Temptations will come to you this week, and Jesus says, “Watch and pray, so that what will come to you will not enter into you and trap you.”

Everybody is tempted. As long as you’re in the body, temptation can reach you. The impulse to sin has a landing place in your life.
Jesus doesn’t say, “Watch and pray, so you won’t be tempted.” There is no way you can get into a place in the Christian life where you are no longer tempted. He says, “Watch and pray, so that you will not fall into temptation.” Literally it says, “so that you will not enter into temptation.”
John Owen is helpful here. Entering into temptation, Owen says, has two distinctive features:
First, “Satan becomes more earnest than usual.”
There are times when he intensifies his assaults against you. Not every day in the Christian life is the same. There seem to be days and seasons of life when all hell breaks loose. Paul refers to this, “put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes…” (Ephesians 6:13).
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Faith is the substance of things hoped for. It is not a blind leap of hope into darkness, but a very tangible realism. That’s one of the reasons why it is so vital for a believer to read the Bible, be conversant with its claims, for the more one does the more the evidence that Russell cried out for will inhabit your soul and give it peace and comfort. Many times in life we allow doubt to flourish because we don’t take the time to nourish faith with truth, truth about God, truth about forgiveness of sin, and many other aspects of our Christian religion.

There’s been a theme developing the last week or so in our evening service on the Lord’s Day and in adult Sabbath School, that wasn’t intentional on my part. However, that’s how God in His providence works all the time. Sweetly complying things with one another in order to show forth His glory. We’ve been looking at Romans in the morning and our topical series on Sunday nights has explored the question “How God Works”. If you know anything about either of those then it makes sense why they make a good pair. One of Paul’s main concerns is how is it that our perfect and holy God was reconciled with fallen, sinful humanity if He is the all-powerful mighty one? As we have seen as we’ve spent time considering Jehovah’s attributes it is because He is the God of mercy and grace that this is the case. In today’s prayer and worship help we will speak a little bit on the topic of the practicality presented to a believer by the great truths offered in a better understanding of the nature of our Heavenly Father, His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. We’ll see how the Trinity especially is of great help to Christians everywhere, at all times.
In the passage we looked at this most recent Sabbath morning, Romans 9, we have these famous words. “…for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works but of Him who calls.” In that discussion of Jacob and Esau the apostle makes clear that the establishment of Jacob as the son of promise, and not Esau, was grounded in nothing about them as individuals. But that’s too narrow in a sense. We need to understand something concerning the reality that election is neither about Jacob nor Esau. The former was the beneficiary of the sovereign love of God in a way the later was not for sure, but what should that then result in for those of us on Team Jacob rather than Team Esau?
Considering the truth that Jehovah through His great benevolence towards men as sinners has sent His Son to lay down His life for the ungodly, and how the Father and the Son send the Spirit to make effectual that which was decreed by the Triune God it should drive us not merely towards obedience, but something higher than that, pure worship and praise.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
There is a clear push to grant LGBTQ+ ideology a favored legal and cultural status that enforces it without compromise. It also labels any and all dissent as morally evil. You don’t have to be an Old Testament prophet to see where this is all heading, or at least where those in power hope it is heading. 

Last week, three news stories threw into sharp relief the ambitions of the sexual revolutionaries who govern the United States. First, there was the predictable outrage from the usual elites concerning Florida’s Parental Right in Education Bill, which would significantly restrict the teaching of LGBTQ+ ideology to schoolchildren. Second, it emerged that Washington State has a policy preventing teachers from revealing a child’s gender transition to parents. And third, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki condemned a directive from Texas governor Greg Abbott that calls on state agencies to protect Texas minors by investigating cases of children receiving “abusive gender-transitioning procedures.”
Each story reveals a particular aspect of the current sexual revolution. The criticism of Florida shows just how deeply the progressive elites have imbibed the notion of expressive individualism. Actress Kerry Washington condemned the Florida law, declaring that “Children deserve to be who they want to be. To be their true selves.” That such a statement makes sense to her and presumably to many of her 5.5 million Twitter followers testifies to how the notion of authenticity, tied to a sexualized notion of childhood, is now unquestioned orthodoxy in our culture.
Washington State’s policy is a reminder of how deeply government agencies have bought into trans ideology, and how they are using it to drive a wedge between parents and children. By the state’s own philosophy, the child is the gender he or she claims to be. So the state holds that the child defines who he truly is, but that the child’s parents have no right to know. That is disturbing in the extreme.
As to the Biden administration’s attitude toward the Texas directive, the president and his entourage seem to believe it is inappropriate, and indeed morally disgusting, to investigate institutions involved in gender transition to see if they conform to current Texas law. Psaki said that Abbott’s guidance was “designed to target and attack the kids who need support the most.” Our administration believes that loving and caring for trans kids apparently means enabling them to do irreparable damage to their bodies at an age when they have no idea what the consequences will be later in life. The lobbyists have so perverted the narrative, and the current administration has so enabled that perversion, that yes, evil is called good and good is called evil.
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