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Endued With Power: How To Activate The Gifts Of The Holy Spirit In Your Life Endued With Power: How To Activate The Gifts Of The Holy Spirit In Your Life

Endued With Power: How To Activate The Gifts Of The Holy Spirit In Your Life Order Printed Copy

  • Author: Novel Hayes
  • Size: 717KB | 113 pages
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About the Book


"Endued with Power" by Novel Hayes is a practical guide that helps readers activate the gifts of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The book provides insights and strategies for understanding and utilizing spiritual gifts such as prophecy, healing, and tongues. It encourages believers to seek God's power and guidance for living a life filled with spiritual gifts.

Mosab Hassan Yousef

Mosab Hassan Yousef Mosab Hassan Yousef (Arabic: مصعب حسن يوسف; nicknamed "The Green Prince"; born 5 May 1978) is a Palestinian who worked undercover for Israel's internal security service Shin Bet from 1997 to 2007. Shin Bet considered him its most valuable source within the Hamas leadership. The information Yousef supplied prevented dozens of suicide attacks and assassinations of Israelis, exposed numerous Hamas cells, and assisted Israel in hunting down many militants, and incarcerating his own father, Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef. In March 2010, he published his autobiography titled Son of Hamas. In 1999, Yousef converted to Christianity, and in 2007 he moved to the United States. His request for political asylum in the United States was granted pending a routine background check in 2010. Biography Mosab Hassan Yousef (later Joseph) was born in Ramallah, a city 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) north of Jerusalem. His father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, was a Hamas leader who spent many years in Israeli prisons. He is the oldest of five brothers and three sisters. When Yousef was growing up, he wanted to be a fighter because that was according to him what was expected of Palestinian children in the West Bank. Yousef was first arrested when he was ten, during the First Intifada, for throwing rocks at Israeli settlers. He was further arrested and jailed by Israel numerous times. As his father's eldest son, he was seen as his heir apparent, and became an important part of the Hamas organization. Yousef said he saw the light after a stint with his dad’s comrades in an Israeli jail during the mid-1990s. At Megiddo Prison, he witnessed Hamas inmates leading a brutal year-long campaign to weed out supposed Israeli collaborators. "During that time, Hamas tortured and killed hundreds of prisoners,” he said, recalling vivid memories of needles being inserted under finger nails and bodies charred with burning plastics. Many, if not all, had nothing to do with Israeli intelligence. “I will never forget their screams,” he continued. “I started asking myself a question. What if Hamas succeeded in destroying Israel and building a state. Will they destroy our people in this way?” Yousef's doubts about Islam and Hamas began forming when he realized Hamas' brutality, and that he hated how Hamas used the lives of suffering civilians and children to achieve its goals. Yousef was held by Shin Bet agents in 1996. While in prison, he was shocked by Shin Bet's interrogation methods, which he considered humane, when compared to how Hamas operatives tortured imprisoned suspected collaborators. He decided to accept a Shin Bet offer to become an informant. Espionage career Beginning with his release from prison in 1997, Yousef was considered the Shin Bet's most reliable source in the Hamas leadership, earning himself the nickname "The Green Prince" – using the color of the Islamist group's flag, and "prince" because of his pedigree as the son of one of the movement's founders. The intelligence he supplied to Israel led to the exposure of many Hamas cells, as well as the prevention of dozens of suicide bombings and assassination attempts on Jews. He has claimed that he did not inform for money, but rather that his motivations were ideological and religious, and that he only wanted to save lives.[13] In order to thwart any suspicions of collaboration, the Shin Bet staged an arrest attempt, telling the Israel Defense Forces to launch an operation to arrest him, and then provided him intelligence allowing him to escape at the last minute, after which he went into hiding for the rest of his career. Yousef says he supplied intelligence only on the condition that the "targets" would not be killed, but arrested. This led to the detention of several key Palestinian leaders, including Ibrahim Hamid, a Hamas commander in the West Bank, and Marwan Barghouti. Also, Yousef claims to have thwarted a 2001 plot to assassinate Shimon Peres, then foreign minister and later President of Israel. According to his former Shin Bet officer, "Many people owe him their lives and don't even know it." Conversion to Christianity According to his story, Yousef met a British missionary in 1999 who introduced him to Christianity. Between the years 1999 and 2000, Yousef gradually embraced Christianity. In 2005, he was secretly baptized in Tel Aviv by an unidentified Christian tourist. He left the West Bank for the United