My friend in the Middle East visited again this summer to super charge and challenge my thoughts on signs and wonders.  The Bible is filled with supernatural signs and wonders.  The western world teaches that these were only for the time ‘back then’ or explains these events away by claiming that people ‘back then’ were very naive.  These miracles never actually happened, were fancy analogies/examples of key teaching principles, or misunderstood by superstitious people back in the past.

What if these signs and wonders could be seen today?

This is the 1st of 3 sermons given by my friend from the Middle East.  I would love to know what you think….

The church in America would do well to take lessons from the church throughout the world that is exploding with prayer.  A missionary friend of mine has seen an explosion of miracles and healings (more on that to follow).

These quotes challenge and empower me to ‘pray without ceasing’:

http://s0.ilike.com/play#Jeremy+Riddle:Surrendered+In+Praise:109656268:s41489609.10987201.14041466.0.2.50%2Cstd_be1756b6612f4da6a04105fe3fcc09b2

Whenever I’m low and sinking down
When I’m overwhelmed and doubts abound
When I’ve lost all heart and the will to fight
When despair sets in and my day is night

Lift up my head, make steel my gaze
Cast out my fear, move me to faith
Surrendered in praise
To Your glorious grace, Jesus

Whenever I’m tired and I feel alone
When oppression mounts and trials come
When the father of lies, his arrows fly
When there are no answers
And my dreams, they die

In my heart of hearts where these battles rage
My strength it fails and my courage fades
In my distress I cry aloud to You

You lift my head, and You steel my gaze
You cast out fear, and I’m moved to faith
Surrendered in praise
To Your glorious grace, Jesus

http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2009spring/article1.html

Another link from the Stanford Medicine magazine: Vaccinate

“The importance of dopamine was discovered by accident. In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner, two neuroscientists at McGill University, decided to implant an electrode deep into the center of a rat’s brain. The precise placement of the electrode was largely happenstance; at the time, the geography of the mind remained a mystery. But Olds and Milner got lucky. They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. Whenever you eat a piece of chocolate cake, or listen to a favorite pop song, or watch your favorite team win the World Series, it is your NAcc that helps you feel so happy.

“But Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. They placed the electrodes in several rodents’ brains and then ran a small current into each wire, making the NAccs continually excited. The scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just huddle in the corners of their cages, transfixed by their bliss. Within days, all of the animals had perished. They died of thirst.

“It took several decades of painstaking research, but neuroscientists eventually discovered that the rats had been suffering from an excess of dopamine. The stimulation of the NAcc triggered a massive release of the neurotransmitter, which overwhelmed the rodents with ecstasy. In humans, addictive drugs work the same way: a crack addict who has just gotten a fix is no different than a rat in an electrical rapture. The brains of both creatures have been blinded by pleasure. This, then, became the dopaminergic cliche; it was the chemical explanation for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

“But happiness isn’t the only feeling that dopamine produces. Scientists now know that this neurotransmitter helps to regulate all of our emotions, from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. It is the common neural currency of the mind, the molecule that helps us decide among alternatives. By looking at how dopamine works inside the brain, we can see why feelings are capable of providing deep insights. While Plato disparaged emotions as irrational and untrustworthy – the wild horses of the soul – they actually reflect an enormous amount of invisible analysis.”

Author: Jonah Lehrer
Title: How We Decide
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date: Copyright 2009 by Jonah Lehrer
Pages: Kindle Loc. 463-538.

Marshill’s newest pastor does a GREAT job of describing how to better find our calling in life….

How do we know God’s will? How do we know our calling?

This sermon ends with a GREAT spiritual meditative prayer exercise that I highly recommend.

Please let us know what you think.

“It was Leider’s dream to be able to provide financial assistance to those seeking second opinions with their sarcoma.
On her website, before she died, Leider wrote: “In closing, I would like to share two simple messages that can profoundly impact the life of a cancer patient. First, for those who have a diagnosis of cancer, maintain your follow-up appointments and tests. Until there is a cure, I believe that early detection is essential in the fight against cancer. Secondly, never succumb to the belief that your life is on hold because you have cancer or that cancer define who you are.”
“Strive to live, experience and thrive in the midst of cancer!” Leider added.”

“Over the years, an enormous amount of research has been done in an attempt to determine how a person’s performance on an IQ test…translates to real-life success…The relationship between success and IQ only works up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage.”

After listing where the last 25 Nobel Loreates in Chemistry and Medicine gradutate from college, it is clear that you don’t have to go to Harvard to be successful. “To be a Nobel Prize winner, apparently, you have to be smart enough to get into…college…That’s all….”

“In a devastating critique, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites–and dispensed with IQs altogether–he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of genisues. ‘By no stretch of the imagination or of standars of genius,’ Sorokin concluded, ‘is the ‘gifted group’ as a whole ‘gifted.’” By the time Terman came out with his fourth volume of Genetic Studies of Genius, the word ‘genius’ had all but vanished. ‘We have seen,’ Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, ‘that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”

“You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence…so where does something like practical intelligence come from? We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It’s something, at least in part, that’s in your genes…But social savvy is knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.”

“What was the difference between the As and the Cs? Terman ran through every conceivable explanation. He looked at their physical and mental health…he compared…what their precise IQ scores were in elementary and high school. In the end, only one thing mattered: family background. The As overwhelmingly came from…homes filled with books…etc…the Cs lacked…a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.”

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell