Douglas Ostien

“Pride” Is Nothing to Be Proud Of

As God’s Word teaches over and over, you, and all lost sinners, are called to recognize your sinful condition before God, acknowledge it, and repent by turning from it, and accepting the only remedy He has provided to deliver you from eternal death: the gift of eternal life. The saving remedy God provided was to send His Son Jesus Christ to this earth to live a sinless life and then to die in our place on the cross to atone for our sins.

LGBTQ pride is defined by the Left as the positive stance toward, and promotion of, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender people as a social group.
“Pride” is all about sex and gender, with the characteristic of having a sexual or gender identity that does NOT correspond to established norms of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms. The term queer is used by both right and left to describe proponents of non-normative sexual identities, but with opposite meanings.
Queerness is an umbrella term, used by the Left, to include people who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender, i.e., all those who embrace LGBTQism. Originally meaning ‘strange,’ ‘odd,’ or ‘peculiar,’ queer gained a connotation of sexual deviance and came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships. This is how the word is still used by the Right.
More recently, queer activists, have tried to redefine the word as a deliberately provocative and politically radical term, and queer has become increasingly used to describe a broad spectrum of non-normative sexual or gender identities. Being queer to the Left is now viewed positively and is proudly included under their banner of “Pride.”
There is very much a dark side to Pride that springs from the extreme culture of sexual freedom that they have created, in which anything goes, sexually speaking. One of the big areas of concern is physical health. Think of diseases like AIDS and Monkeypox that particularly affect gay men. The Atlantic recently carried an article with the provocative headline: Gay Men Need a Specific Warning About Monkeypox.
There are many negative concerns with Pride beyond health, but my main concern with it is not physical, but spiritual and moral. In short, I believe the whole Pride agenda is wrong and profoundly immoral. Pride neither is nor has anything to be proud of.
Queer activists may retort, “How can you say that, Ostien; who are you to judge? Millions upon millions of people believe ardently in Pride and all it stands for. Look at the rainbow flags flying everywhere. The President of the United States is an strong supporter (despite being a ‘devout’ Catholic).”
You’re right, who am I to judge? But it isn’t I who is judging. My authority for calling Pride wrong and immoral is not from me. The authority for saying such is directly from the Word of the living God who created both you and me. He is there and He is not silent (Schaeffer). He didn’t just fill His Word with nice sayings and pleasant stories. He gave us commandments and law. He told us in no uncertain terms to keep his commandments, or suffer serious consequences.
His Word on sexual matters is particularly straight forward and clear, and it’s unequivocally condemnatory to all things Pride. Listen to the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:22-32:
Claiming to be wise, they became fools [i.e., those who suppress the truth], and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. … Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
This passage calls out negatively many practices touted by Pride devotees; v. 22 makes clear that such people may claim to be wise but instead have become fools.
Verse 32 presents your precarious position before God, if you approve or practice the sorts of sinful practices that Pride stands for, listed in the passage. The death spoken of there is not just physical death, which we all experience, but eternal death separated from God in hell.
If you are among the sinful followers and practitioners of Pride, you will die that second, eternal death, because God says in His Word that the wages of sin is death. However, all is not yet lost for you. You don’t have to remain in that fearful condition of facing eternal doom in hell.
As God’s Word teaches over and over, you, and all lost sinners, are called to recognize your sinful condition before God, acknowledge it, and repent by turning from it, and accepting the only remedy He has provided to deliver you from eternal death: the gift of eternal life.
The saving remedy God provided was to send His Son Jesus Christ to this earth to live a sinless life and then to die in our place on the cross to atone for our sins. He rose again and is now in heaven preparing a place for His people to dwell eternally with Him.
But note, that great privilege is only for His people, not for all people in the world. That raises the all-important question, how do you become one of God’s people? What must you do to be saved?
“Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). 
“To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:16-18).
Believe in Christ now and your condemnation will be removed and you will be saved.
Douglas Ostien is a member of Chestnut Mountain Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in Chestnut Mountain, Ga.
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Fast and Pray, But Withdraw Anyway

The fact that the session views as “attacks” the criticism that Memorial Church and Greg Johnson have received, since hosting the 2018 Revoice conference, is very telling. It’s telling because it reveals the session’s mind set as being highly defensive of its position, instead of being open to counsel from Christian brethren. It also shows why Memorial’s session has not moved from their theological error despite all their prayer and fasting.

