This is an awesome Extreme Devotion that I received in my email this morning. As I read through this I was thinking about how often the enemy of our souls, the devil, attempts to counterfeit what God has done - and it ends up being poison. Read on and be blessed.

On September 24th, two churches were attacked by militants in Iraq. The first attack was initiated at 9:30 a.m. by a bomb that detonated beneath a car belonging to the priest of the Assyrian Orthodox Church of St. Mary in Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood. Shortly after a crowd formed around the explosion site, a second bomb blast occurred in the vicinity, taking the life of a church security guard and wounding several other victims. On the same day, about 80 gun shots struck the Chaldean Church of the Holy Spirit in Mosul, penetrating the building’s windows and walls. Just two days later, on September 26th, the same church was bombarded by rockets before a bomb was triggered next to a door on the building’s exterior. After Pope Benedict’s comments about Islam, Christians have endured increased violence at the hands of Muslims, who have circulated flyers threatening to attack them if they did not reject the Pope’s statements.

A man from Asia shared this story with us: