Faith, morality and Christianity continue to be attacked by the woke left. All that is good and wholesome is now condemned, whilst evil and wickedness are now being praised as the new virtues the world needs to embrace. Fox News discusses this further corruption and attack upon our brothers and sisters in Christ within society. Further analysis and a Catholic perspective is provided by Dr Taylor Marshall. Be aware of the apostasy and increased persecution of the universal church in a short matter of time.
One of the hallmarks of democratic society is a healthy, free-flowing media ecosystem.
In times past, that media ecosystem would include various mass media outlets, from newspapers to cable TV networks. Today, the internet and social media platforms have greatly expanded the scope and reach of communication within society.
Of course, journalism plays a key role within that ecosystem. High quality journalism and the unprecedented transparency of social media keeps power structures in check—and sometimes, these forces can drive genuine societal change. Reporters bring us news from the front lines of conflict, and uncover hard truths through investigative journalism.
That said, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley and Carmen Ang detail below, these positive impacts are sometimes overshadowed by harmful practices and negative externalities occurring in the media ecosystem.
The graphic below is an attempt to catalog problems within the media ecosystem as a basis for discussion. Many of the problems are easy to understand once they’re identified. However, in some cases, there is an interplay between these issues that is worth digging into. Below are a few of those instances.
Explicit Bias vs. Implicit Bias Broadly speaking, bias in media breaks down into two types: explicit and implicit.
Publishers with explicit biases will overtly dictate the types of stories that are covered in their publications and control the framing of those stories. They usually have a political or ideological leaning, and these outlets will use narrative fallacies or false balance in an effort to push their own agenda.
Unintentional filtering or skewing of information is referred to as implicit bias, and this can manifest in a few different ways. For example, a publication may turn a blind eye to a topic or issue because it would paint an advertiser in a bad light. These are called no fly zones, and given the financial struggles of the news industry, these no fly zones are becoming increasingly treacherous territory.
Misinformation vs. Disinformation Both of these terms imply that information being shared is not factually sound. The key difference is that misinformation is unintentional, and disinformation is deliberately created to deceive people.
Fake news stories, and concepts like deepfakes, fall into the latter category. We broke down the entire spectrum of fake news and how to spot it, in a previous infographic.
Simplify, Simplify Mass media and social feeds are the ultimate Darwinistic scenario for ideas.
Through social media, stories are shared widely by many participants, and the most compelling framing usually wins out. More often than not, it’s the pithy, provocative posts that spread the furthest. This process strips context away from an idea, potentially warping its meaning.
Video clips shared on social platforms are a prime example of context stripping in action. An (often shocking) event occurs, and it generates a massive amount of discussion despite the complete lack of context.
This unintentionally encourages viewers to stereotype the persons in the video and bring our own preconceived ideas to the table to help fill in the gaps.
Members of the media are also looking for punchy story angles to capture attention and prove the point they’re making in an article. This can lead to cherrypicking facts and ideas. Cherrypicking is especially problematic because the facts are often correct, so they make sense at face value, however, they lack important context.
Simplified models of the world make for compelling narratives, like good-vs-evil, but situations are often far more complex than what meets the eye.
The News Media Squeeze It’s no secret that journalism is facing lean times. Newsrooms are operating with much smaller teams and budgets, and one result is ‘churnalism’. This term refers to the practice of publishing articles directly from wire services and public relations releases.
Churnalism not only replaces more rigorous forms of reporting—but also acts as an avenue for advertising and propaganda that is harder to distinguish from the news.
The increased sense of urgency to drive revenue is causing other problems as well. High-quality content is increasingly being hidden behind paywalls.
The end result is a two-tiered system, with subscribers receiving thoughtful, high-quality news, and everyone else accessing shallow or sensationalized content. That everyone else isn’t just people with lower incomes, it also largely includes younger people. The average age of today’s paid news subscriber is 50 years old, raising questions about the future of the subscription business model.
For outlets that rely on advertising, desperate times have called for desperate measures. User experience has taken a backseat to ad impressions, with ad clutter (e.g. auto-play videos, pop-ups, and prompts) interrupting content at every turn. Meanwhile, in the background, third-party trackers are still watching your every digital move, despite all the privacy opt-in prompts.
How Can We Fix the Problems with Media? With great influence comes great responsibility. There is no easy fix to the issues that plague news and social media. But the first step is identifying these issues, and talking about them.
