Look What LUST Has Done To Us

  Lust has blinded our eyes and caused us to serve only ourselves; we lust and still have not the Bible says. Even though you satisfy that burning lust it is never quenched, it is the equivalent of feeding wood and oxygen to a fire then wonder why the fire hasn’t died out! We have no contentment for our desires, for example, our objectification of one another. I was watching a TV show and a young man was explaining to a young lady that he was a Virgin and he didn’t believe in sex before marriage. Her seductive smile quickly turned into a frown and she said “oh I wouldn’t by a car without test driving it first”. This same metaphor can be used against her; the truth is you can’t drive without a license.  We are so quick to move to the driving (sex) part of a relationship that we forgo the preparation to receive a license (marriage). Here lies the problem with many of us; we view each other as objects and not as human beings with souls. Humans aren’t cars; you see a car you like, you buy it until a newer edition comes out. Doesn’t this sound like many marriages today? Husbands who have been married for years are divorcing their wives for a newer younger woman. We are human beings with souls and emotions; you can’t go around “test driving” individuals. When you sleep around with everything, you’ll catch a little bit of everything! People are so ready to jump in bed with someone not realizing who they lay down with, then they become surprise because they are not who they thought. When you are led by LUST you are walking into a field of land mines blind folded, death is waiting around the corner. The world is full of children who have been the product of two people having sex with no intention of ever having a lasting relationship together. Thousands of people across the world are hooking up just for the sake of satisfying each other’s LUSTFUL desires. Turns out it’s the children who suffer. •Although only 13% of teens have had sex by age 15, most initiate sex in their later teen years. By their 19th birthday, seven in 10 female and male teens have had intercourse. •Among sexually experienced teens, 70% of females and 56% of males report that their first sexual experience was with a steady partner, while 16% of females and 28% of males report first having sex with someone they had just met or who was just a friend. •Young people aged 13–24 made up about 17% of all people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the United States in 2008. •Although 15–24-year-olds represent only one-quarter of the sexually active population, they account for nearly half (9.1 million) of the 18.9 million new cases of STIs each year Each year, almost 750,000 U.S. women aged 15–19 become pregnant. [19] Two-thirds of all teen pregnancies occur among 18–19-year-olds. What has happened to us? Did we think that the demoralizing of a people would not demoralize a nation? Look what LUST has done to US! LUST has wrapped it’s hands around our necks and lead us to the slaughter house! (Read the full Article in the upcoming Blessed BeYond Belief October Magazine)

Proud Virgin Movement x real Men wait

The Hip Hop Church

Recently I went to the library to check out some new books, I left with 5, which I will discuss in the weeks to come.

I have been reading a book titled: "The Hip Hop Church", by Efrem Smith and Phil Jackson. I am only a few pages into the book; in the book it poses these three questions: Does hip hop and the Church collide? Is hip hop in church a compromise? Can hip hop and the church coexist? The collision between hip hop and the church isn’t a new fight, however, it is one that will continue until the end of time. Much of the debate about not letting hip hop in church starts with the image and contributions that hip hop is known for, sagging jeans, chains, objectification of women, violence, and vulgarity just to name a few. Many churches see hip hop as a disease, and it will only spread if you come in contact with it. The truth is, just as Civil Rights and the Black Panther party is apart of the culture for the 50’s thru the 70’s, hip hop is to this generation. Icons such as Dr. King and Malcolm X, have been replaced by Kanye and Jay Z. What Churches haven’t done is support the Christian hip hop artist like Lecrae, Andy Mineo, Swoope, Da' Truth, Flame, Kidd, Gowe, Json, Toby Mac, and Suzy Rock just to name a few. I DON’T listen to secular hip hop at all, because our saved brothers and sisters do a better job. Ironically, Church folk hate hip hop, yet all their members go to all the concerts. Why do you think secular artist charge $80 - $200 dollars for their concerts (that sell out by the way) while a leading Christian artist charges $10-$30 dollars for a smaller crowd? It’s the church that feeds these secular artists they hate so much. If you don’t like what they say, don’t support their music. Instead, many Christians buy the clean version of the song and think they do the world justice (See one of my older posts should Christians Listen to secular music). Can Hip hop and the Church coexist? I believe so, just as Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Whitney Houston and Motown was before this generation; I believe my Christian Brothers and Sisters will do the same. God looks at the heart, but man looks at the outer appearance. Remember, with God all things are possible!

Keep the faith. Min. Emanuel

PVM X Summer time message

During the summer premarital sex rates increase
Avoid the temptations of the summer , staying pure message

PVM X Summer time message from Emanuel Osborne on Vimeo.

                       
             

 

Tall Dark and..Hazardous

Walk By Faith

Sad Statistic Why are Christian Youth are giving up their virginity?

