastor Jack was born as a breech baby with a near-fatal neck condition. After prayers for breakthrough, Jack was miraculously healed. A few years later, he was healed from childhood polio. These healings gave Jack a deep reliance on the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit for daily living.
Pastor Jack Hayford
For thirty years, he was the lead pastor of Church on the Way, Van Nuys, California, growing to over 12,000 people by 1999. Fifty percent of his congregation was Spanish-speaking. Randy Remington, president of the Foursquare denomination, commented, “Pastor Jack was a Kingdom ambassador whose influence transcended denominational, generational, and global boundaries.”
Jack served as President…
View original post 448 more words
A Call for the Miraculous
Check it out.
The following post is a chapter-length excerpt from the manuscript for The Elisha Code & the Coming Revival by Ed Hird and David Kitz.
“And these signs will accompany those who believe:
In my name they will drive out demons;
they will speak in new tongues;
they will pick up snakes with their hands;
and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all;
they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”
(Mark 16:17-18, NIV)
What will it take to turn this nation and the world to faith in Jesus Christ? That question should set us on a Holy Spirit driven quest to see a world-changing, Book-of-Acts revival take place in our time.
There are those within the church who argue the age of miracles ended with the death of the original apostles. But those who hold such a…
View original post 1,882 more words
‘Why is Gossip So Delicious’ video
Have you ever wondered what it is to do the “work” of God? Well, this week we return to the Gospel of John and begin to explore the challenges of following Jesus. Being a follower of Jesus, and living in community are both challenges that we can’t navigate on our own. We need each other. I encourage you to engage in this journey of “followship” and “fellowship” with us.
So come, join us as we worship the triune God together.
In case you missed it, you can find the service from last week by clicking HERE.
Ed Hird preached on ‘Why is Gossip So Delicious?’ (Proverbs 26:13-28)
Important Dates:
Remember that “Ladies’ Refresh” (on Tuesdays) and our Thursday Support Group and Bible Study are having a break during January.
All Saints Pizza Lunch after the service on Sunday the 29th January. We’ll provide the pizza and drinks. You bring your family and friends. Everyone is welcome.
If you have any further questions, or need help in any way, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Thank you Church.
Stay vigilant and prayerful.
Love each other deeply and keep Jesus at the very centre of everything you do.
Blessings on all you do.
The peace of our Lord,
Peter Klenner
Bishop and Pastor
All Saints Community Church
Crescent Beach
604.209.5570
Edhird's Blog 