The more media literate we collectively become, the better equipped we will be to reform these broken systems, and push for accuracy and transparency in the communication channels that bind society together.
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By the end of January 2022, the Navy had received 3,740 religious exemption requests — none of which had been granted,” reports the Daily Mail. Not even military chaplains can get exemptions. “It’s a kick in the gut for sure,” a long-serving anonymous chaplain told Fox News. “If I lose retirement benefits that way, that would be a pretty significant burden to me and my family. At the same time, this is a fight worth fighting. I do not think this is a lawful order.”
The Biden administration claims that this violation of religious freedom is essential to “military readiness.” That takes some gall, given the myriad threats to military readiness Biden has already countenanced. He can accommodate transgendered troops but not unvaccinated ones. For the sake of advancing woke social policy, his politicized generals normally treat miliary readiness as a secondary concern. It is a little late for them to pretend that readiness exclusively determines military standards.
Their mission is to make the acceptance of secularism a condition for employment in the federal government and military.
Far from caring about America’s ability to fight and win wars, Biden is perfectly willing to drive good soldiers out of the military in his pursuit of wokeness and mandates. The Navy SEALs who sued his administration say that the military has sidelined and punished them in response to the suit. “The Navy continues to deny our clients training and deployment opportunities and is assigning these soldiers menial tasks instead of allowing them to defend our country,” according to Mike Berry, general counsel for First Liberty Institute who represents them.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army and other branches of the military have begun discharging soldiers who refuse the vaccine.
As if the Biden administration’s record on religious freedom isn’t dreadful enough, it is moving to create an Orwellian-sounding database that tracks federal employees who seek religious exemptions from the vaccine mandate, according to the Daily Signal. “A little digging at the Federal Register revealed that there are at least 19 total federal agencies — including five cabinet level agencies — that have created or proposed to create these tracking lists for religious-exemption requests from their employees,” it reports.
Republican lawmakers are demanding answers about this emerging database, but they won’t get any. Imagine the corrupt uses to which Biden’s secularists could put it. Their mission is to make the acceptance of secularism and all of its decrees a condition for employment in the federal government and military. They see devout Christians in particular as bad citizens, unworthy of participation in public life. It is hardly a stretch to think those whose names appear in the database could suffer long-term damage to their careers. (READ MORE: HHS, the Tip on Biden’s Spear Against Christians)
The media has, of course, yawned at this story. Threats to religious freedom don’t interest most reporters. Biden is even more brazen than Obama, but the media coverage never reflects that. In the midst of all of his assaults on religious freedom, Biden turned up at the National Prayer Breakfast last week and received fawning coverage. He concluded his speech by saying, “Every time I’d walk out of my Grandpa Finnegan’s house up in Scranton — some of you heard me say this before — he’d yell, ‘Joey, keep the faith.’ My grandmother would yell, ‘No, Joey, spread it.’ Let’s go spread the faith.”
Never mind that he is crushing the faith. His Department of Health and Human Services continues to push a proposed mandate that would force religious health insurers to cover transgender surgeries. Mutilation, according to the Biden administration, is “essential” health care, which speaks to the utterly corrupt philosophy of medicine that underpins all of its mandates. It sees vast “risks” in the unvaccinated while seeing no risks in destroying bodies or aborting children. It is bad enough that the Biden administration expects non-religious insurers to cover these violations of the Hippocratic Oath, but now it can’t even resist imposing these affronts to God on religious insurers.
It can’t even resist imposing these affronts to God on religious insurers.
Biden’s secularists, wanting to monopolize all of public life, have a fundamental antipathy to “exemptions.” On their animal farm, no one is free to leave. Their progressive schemes hinge on universal participation, which in the end means universal coercion. To the extent that they will even consider exemptions, they do so only for those who promise to avoid or leave public life. Only the most narrowly sectarian groups received an exemption from Obama’s infamous contraceptive mandate. But the Little Sisters of the Poor, because they show charity to non-Catholics, got hit with it.
But even the exceedingly narrow exemptions of the Obama years won’t last given the totalitarian bent of modern secularism. Its architects can’t rest until everything is secularized. If somebody, somewhere is foiling their vision, they move into action, faking up some “public health” or “nondiscrimination” rationale for their intolerance and intrusiveness. If anything, the smallness of the threat — a handful of unvaccinated soldiers, a lone holdout chaplain, some religious hospitals, and so forth — seems to inflame the secularists. Like Soviet commissars obsessing over the rare dissident, the secularists must punish in particular the few exceptions to their rule.