By John Blake, CNN

(CNN) –True love doesn’t wait after all.


That’s the implication in the upcoming October issue of an evangelical magazine that claims that young, unmarried Christians are having premarital sex almost as much as their non-Christian peers.

The article in Relevant magazine, entitled “(Almost) Everyone’s Doing It,” cited several studies examining the sexual activity of single Christians. One of the biggest surprises was a December 2009 study, conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which included information on sexual activity.

While the study’s primary report did not explore religion, some additional analysis focusing on sexual activity and religious identification yielded this result: 80 percent of unmarried evangelical young adults (18 to 29) said that they have had sex – slightly less than 88 percent of unmarried adults, according to the teen pregnancy prevention organization.

The article highlights what challenges abstinence movements face. Movements such as “True Love Waits,” encourage teens to wear purity rings, sign virginity pledges and pledge chastity during public ceremonies.

Yet many of these Christian youths eventually abandon their purity pledges, Relevant’s Tyler Charles concludes in the article. Tyler talked to people like “Maria,” an evangelical woman who said she wanted to wait until marriage to have sex.

But she said she started having sex with her college boyfriend when she turned 20 because nearly everyone, even most of her Christian friends, were having sex.

Maria:


"It seemed everyone in my life, older and younger, had “done it.” In fact, I waited longer than most people I knew and longer than both of my sisters, even though we were all Christians and came from a good home.

Relevant theorizes about why it’s so hard for so many young Christians to wait, including the saturation of sex in popular culture, the prevalence of pornography and a popular “do what feels good philosophy.”

Yet the article also asks a question that rarely comes up in discussions about abstinence movement. Relevant notes that in biblical times, people married earlier. The average age for marriage has been increasing in the U.S for the last 40 years."


(Minister Emanuel Explains why Purity and Abstinence is possible and relevant)




Today, it’s not unusual to meet a Christian who is single at 30 – or 40 or 50, for that matter. So what do you tell them? Keep waiting?

Scot McKnight, author of “The Jesus Creed,” and “One.Faith: Jesus Calls, We Follow,” acknowledges that young, single Christians face temptations that their counterparts in the biblical age didn’t face.

He tells Relevant:
"Sociologically speaking, the one big difference – and it’s monstrous – between the biblical teaching and our culture is the arranged marriages of very young people. If you get married when you’re 13, you don’t have 15 years of temptation."

You must be Hungry because you starving for Attention.

Statistics: Teen Sex & African American Youth

Nearly half of African-American youth report pressure to have sex: survey

NEW YORK, NY, September 12, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new survey of African-American youth has found that almost half report considerable pressure to have sex. The results, which were derived from the answers of 1,500 youth ages 13-21, will be featured in the October issue of ESSENCE magazine, out on newsstands today.

“I was elated that Essence, a secular Black magazine, choose to even run the story along with the data,” said the founder of BlackGenocide.org Rev. Clenard Childress Jr. “The multiple images and lyrics and instruction [young African-Americans’] minds are exposed to can only result in ill advised sexual behavior.”

“The result of the pressure has resulted in Black young women getting abortions disproportionately, which accounts for the data stating (a plummeting birth rate),” he told LifeSiteNews.

Released by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the survey found that 47% of respondents, including 21% of those 13-15, said they had been pressured to go further sexually than they wanted to. Among African-American males, 54% said they felt pressured by their friends to have sex.

Respondents said that they believe that the TV shows and movies they watch paint a negative picture of African-American youth. For example, 72% believe that the media sends the message that African-American females’ most important quality is their sex appeal, and 64% believe that the media sends the message that it is okay for African-American males to cheat in relationships.

“We are proud to work in partnership with the experts at the National Campaign on this survey, and to bring its eye-opening results to our readers in our October issue” said Constance C.R. White, ESSENCE editor-in-chief. “I am so grateful to the young people who opened up to us in the survey and told us what is really going on in their lives today.”

Other findings from the survey include that 73% of respondents said the media portrays African-American youth as sexually aggressive and just 18% said they see themselves in the TV shows and movies they watch.

Among those ages 13-21, 31% said their parents have the most influence on their decision whether or not to have sex. Forty-seven percent of those ages 13-15 said their parents’ opinions matter on the issue, compared to 28% of those ages 16-18 and 17% of those ages 19-21.

The survey found that 66% of African-American males said that sex is a “big deal” and 73% would rather be in a relationship with no sex than have sex with no relationship.

Among those ages 13-21, 46%, including 34% of those ages 13-15, said they have seen pornography online when they were not looking for it.

Childress, however, expressed dismay that Essence “deliberately omitted the abortion issue.”

“It is gross negligence of any reporter to present research on the sex habits of African-Americans and leave out abortion,” he said. “1,786 African-Americans are aborted each day.”

