THE ONE YEAR ILLUSTRATIONS CLUB

In 1519 Capitan Hernando Cortes and a small army left the Spanish held island of Cuba and set out on one of the greatest conquests in the history of the world, ~When Cortez, ordered his crew to  fight the Aztecs in Mexico , he met resistance. After all, his crew was grossly outnumbered. What was the incentive?  Once they were ashore, Cortez set fire to his own ships.  Bernal Diaz tells that Cortes was advised by his men to destroy his ships. Diaz states, “. . . we who were his friends advised him . . . not to leave a single ship in port, but to destroy them all immediately, in order to leave no cause of trouble behind.” (Diaz, 130) Diaz goes on to say, “The ships were destroyed with our full knowledge, w ith that act, he changed the question from “Why should we attack the natives?” to “How will we win the fight?” The incentive was now eminently clear to crew members-saving their own lives. They no longer had a Plan B to fall back on. Interestingly, the Aztecs, who witn...

When it was built for an international exposition in the last century, the structure was called monstrous by the citizens of the city, who demanded it be torn down as soon as the exposition was over. Yet from the moment its architect first conceived it, he took pride in it and loyally defended it from those who wished to destroy it. He knew it was destined for greatness. Today it is one of the architectural wonders of the modern world and stands as the primary landmark of Paris , France . The architect, of course, was Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. His famous tower was built in 1889. In the same way we are struck by Jesus' loyalty to another structure, the church; which he entrusted to an unlikely band of disciples, whom he defended, prayed for, and prepared to spread the gospel. To outsiders they (and we) must seem like incapable blunderers, but Jesus, the architect of the church, knows this structure is destined for greatness when he returns and He defends with a passions equaled to...

The supply clerk was captured March 23 after her 507th Maintenance Company convoy was ambushed in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah . The Prisoner of War was rescued from an Iraqi’s on April 1 by U.S. commandos, reportedly after a tip from an Iraqi lawyer, which also led to the recovery of eight bodies of soldiers who had been captured along with her. When U.S. commandos staged their daring rescue in Nasiriyah, they found a frightened woman who hid under a sheet when they stormed into her room. Jessica Lynch, called out an American soldier, approaching her bed. “We are United States soldiers and were here to rescue you and take you home”. Peering from behind the sheet as he removed his helmet, she looked up and said, “I’m an American soldier, too.” Never in her life was she so glad to see an American face, even more so, that is was the face of her deliverer. Have you seen the face of your deliverer? You are the captive and Jesus is the Deliver!

Few doubt that Americans care about improving their health. You might even say some of us are obsessed with it: Our smoking rate is down, sales of nutritional supplements are up, restaurants with low-calorie fare are thriving and throngs of walkers and runners crowd local 5K races every weekend. But there's one area where too many of us still stumble over good intentions — following our prescriptions. The American Heart Association reports that 12 percent of American adults fail to fill some prescriptions; 12 percent don't take a medication after bringing it home; 22 percent take a smaller dosage than prescribed; and nearly 30 percent stop taking their medicine before it runs out — and analysts believe that surveys underestimate  non adherence  because some patients lie about whether they're taking their drugs. "It doesn't work for patients to decide for themselves what medicines they'll take, when or for how long," she says. Diabetics who reduce their i...

Tom turned to Mark and said, “hey, Mark, what did you say to Paul yesterday? I saw him the day before and he was really down in the dumps; said he spoke with you and you really helped him. I tried talking to him too, I told him this, I told him that, but I couldn't seem to help him. What could you have possibly told him that I didn't, I’m really curious to know”.   Mark turned around and said, “actually I didn't’ say a thing, I just listened”.