Woke Ideology Mimics Precursors to Totalitarian Slaughter, Experts Say
BY PETR SVAB June 21, 2021 Updated: June 22, 2021
Some of the core tenets of the “woke” ideology spreading around the country mimic ideas used to justify many of the most horrendous atrocities of the past century, according to several experts.
A recently released documentary exploring the topic, called “Better Left Unsaid,” concludes that the self-identified “radical left” endorses four fundamental “truths” that they “hold to be self-evident,” noting that these tenets have also been used to justify and incite many of the worst massacres of the 20th century.
The first of the four claims is that “the world is best viewed through a group oppression narrative lens.”
The “woke” ideology is based on a set of quasi-Marxist theories that divide society into “oppressors” and the “oppressed” based on characteristics such as race, sex, class, or sexual proclivities. “Woke” is sometimes used interchangeably with Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is one of the more prominent ideologies that operate within this framework.
A scene from the documentary “Better Left Unsaid” by Curt Jaimungal. (Better Left Unsaid/Curt Jaimungal)
The second claim is that “evidence of oppression is the inequality between groups,” the documentary says. If the designated “oppressed” group does on average worse in some regard than the designated “oppressor” group, that is taken as virtually unassailable proof of “oppression.”
The third claim is that “peaceful dialog and understanding between the groups is impossible since the dominant group’s strategy is to retain its power.”
Woke theorists have posited that the “oppressed” have a uniquely valuable perspective on reality unavailable to the “oppressors.” Meanwhile, they say, “whiteness” or “white heteropatriarchy” can’t help but to try to maintain its “hegemony.” Even if it does things that benefit members of other groups, such as by abolishing slavery or giving women and blacks the right to vote, it’s still done out of self-interest and in order to further entrench its institutions and norms and thus ensure the “privilege” of its members.
A scene from the documentary “Better Left Unsaid” by Curt Jaimungal. (Better Left Unsaid/Curt Jaimungal)
Proponents of the ideology engage in dialogue between themselves, but with everybody else the communication is supposed to generally flow in one direction—that of acceptance of their views. Any challenge to the ideology is labeled as self-serving or even as an assault on the “oppressed.”
Finally, the ideology at least implicitly acknowledges that “because of the above, violence is justified to eradicate the inequities,” the documentary says.
“From my experience, they (to the degree they can be grouped together enough to call them ‘they’) tend to advocate for violence against those oppressing and equate it to laudatory behavior; hence, ‘punch a Nazi,’” author of the documentary, Curt Jaimungal, told The Epoch Times via email.
“I have catalogs of tweets, written statements, and videos of people ranging from students to [professors] explicitly calling for violence and downplaying the violence of those on the left when compared to the right,” he added, not because of intensity or frequency of such violence, but because of the so-called “nobleness of the extreme left’s position.”
These four tenets, Jaimungal demonstrated in the documentary, are common to many of the most brutal massacres and regimes of the 20th century, from the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to communist China and the Rwandan genocide.
In each case, an entire class of society is painted as unfairly privileged and as such inherently oppressive, with little regard to specific actions of the individual members of the group. Meanwhile, disagreement with or mere disinterest in this classification is taken as support for the perceived oppression. With reconciliation through dialog taken off the table, the only remaining recourse is conflict—a “revolutionary” action where violence is seen as inevitable and, ultimately, preferable.
“Too few people know about the ceaseless carnage that took place under the masthead of the isomers of equity,” Jaimungal narrates in the documentary.
He said he avoided using examples of atrocities committed as a consequence of the totalitarian nature of the various regimes.
“I am careful to only list or only talk about the deaths associated with the philosophical doctrine of group guilt and class guilt,” he said.
Proponents of socialism commonly argue that the movements that led to these tragedies were commandeered or hijacked by people that didn’t really believe in the ideology. But they have tended to level the argument retrospectively, after they or their like-minded predecessors initially endorsed the movements and nascent regimes, the documentary points out. Also, proponents usually stop short of detailing how the next attempt will prevent any supposed nonbelievers from taking over.
Endorsements The comparison between the preludes to past massacres and the current manifestations of the woke ideology is a fair one, as long as it’s not taken as an absolute, according to Erec Smith, associate professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania.
“We’re not saying [a massacre] is definitely going to happen, but we need to be cognizant and remember our history and be careful about what’s going on here,” he told The Epoch Times.
