You can help Nigerian Christian widows and their children - vomusa.org

The following in Part I is from an email to this writer for MHProNews and this Patch from Voice of the Martyrs. Part II is additional information plus other topics.

Part I

You can help Nigerian Christian widows and their children.

Attacks by Boko Haram and militant Fulani Muslims have widowed more than 10,000 of our Christian sisters in northern Nigeria in the past 20 years, and widows who left Islam to follow Christ are often refused help by Muslim family members.

Many are mothers with no formal education or employable skills. They struggle to feed their families after their husbands are killed. Their children grow up without their fathers, sometimes experiencing persecution themselves.

Regina’s husband, a Nigerian missionary, was shot to death in front of her by Islamic militants who then beat her and her two-year-old son, Joshua, whom she was carrying on her back. They survived, but Regina has been grieving the loss of her husband ever since his murder. She has three children, the oldest of which is 10.

Asabe, another Christian widow, lost her husband in 2020 in a bombing by Boko Haram. After her husband’s death, his Muslim brother threw Asabe and her child out of the home.

Even after experiencing persecution and rejection for Christ, Asabe said, “I learned forgiveness toward everyone who has hurt me.”

We invite you to stand with our Nigerian sisters in Christ whose husbands have been killed for their faith. Your help also shows their children that they are loved and cared for by the global body of Christ.

You can assist with necessities like food, clothing, shelter and children’s school fees. Your gift will also provide help such as vocational training for widows to help them support their families, as well as spiritual and emotional encouragement following their loss.

Part II - Additional Information with More Analysis, Commentary, and Additional Topics

Per their website, "The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) serves persecuted Christians in the world’s most difficult and dangerous places to follow Christ."

Their website also says: "Pastor Richard Wurmbrand and his wife, Sabina, founded VOM after being imprisoned for their Christian witness in Communist Romania. Since 1967, VOM has been dedicated to inspiring all believers to a biblical faith by telling the stories of persecuted Christians, thereby inspiring a deeper commitment to Christ and the fulfillment of his Great Commission, no matter the cost."

This writer is not necessarily endorsing VOMUSA.org. That said, there are certainly topics that they have raised that need to be understood by the Christians in the U.S., Europe and other parts of the Americas because persecution of Christians for their faith is real.

Two parts of their statement of faith are as follows.

> We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

> We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father where He intercedes for us, in His present rule as Head of the Church, and in His personal return in power and glory.

While those statements are Scripturally supported, there are other remarks that bear refinement and that are arguably less than Biblically accurate. For example.

According to left-leaning Wikipedia (which we are also not endorsing, merely citing here below) is the following on the Nicene Creed.

The Nicene Creed,[a] also called the Creed of Constantinople,[1] is the defining statement of belief of Nicene Christianity[2][3] and in those Christian denominations that adhere to it.
The original Nicene Creed was first adopted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325. According to the traditional view, forwarded by the Council of Chalcedon of 451, the Creed was amended in 381 by the First Council of Constantinople as "consonant to the holy and great Synod of Nice."[4] However, many scholars comment on these ancient Councils saying "there is a failure of evidence" for this position since no one between the years of 381–451 thought of it in this light.[5]

According to Zondervan Academic is the following from 'about us.'

Zondervan Academic, a division of Zondervan and HarperCollins Christian Publishing, has provided scholarly works for teachers and students of the Word since 1931.

Zondervan Academic is privileged to partner with the scholarly community in providing Christ-honoring resources in service of the academy and the church worldwide. Together, we produce academic works in various areas of biblical-theological studies that exhibit faithfulness to historic Christian faith, cultural relevance, and excellence.

Zondervan are what some would describe as from the Protestant wing of Christianity. They said the following.

The Nicene Creed is one of the most famous and influential creeds in the history of the church, because it settled the question of how Christians can worship one God and also claim that this God is three persons.

It was also the first creed to obtain universal authority in the church, and it improved the language of the Apostles’ Creed by including more specific statements about the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

That post by Zondervan Academic continues as follows.

In AD 324, Constantine reunited the Roman Empire under a single throne. Constantine was himself a recent convert to Christianity, having (temporarily) ended all persecution by decree in AD 313 after he claimed that he won a battle by calling out to the Christian God. It was Constantine who convened the first ecumenical, fully representative, universally recognized council of the Christian church.

While it is common today to overemphasize Constantine’s role and authority in influencing the shape of Christianity as we know it (he did not declare that Jesus is God or decide the books of the New Testament by any stretch of the imagination), there is no doubt that this was one of the critical turning points in Christianity.

Arianism

The council was summoned to resolve a problem that had sprung up seven years earlier and had left the Christian church fiercely divided. In Alexandria in AD 318, a presbyter named Arius began publicly proclaiming his theory that Jesus was not God at all, only a celestial servant of the true Most High God, who alone was almighty, transcendent, the creator and first cause of all things.
After all, Jesus was prone to emotion (as opposed to the Father, who was always in control of his emotions), grew and learned (as opposed to the Father, who never changed), and died (as opposed to the Father, who is immortal).

Thus, only the Father could be considered uncreated and “timelessly self-subsistent.”
Arius thought that his interpretation had good footing in the theology of the great teacher Origen of the prior century. Origen had said that the Father was due glory and reverence as God himself (autotheos) that was not due to the Son.

Arius’s bishop, Alexander, disagreed, pointing out that Origen also said “Father” is an eternal attribute of God. This means two things: first, since it’s not possible to be a father without also having offspring, the fact that God is eternally a father means that he eternally has a son.

