Where is your Paradigm Shift? Part 3
**
Mountains of fear,
Mountains of doubt,
Mountains within,
Mountains without—
Whatever your mountain,
YOU CAN MOVE IT if you only have
Faith As A Grain Of Mustard Seed! **
Date: 1/3/2014 9:31:21 AM ( 10 y ) ... viewed 11323 times - Where is your Paradigm Shift?
- How can you get a shift?
- It is possible through the Faith and Belief in Jesus Christ!
- Because Jesus Christ made the greatest Paradigm shift in the history of the world!
- When are you going to make a Paradigm Shift in your life?
- Move toward the positive truth that lays before you; and not follow the fickle world pathway most of the people!
=======================================================
Here are some ways to make a shift in your life:
1) No matter your circunstances stop blaming it for your position in life! Look at some of the people who have made a Paradigm Shift that changed not only their own lives but your life and the world!
I could fill over a hundred pages with stories of people who have been born poor, or limited by other circumstances... maybe you should go read about:
=================================================
- John Newton (one of my hero's), read " Finding God in the story of Amazing Grace." by Bruner . Ware - Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
John Henry Newton (24 July 1725 /4 August – 21 December 1807) was an English sailor and evangelical Anglican cleric. Starting his career at sea at a young age, he became involved with the slave trade for a few years. After experiencing a Christian conversion, he became a cleric and hymn-writer and later a prominent supporter of the abolition of slavery.
He was the author of many hymns, including "Amazing Grace" and "Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken".
Early life
John Newton was born in Wapping, London, in 1725, the son of John Newton Sr., a shipmaster in the Mediterranean service, and Elizabeth. His mother was the only daughter of Simon Scatliff, an instrument maker from London (but the marriage register records her maiden name as Seatcliffe). Elizabeth was raised as a Nonconformist Christian. Elizabeth died of tuberculosis (then called consumption) in July 1732, about two weeks before John's seventh birthday. Two years later, he went to live in Aveley, the home of his father's new wife. Newton spent two years at boarding school. At age eleven he went to sea with his father. Newton sailed six voyages before his father retired in 1742. Newton's father made plans for him to work at a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Instead, Newton signed on with a merchant ship sailing to the Mediterranean Sea.
In 1743, while on the way to visit some friends, Newton was captured and pressed into the naval service by the Royal Navy. He became a midshipman aboard HMS Harwich. At one point Newton attempted to desert and was punished in front of the crew of 350. Stripped to the waist and tied to the grating, he received a flogging of eight dozen lashes and was reduced to the rank of a common seaman.
Following that disgrace and humiliation, Newton initially contemplated murdering the captain and then committing suicide by throwing himself overboard. He recovered, both physically and mentally. Later, while Harwich was en route to India, he transferred to Pegasus, a slave ship bound for West Africa. The ship carried goods to Africa and traded them for slaves to be shipped to England and other countries.
Newton proved to be a continual problem for the crew of Pegasus. They left him in West Africa with Amos Clowe, a slave dealer. Clowe took Newton to the coast and gave him to his wife, Princess Peye, an African duchess. Newton was abused and mistreated along with her other slaves. It was this period that Newton later remembered as the time he was "once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in West Africa."
Early in 1748 he was rescued by a sea captain who had been asked by Newton's father to search for him.
In 1750 he married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Catlett, in St. Margaret's Church, Rochester.
* Spiritual conversion
He sailed back to England in 1748 aboard the merchant ship Greyhound, which was carrying beeswax and dyer's wood, now referred to as camwood. During this voyage, he experienced a spiritual conversion.
It was when the ship encountered a severe storm off the coast of Donegal and almost sank. Newton awoke in the middle of the night and finally called out to God as the ship filled with water. After he called out, the cargo came out and stopped up the hole, and the ship was able to drift to safety. It was this experience which he later marked as the beginnings of his conversion to evangelical Christianity. As the ship sailed home, Newton began to read the Bible and other religious literature. By the time he reached Britain, he had accepted the doctrines of evangelical Christianity. The date was 10 May 1748, an anniversary he marked for the rest of his life.