Jaimungal’s conclusions were also recently endorsed by several scholars of totalitarianism, all of whom are critical of woke ideology. They were invited to comment on the film by Pat Kambhampati, chemistry professor and head of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship at McGill University in Canada.
“The same ideas that gave rise to Curt’s movie and the discussion of communism, we see a lot of parallels and isomorphisms taking place in the West and within academia,” he said during a May 31 panel discussion on topics raised by the documentary.
Janice Fiamengo, retired English professor at the University of Ottawa and self-declared anti-feminist, backed Jaimungal’s argument during the panel discussion. She was also featured in the film.
“As soon as one establishes these oppressor groups and oppressed groups, then when you are speaking supposedly on behalf of the oppressed, you can do nearly anything,” she said.
A scene from the documentary “Better Left Unsaid” by Curt Jaimungal featuring retired English professor, Janice Fiamengo. (Better Left Unsaid/Curt Jaimungal)
Gad Saad, evolutionary psychology professor at Concordia University, put forth the point during the panel that people professing utopian goals have a tendency toward eliminating those who oppose them.
“Utopians believe that the world could be a perfect place except for this one group that is stopping the world from becoming a perfect place,” he said.
Another panelist, retired New York University professor of liberal studies Michael Rectenwald, linked the woke ideology’s potential to unleash totalitarian force to its postmodern roots.
Postmodernism introduced the idea of fundamental relativism, professing that there is no objective truth, but instead the powers that be establish as true whatever is in their interest.
While the documentary notes that this notion is itself a “truth claim” and thus undermines its own validity, Rectenwald pointed out that adoption of the notion has serious real-life implications.
“The problem with this is not simply that we have no criteria for truth claims with this kind of notion, but rather it leaves open the possibility that when it has the requisite power behind it then anything can be asserted and can be asserted with force,” he said.
Michael Rectenwald, a former professor at New York University and author of “The Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom.” in New York City on Oct. 4, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
He gave the example of the ideology behind the transgender movement sweeping through government institutions.
“The force of the state is behind it and they can say that if you don’t accept that your child is a boy or a girl when they are the other then you could go to jail for this … or you could lose custody of your child,” he said.
“So when my truth becomes as good or better than any objective truth then we get to this point where the requisite power is applied and therefore we get the kind of authoritarianism and totalitarianism that we saw in the Soviet Union where people were forced to maintain things they knew to be false.”
Memes of Survival Jaimungal defended in his film not only physical truths, but argued that just as there are “preserved genes” in human DNA that stand virtually unchanged through time and would be catastrophic to meddle with, there are also “preserved memes”—ideas that stand true throughout history and are similarly crucial to maintain, timeless lessons one can find in many religious scriptures and ancient stories.
These ideas are ingrained in humans, but have also been “externalized,” meaning imprinted on the external world in the form of the written word, art, rituals, and so on, he says in the film.
“Our survival depends on these ‘externalized memes.’”
A scene from the documentary “Better Left Unsaid” by Curt Jaimungal. (Better Left Unsaid/Curt Jaimungal)
Clinical psychologist and professor Jordan Peterson touched upon this topic during the panel discussion, noting the damage to the Western mythos inflicted by certain scientific theories, particularly Darwinism, and the subsequent substitution of the religious underpinnings of Western culture by an ideological ersatz.
“I could say to the atheists among the group, you know, ‘You’re not too fond of religion. How are you feeling about its replacement?’” he said.
In an “intact culture” a person is “inculturated” by the age of about 18 into “a religious belief that saturates the entire culture,” he said.
“It’s granted to you, it gives you an identity, and that’s what your identity is.”
Western culture has become in this sense fragmented, he argued, as it now lacks such a comprehensive unifying ethos.
Students still come to universities with a “messianic” urge, craving an initiation of this sort, but what they’re offered instead is an ideology, which he described as “a parasite on an underlying religious structure.”
“A proper religious structure gives you a balanced view of the world, there’s characters for that negative part of nature, there’s characters for the positive part of nature, for the negative part of culture, for the positive part of culture. [It] gives you a view that enables you to look at the world and it’s existential permanences, I guess, in a manner that allows you to live a balanced life.”
Ideology, he said, doesn’t serve this purpose.
“You get indoctrinated into an ideology and you find where Satan is, you know, it’s not in you, it’s out there in the patriarchal oppressor, let’s say. And the thing about that is that it rings true mythologically and it is also true because every culture is oppressive to some degree and we’re all crushed as individuals by the dictates of arbitrary society. And kids get into the university and they’re taught this one-sided, lopsided doctrine with a utopian end and it matches their developmental needs perfectly,” he said.
