Too many Christians behave and speak obnoxiously at times, and then when the world responds with hatred, we automatically attribute that hatred to our faithfulness to Christ.

There seems to be a common misconception among many Christians that if the world hates them, it’s incontrovertible proof that they must be doing something right. They must be faithfully following Jesus.
It is true that the world hates those whom Christ has chosen out of this world (John 15:18–25). It is true that the world hates Christians because it hates Christ.
What is the logical fallacy known as “affirming the consequent”?
The problem is that many Christians commit a logical fallacy when thinking about this issue. They assume that if the world hates them, then it must be the case that they are faithfully following Jesus. Let me lay out the statements to make this easier to see.
True Conditional Statement:
If you faithfully follow Jesus, then the world will hate you. (If P, therefore Q).
Logically Fallacious Conclusion:
The world hates me, therefore I must be faithfully following Jesus (Q, therefore P).
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The pro-life movement is tired of district attorneys refusing to enforce pro-life laws and activist federal judges holding pro-life policies up in court for years on end. A new approach is working. No wonder those who promote abortion are so up in arms over its ingenuity.

Right now, more than 100 babies are being saved from abortion every day in Texas. The Texas Heartbeat Act is currently enforceable, even as the abortion industry and Biden administration attempt to thwart it. There has been much legal back-and-forth and misrepresentation of this life-saving law, particularly on the unique way in which it is enforced. Let’s cut through that confusion.
The Texas Heartbeat Act prohibits elective abortion after the preborn child’s heartbeat is detected. Those who commit an abortion after this biological marker in the child’s development, as well as those who knowingly aid and abet in that illegal abortion, can be sued. The lynchpin that has allowed the law to take effect is that the state is not allowed to enforce the law; rather, it is the responsibility of private individuals to hold the abortion industry accountable for following the law.
So far in Texas, we are seeing the abortion industry comply with the new law. Eighty-five percent of abortions that previously would have been occurring in our state are now illegal. More than 100 babies per day are being given a chance at life. There have not been any credible assertions of violation. This means that the unique threat of private lawsuits under this law is successfully saving babies.
Civil penalties are the most effective in pro-life laws because the abortion industry is profit-driven. The industry profits off killing preborn children and does not want to lose money. So it complies with pro-life laws (even as it fights them in the courts). That is why the Texas Heartbeat Act uses civil remedies — because it incentivizes compliance from the abortion industry.
Not Vigilantism
Despite the assertion by pro-abortion advocates and media, this is not vigilantism, and the civil remedies are not a bounty. The threat of a lawsuit and paying out at least $10,000 for a violation is the consequence set up under this law for engaging in an illegal activity, namely, performing an abortion after the baby has a heartbeat.
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Written by Scott R. Swain |
Monday, October 11, 2021
Any attempt to retrieve classical Christian teaching about God must not only retrieve the scriptural foundations of such teaching. It must also retrieve the form that scriptural teaching takes, i.e., the glad tidings of the Lord’s reign (Isa 52:7).