How many Bibles do you have in your house? For most of us, Bibles are easily accessible, and many of us have several. That we have the Bible in English owes much to William Tyndale, sometimes called the Father of the English Bible. 90% of the King James Version of the Bible and 75% of the Revised Standard Version are from the translation of the Bible into English made by William Tyndale, yet Tyndale himself was burned at the stake for his work on this day, October 6, 1536. Back in the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe was the first to make (or at least oversee) an English translation of the Bible, but that was before the invention of the printing press and all copies had to be hand written. Besides, the church had banned the unauthorized translation of the Bible into English in 1408. Over one hundred years later, however, William Tyndale had a burning desire to make the Bible available to even the common people in England . After studying at Oxford and Cambridge , he joined the house...

William Tyndale was the Captain of the Army of Reformers, and was their spiritual leader. Tyndale holds the distinction of being the first man to ever print the New Testament in the English language. Tyndale was a true scholar and a genius, so fluent in eight languages that it was said one would think any one of them to be his native tongue. He is frequently referred to as the “Architect of the English Language”, (even more so than William Shakespeare) as so many of the phrases Tyndale coined are still in our language today. Martin Luther had a small head-start on Tyndale, as Luther declared his intolerance for the Roman Church’s corruption on Halloween in 1517, by nailing his 95 Theses of Contention to the Wittenberg Church door. Luther, who would be exiled in the months following the Diet of Worms Council in 1521 that was designed to martyr him, would translate the New Testament into German for the first time from the 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament of Erasmus, and publish it...

LONDON – A British pilot who was suddenly blinded by a stroke during a solo flight was talked safely down by a military pilot, the Royal Air Force said Friday. Jim O'Neill asked for help after he went blind 40 minutes into a flight from Scotland to southeastern England last week. The BBC reported that O'Neill, flying a small Cessna aircraft, lost his sight 5,500 feet in the air. "It was terrifying," O'Neill said. "Suddenly, I couldn't see the dials in front of me."  The air force said in a news release that O'Neill initially believed he'd been "dazzled" by bright sunlight, and made an emergency call for help. He then realized that something more serious was happening. RAF Wing Commander Paul Gerrard was just finishing a training flight nearby and was drafted in to help the stricken pilot. Gerrard located the plane, began flying close to it and radioed directions.  "Landing an aircraft literally blind needs someone to be rig...

Societies and Cultures rise and fall based on how dear the hold to what “God has established as truth”. If we reject the truth, we will fall for one lie or another; Heaven’s Gate is the extreme, but yet still true story. Heaven's Gate was the name of a bizarre cult of internet web designers who believed they could ride a spaceship behind Haley's comet if they all killed themselves simultaneously. Thirty-eight cult members, plus Applewhite, the cult's leader, were found dead in a rented mansion in the upscale San Diego community of Rancho Santa Fe, California, on March 26, 1997. The mass death of the Heaven's Gate group is one of the most widely-known examples of cult suicide. In preparing to kill themselves, members of the cult drank citrus juices to ritually cleanse their bodies of impurities. The suicide was accomplished by ingestion of phenobarbital mixed with vodka, along with plastic bags secured around their heads to induce asphyxiation. They were foun...

One spring our family was driving from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa , Florida . As far as the eye could see, orange trees were loaded with fruit. When we stopped for breakfast, I ordered orange juice with my eggs. "I'm sorry," the waitress said. "I can't bring you orange juice. Our machine is broken." At first I was dumbfounded. We were surrounded by millions of oranges, and I knew they had oranges in the kitchen--orange slices garnished our plates. What was the problem? No juice? Hardly. We were surrounded by thousands of gallons of juice. The problem was they had become dependent on a machine to get it. Christians are sometimes like that. They may be surrounded by Bibles in their homes, but if something should happen to the Sunday morning preaching service, they would have no nourishment for their souls. The problem is not a lack of spiritual food, but that many Christians haven't grown enough to know how to get it for themselves.

In The Last Days Newsletter, Leonard Ravenhill tells about a group of tourists visiting a picturesque village who walked by an old man sitting beside a fence. In a rather patronizing way, one tourist asked, "Were any great men born in this village?" The old man replied, "Nope, only babies."    A frothy question brought a profound answer. There are no instant heroes, whether in this world or in the kingdom of God.

