Pastor John Hagee called out religious spirits who condemn the Lord’s anointed in a recent Facebook post.  

His social media devotional appears to be straight out of Matthew 23, where Christ condemned the Pharisees.  

Hagee writes: 

#DailyDevotion: What is condemnation? Condemnation is when someone says disapproving things about you, describing your inability to be a certain way or to accomplish certain things. There are “religious” people who go around condemning other people, declaring how unfit they are to be used by God or the church. They do so to hide their own inferiorities and weaknesses. Don’t let people throw their condemnation on you. It is the Holy Spirit’s job to condemn and convict, not anyone else’s.

Do you agree? Sound off! 

A would-be Islamic State recruit from California was sentenced on Monday to 30 years in prison for his conviction on charges he sought to join the militant group in Syria and committed bank fraud to pay for a plane ticket there, federal prosecutors said.

Nader Elhuzayel, 25, was found guilty in June by a U.S. District Court jury in Santa Ana, California, of conspiring and attempting to provide material support, namely himself, to a terrorist organization, and 26 counts of bank fraud.

He became the first person tried, convicted and sentenced for such charges in federal court, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said. More than 70 individuals have been charged in the United States with trying to travel abroad to enlist with Islamic State, with most cases resulting in guilty pleas.

A native-born U.S. citizen, Elhuzayel worked various odd jobs after graduating from high school, took a course in medical billing and attended community college for several semesters, according to a pre-sentencing memorandum.

Elhuzayel was arrested on May 21, 2015, when he tried to board a Turkish Airlines plane at Los Angeles International Airport for a flight to Turkey, from where he had planned to make his way to the Syrian border, federal prosecutors said.

Found in his carry-on bag was a computer storage drive containing graphic photos of Islamic State beheadings and a “hit list” of U.S. Defense Department employee names and addresses compiled by the extremist group, according to evidence presented at trial.

Weeks earlier, prosecutors said, Elhuzayel had posted Twitter messages professing support for a 2015 incident in Texas in which two gunmen attacked an exhibit of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad and were shot to death by police.

Elhuzayel also appeared in a video swearing allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and pledging to enlist as a fighter in the militant group, which has seized swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and claimed responsibility for numerous attacks on civilians in Europe.

Prosecutors said Elhuzayel and a co-defendant, Muhanad Badawi, repeatedly used social media to express their support for Islamic State, including its execution of gay men. One Twitter message posted by Elhuzayel declared: “The only thing more beautiful than rain is homosexuals being thrown off tall buildings.”

Badawi was convicted in a joint trial with Elhuzayel of conspiring with him to support terrorism, aiding and abetting his efforts by purchasing his one-way plane ticket, and a single count of financial aid fraud in connection with the plot.

He is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 17, and faces up to 15 years in prison for each count relating to providing support for terrorism. {eoa}

© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is often referred to as a “gifted debater,” but that really isn’t the half of it.

In 1992 he won both the U.S. National Debating Championship and the North American Debating Championship. Then, three years later, he was a semifinalist in the World Universities Debating Championship.

So, when someone asks him to critique a debate—as nationally syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt did during Tuesday morning’s show—he’s going to give an expert opinion. What he had to say, however, about Monday night’s debate between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic counterpart, Hillary Clinton, got a lot of people’s attention.

“Well, last night, I thought it was a very strong debate,” he said. “I thought Hillary did not have a good performance. I think throughout the night, she was tired, she was formulaic. The entire debate from Hillary was more Washington as usual. And every proposal she advanced was another big government solution that isn’t working, that is failing.

“I thought Donald had the strongest debate performance he’s had in this election cycle. I think he really went after Hillary, which was a good thing. And I think he drew strong contrast, particularly on taxes, and on regulation and on law and order, and on the disastrous Iran deal. And so I thought it was a good debate night.”