Furthermore, Alexander pointed out, God is perfect and not subject to change, so how could God change from not being a father to being a father?

In attempting to preserve the dignity of the Father, Arius was tampering with some of the crucial distinctions that separate God from humanity. But it was not ultimately so much a debate about Origen as a debate about Scripture.

At places, Jesus seems to suggest that he is subordinate to the Father (for example, John 14:28). At the same time, Scripture is equally clear that Jesus is and claimed to be both divine and equal with the Father as God (John 1:1; 5:16–18; 10:30; 14:6–14).

The question is how we can worship Jesus and worship the Father (who we know is different from Jesus) and still claim to be monotheists who worship one true God? (Many people today, such as Muslims, have particular trouble with this idea.)

After years of fierce division that stretched from clergy to the common people, the ecumenical council was summoned to resolve the issue once and for all.

Let's pause and note that truth can be found in an array of places and sources. An atheist may have some entirely true statement, though it may or may not be about some matter of Christian faith. Furthermore, believers - even sincere and reasonably informed believers - can hold a belief that is demonstrably untrue. That reality is why the Bible mentions the principle of separating the wheat from the chaff.

So, VOMUSA.org could be entirely correct about their remarks on the suffering of Christian widows in Nigeria, much of what Wikipedia says about the Nicene Creed can be quite accurate too, but that doesn't mean that either source is entirely correct about all else that they have published. Thinking people must be prepared to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

That said, let's pivot back to what Zondervan said about the Nicene Creed.

"The structure of the Nicene Creed

The final form of the Nicene Creed reads as follows:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. >And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

The creed follows basically the same structure as the Apostles’ Creed. It mentions all three members of the Trinity in a similar order and retains the snapshot of the gospel story when it describes Jesus. It also expands the description of the life and work of Christ, explicitly stating that his mission was “for us and for our salvation.”

Like all of the ecumenical creeds, the Nicene Creed does not set forth any specific theory or view of atonement — the way of understanding what Jesus accomplished on the cross.

Still, in its final form, the creed tells us that Christ’s mission for our salvation included coming down out of heaven and taking on flesh from the Virgin Mary (the incarnation), carrying that flesh in suffering through life and into death on the cross. The creed declares that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate, “for us.”

Somehow or another, Christ died for us to take our place of suffering and set us free to receive salvation.

The creed deliberately draws on tradition to show that the ideas put forward here are not an innovation to the “faith delivered once for all.”

What the Nicene Creed says about the relationship between Jesus and the Father

The main difference between this creed and the Apostles’ Creed, however, is a new, expanded section on the relationship between Jesus and the Father, since the chief concern of the council was to defend the true divinity of the Son against Arius. The creed asserts this by professing the “Lord Jesus Christ” to be the “Son of God,” “begotten of the Father,” “only-begotten.” These are biblical assertions (Mark 1:1 and 1 John 4:15 call Jesus the Son of God; Acts 13:33 and Heb. 5:5 speak of him as begotten of the Father; John 1:14 and 3:18 both use the Greek word monogenous, which means “only-begotten”). Jesus, they claim, is God: “God from God.”

If you need an analogy, the next phrase serves. It’s like light. How can you separate light from light? You can’t. (This was a traditional example in early Christian writings, usually concerning the ray of the sun and the sun itself.) Neither can the Father and the Son be separated."

So, VOMUSA.org's statement of faith is less than accurate when compared to the Nicene Creed.

It should be obvious that God didn't intend for their to be a division among Christians in their core beliefs. The new Christian Constantine understood that and facilitated the statement of faith we now know as the Nicene Creed. Note Constantine didn't impose that on the Church, he encouraged that the Church's own leaders find that truth for themselves.

It goes without saying that the Nicene Creed is not found in the Bible. Nor is the word "Trinity" found in the Bible. There is something else that is not found in the Bible, and that is an index of what books are biblical and which ones are not.

So, you have Mormon's who have added to the Christian Bible their Book of Mormon. Is that proper? Or you have Jehovah's Witnesses changing some of the words in their version of the bible that is arguably not supported by the most ancient versions of the Biblical text.

Protestants have fewer Biblical books than Catholics do. Catholics have fewer biblical books that Orthodox Christians do.

So, it seems that 'the bible alone' (which is also not found in Scripture) can be abused, because all of those groups point to their own versions of the Scriptures and often have not Biblical basis for their respective claims.

We'll plan to look at this more in the future. But in the meantime, VOMUSA.org has done the public a service by drawing attention to the plight of Christians in Nigeria, where some radical Muslims have kidnapped and killed thousands over the years.

Only the truth can set us free. Everyone should boldly seek the full truth and nothing but the truth, whatever the topic may be.

According to Bible Hub in John 8:31-32. The "He" and "My" here is Jesus.

The Truth will Set You Free

31 So He said to the Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, you are truly My disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Every word of that is important. By the way, that is from the Berean Standard Bible, which is also not being endorsed, it was simply the first version that came up in my quick Bing search on this date.

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L. A. “Tony” Kovach is a publisher who has earned multiple awards in history. He and his family live in a manufactured home on private property in Winter Haven, FL. He is the co-founder of Manufactured Home Living News.com (MHLivingNews.com) and Manufactured Home Pro News.com (MHProNews.com), trade publications serving segments of the manufactured home industry. Having worked in several segments of the manufactured home industry for over 3 decades, Kovach is a widely acknowledged and often praised expert on manufactured housing. ###