There is literally nothing more important in this life than the corporate meetings of God’s people as they prep for the heavenly places in Christ. If your local church is opening the doors for worship on the Lord’s Day morning and evening, holding Sabbath School and/or a Wednesday Night bible study/prayer meeting avail yourself of these things. You’re going to need to be strong in faith as the darkness arises. These moments will be quite important as the day approaches. Be strong in Christ and in His word for your blessing.

Growing up is not always for the faint of heart. Grunts and groans as you get up from a chair or walk up the stairs are met with chuckles, but you know we all get there at some point. A new word that has entered the popular lexicon is “adulting”. Young folks use it to describe the switch from having someone else take care of things like paying bills or getting the oil changed in your car to doing it yourself. It’s an eye-opener. Being responsible for yourself is a big step in life. Yet, at some point in time you don’t really have a choice, unfortunately however more and more folks, whether they be Gen Z, Gen X, Gen Y, or Millenial have decided to take up the old Boomer mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”. Whether they be the drugs which Timothy Leary popularized through his teaching (and which produced that statement) or just the laziness of refusing to deal our culture is one that promotes in several different ways immaturity and irresponsibility. In today’s worship and prayer help we’ll talk a little bit about how this mindset has infiltrated the Church and affects members of the body of Christ, and why that is bad.
A common complaint of the Apostle Paul is the fact that outside of perhaps Thessalonica so many of the converts to the Christian faith were satisfied to take in the milk, and not seek after meat. 1 Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 6 being the most pertinent examples. The question is why does this matter? Milk is good, especially when it’s mixed with sugar and frozen. Paul gives a couple of reasons why both having to do with maintaining the present faith that one has. Babies are naturally defenseless against predators and also have issues feeding themselves. Infant Christians are no different. However, we don’t expect little ones to remain little ones forever. Eventually they get bigger, stronger, and more and more independent. Though no matter how old you are you are never in a position where you need no one else. We are all dependent on someone, yet the kinds of things we need change quite dramatically. All that is to say that when it comes to the spiritual strength required of the believer we do damage to ourselves and our walk with Christ when we refuse to eat the food God provides for us in His grace.
How do we do that?
It’s pretty simple. We live in an age of easy access to information.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
What animates the confessional Reformed churches is a holistic theology, piety, and practice lived out in the context of congregations and in the life of the broader institutional church. We are animated by a theology that we share with our Reformed forebears, which we have not amputated or substantially revised. We are animated by our commitment to gathering Sabbath by Sabbath with the covenant community to hear the law and the gospel preached, the sacraments administered, and grace and mercy lived out during the week.