Theology is discourse concerning God: God in his being, attributes, persons, and works; God and all things in relation to God, from whom and through whom and to whom are all things (Rom 11:36). The principal subject matter of Christian theology has a proper name, “Yhwh,” which is the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19). The fundamental claim of Christian theology regarding its principal subject matter is “Yhwh reigns.” This fundamental claim at once identifies God as king and describes the nature of his relation to all that is not God. Christian theology in its breadth and length and height and depth is one long commentary on the claim that the Lord reigns, a commentary designed to aid the church’s own varied expressions of this claim in prayer, proclamation, and praise.
Christian theology in the 20th century was not always eager to affirm God’s regal status. In many instances, in fact, Christian theology sought to deconstruct the claim that the Lord reigns. The deconstruction of the “royal metaphor” (what its critics called it) was central to the revision of “classical theism” (a label also invented by critics of traditional Christian teaching concerning God). Critics of this teaching offered a number of reasons for rejecting or redefining the royal metaphor. It was, they claimed, rooted in antiquated pre-modern approaches to biblical interpretation. It contradicted modern scientific understanding of the nature of the universe. It provided warrant for numerous forms of tyranny and oppression. This picture of the God-world relation, its critics argued, had held the church captive far too long. A Christian theology come of age and alert to the requisites of human flourishing needed to abandon the royal metaphor in favor of a more wholesome and humane conception of God. As a result of this critical judgment, the story of 20th century theology was, in large measure, the story of more or less revisionist proposals regarding the doctrine of God.
The purpose of the present article is not to address modern criticisms of traditional Christian teaching, at least not directly. I mention these criticisms only to observe that the critics were right about one thing: traditional Christian teaching about God is tied intrinsically to the royal metaphor, the claim that Yhwh, the triune God, reigns. Accordingly, any attempt to retrieve classical Christian teaching about God must not only retrieve the scriptural foundations of such teaching. It must also retrieve the form that scriptural teaching takes, i.e., the glad tidings of the Lord’s reign (Isa 52:7).
The central theme of Book Four of the Psalms (Psalms 90-106) is the kingship of Yhwh. These psalms are therefore an instructive place to begin in considering the scriptural portrayal of divine kingship. Psalm 93, the first instance of the claim, Yhwh mlk, “the Lord is king/the Lord reigns,” in Psalms 90-106, provides a helpful entryway into this portion of Scripture and this article of Christian teaching.
Psalm 93:1 opens with the announcement, “The Lord is king,” “The Lord reigns.” The psalm expounds the significance of this announcement in three phases. First, Psalm 93:1-2 grounds the enduring stability of the world in the divine king’s eternal being and transcendent power. Second, Psalm 93:3-4 considers creational sources of opposition to the Lord’s kingship–the mighty floods–only to conclude that creaturely opponents to God’s reign pose no ultimate threat. Third, Psalm 93:5 acclaims the enduring stability of God’s “testimonies” and God’s “house,” two central privileges enjoyed by the divine king’s covenant people.
(1) Ps 93:1-2. The first section of Psalm 93 begins with praise of the divine king’s transcendent power, drawing on the imagery of an Ancient Near Eastern king’s royal attire: the Lord “is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed; he has put on strength as his belt” (Ps 93:1). The section concludes with praise of the divine king’s eternal being: “you are from everlasting” (Ps 93:2; cf. Pss 90:2, 4; 102:24-26). According to the middle frame of this section, the divine king’s eternal being and transcendent power are the source of the world’s enduring stability. Because God the eternal, almighty king reigns, “The world is established; it shall never be moved” (Ps 93:1). Moreover, the psalmist expresses further confidence that the world will stand secure in the future because God’s reign stands uncontested since the beginning of creation, when God established his throne in the heavens: “Your throne is established from of old” (Ps 93:2; cf. Pss 103:19; 104:3).
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Yes, debate critical race theory, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize. We should spend far more time in the pursuit of excellence—implementing reading instruction that would improve literacy outcomes for kids of all races. That would erase the stain of racism far more than endlessly debating critical race theory.

With a new school year underway, parents, teachers and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity.
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution to support the teaching of critical race theory in public K-12 schools. The resolution initially listed among its sponsors liberal mayors like Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, Portland’s Ted Wheeler and Louisville’s Greg Fischer.
Over the summer, Oregon governor Kate Brown suspended a requirement for students to demonstrate reading, writing and math proficiency in order to receive a high school diploma, in a supposed effort to build “equity.” The governor’s office said the new standards for graduation would aid the state’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”
These efforts by politicians to push critical race theory distracts from a real analysis of educational achievement in their states and cities. The real issue in American education is a failure to enable the majority of students—regardless of race—to achieve academic excellence or even, in many cases, basic skills.
We have a national crisis of education that most Americans aren’t paying attention to. Our school systems produce a small group of high-achieving students at the top and a massive group of low-achieving students at the bottom.
America has fallen into a multi-generational crisis of illiteracy. In terms of raw numbers, more white students are reading below grade level than Black students. Of the 1.8 million students who took the ACT in 2019, 36 percent did not achieve college readiness in any of the four subjects. That means about 650,000 American students, despite spending thousands of hours in school, were not prepared for college-level work in a single subject. And that number does not include the millions of students who did not take the ACT. Even worse, 19 percent of American high school graduates are functionally illiterate, unable to read well enough to manage daily tasks.
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Sin isn’t just a series of errors or poor judgments with momentary consequences. Sin is taking you somewhere. It’s leading you down a path of decay, a path that ends in spiritual death.