“In order to have an abortion it is safe to say that at one time in the past 9 months you had sex. To report on sex in the African-American Community and not mention abortion is like talking about the sex habits of homosexuals and not mention Aids.”

Christian College Students Maintain Faith, After Graduating

A study of alumni from two Christian liberal arts colleges shows that a high majority of graduates remain interested in maintaining their faith and worldview from a religious perspective even after they’ve left the university, said a professor who led the research.
The four-year study also suggests that “the integration of Christian values within a college experience ensures the successful well-being of graduates,” according to the report released recently by Gordon College psychology professor Kaye Cook.

Nearly 1,000 Christian graduates from Gordon College and Wheaton College were interviewed on subjects such as spiritual commitment, identity and well-being.

Cook and her team of researchers found that even four years after graduation, 97 percent of the alumni considered themselves moderately to extremely interested in religion, with 76 percent attending church at least once a week.

“That means, those who entered a Christian college with a strong faith graduated four years later with a faith commitment intact – though one that had been tested and deepened,” said Cook in the report. “And we found that their education gave them a higher sense of life satisfaction and well-being, in part because they felt they had a worldview that enabled them to face life’s challenges.”

Christian liberal arts colleges are uniquely dedicated to worldview exploration and character development, said Cook, who is on the board of the international Association for Moral Education and was a recent visiting professor at Dartmouth College.

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Cook told The Christian Post that she was prompted to do the study by the growing interest in “emerging adults,” as evidenced by more studies about 16- to 30-year-olds.

“There are many things we’ve learned from this study. First, is that college higher education needs to look more carefully about what we are doing to our emerging adults,” Cook said. “We need to pay more attention to worldviews and to support emerging adults as they struggle to figure out who they are and what they believe in.”

Cook said that college students can often experience a disorganized, piecemeal, even agnostic approach to higher education.

“Christian colleges have to have a tolerance for raising questions and be willing to explore questions more deeply than maybe we many times feel comfortable with,” she said. “I think (students) raising questions about faith within the context of faith can make one’s faith stronger.”

Cook said that her research also shows that religious faith improves overall well-being.

“Religious faith has multiple positive effects on daily life; it improves well-being by influencing one’s personal characteristics (identity) and relationships (attachment), and the choices one makes,” she said in her study.

“One’s worldview, although it receives little attention in the (academic) literature, is conceptually intertwined with the other two measures of identity and attachment,” Cook said. “And the data shows that Christian college graduates retain their faith to a striking degree.

“Consequently, Christian colleges can serve as a model for a context in which values and academic disciplines are taken seriously, and within which one can be encouraged to develop coherent values to secure success beyond college.”

The study titled, “Is a Christian College Education ‘Worth It’? Worldview Development Among Christian College Students as a Model for the Larger Academy,” was funded in part by an initiative grant from the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.

The research team included co-principal Cynthia Kimball, associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College; Kathleen Leonard, visiting assistant professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell; Chris Boyatzis, professor of psychology at Bucknell University; and 16 Gordon

College undergraduate students

Three Earthquakes in Three Days

The strong earthquake that rattled the eastern United States on Tuesday was highly unusual in its severity, though it was centered in a part of Virginia known for smaller quakes, seismologists said.

he initial earthquake, which registered a magnitude of 5.9 just before 2 p.m. EDT, was felt from the Carolinas to New England.

"One of this size is highly unusual," said Karen Fisher, a professor of seismology at Brown University and president-elect of the seismology section at the American Geophysical Union. "This is the largest earthquake by far that I am aware of occurring there in recent history."

The quake's epicenter in central Virginia is in an area the U.S. Geological Survey calls the Central Virginia Seismic Zone, Fisher said by phone from Providence, Rhode Island.

While the strength of the quake was unusual, the wide spread of the shock waves was common for the East Coast, according to Peggy Hellweg, a research seismologist at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory in California.

This is largely due to the difference in the terrain, Hellweg said in a telephone interview.

"Our ground is all of this chopped-up stuff ... like a pile of marbles," Hellweg said of California's geology, which means that the waves from a quake don't spread out all that far.

In the Eastern United States, she said, "What you've got there is gorgeous bedrock and ... the waves propagate beautifully."

Another difference between the East and West U.S. coasts is that the West Coast is over the boundary between two active tectonic plates, the North American and the Pacific, and the force of these plates sliding against each other generates quakes regularly, Fisher said.

In the East, she said, "There's no driving engine in terms of the two plates sliding past each other ... so that's why it's much more unusual."

David Oppenheimer, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said aftershocks should be expected for months.

"You'll feel magnitude 3 earthquakes over great distances ... I would expect tens of magnitude 3s for earthquakes of this size," Oppenheimer said from Menlo Park, California.




SOURCE: Reuters

Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

(Additional reporting by Mari Saito; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)