Amazing Grace in Scottish Gaelic

Pray for Rahway Indian Mission

Please pray for our Indian Telugu service as we continue to minister to Indian immigrants in the New York / New Jersey area.


Also, pray for Christians in India who continue to be persecuted for their faith. The following is from www.persecution.com

Christian groups are reviled by Hindu extremist groups in India, who see Christian evangelistic efforts as undermining the Hindu-based caste system. Violence against Christians continues at an alarming rate. Persecution comes in the form of beatings, murders, imprisonments, church demolitions, destruction of property and Bible burnings. Perpetrators are rarely charged with these crimes. Most of the violence is initiated by the 30 Hindu nationalist organizations that subscribe to an extremist ideology called Hindutva, which advocates the expulsion of non-Hindus from India. Six Indian states have laws against coerced religious conversion that are often used against Christians. The “anti-conversion” laws impose prison terms and hefty fines on anyone who converts Indians by force, fraud or allurement. On March 28, 2011, 16 new Christian converts were arrested in Odisha (formerly Orissa) state for converting to Christianity without a permit.

Amazing Grace on the Harmonica

Song starts 30 seconds into the video. Have a blessed weekend.

Amazing Grace in French

The Scale of the Universe

Move through God's creation from the smallest known object to the approximate size of the universe.

Amazing Grace on Irish Bagpipes

Amazing Grace performed on Uilleann Pipes, or Irish bagpipes. Bagpipes are found throughout Europe, however they are all different from the well known Scottish version. The wind that drives these pipes comes from a bag that is pumped by the man's arm. Enjoy.

Bake Sale on Saturday

Letter from Asia Bibi

 
Asia Bibi is a Christian woman in Pakistan facing the death penalty for blasphemy against Islam. Christians around the world are trying to put pressure on the Pakistani government to release her. Here she writes about a bird who visits her in her prison cell.
 
There is a beautiful thing that happens every day in my cell. Two days after they announced my death penalty, I was brought into [death row]. Every morning around 3:30 or 4, a brown bird with a long beak appears and sits on the boundary wall. This bird also comes every evening around 5. He sits there for 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening. Later on he became my friend. I talk to him and he also talks to me.
 
As I watched this bird every day, I tried to understand the meaning of him coming day after day. I think this is a messenger from God giving me His message. When the bird comes, I feel encouraged and peaceful. I feel comforted after his visit. I think this is a very significant sign from God.
 
To learn more…

Amazing Grace on the Zither

Amazing Grace on Dulcimer by NC Hillbillies

Very funny and very talented, these two guys play a great Dulcimer.

How Great Thou Art on Harp

Amazing Conception to Birth Video

We should all praise God for the miracle of life!

Pray for Our Neighbors After Fire

*** Update on the fire. Two apartments have been severely damaged and the families have lost everything. One other apartment was also damaged. One firefighter was injured. My daughter Charlotte knows one of the families. Here is a link to the story.

Rahway Fire

Friends, a brick apartment house across from the church was on fire last night. Betsy and I saw the flames shooting above the building. We don't know how bad it is, or if anyone was hurt. I'll know more later in the day.

Please pray for our neighbors. This is not a happy Thanksgiving for them.

Peace, Pastor Bill

God is Not Limited by Time

My hobby is astronomy. I love to be outside feeling the wind on my face, listening to the night sounds and looking at God’s creation overhead. Of course, the looking at God’s creation part is difficult because of NJ light pollution. The light dome from the metropolitan area prevents me from seeing fainter objects like galaxies. So I have become a variable star astronomer. Because stars are focused points of light, rather than larger and more diffuse areas of light like galaxies, faint stars cut through the light pollution. I look at these faint little dots and guess their magnitude. Since they are variable stars, the magnitude changes all of the time, and I submit my guesswork to an organization that collects the data. Magnitude estimates from amateur astronomers worldwide are used to create light curves, which are studied by professional astronomers who look for patterns in the data. It’s all very mundane work, but it gets me outside and looking at the night sky. It also has me studying the evolution of stars and how these magnificent creations glorify God.