We have read the report that the congregation of Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, on November 18, 2022, voted by 92% to withdraw from the PCA. This was recommended by their session and agreed to by their pastor, Greg Johnson, who indicated that he will be leaving with the congregation.
The article noted that the session informed the congregation that their recommendation was coming “with a mixture of sorrow and hope … after fifteen months spent fasting, praying, waiting, consulting and listening.” The reason for withdrawing, the session explained, was “continued attacks” from within the denomination which were distracting the church from its mission.
The session’s statement is troubling to me. They claim to have spent fifteen months “fasting, praying, waiting, consulting and listening,” but still seem to have ended up with the same erroneous views as the ones they started with, namely, approving and promoting Revoice ideology in the church. Where is the repentance for, not only introducing the sinful impurity of Revoice into the PCA, but also violating the principle of maintaining peace in the church, by creating years of conflict trying to justify themselves. All their praying and fasting seems not to have had the corrective effect it should have had. Could that be because what they were praying for was not the will of God?
The fact that the session views as “attacks” the criticism that Memorial Church and Greg Johnson have received, since hosting the 2018 Revoice conference, is very telling. It’s telling because it reveals the session’s mind set as being highly defensive of its position, instead of being open to counsel from Christian brethren. It also shows why Memorial’s session has not moved from their theological error despite all their prayer and fasting. I believe that on this particular error, their minds are locked into what Paul describes in Romans 1 as truth suppression, where they’ve become futile in their thinking.
Critics have not been on the attack, but rather have been seeking to persuade Johnson, his session, Missouri Presbytery, and any others holding similar views, by speaking the truth out of love, in an effort to halt the slide into liberalism and return the PCA to the truth. There has been a noticeable movement in recent years of PCA slippage downward in a progressive direction. This has been led by progressives in the PCA who take an approving stance toward homosexuality, gender identity and other such priorities. Their support, even celebration, of Revoice is proof of that.
The Bible commands us to “speak the truth in love” (Eph 4:15), which is what critics of progressive views and actions are seeking to do in the present conflict. However, you can’t speak the truth in love, without having the truth. Truth comes first, then you can speak it in love.
Progressives reverse the biblical sequence when they, in loving concern for homosexuals, seek support in Scripture for teaching that agrees with their pre-conceived beliefs. Matthew Vines’s book, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships, is a case in point. Note that starting with homosexuality, Vines seeks to show biblical support for it. He argues that homosexual orientation and committed same-sex relationships are consistent with a “high view” of the Bible and evangelical Christianity. I believe he is badly mistaken about that. There simply is no biblical teaching supporting the LGBT agenda; the reverse is true. Revoice doctrine on homosexuality is constructed to meet the need; but being constructed opinion, it isn’t biblical, and it isn’t true, objectively speaking.
PCA progressives are simply repeating and extending the same discredited biblical arguments as Vines did in their efforts to justify the Revoice movement, and in their opposition to conservative efforts to restore the PCA to biblical soundness, after some serious slippage in recent years.
Progressives appear to be post-modernists. As such, they have a fluid, subjective view of truth and reject the concept of absolute truth. They receive the Revoice doctrine subjectively as “their truth” even though it’s been refuted objectively as false. Francis Schaeffer used to distinguish objective truth from post-modern, subjective truth by calling the former true truth, in contrast to the false constructions of “my truth” or “your truth” or “their truth.” The post-modern view is aptly foreseen by the prophet Isaiah (59:14) as truth stumbling in the streets, and by Daniel (8:12) as truth cast to the ground.
Thus, when progressives seek to speak the truth in love to homosexuals, they are speaking “their truth” to homosexuals, not “true truth.” You can see the big problem here for progressives, because it’s never loving to speak falsehoods to someone to whom you are trying to express loving concern. It’s like quoting Ephesians 4:15 to say: “speaking falsehoods in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”
Obviously, that’s bafflegab. It’s perverting to God’s Word and actually unloving to homosexuals. Yet that is what progressives get by starting with what they think is loving concern for homosexuals and then looking for supporting Scripture truth, which they can’t find because it isn’t there. They have to resort to post-modern hermeneutical gymnastics to construct their own truth. Hence, unsound Revoice doctrine.
The real sorrow here is that Greg Johnson and the elders of Memorial Presbyterian Church seem blind to the realities of Scripture, and bent on continuing to pursue the destructive course they’ve been on. Since they have refused to repent and desire to persist in error, it is no doubt best all-around that they withdraw the PCA.
Douglas B. Ostien is a member of Chestnut Mountain Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in Chestnut Mountain, Ga.
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The Slippage Needs to Stop: We’re Starting to Look Like the 1920s PCUSA.

The progressives have not been solid with biblical truth. This is clearly exemplified by their weak handling of the whole Revoice affair. The first Revoice Conference was held in a PCA church in Missouri Presbytery, pastored by a self-avowed same-sex attracted pastor, and pretty well celebrated all around by progressives. Where were the elders (overseers) of the session of Memorial Presbyterian Church; and where was the denomination when this was going on? Why was it ever permitted?  