Recently, Trevin Wax crystalized the case for preserving the neo-evangelical coalition, which emerged after World War II and in so doing, for Reformed confessionalists, he has also made the case against the neo-evangelical coalition. What is that the coalition and what are its attractions and problems? Let us go back to the Reformation for a moment to set a baseline. As the Luther began to recover Augustine’s doctrines of sin (i.e., total depravity) and grace (sola gratia), Paul’s doctrine of imputation and his definition of faith (sola fide), along with the biblical distinction between law and gospel (with some help from Augustine) and the doctrine of sola Scriptura the Reformation message spread from Wittenberg throughout Europe and the British Isles. In the Reformation an evangelical was one who confessed those truths and others. To be an evangelical was to be about the gospel and a very particular understanding of it but, in the Reformation, the evangelicals were so within increasingly distinct ecclesiastical traditions and confessions. That process of distinction is known to scholars as confessionalism, when it is considered as a bottom-up movement and as confessionalization, when it is considered as a top-down movement. By the 1550s there were two distinct Reformation churches: the Lutherans and the Reformed. They had distinct views of the two natures of Christ, the way Scripture regulates worship, and the sacraments among other things.
The Rise Of Trans-Denominational Movements
There did develop in the seventeenth century a trans-denominational movement centering on religious experience, Pietism. This movement was the seedbed for the modern evangelical and neo-evangelical movements. In the eighteenth century another trans-denominational movement emerged, which was related to the Pietists: the revivalists. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revivals of varying kinds swept across the American Colonies (the First Great Awakening), then Europe to a lesser degree, and again in the USA (i.e.,  the Second Great Awakening) and Europe (e.g., the Réveil).
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even as Pietism and Revivalism producing great fervor and social activity (e.g., poverty relief, anti-slavery movements, temperance movements) the eighteenth-century Enlightenment movements were conquering the universities, the intellectuals, and the elites. By the late nineteenth century most in those sets had accepted the rationalism (the superiority of reason over all other authorities), empiricism (the superiority of sense experience over all other authorities), or romanticism (the superiority of the inner life over all other authorities) and had lost confidence in Scripture and the historic Christian faith. In response the children of Pietism, Revivalism, and those who still affirmed the old Protestant confessions, theology, piety, and practice sought to defend the fundamentals of the historic Christian faith.
By the end of World War II, the West was tired of near constant conflict, whether marital or ecclesiastical and the fundamentalist movement had become increasingly narrow. The great hero of the early fundamentalist movement, J. Gresham Machen, was dead and some of those who had studied with him wanted to retain his high view of Scripture but they also wanted to move on. They wanted to influence the broader culture and to leave behind his commitment to the Westminster Standards and his Presbyterian view of the church and sacraments. Scholars call this movement, led by Carl F. H. Henry, Henry Ockenga, and Bill Graham, among others, neo-evangelicalism. This movement would seek to be both faithful to a small number of core theological commitments and culturally influential. To that end they began to build institutions. They built Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California where they would seek to produce theologically conservative graduates who were solid like Old Westminster (Machen’s school) but not ecclesiastically narrow like Machen nor pugnacious as he was accused of being. They founded a magazine and located it in Washington, D.C. the capitol of the USA and of the world.
That project lasted about three decades. The Baby-Boomer children of the neo-evangelical founders were a generation that knew not Machen. They did not see the point of holding on to the historic doctrine of Scripture while jettisoning so much of the rest of Christian history (e.g., the Reformation confessions, churches, and sacramental convictions). This move, symbolized by Fuller’s revision of their view of Scripture (i.e., “limited inerrancy”) provoked the “Battle for the Bible” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time, the leading edges of the progressive movement within the neo-evangelical establishment was also pushing the boundaries on the doctrine of God by arguing that God cannot know or control the future. They called themselves “Open Theists.” Others revised the doctrine of the Trinity so argue that the divine unity was more one of society than one of being. There were other revisions such as Daniel Fuller’s proposal that justification is not through faith alone but through faithfulness, which, mutatis mutandis, continues to reverberate in the theology of John Piper, one of the fathers of the so-called Young Restless and Reformed movement. About the same time, in the early 1990s, some of the older neo-evangelicals (e.g., J. I. Packer) along with their more progressive evangelical children sought to negotiate a settlement on the Reformation doctrine of justification in order to facilitate a cultural common cause in the face of an increasingly hostile and post-Christian culture. The late 1990s saw another wave of progressive evangelical movements, now increasingly led by Generation Xers. They called themselves “emergent” and they developed two factions, one slightly more conservative of the past and the other more critical of the past.
The YRR movement, which was stimulated by the theological drift among the evangelical children of the neo-evangelicals, sought to get the old neo-evangelical band back together. This impulse in the 1990s and early 200s produced a flurry of coalitions, e.g., The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which was a response, c. 1995, to the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” documents and movement. About a decade later we saw the emergence of The Gospel Coalition, and Together for the Gospel, among others.
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Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
Jesus reached out to sexual sinners because they, like the exploitative tax collectors, were most in need of being called to repentance, so that they might yet inherit the very Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. Jesus both intensified God’s ethical demand and reached out in love to the biggest violators of that demand.

Rachel Held Evans is once again arguing against “The False Gospel of Gender Binaries.” Regrettably, she does little more than provide us with a reminder of a textbook example of eisegesis (reading “into” the biblical text one’s own ideology) rather than exegesis (reading “out of” Scripture with attentiveness to historical and literary context, even if it conflicts with one’s own personal views). To suggest that Jesus cared little for gender binaries is to distort badly the portrait of Jesus that we find in the Gospels, or for that matter any credible reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” in his first-century Palestinian Jewish context.
Some background: Rachel Held Evans has made a career out of undermining fidelity to the teachings of Scripture by ridiculing simplistic or non-existent notions of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), while practicing a flawed hermeneutic of her own that often seems to be little more than an extension of her own ideology. After starting in the evangelical tradition, she abandoned that tradition to embrace a non-orthodox sexual ethic and is now a member of the Episcopal Church.
She believes that all who do not agree with her promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism—an overwhelming “cloud of witnesses” from the beginnings of God’s people to the present day—have been proclaiming a “false gospel.” That depends on whether the Gospel is determined by her or by Christ.
In Mark 10 (par. Matt 19) Jesus predicated a duality of number for sexual unions (what we call monogamy; a strict monogamy I might add) on the deliberate divine design of the duality of complementary sexes. Binary sexuality for Jesus, the singular fact that God created us (as part of an intentional Divine Design) as “male and female,” was the foundation for rejecting both polygamy and a revolving door of divorce-and-remarriage for any cause.
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