Hewitt pointed to the “conventional wisdom” analysis of the debate, which suggested Clinton had “trounced” Trump, particularly in the latter half. He asked Cruz to address those analyses and to provide his own commentary.

“You know, anyone who is swooning at Hillary’s performance last night, that’s a pretty good indication that you’re a card-carrying member of the liberal media, especially in the first half hour,” he said. “I think Donald very much had the upper hand over Hillary. Hillary was tentative and had no real answers. She was on the defensive the entire time.

“And the biggest thing is her answers, they sounded old and tired, and I don’t mean that in a comment on her health. I mean it on a comment on her ideas. Her ideas are rehashed 1960s Great Society, big government programs. And to me, they did not rise to the occasion remotely.

“Now of course, the media is going to hyperventilate at how terrific she is, because that’s what they do. You know, the idea that they focus on the birther issue I find thoroughly amusing because, unless you are in a college faculty hall, or the newsroom of a major newspaper, I don’t think there are a whole lot of voters in this country that give a flying flip about the birther issue.

“And so if the media thinks that was the takeaway from last night, I think that shows just how disconnected they are from working men and women who’ve been hammered for seven years under the Obama economy and are looking for something different. And if all Hillary cares about is screaming you’re a racist, you’re a racist rather than actually providing real solutions to the challenges facing working men and women, I don’t think that’s a good debate night for her.”

Hewitt asked why Trump didn’t force a conversation about the Supreme Court, and Cruz suggested the line of questions from moderator Lester Holt didn’t really afford the opportunity to do so. He said, however, it is the biggest distinction between the two candidates.

“[A]s you know, the developments last week were a major reason why I made the decision to vote for Trump in November, because on Friday, he put out a list of 21 judges, and a couple of important things,” he said. “One, as you noted, he put my friend and colleague, Mike Lee, at the top of the list. Senator Mike Lee, I think, would make an extraordinary Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia.

“But secondly, and this was the most important part of the list, and much of the media missed this, when he put it out, he explicitly committed that the only people he would consider are the 21 names on the list. Previously, they had put out a list of 11 names, but there had been no commitment other than these are among the people we will look at. 

“On Friday, they locked themselves in and said these 21 are the only ones up for consideration. That was a major new development, and it was a major new development exactly along the lines of what I had urged in Cleveland, which is that I wanted to see our nominee defend freedom, defend the Constitution, and the Supreme Court is going to be right at the crossroads of determining whether the Bill of Rights remains vibrant in protecting our liberties, or whether it is rendered a dead letter by a Hillary Clinton judicial activist Court.”

Cruz also made an offer the Trump campaign just cannot refuse. Asked by Hewitt if he would be willing to campaign on the GOP nominee’s behalf, or to assist with future debate prep, the senator said he had already made that offer.

“I will do whatever I can to defeat Hillary Clinton,” he said. “My heavy focus this cycle, in addition to defeating Hillary, is on preserving a Republican majority in the Senate, and I am working hard to help my colleagues get re-elected.

“I’m working hard to raise money for them, to help turn out conservatives in their state. And then I’m also working hard in the state of Texas to turn out conservatives, because if conservatives stay home this cycle, we could see really bad results on down-ticket ballots, on judicial races, on state rep races.

“I don’t want to see that happen. So I’m going to do everything I can to urge conservatives to come out and vote, even if they may not be thrilled at the candidates on the ballot. I’m urging them to come out and vote anyway, because the consequences of staying home, I think, are really quite significant.”

In discussing the person of the Holy Spirit, the apostle Paul gave one of the clearest commands in Scripture when he wrote to the church in Ephesus. That command was: “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you are sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30, MEV). Since the Holy Spirit is God, we should certainly want to give this command careful consideration and obedience.

What does it mean to “grieve the Holy Spirit”? The word “grieve” generally means to make someone sorrowful or to cause them sadness, grief or offense. That the Holy Spirit can be grieved points out in greater degree the reality that the Holy Spirit is a person and not just a power. So what is it that would cause the Holy Spirit to be stricken with sorrow or offense?