​ Eric became a Christian and when he heard that his event was going to take place on a Sunday, do you know what he said, "NO can do!", Sunday is church and I don’t miss church for anything. Everyone said “this is what you live for”!  ​ And he said "no it's not, I live for Jesus!!”  So he ended up running in the 400, an event that he didn't even train for; and won the gold! But that's not the most amazing part of the story....the most amazing part is...Eric Liddell took his gold medal and moved on to better things, to be a missionary in China.

A river must have water pouring into it or it becomes stagnant. Not only does new life stop flowing into that river but everything that is in that river begins to die. The church is no different. The moment a church gives up on reaches other souls and is content to just exist with the members it has and not contend for new life, it signs it's own death warrant. New life must be flowing into a church for it to survive; otherwise it becomes stagnant and even the life that is in that church, will begin to die. Jesus' promise was, "out of you will flow rivers of living water". 

Six persons were killed and three seriously injured when a three-storey shopping complex caved in on Wednesday.  The incident occurred around noon. Police said construction work was in progress on the top floor of the building -- located in the City Centre complex of the New Industrial Township -- when it collapsed. Most of the victims were laborers. Several people are feared to be trapped inside the building.  Rescue operations were hampered for a while in the evening by the rain.  "We have recovered six dead bodies. Three injured have also been rescued. Rescue operations are on. As of now, we can't say how many people are trapped inside," said Praveen Kumar, Deputy Commissioner, Faridabad .  "The upper storey suddenly began crumbling on top of me," said Satya Dev, a laborer from Nalanda in Bihar , who has been working inside. Dev got away unscathed, but others were not so lucky. "Another laborer Sunil who was working right next to me got buried unde...

One of Wycliffe’s followers, John Hus, actively promoted Wycliffe’s ideas: that people should be permitted to read the Bible in their own language, and they should oppose the tyranny of the Roman church that threatened anyone possessing a non-Latin Bible with execution. Hus was burned at the stake in~1415, with Wycliffe’s manuscript Bibles used as kindling for the fire. The last words of John Hus were that, “ in 100 years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed. ” Almost exactly 100 years later, in~1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses of Contention (a list of 95 issues of heretical theology and crimes of the Roman Catholic Church) into the church door at Wittenberg . The prophecy of Hus had come true! Martin Luther went on to be the first person to translate and publish the Bible in the commonly-spoken dialect of the German people; a translation more appealing than previous German Biblical translations. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs records that i...

Many years earlier, the psychologist B.F. Skinner had devised the operant conditioning chamber or “Skinner Box” in which a lever press by an animal triggered either a reinforcing stimulus such as delivery of food or water, or a punishing stimulus like a painful foot shock. Olds and Milner soon adapted the chamber so that a lever press would deliver direct brain stimulation through the implanted electrodes. What resulted was perhaps the most dramatic experiment in the history of behavioral neuroscience; rats would press the lever as many as 7,000 times per hour to stimulate their brains. They weren't stimulating a “curiosity center” at all-- this was a reward circuit, the activation of which was much more powerful than any natural stimulus. ~A series of amazing experiments revealed that rats preferred reward circuit stimulation to food (even when they were hungry) and water (even when they were thirsty). Self-stimulating male rats would ignore a female in heat and would repea...

This story comes out of Houston....(May 2014) 17-year-old student has been found dead in a Texas hotel room just hours after celebrating her prom with school friends. Jacqueline Gomez's boyfriend called 911 at about 11am on Saturday to report that the teenager had stopped breathing.The couple had booked into Houston 's Hyatt Hotel, where other students were also staying, at about pm. It is believed they had been drinking in their room before falling asleep.What's even more tragic is that her mom had told her "no" she could not go, but she snuck out to the prom anyway, if only she had known, her disobedience that night would cost her, her life, I think she may have listened, how about you?