The Lord teaches us to ask for the Father’s provision of our daily bread. What does this mean in our modern culture where we are taught to take care of ourselves? This sermon by Cedrick Baker seeks to address this question.
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Daily Bread
• Cedrick Baker
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There many ways you can focus your prayer i.e., worship, thanksgiving, confession, consecration. Jesus teaches us that we should focus at least a part of our prayer time in petitioning or asking God to meet our needs, referring to the phrase ”daily bread.” In the historical context of this passage, the people to whom Jesus was speaking would have been poor, with no safety net. Less than 10% of the population had the economic standing to have the luxury of surplus.
In addition, ancient laborers were paid daily, and they usually earned just enough to cover their basic survival and no more. The word for “daily” has a double meaning. It refers to daily sustenance and to the sustenance that “comes after.” It has a meaning for what God is providing now and for the eschatological coming of God’s completed Kingdom.
This helps us to reorient our perspectives on God’s provision, especially in the modern context where we are challenged to depend on God because we often have even more than we need.
Martin Luther wrote, “For when you mention and pray for daily bread, you pray for everything that is necessary in order to have and enjoy daily bread and, on the other hand, against everything which interferes with it. Therefore you must open wide and extend your thoughts not only to the oven or the flour-bin but to the distant field and the entire land, which bears and brings to us daily bread and every sort of sustenance. For if God did not cause it to grow, and bless and preserve it in the field, we could never take bread from the oven or have any to set upon the table.”
We must remember that this life is a gift, as stated in James 1:17. We didn’t work for the gift. Our responsibility is to trust God for the fullness of life today. Our health, job, connections, community support, ability to navigate certain systems, education, family, etc., all of this is a gift. Remembering this can help us stay in a humble posture of prayer.
Our loving Father is teaching us how to communicate. His goal is to commune with us. He genuinely wants to fellowship, spend time, and connect with us. He desires to hear about and meet our needs, while allowing us to be part of the solution with our “say-so.” The challenge is that we must push against the tendency of self-reliance. Our job is to talk to our heavenly Father about our needs. Based on the technology and progress of modern society, it can be challenging to trust God for our daily needs. Jesus shows us it is important to trust and to remember that meeting our needs is God’s gift!
Hide Extended SummaryTopics: Disciplines, Prayer
Sermon Series: Sermon on the Mount, When You Pray
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The MuseCast: February 8
Focus Scripture:
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Matthew 6:11
Give us today our daily bread.
2 thoughts on “Daily Bread”
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Loved this!
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Key points: The Fathers will – Love is the language for access – what’s happening today is the lack of
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Greg did a podcast: Will We Have Technology in Heaven?
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Greg said that With Jesus’s new body He could walk through walls and go from here to there like boom!
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So Greg is kind of thinking NO.
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I have some expertise in the area of computers especially concerning AI, made my living in discovery mode then piecing together (adding to) AI template prototypes; however I think NOT also.
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I’d like to give a somewhat detailed explanation, but hopefully informative if you have an interest, using science, some of it yet theories so subject to change, for I believe it will connect the dots, add solidification, to Greg’s sermon today and numerous others he has given us.
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Following the development of MOS, Robert Horman invented the first static random-access memory (SRAM) in 1963. A year later the MOS SRAM was invented by John Schmidt. IBM finally utilized SRAMs commercially when they released the SP95 memory chip in 1965.
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Until then information was processed sequentially via tape drives a glorified file cabinet system. The first astronaut capsules were tube-based NOT solid state so they carried replacements just in case; for those of you who remember the tube tester in the entryway to Snyder’s Drug,
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In 1968 I took an IBM test in pattern recognition and scored second highest in the nation landing on a team writing the first worldwide reservation system for National Car Rental.
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In Chaos Theory, (a mathematical sub-discipline that studies complex systems), Helge von Koch discovered fractals and later Stanislaw Ulam discovered the Ulam Spiral, prime numbers huddling together, making the Ulam Rose.
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My first assignment was to write routines working with the SP95 memory chip and SRAM using prime numbers.