To help us understand Paul’s concern, we should remember that “grief” is quite often thought of in connection with someone’s death or a funeral. Family or friends often “grieve” over the loss or death of a loved one. Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss easily remembers the pain and weight of that sorrow. It isn’t something that most would want anyone to endure, let alone the Holy Spirit of God.

That brings us back to the question of what exactly would cause the Holy Spirit to grieve or mourn. Our answer is found in the context of the bible and Paul’s letter. Ephesians encourages the believer to actually believe and act on the wonderful truth and power of life in Christ. In Ephesians chapter 3, Paul prayed, “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we ask or imagine, according to the power that works in us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

Can you hear the hope and expectation in Paul’s words? Since the Spirit inspired these words, it makes sense that a key part of causing the Spirit grief would be anything that would cause a semblance of death instead of life. In other words, believers behaving as though they were separated from God or in fact behaving as the spiritually “dead.”

From a biblical perspective, it is fair to define “death” as a “separation.” For example, “spiritual death” is actually a separation spiritually from God, a severing of relationship with God. When Adam sinned, he and all mankind died.

Humanity didn’t cease to exist but had their relationship with God severed. Jesus came to restore that relationship and give us new “life” as a result of His work and sending the Holy Spirit to indwell believers, thus reconnecting that which was lost.

Now for a believer to talk or behave so as to be a fountain of anger, hate, malice, unbelief or anything that works to tear down God’s church or God’s children (Eph. 4:29-31) resembles “death” or separation from the way of God. This of course causes the Holy Spirit to be grieved and mourn. The Holy Spirit lives to enable us to reflect the Lord’s presence and facilitate the kingdom’s presence here on Earth. The Holy Spirit is working to bring glory to the Lord and if we, by our words or actions, work against the Holy Spirit then He is rightly offended and grieved. Believers can cause the Holy Spirit grief, sorrow, pain and offense.

But, instead of grief, we can give the Holy Spirit joy. Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:10, 15-20: “… proving what is pleasing to the Lord … See then that you walk carefully, not as fools, but as wise men, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not be drunk with wine, for that is reckless living. But be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. Give thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Don’t live as a dead person, giving grief to the Holy Spirit, but live as a child of God, filled with the Spirit and giving pleasure and joy to Him.

Reprinted with permission from Dustin Smith Ministries: The Lion’s Roar. Tom Trout, with his wife Diana, has over 30 years of experience pastoring churches. They both serve local churches by traveling as a part of Dustin Smith Ministries, teaching and speaking all over the nation.

The nation got to see the best and the brightest that the Republicans and Democrats had to offer last night at Hofstra University. Here are six takeaways from the debate: 

1. Somebody forgot to tell the moderator that he was supposed to moderate and not debate Donald Trump. Lester Holt, of the Nobody But Clinton network, was clearly in the tank for Hillary Clinton. I suspect he was secretly auditioning to be her press secretary. Just tally the number of times Holt interrupted Trump and pressed him on follow-up questions and then compare that number to Hillary’s. As we say in Dixie, Hillary got some home-cookin’.

2. Hillary Clinton does not hold the American people in high esteem. She previously referred to us as a “basket of deplorables” and irredeemable. But during the debate she accused us of having an “implicit bias” against African-Americans. She seems to believe the only way to redeem all of us gun-toting, Bible-clinging deplorables is to shame us into submission.

3. If Donald Trump’s record on women is fair game, then so is Hillary’s. She needs to be called out for taking money from countries that treat women as second-class citizens. She needs to be called out for the terrible things she said about her husband’s “lady friends.” Hillary also took a swipe at Trump’s achievements. She said the only reason he was successful was because of his father. To be fair, Trump could argue that the only reason for Hillary’s success is because of her husband.