If an ideology is accepted as an intimate part of one’s identity, it becomes difficult to let go of as it provides the person’s life meaning, Fiamengo noted.
“They would actually rather die than admit that they’re wrong,” she said.
Part of the solution, the panelists agreed, would be to restore universities to their original purpose of pursuing objective truth.
This is not a transcript but a summary of the prophecies provided by Tomi Arayomi. It is worth viewing the video multiple times to find the nuances and follow the Bible references in his speech.
Look to Luxembourg: Biotech laboratories will build the future model for the ‘sons of men’ over the next nine years. The Lord will expose ‘smart city’ prototypes, data banks, tax havens and genetic engineering or genetic hacking. Exposure will only slow down this acceleration and not stop this from happening. The redesign of the world has started.
I am now counting down: The clock has reversed and is now in a countdown. Nine years remaining before the antichrist appears. The church is double minded and unstable in her ways. Choose who you will serve, and use the time to redeem and not to wait. Nine years will seem to be like nine months and nine months like nine minutes. A new church will arise but from persecution – its success will be measured not by attendance but through its disciples.
Prime ministers will become presidents and presidents become kings. Leaders will be crowned as kings – not literally but will be quickened, with greater governmental powers and longer tenure for leaders. Nations will push for more power and a spirit of delusion will embolden these nations to implement their plans. Citizens will trade their freedom in the face of fear and despotism will be their reward. If one sows the wind, then one shall reap a whirlwind.
A new false crisis. A false alarm will become a real threat, and a real threat a false one. The talking heads will proclaim that global extinction is upon us and that new powers are needed to save the planet. But the Lord will, in His time, create a new Earth and a new Heaven.
God will sound proof His church. A time to separate from the noise of the world, and the church will be able to distinguish those who are for them or those who will rise against them, like the different notes in music. The church will be proven right by their results and not by their methods.
A new genetic race. A race to compete against China with the development of DNA modification begins. Ethics will be overlooked as science is funded and the ‘birthings’ will be real and unstoppable. The Lord will raise up the ethical ones in the world of science and lead many to new breakthroughs.
The clashing of the swords. Many shall fall and many shall rise. A fight that should be fought at the gates of Hell will be brought forward to humanity. Stand at the gates for the foul spirit has not finished releasing its foulness. They may say, “Safety first,” but I now tell you safety third, courage second and strength first. I will let the opponent draw first blood, and the tech giants will stand against us for they know that they stand against the Lord and His ways.
Constitutional crisis. Not just of state, but of the bride, the church, for they no longer believe in His prophets. The Lord will work out for good, what the enemy had worked out for harm. The journey will lengthened, but the time will be shortened for a divider has done this because a divided kingdom cannot stand. The Lord will separate the spiritual from the worldly.
The church has nine years. I give you nine years of intercession without intermission. While the hands of Moses arise into the air, their must be an army willing to go down and intercede. Men are needed in the breeches to halt the antichrist and bring in the bountiful harvest. I will raise those who know God and they shall be known by their exploits. You have nine years to beat your ploughshares into swords. Churches need to be made into schools of empowerment.
2021 is the year of hasting. The enemy will speed up automation, bankruptcy, impeachment of ’46’ cries out of Ukraine and China (this may refer to the president of the USA- editor). China’s asset is deposed. A great push towards censorship, draconian laws, unlawful arrests and civil disobedience. BLM will show their true colours and the colour shall not be black.
The shaking will continue….the Lord will shake all things and carry with it the seeds of His revelation and prioritise it above the bread of the world. It will continue until His people are unshakeable.
The ekklesia arising. A time when justice is not delayed. The great reset will lead to a great awakening.
A divided states of America. Sheep and goat states and counties will rise. Talks of secession and ancient alliances will be broken and new ones formed. Much taunting and jeering. A two headed monster comes from your sea and a new party arises from within. Some cry out ‘Peace!’ but a war has already started in the heavens and the ground will shake.
Home schooling and the Deborah annointing. A woman, or women, will have the ability to develop a highly engaging, tech integrated home schooling system that will greatly assist the poor and disadvantaged.
A changing of the guard in Israel and Iran intensified. Pray for Israel for her allies will retreat and her guard will shrink. Netanyahu will be shaken. If my church will rise and pray for her tension will ease -but many in the UN will push to enter into Israel when they should not.
