➡ Theophany, also known as Epiphany or the Feast of Lights, is a celebration of God’s creative power, shown through Christ, who is seen as the light of the world. This event signifies Christ’s baptism, which is believed to have restored the world that was lost due to Adam’s sin. When Christ was baptized, it is said that he purified the waters, making them suitable for Christian baptism and symbolizing a new creation. This idea is being witnessed today through the increasing number of baptisms, which are seen as a revival of Christian faith and a sign of a new world awakening.

In accordance with the great head of the church, we baptize you, my brother, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. That’s Hollywood icon Denzel Washington. He was just baptized at a church in New York City in December. And as it turns out, his baptism is just the latest in a surge of celebrities joining the Christian church. So much so that the liberal media has started to freak out over all of these conversions. But it’s true. There’s been a noticeable uptick in the amount of Hollywood celebrities coming to faith.

You’ve seen him. Russell Brand, Sheila Buff, Hulk Hogan, Kanye West, Justin Bieber, Mark Wahlberg, even pop star Gwen Stefani is doing commercials like this. The season has always been my favorite time of the year. It’s the season that we get to celebrate the birth of our Lord. This year, I’m excited to share that I’ve partnered with this amazing prayer, meditation, and music app called Hallo on their 25 day prayer challenge leading up to Christmas called Advent Pray 25. Join me and millions of other Christians around the world as we celebrate together the truth that God so loved the world that he gave us his only son.

Download Hallo and join me in praying every day. God bless. The Golden Age really does appear to be upon us. And what’s so fascinating here is that these Hollywood celebrity conversions are actually part of a larger trend in the L.A. area where baptisms are surging. In the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, they’ve reported that the number of baptisms have increased by 38 percent this year over their previous record year, which was interestingly enough set back in 2016. So it seems like the Trump eras attract mass baptisms. And as I noted earlier, this trend of celebrities finding faith was even noticed by the ultra repulsive woke rag Vanity Fair.

Look at the headline here. Bad faith. That’s what they’re calling these conversions. They’re calling them bad faith. And the byline reads quote from exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals. Vanity Fair gets under the hood of the Catholic rights celebrity conversion industrial complex. The Catholic rights celebrity conversion industrial complex. Vanity Fair is creative. I’ll give them that. But the whole gist of the article is that the Catholic Church in particular and the religious right in general are basically engaged in a PR campaign here. So they’re purposely targeting celebrities selling them on the faith in order to increase the church’s social cred.

It’s an astonishing article for just how utterly clueless it is and even coming close to understanding the re mythologize and retraditional eyes world that’s rising all around us. Scholars have observed that in the face of threats of a sense of place identity security that’s posed by globalization populations tend to reassert their historic identity and security markers such as religion custom culture tradition. All of these become mechanisms of resistance against secular globalization’s anti-cultural, anti-traditional dynamics. So scholars have increasingly noticed that as people feel vulnerable and experience existential anxiety because of globalism, the way globalism destroys our nations, our cultures, our identities.

It’s not uncommon for populations to increasingly assert their customs, their traditions, particularly their religious traditions, their culture, their language, their ethnicity as bulwarks against threats to their sense of existential security. And so what we’re seeing today is a renewed interest in a cultures ancient traditions of wisdom and virtue that approve their validity through the test of time. And these of course tend to be founded in the great historic religious traditions, the great spiritual traditions and practices that do seem to transcend history and therefore can be valued as authentic resources for not only resisting the anti-cultural and anti-traditional processes of globalization, but also as a basis of the spiritual renewal of a nation, of a culture, of a people.

And what I’m about to show you, what I’m about to do is I’m going to reveal to you how that renewal signified by all of these mass celebrity baptisms is more profound than anything you could have ever have imagined. But first, obviously Americans are tired and frustrated by a stalling economy, inflation, endless wars and the relentless assault on our traditional values. But thankfully they’re companies like Patriot Mobile that still believe in America and our Constitution. I’m proud to partner with Patriot Mobile because they’re on the front lines fighting for the first and second amendments, sanctity of life and our military and first responder heroes.

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Don’t get fooled by other providers pretending to share your values or have the same coverage. They don’t and they can’t. Join me, switch to America’s only Christian conservative mobile provider Patriot Mobile today. Today, January 6th is one of the most important beautiful feasts of the church. It’s called the Feast of the Epiphany or as we call it in the Orthodox Church, the Feast of Theophany. Now, while the Western Church focuses on the visit of the Magi, the three wise men, Mirhior, Caspar, and Balthazar, which we see here at the Three Kings Day celebration in Madrid, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the focus today is on Christ’s baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptizer.