4. Trump needs to let go of the birther stuff—even if the mainstream media won’t. And he needs to either release his tax returns or come up with a better excuse for why he won’t.

5. There was no clear winner—but that does not mean Trump lost. In spite of the mainstream media’s disgusting narrative, millions of Americans tuned in to discover that Trump does not wear gold-lined bed sheets or burn crosses at Mar-a-Lago.

6. There is bipartisan agreement that Hillary should never do another shoulder shimmy on national television. Ever.

Following a particularly rough salvo late in Monday night’s presidential debate from Republican nominee Donald Trump, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had a very odd reaction that has many speculating she may have had another “medical episode.”

“Well, I have much better judgment than she does. There’s no question about that. I also have a much better temperament than she has, you know? I have a winning temperament—I know how to win,” he said, drawing one of several interruptions from moderator Lester Holt.

But Trump didn’t back down.

“Wait. The AFL-CIO the other day, behind the blue screen—I don’t know who you were talking to, Secretary Clinton, but you were totally out of control,” he added. “I said, ‘There’s a person with a temperament that’s got a problem.'”

Holt asked Clinton to respond, but it wasn’t just what came out of her mouth that shocked some observers. Letting out what can only be described as a “Howard Dean yell,” she began to shudder.

A momentary shoulder shake would’ve been entirely appropriate for the moment, but her tremors went on for a couple seconds, during which time she seemed to have difficulty keeping her eyes open. It was eerily similar to her “cold chai moment” in July.

The Clinton campaign apparently wanted to get out ahead of this one, turning it into a .gif—albeit a much shorter version of the events—calling it a “shimmy.” With the help of Mashable and the like, the clip is quickly going viral, but not for the reason perhaps it should.

Don’t buy into the media’s lies about the chaos erupting in the streets of Charlotte, the Benham brothers say in a recent viral video.

“There is chaos in our streets, but what people don’t know is this narrative,” Jason Benham says.  

More than two years ago, the Holy Spirit began uniting two pastors of different races, Charlotte-area pastor Jay Stewart tells the Benham brothers.  

Stewart is about to merge his Refuge church with Derrick Hawkins’ church, and Hawkins’ church will become the Greensboro campus in November.  

“Listen, God is doing an amazing thing with this relationship … ,” Hawkins says. “The Lord’s hand is upon this union.”

Watch the video to see more. 

A cancer diagnosis changed Mark Hall’s faith and his family. A year later, we sat down with Casting Crowns’ lead singer for a candid conversation on faith, fatherhood and what youth pastors need the most from parents.

Husband, dad, youth pastor, lead singer—cancer diagnosis. Mark Hall of Casting Crowns was already wearing a lot of hats when a Wednesday afternoon phone call brought a new one that would change his family’s life. Parenting Teens sat down with Casting Crowns’ lead singer for a candid conversation on cancer, parenting on the road and what youth pastors really want to hear from their parents.

LW: After everything that happened, how will you look back on 2015?

MH: I joked with my students and friends around here about it, and I said, you know I’m really glad 2015 is over. It was probably one of the toughest years of my life. It was a tough year in ministry, being in a local church. And then cancer happened, and that was sort of out of nowhere for me. I’ve been a pastor 20 years. I help other people through cancer. I don’t have cancer.

Yesterday I was walking through my front yard and it hit me. I don’t know why. I mean it sounds so crazy to say this—that I’m a cancer survivor. It didn’t even hit me that I’m one of those. 

We all know that God works all things together for good, and God keeps drawing me to Himself and turning me into Jesus from the inside out. But it still stunk. You’ve got to be real. I’m glad that year’s over and I’d prefer not to relive it. 

LW: You dealt with parts of your illness publicly, seeking prayers and giving updates online. What was it like to have a large network of support?

MH: When I found out that I had cancer it was on a Wednesday afternoon, right before our Wednesday night Bible study. And immediately I did not want anyone to know. And I don’t know where any of that came from. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want a bunch of people coming around me and trying to make it better. 