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Disk drives were portable – stored a limited amount of data – you had maybe five slots and let’s say 20 on the shelf – you just popped them in and out as need.
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A prime number is one that cannot be divided by any other number without having a remainder so using it as a divisor produces a result, in a range, from 1 to 1 less a given prime in a somewhat chaotic but evenly distributed pattern (Ulam Rose).
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Say you have potentially 3 million reservation records and you want to find the physical data on a disk in two physical I-Os.
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By creating the first level I-O record index, each record has 30 separate bucket entries, then dividing 3 million by 30 you get 100,000; the number of needed first level I-O index records.
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Using a close prime from above, (100,151), you RANDOMIZE, strip out any alpha and twist for the best evenly distribution, and then divide the randomized number by the prime to get a number between 1 and 100,150.
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Go to that index record placing, in the next open bucket of the 30, the original unstriped and twisted number and the physical address to the actual data stored on the SRAM device.
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There you go pretty simple: randomize to get the index key (1) I-O, walk the buckets to get the physical key to the data (2nd) I-O.
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We created multiple subsystems using this concept up until the 90’s when we discovered entering multiple SAME data into unique subset systems created mismatched duplicate entry information which leads to purchasing, NOT creating, large scale packaged complete one level systems, like SAP, where a piece of unique information was only entered and stored once in one spot.
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So maybe storing duplicate information inside every brain might be a little bogus.
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IT does a simple mimic of a cell which is at least a million times more complex than a quantum computer.
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How they discovered that.
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There are 200 billion-plus galaxies, more than the number of humans that have ever existed, each producing supermassive black holes, the contents very big stars imploding, from stars, collapsing into supernovas, that continually suck more and more into them but release stardust (the table of elements less three) that all matter in the universe is formed from to include us (precisely 3.9% the 1st three elements – the remainder 96.1% all the other elements).
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72.1% of the universe is dark energy with dark matter making up about 23.1% for a total of 96.1%. Hmm
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The rest, everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter, adds up to less than 4% of the universe.
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Today we know, Eric Kandel Nobel Prize, information is not stored in the brain only the indexes via enough neurons, (100 billion neurons each the potential of 15,000 connections), to exceed the requirements, (matter particles in the universe), for the passing of knowledge between an eternity of atom, (10 billion photons of intelligent force energy to 1 quark material ratio), conscious generations. There are between 10*78 to 10*82 atoms in the observable universe. Humans are creatures of habit while all other living organisms are instinctive. If you add enough energy to crack a proton it will promptly create a meson, or kaon, or Penta quark or possibly another proton as a result, you can’t destroy atoms, generations recycle doing a cosmic dance and concatenating generational information.
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I’m at a loss for words here. Pattern recognition is a right hemisphere artistic skill NOT left analytical so I’m much better with images. I think Greg has said if you want to figure out the exact why behind given event circumstances there’s a Chaos Theory butterfly effect behind it that’s entangled all the way back in time. We neither have the data nor the chipset to process nor comprehend that only God does. With extreme speed and accuracy, He can process that right to the now moment however the future generations are still open. He can only know them as possibilities.
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Every atom is made up of electrical charges, vibrating energy. Every cell is made of 100 trillion atoms that put out 1.4 volts.
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Scientific estimates of the number of cells in the human body ranged between 10*12 and 10*16.
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The average they come up with is 37.2 trillion cells so doing the math 1.4 * 37.2 = 52.08 trillion volts and there are 7 billion-plus of us on the planet. That’s a lot of juice to be running 24/7 and not be plugged in for recharging overnight. Off the grid, you might say.
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One other interesting fact is my laptop, it’s pretty jazzed, executes 1.5 billion instructions a second but all the neurons in a single body executes 400 trillion; sadly most spent on perseverating on the past or the future.
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As Greg says put your thinking cap on. Where does that energy come from and considering 200 billion-plus galaxies; how entangled and what might the complications be?
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Stop hold that thought:
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The first hard disk drives (RAMAC 350 produced by IBM), back in 1956 weighing in at well over a ton, could store only 3.75MB of data.