Hyperbolic, isn’t it? “Sin is death” sounds like something you’d hear echoing from a bullhorn in a city that embraces noise as part of its culture. Philadelphia and New York come to mind (no offense, by the way; it’s just that I hail from a quiet fishing town in Canada). In the context of so much physical turmoil and death in our world, calling sin “death” seems almost offensive, as if we’re insulting people struggling with leukemia or COVID, the real death threats. How can we claim something so serious about a problem that seems more conceptual than physical?
It all depends on how you define life and death. What is life? If life is measured only in blood flow and heart beats, then “Sin is death” sounds ludicrous, like a misinformed battle cry of pre-modern street preachers. Sin might be a hindrance, a nuisance, or even a threat to moral flourishing in society at large, but death? Hardly.
But what if life has more to do with bonds than with blood? What is life is more deeply about a relationship than it is about our respiratory system? What is life is about an active (even if neglected or forgotten) bond of communion between us and the God whose breath gave us our breath? That would change our perspective on the whole “Sin is death” thing, wouldn’t it? And doesn’t Jesus refer to himself as the life (John 14:6)? Living would thus be a relationship with him, not a set of physical and mental animations.
And what is death? If it’s not just about the stillness of the body, the absence of animation, or the fading pulse beneath your skin, then what is it? Maybe if life is all about relationship, then death is really about the ending of that relationship, or at least the most dramatic change imaginable.
Sin as Death
Now, what struck me as I read Romans is just how direct Paul is in linking sin with death. He clearly views sin as more than a behavior problem that can be remedied by a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality. Sin is far more serious. Sin is lethal.
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” 8 But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. 9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. 10 The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. 11 For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.Rom. 7:7-11
For Paul, sin kills. It brings death. This doesn’t mean that sin is an actual substance, some soul disease that spreads like wildfire. Sin is ethical, and it has no independent existence. It’s parasitic; it can’t exist on its own, so it follows around the good things of God’s creation and distorts them, deforming us in the process. As Bavinck put it in The Wonderful Works of God, sin is “a manifestation which is moral in character, operating in the ethical sphere.” Sin is moral and ethical. Yet, the fact that it’s moral and ethical doesn’t mean it’s not lethal. Paul’s language makes it clear that sin brings death. It destroys us.
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With the intensified crackdown against churches, both state-vetted and underground, there is no longer a safe place to be a Christian in China. Almost every province in China has seen an increase in Christian persecution over the last year.

09/17/2021 Washington, D.C. (International Christian Concern) – International Christian Concern (ICC) has just published a new report on persecution in China. In it, ICC lists and analyzes over 100 incidents of Christian persecution between July 2020 and June 2021, a period marked by a significant campaign by the Chinese government to forcefully convert independent religious organizations into mechanisms of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This forceful assimilation—also called Sinicization—has continued to intensify since it was introduced as part of the Four Requirements campaign launched in 2018. Since then, the government has only increased its attempts to use the Church for political purposes. It has gone as far as converting church buildings into propaganda centers and even regulating the content of sermons in order to promote communist party values.
Three-Self churches are part of the legal framework the CCP uses to systemically curb Christianity, including Catholicism. If a church is not registered as a state-sanctioned church, it is violating the law and the CCP can step in at any time to shut it down, prosecute individuals, and put enormous social pressure on attendees. As described in last year’s report, registered churches are at the mercy of laws that were passed entirely in contradiction to the constitution and enforced by multiple departments, bureaus, and agencies using them to suppress house church activity.
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From the Parable of the Talents you must see the hand of God in it all, for he is the one who has entrusted all these things to you. And behind the hand of God, you must see his confidence in you, his trust, his optimism. God is the one who has called you to walk this path, and he is the one who has called you to walk it faithfully. 

The Parable of the Talents is one of the best-known and best-loved of all the parables Jesus left us. It tells of a man who is going on a journey and, who, before he sets out, distributes his wealth among his servants for safekeeping. To one he gives five talents, to another two, and to another just one. (A talent, for sake of context, is about 20 years’ of wages for a laborer.) It tells how each of these servants responds to what is entrusted to him: Two of the servants invest the money wisely and double it, while the other simply buries the money and then later returns it as-is. The first two receive their master’s approval while the third receives his condemnation.
This parable leads to many legitimate applications and often challenges us to be faithful with what the Lord has entrusted to us, whether that is the gospel itself, or the gifts, talents, money, responsibilities, or opportunities we have been given. God entrusts us with so much and it falls to us, as his servants, to be faithful with it all. We can expect that as we are faithful, we will know God’s approval and reward. “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance.”
Hidden in plain sight is a simple observation: the servants are never offered a choice in their stewardship. The master does not come to them to ask, “How much of my wealth do you think you’re capable of handling?” He never checks in to inquire, “How would you feel about being given the full five talents? Do you think you can handle five, or would you prefer to have just two?”
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As the late Professor John Murray of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia put it: “The work produced by the Westminster Assembly has lived and will permanently live. The reason is obvious. The work was wrought with superb care, patience, precision, and above all with earnest and intelligent devotion to the Word of God and zeal for His glory. Sanctified theological learning has never been brought to bear with greater effect upon the formulation of the Christian Faith. 

