What Passed You By While You Were Sleeping?

Dakota Voice contributor Paul E. Scates emailed me with links to this material this morning.

It's a powerful song from Casting Crowns called "While You Were Sleeping".

An excerpt from the story behind the song:

’While You Were Sleeping’ took me nine years to finish. The year was 1996. I was trying to come up with something new to sing to the Lord for Christmas. I wanted to compose a new arrangement to the famous hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem." I set out to use the hymn’s original lyrics but to spin them into my own version with different chords. I didn’t even make it to the second verse. I was playing with some chords and realized halfway through the first verse that I was 27 years old and had been singing the song since I was a kid without grasping its meaning. Halfway through the first verse, the whole point of the song hit me: They missed it! Bethlehem missed it. They never knew what happened. They had no idea their Messiah, the Savior of the world, had fulfilled the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and was sleeping in a feeding trough in their very village. They slept through the whole thing...

I thought, 'We’re doing the same thing. We’re missing it. We’re missing the Answer. We’re missing the Savior.' Instantly the second verse took the song in a radically different direction...

It is amazing and sad what wonders and opportunities can slip past us while we're unaware and sleeping.

This Christmas, don't let the ultimate opportunity slip past while you are sleeping...

Just wanted to share a Christmas video I created in 2005 for Casting Crown's "While You Were Sleeping". Think about all the things we let slip by while we have become so complacent in our lives.

In His Service,
Brian

Desperation Leads Obama Campaign To Droll Analogy

Donna Brazille made it public, but the analogy began in a post on a far-Left website. We have all heard it several times and even Tom Brokaw alluded to it when confronting Rudy Giuliani.

The incredible arrogance of equating B. Hussein Obama to Jesus Christ aside, what can we say about the message? Was Jesus a “community organizer?” The proposition betrays a cynical misunderstanding of Jesus’ life on earth. He was a ‘fisher of men,” asking all to follow Him and turn away from the base and profane world dominated by Jewish leaders, Romans and lovers of self. He did not, however, set Himself explicitly against governmental authorities. How else could Pilate have said “I am innocent of this man’s blood. It is your [the Jews] responsibility?”

Far from being a community organizer, Jesus called His followers out of the community of sinners, and it was the community that demanded His crucifixion. He did not enjoin His followers to organize or act in any political sense, instructing, in fact, that they “give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” What Jesus of Nazareth began was a movement that would transform the world, but not through political action or demonstrations, or get-out-the-vote drives, civil disobedience, or fund drives for PUSH or the Rainbow Coalition.” Jesus called upon His followers to repent, reject Satan, go and sin no more, love one another and to believe upon Him and the Resurrection and the promise of Salvation.

Pontius Pilate was the Prefect of Judea, a position roughly translated as a governor. Far from being an elected executive of the people’s business and welfare, Pilate was appointed by Tiberius to act on Caesar’s behalf in Palestine, which was under the martial law of Rome. His goal was, by all accounts, to impose the severest form of governmental oppression, just short of causing a general insurrection, which is what he feared of the Jews if he didn’t hand over Jesus to be crucified.

So please, enough of this silliness about Jesus being a community organizer and Pilate being a governor. This is nothing more than a diversionary tactic of the Left hoping to cloud the obvious differences between the Obama/Biden ticket and McCain and Palin, and aimed at the ignorant, misinformed or hopelessly cynical.