And it totally made sense in my head at the time. And for several days I didn’t want to talk about it to the world. And God started showing me what that really was—pride. I didn’t want to hurt in front of people. And what God showed me was that this is what the church is for. We’re here to love you and to walk with you through it.

And so it was a Wednesday when I decided to tell the church and tell the world. Up until then only my family knew. And God just sort of blew me away. I mean it just sort of took the world by storm online, as the hashtag #prayforMark sort of went wild. And God really showed me how big the church is and how much I need them.

Paul wrote Philippians from prison, and in the first chapter he says, hey, it’s turned out to be a really good thing that I’m here in prison. The guards here realize that I’m here for Jesus. The other prisoners here realize that I’m here because of the gospel. And the believers in the churches are encouraged and challenged. And what he’s saying is that how you handle a storm in your life will preach louder than probably anything you’ll ever say.

God was showing me that everything in my life has been so transparent in the past. I talk about dyslexia. I talk about my failure. I talk about fear. I talk about everything—I’m a youth pastor. You can’t be fake. You’ve got to be real. So all of my songs are basically saying, I’m a big dork and a train wreck and God loves me anyway. But when it came to cancer, I just shut down. I don’t know. It was weird. I didn’t want anybody to help me.

LW: How did that experience change the way you think about parenting or your kids?

MH: As soon as the doctor said cancer, I immediately thought of my kids. And I thought, how am I going to get them through this? How am I going to pull them together and them not be scared?

And that’s really part of why I shut down. I’m open about a lot of things, but if I tell the youth group how worried I am, my kids are going to be worried. My kids are in the youth group. So I can’t be transparent about this. I can’t talk about how serious it is. I’ve got to be strong for them.

It affected how I see teenagers who have lost parents and who are going through illness. When a kid loses his parents or his family splits up, the ground under him is breaking open. And I could see that in my kids as I’m trying to carefully tell them what’s going on with me. They’re looking at me like everything is about to change. All they could hear is, you’re going to die. That’s all they could hear.

LW: A lot of your songs deal with authenticity in one way or another. How do you think about that when it comes to parenting teenagers?

MH: Kids have a really hard time imagining adults as kids. It’s really hard for a kid to hear from a perfect person because they’re thinking, “Well it’s already too late for me. You’re awesome and you’re just going to keep being awesome.” They’ve really got to know you struggle, too.

My songs started out as just my rantings, me figuring out what God looks like in my life. I knew what He looked like at church. I just wasn’t really sure what He looked like at school and at my job and in my thought life.

I remember the first time I gave my testimony to the youth group and told the youth group I was dyslexic, I thought, they’re never going to listen to me again. They’re going to think I’m stupid now. And everything got real when I started getting real.

“The Voice of Truth” is one of the first songs I wrote. And I started seeing that people—people want to hear this. They want to hear truth, but they want to hear truth from a broken person. And that’s where it started with me.

LW: You’ve been intentional about protecting family time while you’re on the road. What has your job taught you about being a dad that you might not have been able to learn otherwise?

MH: The way my schedule works is that Sunday through Wednesday I’m in the church and at home, doing everything youth pastors do. And then we get on the bus Wednesday night after Bible study and we do concerts Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, then we roll in Sunday morning, because we lead worship on Sunday morning at our church.

My wife, Melanie, runs Casting Crowns. She keeps it going. So, since mom’s on the road, the kids travel with us. When we’re on the road, we do home school, or bus school I guess you could call it, and we do our weekend, just in different cities. We hit the mall, parks, museums, whatever is around.

If you’re going to be in ministry and you’re going to have kids, the kids need to be in the ministry with you. They need to be involved. My son, John Michael, plays bass and helps lead worship here at Eagle’s Landing and he plays a song on the stage with us on the road, which is pretty cool. Reagan, my 15-year-old, works with Melanie and does a lot of the production assistant work and the lyrics on the screen on the stage. So it’s not like they’re just getting dragged around by my ministry. It’s their ministry, too. They’re seeing it as something they are a part of.