From that point on, he avoided profanity, gambling, and drinking. Although he continued to work in the slave trade, he had gained a considerable amount of sympathy for the slaves. He later said that his true conversion did not happen until some time later: "I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full sense of the word, until a considerable time afterwards."
* Slave trading
Newton returned to Liverpool, England, and, partly through the influence of his father's friend Joseph Manesty, obtained a position as first mate aboard the slave ship Brownlow, bound for the West Indies via the coast of Guinea. During the first leg of this voyage, while in west Africa (1748–1749), Newton acknowledged the inadequacy of his spiritual life.
While he was sick with a fever, he professed his full belief in Christ and asked God to take control of his destiny. He later said that this experience was his true conversion and the turning point in his spiritual life. He claimed it was the first time he felt totally at peace with God.
Still, he did not renounce the slave trade until later in his life.
After his return to England in 1750, he made three further voyages as captain of the slave-trading ships Duke of Argyle (1750) and African (1752–1753 and 1753–1754). He only gave up seafaring and his active slave-trading activities in 1754, after suffering a severe stroke, but continued to invest his savings in Manesty's slaving operations.
Anglican priest
In 1755 Newton became tide surveyor (a tax collector) of the Port of Liverpool, again through the influence of Manesty. In his spare time, he was able to study Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac. He became well known as an evangelical lay minister. In 1757, he applied to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England, but it was more than seven years before he was eventually accepted.
Such was his frustration during this period of rejection that he also applied to the Methodists, Independents and Presbyterians, and applications were even mailed directly to the Bishops of Chester and Lincoln and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.
Eventually, in 1764, he was introduced by Thomas Haweis to Lord Dartmouth, who was influential in recommending Newton to the Bishop of Chester, and who suggested him for the living of Olney, Buckinghamshire. On 29 April 1764 Newton received deacon's orders, and finally became a priest on 17 June.
As curate of Olney, Newton was partly sponsored by an evangelical philanthropist, the wealthy Christian merchant John Thornton, who supplemented his stipend of £60 a year with £200 a year "for hospitality and to help the poor". He soon became well known for his pastoral care, as much as for his beliefs, and his friendship with Dissenters and evangelical clergy caused him to be respected by Anglicans and Nonconformists alike.
He spent sixteen years at Olney, during which time so popular was his preaching that the church had a gallery added to accommodate the large numbers who flocked to hear him.
Some five years later, in 1772, Thomas Scott, later to become a biblical commentator and co-founder of the Church Missionary Society, took up the curacy of the neighboring parishes of Stoke Goldington and Weston Underwood. Newton was instrumental in converting Scott from a cynical 'career priest' to a true believer, a conversion Scott related in his spiritual autobiography The Force Of Truth (1779).
In 1779 Newton was invited by John Thornton to become Rector of St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, London, where he officiated until his death. The church had been built by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1727 in the fashionable Baroque style. Newton then became one of only two evangelical preachers in the capital, and he soon found himself gaining in popularity among the growing evangelical party.
He was a strong supporter of evangelicalism in the Church of England, and remained a friend of Dissenters as well as Anglicans.
Many young churchmen and others inquiring about their faith visited him and sought his advice, including such well-known social figures as the writer and philanthropist Hannah More, and the young Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, who had recently undergone a crisis of conscience and religious conversion as he was contemplating leaving politics. Having sought his guidance, Newton encouraged Wilberforce to stay in Parliament and "serve God where he was".
In 1792, he was presented with the degree of Doctor of Divinity by the College of New Jersey (now Princeton)
Abolitionist
Newton in his later years
In 1788, 34 years after he had retired from the slave trade, Newton broke a long silence on the subject with the publication of a forceful pamphlet.
"Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade", in which he described the horrific conditions of the slave ships during the Middle Passage, and apologized for "a confession, which ... comes too late ... It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders." A copy of the pamphlet was sent to every MP, and sold so well that it swiftly required reprinting.
Newton became an ally of his friend William Wilberforce, leader of the Parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade. He lived to see the passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807.