T Tauri stars are called eruptive variable stars. If our Sun is considered middle aged, these sun-like stars are pre-teens. They have not developed the convection currents that the Sun has to regulate heat throughout the gas envelope. They are also surrounded by clouds of gas and dust called accretion disks that help the stars gain in size. All of these conditions create extreme volatility in T Tauri stars. The heat builds up inside the star without a proper way of regulating it and they explode. The explosions are not big enough to destroy the star, but they are big enough to affect the surrounding accretion disk. If there is a planet in orbit with the beginnings of life on it, those creatures would be destroyed. The environment surrounding a T Tauri star is extremely hostile and so living things would have to wait until the star starts up the convection currents, gobbles up most of the accretion disk and settles down into a more mature phase, called the Main Sequence. Our Sun went through a T Tauri phase, and now we live in a nice quiet place in the universe where we can happily look through our telescopes and watch the fireworks happen in other parts of the cosmos.

Most scientists believe that it has taken 5 billion years to reach this nice quiet point in our Sun’s lifetime. Many Bible scholars can’t reconcile that timeline with the one found in the Old Testament. I say that we are too concerned about time. We are limited to living within a timeline, but God is not. “The LORD sits enthroned over the flood; the LORD is enthroned as King forever” (Psalm 29:10). God is eternal and God has no limits, “Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit” (Psalm 147:5). Since God is not limited by anything, God is not limited by time.

Because time is so important to us, we become blinded by it and cannot see the big picture. The famous passage from Ecclesiastes chapter 3:1 says; “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” The universe is created and shaped in God’s time. If God decrees that the Sun lives for 10 billion years, then that is the right amount of time for the Sun to exist. God sees and understands the big picture; we struggle to comprehend tiny pieces of it. Therefore, God knows what is best. It is often difficult for us to understand that.

The stars I measure, some of which are T Tauri stars, change over long periods of time. Variable star observation requires a lot of patience. But every once in a while, one of these stars erupt without any warning. Suddenly a star that can be barely seen in a telescope is bright enough to see without one. That is what makes the T Tauri stars magical. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1) and they do this in God’s good time.

Peace,

Pastor Bill

How Great Thou Art Jazz Piano

NFL Head Coach Tony Dungy Talks About His Faith

When Tony Dungy got fired he didn't know what to do. His faith carried him through the bad times.

Campus Crusade Ministers at Penn State

There are two things we're all about: Jesus and community.

Let's start with community. Being alone stinks. Everyone on the planet knows what it's like to be alone, and no one likes it. Sometimes even worse than being truly alone though, is being around a whole lot of people and still being alone. Ever been to a party where everyone was talking about the weather, the latest movies, or what they do on the weekends, but no one really cared about the people they were talking to? That's why at Cru we call ourselves a real community. We don't want to fake it. We want to get into each other's lives — to really know, challenge, and help each other as friends. And we want to have a ton of fun doing it!


Read more...

The Story of How Great Thou Art

In response to requests from many lands for an authoritative account of how this hymn came to be written, the following has been compiled by the writer, Stuart K. Hine, and by the publisher, Manna Music, Inc.

In 1885, a Swedish preacher, by the name of Carl Boberg, at age 26, wrote the words only of a poem entitled, “O Store Gud”. Boberg’s poem was published in 1886. The title, “O Store Gud”, translated into English is “O Great God”. A fairly literal translation from Swedish into English, of the first verse and refrain of “O Store Gud”, is as follows:

O, GREAT GOD!

When I the world consider
Which Thou has made by Thine almighty Word
And how the webb of life Thy wisdom guideth
And all creation feedeth at Thy board.

Refrain:
Then doth my soul burst forth in song of praise
Oh, great God
Oh, great God.

The translation from Swedish to English is obviously different from the words we are familiar with today, as found in Stuart K. Hine’s words of HOW GREAT THOU ART. Carl Boberg wrote this poem with no thought of it becoming a hymn. He did not write any music to the text. After publication, the poem was apparently forgotten, but several years later, Boberg attended a meeting and was surprised to hear his poem being sung to the tune of an old Swedish melody. This original melody was different from the arranged melody made by Stuart K. Hine and copyrighted in 1949 and 1953.

In the early 1920’s, English missionaries, Mr. Stuart K. Hine and his wife, ministered in Poland. It was there they learned the Russian version of Boberg’s poem, “O Store Gud”, coupled with the original Swedish melody. Later, under inspiration, Stuart K. Hine wrote original English words, and made his own arrangement of the Swedish melody, which became popular and is now known as the hymn, HOW GREAT THOU ART.