Let me take you back to seventeenth-century England—1643, to be precise.
King Charles I was increasingly hostile to the Puritans and their Reformed theology. And members of Parliament—many of whom were Puritans and Puritan sympathizers—were becoming increasingly aggrieved by the king. They were convinced that there was still a lot of work to be done in the Church of England, that it still needed to be reformed in light of Scripture.
Although the English Church had separated itself from Rome during the English Reformation more than one hundred years earlier, the Puritans felt it hadn’t gone far enough. So, with that in mind, Parliament called upon Reformed theologians to meet at Westminster Abbey. Their job was to advise Parliament on issues of worship, doctrine, government, and discipline in the Church of England.
Despite a royal proclamation prohibiting its meeting, the assembly first met on 1st July, 1643, at the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey, before later moving to the abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber.
This Westminster Assembly consisted of 151 men, which included twenty laypeople from the House of Commons and ten from the House of Lords.
The assembly lasted officially until 1649, although it continued to meet occasionally until 1652. And those present certainly did not slack during that time. Over the course of the six years between 1643 and 1649, they met 1,163 times.
The documents they produced are known as the Westminster Standards, namely:

the Westminster Confession of Faith
the Larger and Shorter Catechisms
the Directory for the Public Worship of God (which is a sort of liturgical manual)
and the Form of Presbyterial Church Government (which describes how churches ought to be structured and governed)

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The day of great news has come to believers. We were slaves to sin and death and have been bought for a price and set free by the blood of Jesus Christ who gave Himself for us. We have heard the call of the gospel and believed in Christ alone for salvation. We want to tell the news to many and live it out each and every day. 

Then they said to one another, “We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news, and we remain silent. If we wait until morning light, some punishment will come upon us. Now therefore, come, let us go and tell the king’s household. So they went and called to the gatekeepers of the city, and told them, saying, “We went to the Syrian camp, and surprisingly no one was there, not a human sound – only horses and donkeys tied, and the tents intact.” And the gatekeepers called out, and they told it to the king’s household inside.
II Kings 7:9-11 NKJV
When I was a child I attended the funeral of an elderly church member. An unbelieving adult daughter of the deceased was present at the funeral and was quite distraught but thankful for the kindness of the church. My mother had prepared much of the luncheon and assisted the daughter in various parts of the day. After most people had left the daughter remained and told my mother how she was so moved by the love of the church to her mother that she was going to start coming to church and get right with the Lord. Later I expressed to my mother what a great event happened with the daughter from her mother’s death. My mother agreed but with a word of caution – the death of loved ones often stirs up great spiritual emotions. Promises and thoughts of ‘getting right with God’ in the future are only meaningful if they are acted upon – if the person actually repents and believes in Christ alone for salvation. I don’t remember ever seeing or hearing about the daughter again.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” This common saying highlights that good intentions without action are useless. Perhaps it was derived from several passages in Scripture like James 2:14-17.
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We receive God’s forgiveness and cleansing the moment we cry out to him in repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus.  We receive them afresh when we participate in the corporate confession of sins during the worship service; and we have them confirmed and sealed to us by means of the sacraments.  The proper use, therefore, of the means of grace—prayer, worship and sacrament—is how we get rid of our sin and also how we find the strength to get back up on our feet and keep running.

One of the most anticipated races of the 1984 summer Olympics was the women’s 3000m, featuring the American Mary Decker and the South African Zola Budd. Decker—who had won a 3000m at the World Championships the preceding year—was favored to win the gold medal, and Budd knew she could not beat the champion if it came to finish line sprint. She began to pick up her pace, and by the middle of the race she was able to move ahead of Decker. Yet as Budd cut to the inside lane, the two collided. Decker fell and injured her hip. She was unable to finish the race.
In a similar fashion, sin will trip us up as we run to glory. This means we need to do our utmost to avoid it. Even more, it means that when we fall into it, we must get back up quickly and keep running.
Hebrews 12:1 says that we are to lay aside “sin which clings so closely.”  The idea seems to be that sin clings so closely that it entangles you, impeding your progress, tripping you up, and perhaps even keeping you from moving forward altogether. We see this in numerous biblical examples.  The love of money pushed Judas down; the love of this world threw Demas to the side; covetousness tripped up Achan; adultery and murder entangled David.
The problem with sin is manifold.  Discreetly and deceptively, it will harden our hearts, weaken our faith, and damage our relationship with God.  The more we sin, the more we become acclimated to it, and before long we begin to call evil good.  Throughout the whole process, our relationship with God will be rattled. God will become displeased with us, and we will find it increasingly hard to walk closely with him.
A Christian is sleeping with his girlfriend, and knows that God hates this. How will this influence the way that he relates to God? Assuming that his conscience is not already seared, he will find it difficult to talk to God in prayer, and even attend church.  He may pray and worship, but it will not be sincere, and it will quickly become lifeless.  Religious acts of worship will become perfunctory because he knows in his heart that he is actively offending his heavenly Father.  Like David when he was in the grip of his sins, the sinning Christian will lose the joy of his salvation, and his spiritual vitality will be turned into the drought of summer.
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