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      In A Mirror

      Reflections from The Life of Jesus Christ

      Raed Mikhael

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      in a mirror

      Reflections from the life of Jesus Christ

      Copyright © 2018 Raed Mikhael. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-5520-3

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-5521-0

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-5522-7

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/07/18

      In A Mirror

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      Prologue

      Blessed is the Lord Jesus Christ, the source of all blessings and inspirations and the central character of my writing. I pray that the Lord may use the words of this book to bring perspective to its readers, changing lives where needed.

      A testimony written after decades of isolation, the book is inspired by the life of an individual whose introspection lacked Christ, before he was shocked by the image of a man whom he does not recognize. Swaying back and forth, by all kinds of doctrines, beliefs and traditions in which negligence to the presence of God distanced the world from a purpose to life, I waited thirty years before a close-up encounter with Christ. Prior years I have maneuvered my affair with a considerable distance from Christ, keeping separate my spiritual development while attesting to questionable paths bordering atheism. Many times I have disregarded life with a slight irreverence to the fleeting sense of time and the normalized imminence of death following years of aimless strife to survival. I contained my faith to the coping mechanisms in which reliance on human power dominated reason, resolving to my own strength to amend meaning to incomprehensible traditions. Disguised under traditions of growing up in a Christian family, I achieved a reasonable balance of faith in which I tailored God around my needs. While I retired my atheist’s pursuits by a more moderate agnosticism, lacking the Holy Spirit, a relationship with Christ was void of the elements needed for conviction. It was the late experiences of the Holy Spirit that brought forth the testimonies in this book, which attest to the powerful work of God through Jesus Christ to reach individuals like myself.

      Doing the work of missionaries, my family uprooted from many towns where they were assigned to build churches, which made it difficult to establish any strong attachment to one particular place, aside from a hopeful sense of strengthening God’s outreach by unbounded measures—a “Christianity-Without-Borders”—a reality that would prove a lot more complex as spiritual sectarianism spread to the global phenomena we now live in. By relativity of faith, a greater freedom to exploration became a viable alternative to the more orthodox religions, giving way to a more convenient ideology by which a trend of a new world order emerged—a peaceful common humanity—which unified the world with godless tenets against the disregard of man, based on the most critical aspects of human identity, those related to origin, religion, faith, color, creed, etc., leaving only acts of labor to entitle them to an immutable birth right by virtue of being human. No greater constituents were more amicable than those of such an order, drawing many by its sacraments of free-will in spite of its marked dogmatic challenges which it continues to dismantle by unethical practices of an immoral system, replacing Christ from the center by a similar faith in the power of the collective-self—the safety in numbers—relaying on promises of a social order when Christ’s adoption is the only sacrificial sacrament required to eternal salvation. Inherent of western mythology and philosophy, a new world order had spawned multiple of deities which appeal to adherence by the common sense, that which parallels the diversity of human thoughts in spite of the evidence to our systemically unified paths through cycles of life and death. While, on the other hand, absolute truth presents decisive facts determine the way we live and die, less concerned with homogenous peaceable unity if rooted in lies that entirely undermine the most critical Christian pillar, Jesus Christ. Spoken by Christ and the apostles, the word of God is a “sword” of a decisive truth, given for a choice between two paths, one leading to life in Jesus Christ and

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