Newton has been called hypocritical by some modern writers for continuing to participate in the slave trade while holding strong Christian convictions. Newton later came to believe that during the first five of his nine years as a slave trader he had not been a Christian in the full sense of the term: "I was greatly deficient in many respects ... I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full sense of the word, until a considerable time later." Although this "true conversion" to Christianity also had no immediate impact on his views on slavery, he eventually came to revise them.
Writer and Hymnist
The vicarage in Olney where Newton wrote the hymn that would become "Amazing Grace".
In 1767 William Cowper, the poet, moved to Olney. He worshiped in the church, and collaborated with Newton on a volume of hymns, which was eventually published as Olney Hymns in 1779. This work had a great influence on English hymnology.
The volume included Newton's well-known hymns
"Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken,"
"How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds!,"
"Let Us Love, and Sing, and Wonder,"
"Come, My Soul, Thy Suit Prepare,"
"Approach, My Soul, the Mercy-seat",
and "Faith's Review and Expectation," which has come to be known by its opening phrase, "Amazing Grace".
Many of Newton's (as well as Cowper's) hymns are preserved in the Sacred Harp. He also contributed to the Cheap Repository Tracts.
Also, he wrote an anonymous autobiography called An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable And Interesting Particulars in the Life of ------ Communicated, in a Series of Letters, to the Reverend T. Haweiss. described as 'written in an easy style, distinguished by great natural shrewdness, and sanctified by the Lord God and prayer'.
==================================================
- Richard Paul Evans (see his story in book "Four Doors")
Evans graduated from Cottonwood High School in Salt Lake City. He graduated with a B.A. degree from the University of Utah in 1984. While working as an advertising executive he wrote a Christmas story for his children. Unable to find a publisher or an agent, he self-published the work in 1993 as a paperback novella entitled The Christmas Box. He distributed it to book stores in his community.
The book became a local bestseller, prompting Evans to publish the book nationally. The next year The Christmas Box hit #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, inciting an auction for the publishing rights among the world's top publishing houses. Evans signed a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster, who paid Evans $4.2 million in an advance.[1] Released in hardcover in 1995, The Christmas Box became the first book to simultaneously reach the number-one position on the New York Times bestseller list for both paperback and hardcover editions. That same year, the book was made into a television movie of the same title, starring Richard Thomas and Maureen O'Hara.
Evans has subsequently written 31 nationally best-selling books,[2] including those for children, with conservative Christian themes and appealing to family values. His 1996 book Timepiece was made into a television movie featuring James Earl Jones and Ellen Burstyn, as were 1998's The Locket, which starred Vanessa Redgrave, and 2003's A Perfect Day, which starred Rob Lowe and Christopher Lloyd.
During the Spring of 1997, Evans founded The Christmas Box House International, an organization devoted to building shelters and providing services for abused and neglected children. To date, more than 35,000 children have been served by Christmas Box House facilities.
===================================================
- Suprise Sithole (Surprise "Supressa" Sithole was called by the Lord Jesus Christ at a young age of 15 when the Lord told him to leave everything behind. Surprise loves Jesus more than life itself. This all consuming passion drives him to the darkest and most unreached areas of the world with one desire alone - to see the glory of the Lord cover the earth as the waters cover the sea (Hab 2:14). With a special impartation to catalyze revival fire all over the world, Surprise is often sent by the Bakers to stir an unquenchable hunger for Him and the harvest. Surprise is married to Trythina, and they have three sons. The Sithole's live in Nelspruit, South Africa where they direct the work of IRIS-Africa and Partners In Harvest.
======================================================
- Nasir Siddiki (Siddiki was brought up in London, England. He worked as a marketing executive at A.L. Williams, now Primerica Financial Services, before a life-threatening bout with shingles in 1987, at the age of thirty-four, which he testifies led to his conversion from Islam to Christianity.