Every family looks different. Every family can’t sit at the table together every night. John Michael and I are walking through Galatians this year. We decided, live or die, this year, every day, we’re in the Word. I don’t care if we’ve been up all night and we get home and we are falling asleep, we are getting in the Word before we go to bed. That’s been pretty cool so far.

The important thing for me is just not to sound like a parent who has got it altogether. Everybody in interviews sounds like they’re just killing it and giving all this great advice. But everything I’m saying, I need to do better. I’m fighting my schedule to be with my kids.

It’s a mess at our house, but Jesus lives in this mess.

LW: How has the youth pastor’s job changed in the last decade?

MH: Well, media has changed everything. Everything is different. Bullies are different now. Friend drama is different now. The availability to fall into temptation has intensified. Everything we ever dealt with, the means of it getting to us is multiplied times 10 now. And most parents aren’t educated enough to know what they just gave their kid when they handed him an iPhone for Christmas.

We’re finally in a place where a new generation of youth pastors, sadly, grew up in broken homes. I think a lot of times it’s easy for us when we teach to say stuff that assumes everybody is going home to a mom and dad, when they’re not even going home to either. They’re living with their grandmother.

There’s not a standard family unit any more. We’re trying to do parent ministry to non-parent families. So we’ve really got to broaden our scope of what families really look like. We know what they should look like, but we’ve got to think about what they do look like.

LW: What do youth pastors need from parents in 2016? What can parents do to help you as a youth pastor?

MH: There have been times when I think I know a kid pretty well, and I’m hanging out with him and trying to be a good witness to him, and his parent will say, “Just so you know, this is something that’s going on at home right now…” And it just totally broadens what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it. When you can let a youth pastor know what’s happening in a teenager’s life, it helps them love that kid better.

Kids will tell the youth pastor everything, and that’s great. But they tell the youth pastor everything—so now parents are like, “I don’t want to be around that guy. He probably knows all the bad stuff I do. I’m slamming doors and kicking dogs and now the pastor knows about it.” Parents need to see that the youth worker can be an asset to you. You can partner through this. You can do this together. And youth pastors need to understand the same thing. You’re not fighting the parents as much as it feels sometimes. You’re just more aware of some things than they are.

LW: Part of our mission is to equip parents to be the primary spiritual developers of their kids. What does that phrase mean to you?

MH: Well, I’ll tell you what it means to most dads. It means when we hear that, we hear “you’re not qualified.” Because most dads do not feel they know enough about the Bible.

You don’t have to know everything about the Bible, and you don’t have to act like you do. John Michael and I read Galatians last night, and I got to a verse and was like, “I don’t understand what he’s really saying right here.” And it’d be easy just to skip it and talk about something I do know. But I just told him, like, dude, I don’t get this one. We’ve got to look this up.

Being the primary spiritual leader in your home doesn’t mean doing everything perfectly. It doesn’t mean knowing everything. What it means is, I love Jesus. I love you. I’m doing my best.

We’re going to do life together. And we should pray more. We don’t have to be doing everything right to pray. And even if you can’t pull out the theological points from Scripture, your kid grows up knowing my dad sat me down and read the Bible with me.

We weren’t real sure what it meant, but it was a big deal to him and this is going to be a big deal to me now. And it’s just—it’s gold. Your kid doesn’t really mind as much that you don’t know all the answers as much as the fact that you sat down with him and looked for the answers.

Excerpted from Parenting Teens magazine.

For the original article, visit .

On Saturday, I received a text from Frank Amedia saying he and other Christian leaders were calling for prayer for Donald Trump before the first debate on Monday. Even though it was short notice, I assigned an article to be written. As far as I knew, a call to prayer for a presidential debate was unprecedented.