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In 1995 I built my first PC with a whopping 500MB drive that I got a super deal on it for only 500 bucks,
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Fast forward to the present day, and you can buy a 3.5-inch hard disk drive with 15TB of storage space. I bought a few portable 250 gig USB drives, two years ago, for 25 bucks each.
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In 1975 at American Hoist & Derik I wrote, Part Analysis, a piece of code that did both material requirement planning and forecasting in one program using two different Database methodology’s. The Hoist made some big stuff (cranes and derricks) and this code was the cat’s meow at that time. It ran in a 60k partition. That’s about 1/20 of a floppy disk. The 360 model 40 cost 2 million, sat on a raised floor for cooling, a million a year expense, and IBM SE’s would still come in and replace the overheated core.
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Today a cell phone has 80 thousand times the firepower and rarely burns up.
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Like natures Bacterial flagellum, the world’s most efficient motor (1/20,000 inch – 10,000 rpm), science has pieced together Nano-Tech cars measured between one and three nanometers – about 30,000 times smaller than a human hair.
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Sorry, I’m back.
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The current hopeful thinking is the implied expansion of the dark matter/energy between galaxies is actually caused by the shrinking of galaxies by stuff being sucked into black holes and then expelled out to include, beyond the stuff that makes up the normal matter universe, newly added zero-point energy, to the 96.1% dark areas, a new hopeful future fuel/energy resource.
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Everything even the 4% quarks, the only material in the universe, is actually a wave and a particle (a field), Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
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The remaining is intelligent energy, (Biblically: principalities, powers, thrones and us – ALL being SPIRITS); morphogenetic fields hierarchically organized existing as nested hierarchies, parts within wholes.
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Both energy and matter consist of – accumulative memory – of similar systems through cultures and time, so that all ‘remember’ not only how to look but also how to act.
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Consider the cells as manufacturing facilities each producing 2000 proteins a second and your part stuff, hopefully, the right food down your throat. Your stomach breaks it down and sends it off as atom particles. A protein is a string of several hundred amino acids, and an amino acid is a molecule having twenty or so atoms. Do the math 2000*200*21 = 8,400,000 now * 37.2 trillion cells. EVERY SECOND! A cell has millions of protein machine-controlled openings with specific key formats to accept specific materials, keeping the bad stuff out and expelling waste products. Messengers unravel the DNA for instructions on building the proteins and maintaining the protein equipment used in the manufacturing process. To ensure accuracy there is a two-step (RNA) process organizing them into preselected strings, joining them together and checking to be certain each string is folded into specific shapes and then shipping off to sites inside or outside the cell based on order requests. The only say so, beyond stuffing, we have here; is our emotional state signals we send to our cells, (Oh Oh incoherent/negative UN-LOVING compromises the immune system- turns it into fear flight mode), and rest is the business of morphogenetic fields. This little community does not have free will, being instinctive; they are subject to yours unless possibly you prescription drug them with enough.
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Aside from material particles, other habit patterns exist as social hierarchies which would encompass corporations and functional departments within.
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Others oriented; God’s possibilities, by nature, again Eric Kandel, but affected by pattern realms of a different nature, Romans 2:12, — (coherent incoherent) good and evil.
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Example: Folks operating in a coherent state will, in their imaginations, invasion (discover) God’s will of good possibilities, preordained from the foundation of the universe, as they correlate with, stored so far, actualities in this given specific morphic field area and then adding to it; however incoherent folk will only envision a chaotic set, detracting from, sowing chaos into their department area.
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The habit power of these fields would increase as more conformed to, and in so doing, would also increase the hierarchies within, above, and below as they correspond making it easier for other nested levels who follow to conform. (good or bad)
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Ephesians 6:12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
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As Greg often points out: So goes this cosmic dance, back and forth, from galaxies right down to the quarks and the powers that be, beneath them, in the every now moment.