=====================================================
- Brother Lawrence ("The practice of the presence of God")
Compiled by Father Joseph De Beaufort, this book introduces us to a 17th century Carmelite monk known as Brother Lawrence. Lawrence worked in the kitchens and as a cobbler for the Carmelites. He rejoiced in everyday tasks, prayed constantly, and was known around the monastery for his kindness and willingness to help others. Brother Lawrence recounts in detail how to gain constant and comforting connection to the Almighty. Readers have treasured this little book for centuries because of Brother Lawrence's honest advice and his obvious passion for spiritual matters.
====================================================
- Ron Wyatt (Wyatt was as a nurse-anesthetist in a hospital in Madison, Tennessee, when in 1960, at the age of 27, he saw a picture in Life Magazine of the Durupınar site, mountain near Mount Ararat Noah's Ark... Started Wyatt on his career as an amateur archaeologist. From 1977 until his death in 1999 he made over one hundred trips to the Middle East, his interests widening to take in a wide variety of references from the Old and New Testaments.
=================================================
- Henry Ford(master mind of mass production)
Automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863, on his family's farm in Dearborn, Michigan. From the time he was a young boy, Ford enjoyed tinkering with machines. Farm work and a job in a Detroit machine shop afforded him ample opportunities to experiment. He later worked as a part-time employee for the Westinghouse Engine Company. By 1896, Ford had constructed his first horseless carriage which he sold in order to finance work on an improved model.
Ford incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903, proclaiming, "I will build a car for the great multitude." In October 1908, he did so, offering the Model T for $950. In the Model T's nineteen years of production, its price dipped as low as $280. Nearly 15,500,000 were sold in the United States alone. The Model T heralds the beginning of the Motor Age; the car evolved from luxury item for the well-to-do to essential transportation for the ordinary man.
Ford revolutionized manufacturing. By 1914, his Highland Park, Michigan plant, using innovative production techniques, could turn out a complete chassis every 93 minutes. This was a stunning improvement over the earlier production time of 728 minutes. Using a constantly-moving assembly line, subdivision of labor, and careful coordination of operations, Ford realized huge gains in productivity.
In 1914, Ford began paying his employees five dollars a day, nearly doubling the wages offered by other manufacturers. He cut the workday from nine to eight hours in order to convert the factory to a three-shift workday. Ford's mass-production techniques would eventually allow for the manufacture of a Model T every 24 seconds. His innovations made him an international celebrity.
Ford's affordable Model T irrevocably altered American society. As more Americans owned cars, urbanization patterns changed. The United States saw the growth of suburbia, the creation of a national highway system, and a population entranced with the possibility of going anywhere anytime. Ford witnessed many of these changes during his lifetime, all the while personally longing for the agrarian lifestyle of his youth. In the years prior to his death on April 7, 1947, Ford sponsored the restoration of an idyllic rural town called Greenfield Village.
==================================================
- Yeshua - Jesus Christ (mainly New Testament)
In Jesus’ own time on earth, the biggest resistance to his ministry came from the religious leaders of his day because like so many religious people they thought they understood what God was all about and what God’s plans were and what God would look like. So, let’s remember that God is so much bigger than we understand.
Whether you are an atheist who thinks that there is no God, or an agnostic who thinks we cannot really know if there is a God on this side of heaven, or a deeply spiritual person who is sitting on some amazing experiences with God, please remain open to discovering something new about God. Be careful not to be like the six blind men of indostan who only understand a piece of the elephant but think they have it all figured out.
Let’s be like children who accept whatever God is doing with open hearts. I’m not saying that we need to be gullible. But we do need to try to stay open to learning and discovery — especially concerning the invisible realm. Jesus said that it is impossible to enter the kingdom of God without becoming like a little child.
Unfortunately as children many of us were deceived by adults and lost our child-like faith.
We were tricked into believing that there was a tooth fairy and a Santa Claus who flies reindeer and other things that we later found were not true. It is no wonder that now we also have trouble believing in angels and God who are other beings we have heard about but never actually saw.
God wants us to know that he really is there and that he really does care about us.
=====================================================
Continued later with more facts in part 4 ...
Add This Entry To Your CureZone Favorites! Print this page
Email this page
Alert Webmaster
|