An activist (not pictured) holds a burning torch near children carrying banners inside a cage during a protest against forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Douma, eastern Al-Ghouta, near Damascus February 15, 2015.
The Islamic State has reportedly burned 15 people alive for trying to escape the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, and has also reportedly arrested a woman who pleaded in a video for Western powers to "save us or bomb us," so they can die quickly and end their sufferring.
MailOnline reported that IS captured and killed 15 civilians in Fallujah, which is located west of Baghdad, and is currently being besieged by Iraqi government forces who are trying to liberate the city.
The radical group is said to have sentenced the hostages to death for their attempts to flee, with a source telling Kurdish news agency ARA that living in the IS-held city has become "unbearable."
"Fallujah has been under suffocating blockade for several months. People endure severe shortage of basic materials, amid deteriorating living conditions," the source explained.
The Islamic radicals have also arrested a woman who went on television with a plea to the Western world.
"People are dying because of hunger, there is no medicine, no food, we have no more options left," the woman, who wasn't named, told Al Arabiya News Channel.
She cries: "Save us from Islamic State or bomb us with chemical weapons so we will immediately die and not have a slow, agonising death."
Reports have suggested that IS is struggling to keep control of Fallujah, as it is isolated from other captured territory, and there is difficulty getting supplies in.
Joint efforts by the Iraqi government, Western powers including the United States, and other factions have been determined to destroy IS.
The radicals have become infamous for their numerous beheading execution videos, but they have also burned prisoners alive on a number of occasions.
An Iraqi soldier who escaped IS capture shared in January that some Christians, who have been heavily targeted by IS, have been locked inside caskets and burned alive, alongside suffering torture and other abuse.
"They tortured the [expletive] out of the Christians and some died in the process," Sergeant Karam Saad of the Iraqi military said.
"They would take some and lock them in a kind of casket, and set it on fire from the inside," he added.
IS officials have even burned alive some of their own soldiers who failed to fight to the death in military operations.
"They were grouped together and made to stand in a circle and set on fire to die," one former resident of Northern Iraq who is now living in the United States told Fox News, speaking about an incident in which IS higher-ups sent a message to their rank-and-file fighters by burning alive a group of soldiers who were pushed out of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province.
Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/isis-burns-15-civilians-alive-crying-woman-begs-the-west-save-us-or-bomb-us-161025/#LeVWHx1ADMWUwwL2.99
Jesus.org Question of the Day
by Sam Allberry
Two clear principles are shown to us in the Bible: 1. Prayer is ordinarily directed to the Father. Jesus teaches us to pray to the Father
When his disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, this is how he instructed them, “When you pray, say: ‘Father…’” (Luke 11:1-2). In prayer, we are to address God the Father. This is to be the norm; it is the pattern Jesus gives us to follow. In giving this instruction Jesus is not forbidding prayer directed at other persons of theTrinity, he is showing us that prayer will ordinarily be directed to God the Father.
This is a sentiment reflected by Paul. He writes to the Ephesian Christians of how, “Through [Jesus] we… have access to the Father by the one Spirit” (Eph. 2:18). This is the posture of the whole Christian life, and the pattern for our praying: by the Spirit, through the Son and to the Father. The Spirit moves us to pray to the Father
As Paul explains the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, one of the things he emphasizes is how the Spirit gives us confidence to approach God in prayer. In fact it is by the Spirit that we cry, “Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:6;Rom 8:15). This is not incidental. Jesus himself cried out these same words in his own prayer (Mark 14:36). The Spirit is moving Christians to address Father in the same language that God the Son uses. Prayer is a way of expressing the sonship we have through Jesus.
This is the normative shape of prayer and reflects the shape of the relationships within the Trinity: the Son lives by the Spirit to the Father. As we pray, we come in through Jesus into this eternal and happy dynamic. 2. Prayer should also be directed to the Son.
Yet for all this, the New Testament does not prohibit prayer being directed to Jesus (or to the Spirit). In fact there are a number of examples of people praying directly to Jesus.
Examples like this give us a precedent for doing the same – it is good, right, and proper to pray to Jesus. (There are no examples of praying directly to the Spirit, but we can assume this too is not forbidden.)
Given the biblical precedent of praying to Jesus, and considering all that Jesus is to mean to his followers, it would be odd for a Christian never to pray to Jesus. In this sense we should pray to him; it should be natural to cry out to him in adoration for all he has done, and for help to follow in his footsteps. But we can also see that prayer should not always be directed to him. Jesus himself teaches us to pray to the Father.
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