Apart from God, the world would be, according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy), in a repetition of survival thinking lapsing from ordered behavior to more random. However, out of the collapsing entropy of all the galaxies God created one rock and fine-tuned it so it could support life, everybody could live on it and stand in stark contrast to all the other floating rocks in the universe. God, the divine Eros, confronts this world with new heights of unrealized opportunities opening up space for self-creativity; establishing what-is-not as relevant to what-is and lures the world toward new forms of realization. However God’s power is NOT in terms of God being coercive, that is dominating others. Instead, God’s power is persuasive. God uses his power in a way that brings people about willfully not forcing anyone to do anything. God is not about control.
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Whether this luring forward to another home is a new evolutionary or a restoration project is a debatable question but either way it’s about a loving non-coercive Father.
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So where is information stored if not in your head?
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The best theory, to date, would be in the CLOUD of the dark expanding universe.
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Roger Penrose is decanting his 2020 Nobel Prize and has had interesting conversations with William Lane Craig, side note: (I believe Greg had a debate with Bill on Penal Substitution Atonement), concerning Rogers Conformal Physical Cyclical Cosmology theory, his decant, and Bills Kalam Cosmological Argument with the implications or Lorentzian time. If Bill can convince Roger, I think he’s close, to become a Jesus follower they could go on to share the most mind-blowing Nobel Prize ever.
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Rogers describes himself as an atheist, though descended from a Hebrew scholar and of Russian Jewish heritage, but has rejected the idea that the universe is purposeless saying I think that there is something much deeper about its existence which we have very little inkling of at the moment.
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His problem is he believes now that we discover mathematics and more so possibly everything for the laws of physics and the fine-tuning of the universe has been in place since its foundation. So how did they get there? If from outside that is above even Rogers’s pay grade a matter of faith and that’s a new concept for him.
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Also, Templeton is sponsoring Rogers and Dr. Stuart Hameroff “Orch OR theory of conscious Neurobiology” concerning falsifiability Quantum interference ‘beats’ in tubulin and microtubules, a staggeringly high space-time frequency that if proven will put the final nail in Calvinism by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the future is about possibilities starting in your conscious imagination via microtubules neurofibrils between synapse neurotransmitters and receptors.
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The Bottom line is Greg gets it exactly right. The infinite intelligence of God knows the future as possibilities and is specifically focused on the likelihoods based on ALL actuaries since the foundation of the universe, of all the collected concatenations, of the entanglement of all things, from galaxies to quarks to include the quark dances; minuscule vibrating loops of preons (a set of fundamental point particles) every .0000000000000000000000023 (10-23) of a second,
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There is only one truth but we each have our own perceptions.
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In technical computer terms: We need a direct I-O interface with the Father and that ONLY comes from Jesus the son, the central processing unit NOT us we’re only peripheral units, and the ONLY language is love however there is a problem: There is malware (a network of lies – the Matrix) running amuck in our soul.
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The power of Satan’s lies and deceptions lies in the feelings and emotions that he is able to stimulate and stir within us. We need to cooperate with God to locate the malware and reconnect the neuron indexes to the Truth.
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As Greg has said The very now moment starts in our imagination, with the importance of (holding thoughts captive Philippians 4:8) bringing an empty frame, where God then brings the future, His will, to us as wave-like possibilities however we also have our own images from the past stored inside us, 100 times faster processor speed, that tends to fill the empty frame first.
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Greg did a series on a rider on an elephant. Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior but emotion, a major part of the elephant, does most of the work. The neocortex made the rider, controlled processes, possible but it also made the elephant, automatic processes, much smarter (100 times) faster. We are creatures of subconscious habit (98%) with some degree of consciousness (2%) some of the time.
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Love is the language for access but as Greg says TIC for TAC strategies are not the kingdom.
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We are all Pharisees self-righteous hypocrites. The truth is we are all very good a judging others however we are called to judge/hate the sin but not the sinner. Passing Judgements on sinners is above our pay grade.
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We can only deal with our own planks and only with God’s help. Given any wrongs we encounter at least a small portion (plank) of, let’s say 10%, is our piece. If we don’t resolve our part, as small as it may appear, we take it and the other 90% into our future and that will play havoc with the empty frame, remember above, in our imagination.
