Eph. 5:3 But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints; 4 neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. 5 For this you know, that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. 6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. 7 Therefore do not be partakers with them.

Eph. 5:8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light 9 (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), 10 finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. 11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.


[b]11 "And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather EXPOSE them."[/b]

How many are willing to accept what is of the darkness? How many still look for security found in the sons of disobedience?

In Christ
Jeff

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Jeff Marshalek

bro Jeff
thw word says that the love of money is the root f all kinds of evil, i had no concept really of this as i was younger. however in seeing all the wird things that go on in politics, corperations, churches even and other institutions i think i'm beginning to inderstand what this means. basically people will do whatever for money and these coperations moving their operations overseas and saving billions on manufacturing here but selling the products to us for get that once the middle class is all out of work, they will go down coz noone will be left to buy their products. all these additional burdens on the economy will eventually cause it to collapse and all this prosperity nonsense will be exposed. some people will come running to God after that and shall surely be saved. there will be those who are so attached to all this they won't let go. i don't know about y'all but the Lord has shown me how pittiful this existence we hold so dear is. wake up, work, run here and there, pay bills etc...surely there is something better!we are pilgrims as the word says and i'm saying this as a man who is LONGING and WEEPING for home... brethren let those who have ears hear and repent now before the fire comes. let us be concerned with the kingdom of God which is everlasting rather than building earthly empires which the Lord will surely destroy.

let us repent, repent and repent some more before an all holy God!

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Farai Bamu

Bro,

It is a pitiful experience when one has tasted the goodness of His word. How good it is to be a pilgrim. This is true freedom.

In Christ
Jeff

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Jeff Marshalek

By Robert Parry


It was and still is about the oil, stupid!


When Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson publicly decried the Bush administration’s bungling of U.S. foreign policy, the focus of the press coverage was on Wilkerson’s depiction of a “cabal” headed by Vice President Dick Cheney that had hijacked the decision-making process.

Largely overlooked were Wilkerson’s frank admissions about the importance of oil in justifying a long-term U.S. military intervention in Iraq. “The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption,” the retired Army colonel said in a speech on Oct. 19.

While bemoaning the administration’s incompetence in implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the U.S. government now had no choice but to succeed in Iraq or face the necessity of conquering the Middle East within the next 10 years to ensure access to the region’s oil supplies.

“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly,” Wilkerson said. “That’s how serious we thought about it.”

The centrality of Iraq’s oil in Wilkerson’s blunt comments contrasted with three years of assurances from the Bush administration that the war had almost nothing to do with oil.

When critics have called the Iraq War a case of “blood for oil,” George W. Bush’s defenders have dismissed them as “conspiracy theorists.” The Bush defenders insisted the president went to war out of concern about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda, neither of which turned out to be true. Later, Bush cited humanitarian concerns and the desire to spread democracy.

Always left out of the administration’s war equation – or referenced only obliquely – was the fact that Iraq sits atop one of the world’s largest known oil reserves at a time when international competition is intensifying to secure reliable oil supplies.

But Wilkerson is not the first senior Bush administration official to cite the importance of oil in the U.S. calculus toward Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill made similar assertions in 2004.

O’Neill, who was fired in late 2002 after disagreeing with Bush on tax cuts and Iraq, told author Ron Suskind that Bush’s first National Security Council meeting just days into his presidency included a discussion of invading Iraq. O’Neill said even at that early date, the message from Bush was “find a way to do this.”

Oil and Iraq were soon mixing in the administration’s thinking about energy and politics.

On Feb. 3, 2001 – only two weeks after Bush took office – an NSC document instructed NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney’s Energy Task Force because it was “melding” two previously unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

Before this disclosure, which appeared in The New Yorker three years later, it was believed that Cheney’s secretive task force was focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

But the NSC document suggested that the Bush administration from its first days recognized the linkage between ousting unreliable leaders like Saddam Hussein and securing oil reserves for future U.S. consumption. In other words, the Cheney task force appears to have had a military component to “capture” oil fields in “rogue states.” [For more on the NSC document, see The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004.]

After al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush had the political opening he needed to turn his designs on Iraq into reality. Though there was no credible evidence connecting Hussein to al-Qaeda and Sept. 11, Bush and Cheney made the linkage anyway.

Active preparations for war with Iraq were soon underway. Behind the scenes, O’Neill said he watched as the administration refined its plans for how to divvy up Iraq’s oil reserves after the invasion.

“Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld’s intelligence arm, mapping Iraq’s oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset,” Suskind wrote in The Price of Loyalty.

Beyond giving U.S. firms access to Iraq’s oil, the Bush administration recognized how the oil could help induce both allies and rivals to back broader U.S. policies.