So Orthodoxy sees an inextricable link between Christ’s birth and baptism, which reveals a profound significance for all of these Hollywood baptisms I’m going to show you here. Now, interestingly, in Orthodoxy, Christmas or the Feast of Nativity, as it’s traditionally called, while focusing on the on the birth of Christ, Orthodoxy frames that focus on Christ’s birth with the arrival of the Magi and their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, which is actually, if you don’t know, it’s an echo of an ancient Jewish text called the Life of Adam. And in that text, we’re told that when Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden, an angel granted him three gifts by which to remember paradise, gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Isn’t that cool? And so the symbolism here is that the Magi, the Wise Men, realize that Christ is the new Adam who’s bringing back the Garden. So that’s the significance of the Christ child being surrounded by animals and angels, right? It’s paradise-like. It’s just like the original Adam in paradise. So while the story of the Three Wise Men from Chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew is read in the Western Church on this day, January 6th, it’s actually read on Christmas Day in the Orthodox Church. So instead, today in Orthodoxy, we celebrate the Lord’s baptism in the Jordan River and what’s called the Great Blessing of the Waters.

You may not know this, but today all over the world, Orthodox clergy are blessing the waters of creation. So rivers, springs, lakes, seashores, and that blessing realizes and fulfills the restoration and the redemption, indeed, the transfiguration of the entire cosmos in Christ’s own baptism in the Jordan. Now, we could see the cosmic significance in the icon of the Theophany. This is a traditional icon of this feast day today of Christ’s baptism. And as you can see at the top center, the heavens are opened up with God the Father manifesting Himself through the concentric heavenly spheres of the cosmos.

And then from the heavenly spheres, we could see the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove as described in the Gospels, which is an echo of the dove hovering over the waters at the time of Noah and the recreation of the world after the flood. And the Spirit descends upon Christ, the Logos, the one through whom all things are created. And this is why Orthodoxy refers to this day as the Feast of the Theophany, which means the revelation or the manifestation of the Triune God Himself for the purpose of renewing the whole of creation.

And again, what’s so key here with linking together Christ’s birth in baptism is this transfiguration concept, this redemption renewal of the whole of the created order. Through His incarnation, Christ made heaven manifest on earth. You got to get that. He remapped heaven as the center of the cosmos. In Christ, the whole of heaven has been re-centered in and through our world. So this is what we call a cosmography moment here, where the world, the cosmos is literally being reconfigured now around planet earth with Christ manifesting heaven in and through earth. So this is why this revelation of the Trinity in and through Christ’s baptism involves the renewal of the whole of the material creation.

We first see the Spirit hovering over the waters, the primordial and formless creation back in Genesis 1 verse 2. And then the manifestation of God’s creative light, boom, in Genesis 1.3, right? Yahiyur, the Yahiyur, and God said, let there be light in the Hebrew. This is why Theophany is often referred to as Epiphany, the Feast of Lights, for it’s the event that reveals the same creative activity of God in recreating the entire world in Christ, who’s the light of the world. Right? John 8, 12. The Orthodox Church, from its beginning, has taught that Christ’s baptism restores the world lost in Adam.

So when Adam sinned, the Spirit abandoned not only Adam, but the whole cosmos. Hence when Christ, as the new Adam, entered into the waters of the Jordan, he sanctified and purified the waters by restoring the Spirit to the whole of the created order. So it’s not so much Christ is baptized as much as he baptizes the world, as it were. The sanctifying effect Jesus had on the waters thus rendered all water worthy of Christian baptism, enabling us to participate in our baptism in this theophonic manifestation of the new creation realized in the present. In fact, the second century theologian, Melita of Sardis, he actually saw the sun in its setting in the ocean seas in the west, and then it’s rising from the same seas in the east as a daily symbol of Christ’s baptism.

As he descended into waters and rose again, it’s a symbol of Christ’s baptism sanctifying the whole of the cosmos. And so the return of the garden and the recreation of the cosmos that was announced by the angels at Christ’s birth is actualized and realized in Christ’s own baptism in the Jordan. The two feasts of Christ’s birth and baptism are so closely linked together so as to form one reality, one single and undivided observance. One that extends out now into all the earth through our own baptisms. As Christ stepping into the waters of the Jordan transformed the river back into the purifying waters of the Garden of Eden, so now Christian baptism reveals this cosmic transfiguration in the regeneration of the baptized.

This is exactly what we’re witnessing in all of these baptisms that are surging today. We’re literally seeing in real time the recreation of the cosmos as our own individual baptisms, our continuous extensions of Christ’s recreative and purifying baptism in the Jordan. And so when all is said and done, these surge in baptisms that we’re seeing among celebrities in Hollywood not only signals a revival of Christian faith and culture, these baptisms signal nothing less than the reawakening of a whole new world. [tr:trw].

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