It’s called The Exorcist Files. In its first year, the podcast had over 7.5 million downloads and has been at the top of Spotify charts for upwards of 40 weeks.
By Rick Renner
How would you like God to give you a weapon that can rip to shreds the devil’s strategies against you? Well, that’s exactly what He has done! Ephesians 6:17 declares that God has given you “…the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”!
We have an interesting incident that took place in Acts 18:6-16 while the Apostle Paul was in Corinth. Things were getting heated after the Apostle convinced Crispus, the leader of a local synagogue and his family, to believe that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. During that period, God actually spoke to Paul in a night vision, telling him not to be afraid but to stay in the city and keep preaching the Gospel. Eventually, several leading Jews in the city came together in a ‘united attack’ and dragged the Apostle Paul before the proconsul of Achaia, a man by the name of Gallio. Proconsul was the title used for the governor of an area or the mayor of a city. They accused Paul of causing Jews “to worship God in ways contrary to the law.” Luke actually quotes Gallio, who immediately recognized this was not a legal matter, but rather a theological one. “If you Jews were making a complaint about some misdemeanor or serious crime, it would be reasonable for me to listen to …
Many remember the Columbine High School massacre that took place, in Columbine, Colorado on April 20, 1999, resulting in the deaths of 12 students and a teacher at the hands of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Harris and Klebold committed suicide when police finally stormed the school. This year marks the 25 anniversary of the horrific mass murder that also saw 24 people injured. One of the survivors of that shooting was Craig Scott, now 41, who recently shared with the Christian Post how a missionary trip to Africa helped him deal with his anger and hatred by enabling him to forgive the two killers. Scott was in the library when he heard shots going off at the school and hid under a table. While under the table, he prayed to God for help dealing with the fear and felt impressed by the Holy Spirit that he needed to get out of the library. He ended up helping several students leave the library as well. Most of the killings ended up taking place in the …
According to a poll conducted by the Metropolis Institute and the Association for Canadian Studies, the majority of Americans and Canadians do not trust the UN, the National Post reports. When asked if they trusted the UN, only 30% of Americans and 38% of Canadians said that they did. The poll was taken three months after Hamas invaded Israel when the UN faced a barrage of criticism for its failure to condemn the attack. The survey found that in both countries, the people who leaned left politically had a greater trust in the UN than those who classified themselves as middle of the road or on the right. In the US, 54 percent of those who self-identified as left trusted the UN, compared to 38% for those who said they were in the center politically and 13.2% who leaned to the right. In Canada, 53.7% of those who leaned left trusted the UN, compared to 41% of those who identified as centrists and 23.5% of those who leaned right politically.
There was a bit of good news in a recent survey of Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, conducted by the American Bible Society, CBN reports. For the past 14 years, the American Bible Society has been asking Americans how much they engaged in the Bible. Based on how much they read the Bible and believe it is relevant to their everyday lives, the State of the Bible survey sorts Americans into three basic groups, ‘scripturally engaged’, ‘moveable middle’, and ‘disengaged’. Overall the survey found that the percentage of people who are considered ‘disengaged’ from the Bible, was at its highest percentage, 57%, in the survey’s 14-year history. This was up from 53% the previous year. However, amid this overall decline, the 2024 survey found that Gen Z was bucking this trend with 54% stating their lives had been transformed by reading the Bible, up from 50% the previous year. Another group that showed improvement was Black Americans. The survey found that the number of Black Americans who ‘engaged’ the Bible had increased …
Ok, I don’t smoke, either tobacco or anything stronger, but there was a time when I started. I realize now that I learned one of the most important life lessons if I was willing to learn. I was raised in a strict religious family, and we knew that we could never do many things. In my lifetime, I never heard my father swear, and I heard a story at his funeral, that his coworkers annoyed him, just to get him to say some of those words. Apparently, he never did. When I lived in that family, I was walking home from school with my friends, one afternoon, and I saw something on the ground. We all looked closer, and we found a cigarette butt, still smoldering, which a smoker had just thrown to the ground. I looked closely, and then I had an idea; a small boy idea. A voice in my head said, “I want to try that.” So, I picked up that cigarette butt and put the business end between my lips, and …
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