The time for awakening. The reset has started and it is time to redeem. The people who preached tolerance and wanted all to be tolerant will now become intolerant. A new level of persecution will test the church. Socialism will cost the people their freedom and this focus will split the church. The Lord will be feared among the nations and the remnant will be called to fulfil the will of the Lord. A call for christians to be truthful and holy although this will bring persecution.
By Rev. Mark H. Creech, Christian Post Columnist| First published: Wednesday, July 24, 2019.
The Washington Examiner reported that Pastor Andrew Brunson said he was “astounded at the speed with which the U.S. is imploding” and that he predicts persecution of Christians will follow.
Brunson is the evangelical Presbyterian missionary to Turkey, who spent two years in a Turkish prison. He was falsely accused of being part of a failed coup attempt against that country’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The charges against Brunson resulting in his unjust imprisonment triggered a war of words and diplomatic struggles between Turkey and the U.S. Government.
North Carolina U.S. Senator Thom Tillis visited Brunson in prison and diligently worked and advocated for the missionary’s release from prison.
Since Brunson was not only an American citizen, but a North Carolinian, the Christian Action League initiated and lobbied for a resolution from the North Carolina House and a Senatorial statement from the state Senate, calling on Turkish officials to free Brunson. The House passed the resolution unanimously, and 48 out of 50 Senate members signed the Senatorial statement. (Currently, the North Carolina Senate does not adopt resolutions, but only Senatorial statements.)
Brunson made his remarks about the coming of persecution for American Christians during an interview at the Western Conservative Summit, held every year by the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University.
According to the Examiner Brunson said:
“First of all, I think it’s coming to the U.S. that there will be persecution. I was isolated for a few years, and coming back to the states was almost like coming back to a different country in many ways. And I’m astounded at the speed with which, I think, the U.S. is imploding.
“There are any number of issues where it seems that it’s no longer enough for a person of faith to get along with, or to serve, or to treat well someone they disagree with. And I think that the political business, media, celebrity class, and also academia, it seems that there’s much more of a demand that people approve of, that they validate, that they celebrate things that they actually disagree with.
“Persecution is nothing new….The thing is, that we in the West have not experienced [persecution] very much. It’s very unusual for a Westerner to be arrested for his faith. So we haven’t experienced it, but I think we are going to. I think it’s coming to this country.”
One might argue that persecution is now alive and well in America with the purging of Christianity from the government, the muzzling of state officials, employees, and appointees who are Christian, the public attacks on churches and Christian businesses, the media and Hollywood’s disparaging of anything Christian in almost every film they make. The kind of persecution Andrew Brunson endured in Turkey hasn’t arrived yet. Nevertheless, as he suggests, it appears as though it might be right around the corner.
As frightening as that prospect may seem, and no one in their right mind desires it, persecution could have a positive effect on true religion.
For example, Bishop Polycarp, an older man at the time, was put to death for his faith in Smyrna in the year 167. He had tried very hard to escape arrest, but was eventually tracked down. When apprehended, he was ordered to curse Christ.
Polycarp replied:
“Six and eighty years have I served him, and he has done me nothing except good. How then can I curse my Lord and Savior?”
At that profession, his abductors sentenced him to death. Wood was gathered and piled in an open square, and the white-haired old man was made to mount the large heap. But when they sought to fasten him to the stake, he told them:
“No, leave me thus. He who has strengthened me to encounter the flames will give me the power also to stand firm at the stake!”report this ad
And in this manner, Polycarp suffered a martyr’s death.
Persecution has a way of making a genuine follower of Jesus Christ, an individual of sturdy and profound faith.
Other Christians died as Polycarp did during the 2nd Century, and their heroism had a positive outcome in making Christians of that time nobler, purer, and vigorous in their walk with God. The persecuted became, as Tertullian said, “a fan which cleanses the Lord’s threshing-floor.”
Moreover, Christianity began to sweep the land.
To quote Tertullian again:
“We conquer in dying; we go forth triumphant at the very moment we seemed subdued….The oftener we are mown down, the more do we grow in number. The blood of Christians is the seed of the Church”.
Someone once wisely said, “Be careful for what you pray; you just might get it.” Quite sometime now, many faithful Christians have been praying earnestly for revival in the church and a spiritual awakening to sweep America.
The answer to such prayers may be on its way and coming via an unexpected means – persecution.
Online Church for Christ 