States in 2007, and lived some time in San Diego, California, where he joined the Barabbas Road Church. In August 2008, Yousef publicly revealed his Christianity, and renounced Hamas and the Arab leadership, thereby endangering himself and exposing his family in Ramallah to persecution. Yousef has also claimed that his aim was to bring peace to the Middle East; he hopes to return to his homeland when there is peace. Yousef has stated that despite his conversion to Christianity, he is "against religion", and does not adhere to any denomination of Christianity. He has stated, "Religion steals freedom, kills creativity, turns us into slaves and against one another. Yes, I am talking about Christianity as well as Islam. Most Christians I have seen, seem to have missed the point, that Jesus redeemed us from religion. Religion is nothing but man's attempts to get back to God. Whether it is Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, any ism. Religion can't save mankind. Only Jesus could save mankind through his death and resurrection. And Jesus is the only way to God." Autobiography Yousef's co-authored autobiography, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices, written with the assistance of Ron Brackin, was published in March 2010. Yousef's brother Ouwais denounced the report about his brother's activities, saying: "It was full of lies; it's all lies." Ouwais also revealed that the last contact between his family and Mosab took place more than a year before the news of his spying. Sheikh Hassan Yousef, Mosab's father, while in an Israeli prison, disowned his son for spying for Israel. The Haaretz report on Yousef was described by Hamas MP Mushir al-Masri as "psychological war being waged against the Palestinian people... [it] did not deserve a response". Deportation threats and political asylum For a time, Yousef was threatened with deportation from the U.S., after his request for political asylum was denied, since statements in his book about working for Hamas were interpreted as "providing material support to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization", despite Yousef's explanation that they were "intended to undermine the group". His case then proceeded to the deportation stage, despite Yousef's advocates' warning that he would likely be executed by the Palestinian Authority if deported to the West Bank. On 24 June 2010, Shin Bet handler Gonen Ben Itzhak, who for 10 years worked with Yousef under the cryptonym "Loai", revealed his own identity in order to testify on behalf of Yousef at an immigration hearing in San Diego. Ben-Yitzhak described Yousef as a "true friend", and said, "he risked his life every day in order to prevent violence". Partially as a result of this, Immigration Court Judge Richard J. Bartolomei, Jr., ruled on 30 June 2010, that Yousef would be allowed to remain in the United States after being fingerprinted and passing a routine background check. He is a frequent guest speaker on various American news channels, where he talks about the atrocities committed by Hamas. Films A documentary adaptation of Son of Hamas titled The Green Prince, directed and written by Nadav Schirman, premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for World Cinema: Documentary. The Green Prince will be re-made into a live-action feature film. Yousef is collaborating with US-based actor and film producer Sam Feuer in the production of two films: a feature film adaptation of Yousef's book Son of Hamas and documentary The Green Prince, and a historical depiction of the life of the Muslim prophet Muhammad based on the accounts of eighth-century historian Ibn Ishaq. Views and controversies Some elements of Yousef's story have been questioned. Former Shin Bet Deputy Chief Gideon Ezra described Yousef's claims as "too good to be true", and stated that, "there are hundreds of collaborators like him. He is not unusual. He just decided to write a book about it." The conversion to Christianity narrative promoted by Yousef and his book publishers remains unsubstantiated as well. Critics have alleged that Yousef claimed he was a Christian (for a longer period of time) in order to help secure asylum in the United States. This tactic is common for Muslim immigrants seeking to avoid deportation to countries where apostasy laws exist. However, he has since become an active figure in evangelical non-denominational Christianity in America, and has appeared on programs such as The 700 Club. Interest in the book from Christian readers helped make it a New York Times best-seller. During an appearance on The 700 Club to promote his book "Son of Hamas", he was welcomed and interviewed by host Pat Robertson. At an "End Times Prophecy" conference in 2010, hosted by California-based evangelist Greg Laurie, Yousef told the crowd in attendance that Islam is "the biggest lie in human history." He further suggested at the conference that the Quran should not be legal in the United States ("banned on American soil"). In May 2016, talking to a Jerusalem Post conference in New York, Yousef claimed that at one time that he was working for, and being paid by, Israel, the United States, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, all at the same time. He went on to say that Islam as a whole is comparable to Nazism, and must be defeated.