The first three verses were inspired, line upon line, amidst unforgettable experiences in the Carpathian Mountains. In a village to which he had climbed, Mr. Hine stood in the street singing a Gospel hymn and reading aloud “John, Chapter Three”. Among the sympathetic listeners was a local village schoolmaster. A storm was gathering, and when it was evident that no further travel could be made that night, the friendly schoolmaster offered his hospitality. Awe-inspiring was the mighty thunder echoing through the mountains, and it was this impression that was to bring about the birth of the first verse.

Pushing on, Mr. Hine crossed the mountain frontier into Romania and into Bukovina. Together with some young people, through the woods and forest glades he wandered, and heard the birds sing sweetly in the trees. Thus, the second verse came into being.

Verse three was inspired through the conversion of many of the Carpathian mountain-dwellers. The fourth Verse did not come about until Mr. Hine’s return to Britain.

During the summer of 1954, Dr. J. Edwin Orr introduced HOW GREAT THOU ART to a college-age conference at a church camp known as Forest Home in California. (Prior to that conference, in April, Dr. Orr had heard Naga Tribespeople from Assam sing HOW GREAT THOU ART and intended to use the hymn in his meetings in the United States.)

Dr. Orr’s theme for the week of the conference was “Think not what great things you can do for God, but think first of whatever you can do for a great God.” And so he introduced the song at the start of the conference and it was sung each day. Attending the Forest Home college-age conference were Hal Spencer and his sister, Loretta, son and daughter of Tim Spencer who was a songwriter and publisher of Christian music. Hal and Loretta borrowed the song sheet from Dr. Orr and brought it home and gave it to their father. He contacted Stuart K. Hine and the publishing rights were granted to Manna Music, Inc.

The first major American recording of HOW GREAT THOU ART was by Bill Carle, followed by The Spencer Family, and then by George Beverly Shea, soloist for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The Western singing group, The Sons of the Pioneers, recorded it soon thereafter.

HOW GREAT THOU ART, by Stuart K. Hine, as published by Manna Music, Inc., became the best-loved hymn of the Billy Graham Crusades. They used it over and over again. In New York, in 1957, it was used more than 100 times by George Beverly Shea and the Crusade Choir in 119 meetings. In 1959, it became the theme of Billy Graham’s “Hour of Decision” weekly radio broadcast.

HOW GREAT THOU ART has been named in numerous polls as the number one hymn in Britain and America. It is considered to be the most recorded Gospel song by major Gospel artists, as well as many secular artists. It has received two Grammy Awards.

HOW GREAT THOU ART has been performed in Broadway productions in New York, and on the London stage. In the mid 1970’s, HOW GREAT THOU ARTreceived an award for one million performances on radio and television, and was also named, in 1978 by ASCAP, as “The All-Time Outstanding Gospel Song” in America.

Lawrence Welk has been quoted as saying, “Of all the songs, both religious and secular, HOW GREAT THOU ART was the most requested song for our television program.”

There have been over seventeen hundred documented recordings of HOW GREAT THOU ART. It has been used on major television programs, in major motion pictures, and has been named as the favorite Gospel song of at least three United States’ presidents.

Billy Graham gave Mr. Stuart K. Hine permission to quote his reaction to the hymn: “The reason I like HOW GREAT THOU ART is because it glorifies God. It turns Christian’s eyes toward God, rather than upon themselves. I use it as often as possible because it is such a God-honoring song.”

STUART K. HINE

Stuart K. Hine was born in 1899 in England. His parents were at that time worshipping with the Salvation Army, and dedicated him to God during a time when opposition was strong against those who proclaimed Christ.

After serving in the Armed Forces, Mr. Hine was called to the mission field. For many years he served in Poland and Czechoslovakia. It was during missionary work in these countries that Mr. Hine composed many of the songs for which he’s well-known today.

Stuart K. Hine died in 1989.

Pray for the People of Alaska

I didn't think big storms hit Alaska. I know they have bad weather, but its the first time I have heard of a hurricane striking way up there. Pray for the people in the way of this gigantic storm.

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Kurt Warner, NFL Quarterback Gives His Testimony

Tim Tebow continues to receive praise and complaints about his profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Before he was the lightning rod for NFL Christians, there was Kurt Warner. He got a lot of press, good and bad, when he thanked Jesus after winning the Superbowl. Listen to his testimony in the video above.

Here is a link to yet another story on Tim Tebow and his faith. I wish people would lay off the guy.