I’m alarmed at the trends taking place in the PCA, marked in some places by the decline and departure from the truth that are very similar to what happened in the PCUSA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I spent some years in the ‘80s as a ruling elder at Hope Presbyterian Church, an evangelical PCUSA church in Minneapolis, before leaving to join a startup PCA church (Parkwood Pres.) under Douglas Lee as pastor. While at Hope, I was liaison to the Twin Cities presbytery and suffered through many presbytery meetings, where the conservative to liberal ratio was about 25/75. I spoke out when I could, but the votes were hopelessly in favor of the liberal unbelievers. Now look at the state of the PCUSA, as its demise is marked by its death rattle.
We moved to St. Louis in 2002 and remained there for 13 years. During those years we were members at Covenant Presbyterian Church under the pastorates of George Robertson and Ryan Laughlin. In 2015 we moved to Flowery Branch, GA, and are currently members of very solid Chestnut Mountain Presbyterian Church, where John Batusic is pastor.
Having carefully read David B. Calhoun’s 2-volume work, Princeton Seminary, which masterfully documents the tragic fall of the seminary and denomination as a whole, I am struck with the similarities between PCUSA/Princeton Sem. and PCA/Covenant Sem. The former is of course far down the road to oblivion and the latter is only in the early stages, but the PCA will end up where the PCUSA is now, if its slippage is not halted in its tracks and it is not delivered from the deadly effects of the progressivism in our midst.
It needs to be noted here that it was the fault of progressive elders in the PCUSA and PCUS that those denominations stumbled and fell. The elders are charged with protecting the sheep but many of the “shepherds” proved to be false prophets dressed in sheep’s clothing, who inwardly were ravenous wolves. Instead of protecting and nurturing the sheep according to God’s Word, as Machen and many others were urging, they led the sheep astray and scattered them. Here is Paul’s instruction to elders:
“Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:28-30).
Unfortunately, I see Paul’s prophecy coming to pass now among progressive elders in the PCA. They don’t seem like fierce wolves, of course, because they’re dressed in shepherd’s clothing.
But progressivism is never a good thing, either in politics or in religion. Religious progressives have a tendency to change the Gospel to make it culturally relevant and less offensive. They wobble and vacillate on homosexuality, creation, the social justice gospel, the Federal Vision, and other issues. When elders are not solidly biblical on these, they are trifling with the truth and not communicating the Christian Gospel as written. They are telling God that they know better than he does, what his Word should say and how it should be interpreted.
Now, I acknowledge that progressives in the PCA are not (yet) as bad as the progressives in the PCUSA. But, then, neither were the PCUSA progressives in 1915 as bad as they are now. There is a tendency for a denomination to spiral downward once progressivism takes hold in that denomination. I am concerned that this downward spiral, already commenced in the PCA, will accelerate if the PCA allows its own organization of progressive Christians (known as the National Partnership) to have significant influence.
The progressives have not been solid with biblical truth. This is clearly exemplified by their weak handling of the whole Revoice affair. The first Revoice Conference was held in a PCA church in Missouri Presbytery, pastored by a self-avowed same-sex attracted pastor, and pretty well celebrated all around by progressives. Where were the elders (overseers) of the session of Memorial Presbyterian Church; and where was the denomination when this was going on? Why was it ever permitted?
The short answer is that, as appalling as it sounds, the progressive elders, teaching and ruling, wanted it to happen, participated in its happening, and celebrated its happening. That shows where they’re coming from and where the PCA is headed if progressives are allowed to have their way.
The 2021 General Assembly dealt forthrightly with this serious breach of biblical sexual ethics. Against the desire of the National Partnership (NP), the issue of homosexuality was addressed in two overtures, with many progressives speaking against them. Overtures 23 and 37, after much debate, were both passed in the Overtures Committee with strong majorities and were passed on the floor of the Assembly with similarly overwhelming majorities. These overtures are now before the PCA presbyteries for their consideration. Each must receive approval from 2/3 of the presbyteries, and then another vote by the 2022 GA in Birmingham.
I have read many analyses of the overtures and reasons why they should be approved as well as why they should not be approved. I heartily approve of both overtures and find the arguments for approving them biblical and strong.
On the other hand, I am amazed to see progressives vigorously opposing approval of these amendments, offering what I consider to be weak rationale to justify their disapproval. For example: (1) the overtures are unnecessary (no, they are necessary because they provide needed guidance on what it means for officers to be above reproach in their walk and Christlike in their character); (2) the overtures are unclear (they are clear enough for the average person to understand); (3) they will not bring peace to the PCA (of course they won’t, their purpose is to expect biblical traits and behavior). And on it goes, with no convincing biblical rationale against the overtures.
Finally, I find it disturbing that, of those who recorded their No votes on the overtures at GA, the votes were overwhelmingly those of teaching elders. As I reviewed the No votes I was surprised with some of the names on the list.
It seems to me that, in signing their names to a list like that, they wanted to draw attention to how they voted. That they voted No, undoubtedly pleased those associated with the NP. Apparently, they don’t want to do anything to stem the growth of the cancer infecting the PCA from within, or perhaps they prefer to deny that there is a cancer at all.
In the case of “cancer,” we know that sometimes the best remedy is the surgical removal of the cancer. Is this what we are faced with in the PCA now? My hope and pray is that we are there yet. The concern now is to see the overtures passed successfully in the presbyteries and ratified at the next GA.
David Ostien is a member of Chestnut Mountain Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in Chestnut Mountain, Ga.

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