We posted the article at 5 p.m. Sunday, barely 24 hours before the debate at Hofstra University in New York. I posted it on my public Facebook page. By the time I went to bed, it had 2,700 shares.

Clearly people believe we need to pray, and my inbox was full of messages of support. By the time the debate took place it had an amazing 34,000 shares and has continued to climb since the debate between Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. It has now reached more than 56,000 shares.

Amedia, the founder and director of Touch of Heaven Ministries in Canfield, Ohio, was one of the early supporters of Trump. He hosted a rally last Wednesday along with Rev. Darrell Scott at Scott’s New Spirit Revival Center church in Cleveland, Ohio. At the end of the rally, he led a prayer binding and loosing over Trump and vice presidential nominee Gov. Mike Pence from Indiana. Watch here to see how respectful they were as others laid hands on them and prayed.

Charismatics and Pentecostals aren’t usually visible in politics. If they pray it’s behind closed doors out of sight of the media and the public who often don’t understand or appreciate how we pray or how we understand the spiritual realm. Yet there are those like Amedia and Scott who feel what is happening in our nation is result of spiritual warfare and the time to be passive or secretive is over. It may make some of Trump’s handlers uneasy if they aren’t familiar with Pentecostal-style worship, but Trump seems to appreciate it.

Of course, there are so-called evangelicals who are liberal and support Clinton in spite of her policies and beliefs that run counter to what we believe. A number of them wrote nasty things on my public Facebook page.

But I was encouraged by how many feel the need to pray.

The election was one of the topics I discussed Monday with Jim Bakker when I was a guest on his program. We talked about the October issue of Charisma, in which I endorse Trump for president and included powerful articles by Pastor Jim Garlow and Lance Wallnau that we’ve featured online. (That episode of The Jim Bakker Show will air next week.) If you missed the Charisma issue, click here to subscribe.

Monday I was glued to the TV as I watched the pre-debate discussion, the debate itself and the post-debate analysis. To me, neither candidate made any big mistakes and each scored points. Of course, Trump missed opportunities to drill home about the problems with influence peddling and the Clinton Foundation as well as about Benghazi and the email scandal. But there are two more debates and plenty of time to make his case.

Meanwhile, Amedia is continuing the prayer effort with a “24-7 to heaven” prayer website. 

“We will be posting prayer points and will keep this momentum going,” he told me. “Many networks are affirming—providing prayer points and sending out information. You can stay connected to the Prayer Watch on . Also, we estimate the total outreach has touched 100,000-plus, taking into account the multitude of ministries and networks. Our goal is to grow the Watch to 200,000 by the second debate.”

We will continue to cover this prayer movement. I urge you to share this article on social media and to check out the website when it’s ready as a way to be involved. 

And be sure to pray. This is a critical time for our nation. {eoa}

Hillary Clinton made a comment during Monday night’s debate with Donald Trump that may have seemed innocuous when she said it, but has the potential to utterly destroy her campaign if one were to actually think about the context in which it was said.

During a discussion about law enforcement and policing, moderator Lester Holt—who had just taken a beating from Trump for arguing about a “stop and frisk” policy adopted by the New York City Police Department—asked Clinton to weigh in. He asked, “Do you believe that police are implicitly biased against black people?”

In other words, are police inherently racist?

Given the beating she took earlier in the month for her “basket of deplorables” comment, which she suggested applied to one quarter of the American population, many expected her to sidestep the question. And in a way, that may have been what she was trying to do.

Her answer: “Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other, and therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about ‘Why am I feeling this way?'”

In other words, everyone’s racist.

Unfortunately for Trump, he never pounced on what she said, perhaps because he was still regrouping from his previous exchange with Holt—which violated the rules of the debate established by the Committee on Presidential Debates. Some media outlets did pick up on the comment in their post-debate analysis, though.

As The Daily Caller noted, it remains to be seen if the comments get the attention of the electorate, which has already found the “deplorables” comment off-putting.