What Cravings Will Take from You

We spend our lives with hands out and mouths open, looking for what we might consume. This is our experience as humans, in part because of how God designed us: we eat because our bodies require energy, and we reach with gentle affection for those we love out of a shared hunger for relationships. We’re born in need, and our desires, implanted by God himself (Acts 17:24–27), send us on a search for fullness of joy. Our desires, however, so easily turn into obsessions, leading us into wild over-consumption (James 4:1–3). Our desires become cravings, the ultimate pursuit and point of life itself. Rather than signals meant to send us off in exploration for the original source of joy (Psalm 16:11), they instead become taskmasters, demanding our undivided loyalty and taking our peace and joy right along with them. In our unchecked drive to consume, we ourselves become the ones consumed. My Primary (False) Allegiance When we don’t allow our desires to send us seeking fullness of joy from the source of all joy — God himself — we develop an allegiance to false kings. My primary false allegiance is to the love and admiration that come from other people. I crave validation, and I find myself performing for it like a circus animal. This is how I’ve come to know just how much I’ve allowed this false king to rule over me: the past few years have been brutal, full of confusion and emotional pain. Somewhere along the way, my heart, bowing before this false king, started aching for belonging. I started wondering if my presence mattered as a person and not as a performance. I started wondering if I was truly known. I started wondering if anyone might notice my need. My deep self-focus drew me further and further inside, and at some point I simply disengaged my heart. If I couldn’t have what I craved, I would not give of myself any longer. I began to look back at who I once was and how passionately I’d loved others, and I wanted so badly to be that person again. But I couldn’t manufacture love, and I started to believe that joy would never come again. My heart instead felt hard and apathetic, looking to be served, noticing every slight, envying the belonging of others. False Kings Only Take The trouble for an idolatrous heart (and the gift for the repentant heart) is that God will stubbornly interrupt and intercept our pursuit of joy as we seek it in anything less than him. He will not give us lasting peace in our false allegiances, because he is jealous for us to have the actual peace we’re pursuing. In those years of struggle, a chorus of people could have sung my praises, and it never would have settled as peace in my heart. Anytime a friend offered a word of encouragement, my mind immediately turned to panic: “What must I do to keep that love?” Or I’d think, “What about the one who didn’t voice encouragement? How do I win her over?” I was so hungry and thirsty that I was withering away, consumed by what I was trying to consume. False kings never give; they only take. Kings Who Take When the prophet Samuel was growing old, the Israelites worried about their future. Samuel had mediated for them well as both priest and prophet before God, but they needed a new leader, and humanly speaking, there were no options available. Samuel’s sons, the next sure thing for the nation, didn’t walk in the ways of the Lord, so the elders sought answers by looking around at how other nations were structured. They approached Samuel with their solution: “Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). At first glance, this doesn’t seem like such a bad request, but Scripture says it displeased Samuel, and it also displeased God, because the elders hadn’t thought to bring God into their calculations (1 Samuel 8:6–9). Did they not already have a King? They had, in effect, spurned the perfect rule of the One who’d delivered, provided for, led, and protected them, and they’d turned in their desire toward another option. They weren’t ready to reject God entirely. They just wanted him plus a safe, tangible plan B king like everyone else around them. Samuel’s response is a fair warning to us as well about plan B kings: they will only take from you. Samuel warns that a king appointed by people takes sons and sends them to war, takes children and turns them into slave labor, takes daughters into his service, and takes crops in order to feed his servants (1 Samuel 8:10–17). Samuel knows what false kings do: they take our best and then make us their slaves. Kingdoms with Two Kings We tend to believe the same as the Israelite elders: What will it hurt to have God and also hedge our bets a little? We want to believe we can pledge allegiance to King Jesus and also throw our heart to human kings or human things. But the Bible is plain: No one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). A divided kingdom cannot stand (Matthew 12:25). Jesus is our king, not merely a wise consultant we turn to when we need to know what to do. And as the Israelite leaders show us, a divided heart is actually not divided at all: it has already chosen sides. A divided heart is one that’s spurned God. We turn toward false kings who we think will give us comfort, security, belonging, approval, validation, love, sexual gratification — but in the end they only take. They promise life but give death. Consumed to Satisfy But God. Through Jesus Christ, he made a way for us out of this death spiral, giving us a direction to point our desires, providing something we can consume that doesn’t consume us in return. Jesus came saying, Repent and believe (Mark 1:15). His words were an invitation, a stretched-out hand, an open door for us to enter with him into the kingdom of God. Jesus came saying, This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, poured out for you (Luke 22:19–20). Feed on me (John 6:51–58). Jesus was consumed by death precisely so that we would feast on him. This king is called Bread of Life (John 6:35) and Living Water (John 4:13–14), so we might know we can, in our hunger, eat, and in our thirst, drink. When we consume him, we find ourselves consuming his good rule, loving provision, and peaceful reign. We cannot reach the end of him, but in him we can certainly satisfy the longing underlying all of our desires: the longing for joy. The King Who Gives The Israelites placed a mirror before my heart, helping me see my false allegiances clearly. My actions were their actions: turning toward kings who couldn’t fulfill their promises. Like them, my desires and needs weren’t all wrong; what had been wrong was where I turned with them. I turned in repentance to Jesus and found joy again in allegiance to him. Do you have a need? A desire? Submit it totally to King Jesus. He doesn’t just require our allegiance, as if obedience is a form of punishment or something through which we grit our teeth. His demand of wholeheartedness is an invitation to receive what is his: the very kingdom (Matthew 5:3). He opens his treasury to us, sharing his peace, love, joy, life, and fruitfulness. And perhaps best of all, we receive his allegiance in return (Romans 8:38–39; Matthew 28:20; Hebrews 13:5). He is a king who gives. Article by Christine Hoover

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