“One document, headed ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,’ lists companies from 30 countries – including France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom – their specialties, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest,” Suskind wrote in recounting O’Neill’s observations.

“An attached document maps Iraq with markings for ‘supergiant oilfield,’ ‘other oilfield,’ and ‘earmarked for production sharing,’ while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine ‘blocks’ to designate areas for future exploration.

“The desire to ‘dissuade’ countries from engaging in ‘asymmetrical challenges’ to the United States … matched with plans for how the world’s second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world’s contractors made for an irresistible combination, O’Neill later said.”

In pronouncements to the American people, however, Bush and other administration officials denied that oil was a reason for the Iraq invasion. Instead they stressed the danger posed by Iraq’s supposed WMD, then the humanitarian interest in removing Hussein, then encouraging democracy to flourish in the region, and finally preventing the spread of Islamic extremism.

Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was among the career military officers pulled into the war planning, said she and her fellow officers were troubled by how the American people were manipulated.

“Many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this (Iraq) agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people,” she wrote. “Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses.” [See Salon.com’s “The New Pentagon Papers.”]


Wilkerson’s Critique

By contrast, Wilkerson openly acknowledged the oil factor both in explaining the U.S. invasion and in justifying the need to remain in Iraq to ensure that any new government is not hostile to American interests.

Despite his earlier doubts about the wisdom of invading, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Powell said the Middle East’s oil reserves makes withdrawal from Iraq more dangerous than leaving Vietnam three decades ago.

“We can’t leave Iraq; we simply can’t,” Wilkerson said in his Oct. 19 speech to the New America Foundation in Washington.

“I’m not evaluating the decision to go to war. That’s a different matter. But we’re there, we’ve done it, and we cannot leave. I would submit to you that if we leave precipitously or we leave in a way that doesn’t leave something there we can trust, if we do that, we will mobilize the nation, put five million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East within a decade. That’s what we’ll have to do.”

Wilkerson made clear that what made Iraq such a strategic concern was the oil.

“We consume 60 percent of the world’s resources,” he said. “We have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets (in the Middle East).


James 4:

1 Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? 2 You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. 4 Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.


Be free in Christ

Jeff

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Jeff Marshalek

bro Jeff
it is indeed the most wonderful thing to be free in Christ! no longer bound by the things of this world. i see all this politicking and the Lord has shown me that much of it is a farce to placate the masses by speeches etc and it angers my spirit. what's sad is that so many people buy into it...i see people ripping and running trying to secure this and that thing for the future and perhaps a few think i'm crazy for being unconcerned. bro i've pledged my life and allegiance to heaven and that peace that paul talks of in philippiams is so real to me now. all this scrambling about for security is due to a lack of reliance on God.

but happy are those that He has graciously allowed to learn to lean on Him, His grace shall be sufficient.

it's amazing how much shadiness goes on behind the scenes...however what is done in the dark shall surely come to light...

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Farai Bamu

Brother Farai

Continue to be that light in the dark place. Preach the good news of peace to those who still hold onto what is "seen," what is "the country he or she belongs to."

God Bless
Jeff

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Jeff Marshalek

Jeff,

What are you driving at?

You made a big case in detailing how lies and deception has been a driving force in national politics and in the decision making process. What about it on the local level? I read recently how some officials declares Mississippi to have so such corruption among its elected persons making them among the highest in the nation. Without that information, I have been coming to the point where I am thinking I should not even vote in local politics! You look at the canditates and try to decide which one is the better of the two. I have done jury duty, one being a murder case. There was jury tampering done and the judge was said to have been bribed. (He did not run in the next election, citing personal ambitions outside of being judge).

Jeff, I can not do anything about national politics. But what about the local level, where I live, where it is reported to be so corrupt? (Oh, BTW, the USA justice department is looking into the way elections are run in our county and are on the brink or have -am not certain - of filing some lawsuits which will be very interesting to watch... reverse discrimination, among other things.) And neither am I about to run for office. We have been told of honest people who have tried and withdrew from running because they complained of the corruption there, that an honest person can not be elected.

What do you think a person should do?

ginnyrose

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Sandra Miller

Sister ginnyrose wrote:

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Jeff Marshalek

Sister ginnyrose wrote:

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Jeff Marshalek

One thing is certain, we can not look to secular government to provide us with a utopia on earth. It likely is more of a mircle there is any semblance of law and order considering the corruption in high places.

You are right. There is nothing in secular government that can ever take the place of Jesus. Too many are looking for government to do for them which it can not do and never had the ability to do.

But I still wonder since my experience as a juror whether it was even worthwhile. I learned a lot....do appreciate the court process but when it is tainted by corruption, one cannot even make a difference. Or so it seems...


ginnyrose

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Sandra Miller