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If you don’t deal with your demons they’ll go into the cellars of your soul and they will lift weights.
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Ephesians 4:26-27 “In your anger do not sin” Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.
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People’s debts, their pieces, become your ongoing baggage. Tell your demons I’m closing the gym.
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Ephesians 4:31-32 Get rid of all bitterness, rage, and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
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So now Technology in Heaven:
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.Revelation 6:14 The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. 20:14 Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. 21:23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp
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Galaxies rolled up; forget the stardust we’re getting new bodies, glow from the Sun don’t need that either and the data stored in the gaps in between: only need the good data (survives with a reward) and the rest we’ll need to let it go (suffer loss). 1 Corinthians 3
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With all the incoherent emotional states in the lake of fire, there is no need for the elephant to be 300 times faster, frontal lobe activity will flourish, not tormented, and God, who can play 100 billion-plus games of chess at once, will process ALL data requests in a femtosecond or less.
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So why would you want to store duplicate data when you can get the real deal,
on-demand, with no elephant interference.
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Love is the language for access so if you are not willing to operate using this language you get a time out in the lake of fire until hopefully, you are willing to suffer the loss of your old OS and learn to operate in the language of LOVE.
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14 “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. 15 Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood
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16 “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you[a] this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”
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17 The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come, and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.
While you are learning you can get a drink of water but until you become proficient you can’t put on a white robe and join the party and eat the food.
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AS Greg says in his sermon (Hell in a nutshell) God will keep those folk in the lake of fire in the hope they will change their mind but when God sees there’s no longer any hope he annihilates them.
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C.S. Lewis – The Great Divorce the dwarf in chapter 12.
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The Tragedian is killing the dwarf. He is now so small that he’s indistinguishable from the chain. It appears, as Greg thinks, there is no longer any hope for him and God, in His mercy, annihilates him.
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So, like Greg, my two cents, as a NO however subject to change, for what it’s worth.
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As a final note, my friend and mentor Al Larson has passed away, now sleeping, awaiting Jesus’s return.
Cedrick:
I came back to your sermon because of the crazy stuff/opinions I inserted and now listing to Dan’s sermon Miracles and Microscopes, great stuff, constellation of neurons just blew me away so I had to come back and check my insanity and it all stills works well with his incites.
I now listened to your sermon again and wow also great stuff.
I just wanted to comment and leave a link to an interesting site I believe relates.
The Roman Empire, at Jesus’ time, was an upper and lower-class agrarian Society.
Upper: Senatorial Equestrian and Decurion
Patricians – an aristocrat or noblemen
Rulers and governors who made up 1% population but owed at least half the land
Also the priests owned another 15% of the land
Equites – retainers, ranging from military generals to expert bureaucrats and merchants who probably evolved from the lower class but could end up with considerable wealth and even some political power.
(Note: this was an agrarian society – not like ours, (the Christian Nation?), no middle class – it was not consumer driven.)
Lower: Plebeians Freedmen and slaves
Peasants (farmers), about half of the economy, whose annual crop went to support the upper classes. If they were lucky they lived at a subsistence level, barely able to support family, animals, and social obligations (taxes about a third of the crop) and still have enough for next year’s seed supply.
Workshop owners, small businesses (a 3rd), and Artisans, for example, Jesus a carpenter, about 5 percent of the population below the peasant in social class because they were usually recruited and replenished from its dispossessed members.
Freedman, ex-slaves, and beneath them were the degraded and Expendable classes – the former with origins occupations or conditions rendering them outcasts; the latter, as much as 10 percent of the population, ranging from beggars and outlaws to hustlers, day laborers, and slaves.
So 80% of the world, at that time, had very little.
In the US 38.1 million people, 11.8% are considered in poverty living on less than $33.26 a day however at the world level half-lives on less than $2.50 a day but are only considered at the international poverty level at US$1.90; 736 million people or 8%.
Bill Gates’s favorite site: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street how people live around the world