God is not interested in simply re-tweaking a few behaviors and calling them good. He is about repentance and radical transformation in our lives! Jesus is not about behavioral retraining of a therapeutic relationship which is reward-based. That is basically to stop bad behavior and start doing good behavior like training a dog! How does he sanctify us and make us more like Jesus? 

“You’re Ready to Go!” Those are the words I received from my Senior Pastor! I felt pretty good about myself. I was 20, single, and was still in Bible college. What can go wrong right?
Now that I’ve been 15 years fast forward, I have been in ministry, and some may have the idea that it was an easy-breezy journey as it led to where I am today. But that was not the case. I went through a significant church conflict as a young pastor that has shaped the rest of my ministry.
Knowing where you start helps us understand how we can end at the final destination. Hope while suffering and strife, gives them fuel to run together.
God is not interested in simply re-tweaking a few behaviors and calling them good. He is about repentance and radical transformation in our lives! Jesus is not about behavioral retraining of a therapeutic relationship which is reward-based. That is basically to stop bad behavior and start doing good behavior like training a dog!
How does he sanctify us and make us more like Jesus? Sometimes, he brings great affliction. There’s nothing like the school of suffering is there? Trial, tribulation, testing, and temptation…. These were all part of the equation of becoming the person I am today.
What is Your Life About?
“What brings you in today?” That is often how I begin a counseling session. I sometimes wonder, how Jesus would approach us in the mess.
A humanistic approach in psychotherapy would say, “Not get too involved” because of transference. The clinical model is where you are the authority in the room and that is under your tool so you can be trusted and have a “cold” and “distant” relationship.
I’m thankful Jesus was not sent for a professional relationship, but Jesus seeks for a personal relationship. The world avoids messed up people, but Jesus runs to messed up people. Jesus would look at our suffering and he would give a word, a look, and a touch.
Jesus began his ministry of service by proclaiming the good news of God.  What is this good news? Gospel which means “good news.” Specifically, it refers to the good news of salvation through Jesus. It comes from the Old English word god-spell (meaning “good news”) which comes from the Greek word euaggelion (Strong’s #2098, eu = “good,” angelion = “message”).
The good news is all about Jesus! The good news is both from God and about God. As one commentator put it this way, “Men and women have been longing to hear such a message. Now they not only hear it but encounter the One who can deliver it.”
Jesus then called the disciples to himself with his life. He wanted to communicate with a life of discipleship which is not easy. He sees the life of the disciples and they will suffer for their faith. Jesus’ call to discipleship is the main point that we see. What it means to carry the cross.
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34).  What does carrying the cross cost look like? Christians ought to believe and obey: It is not just knowing the Word of God.
So, what does a follower of Jesus look like practically? What does it mean to be a disciple of Christ? What is the cost of the call to “discipleship” in the process of learning to become like Christ?
Who is Jesus Christ?
“Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’” (Mark 1:2-3). This was a quotation from Isaiah from the Old Testament. He was quoting from the Old Testament Isaiah 40:3 with Elijah the eschatological prophet, “a voice crying in the wilderness”
Later in the context says, “Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey.” (Mark 1:6). You may be thinking, what is up with this weird dude?
Read More

Related Posts:

.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{align-content:start;}:where(.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap) > .wp-block-kadence-column{justify-content:start;}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{column-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-md, 2rem);row-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-md, 2rem);padding-top:var(–global-kb-spacing-sm, 1.5rem);padding-bottom:var(–global-kb-spacing-sm, 1.5rem);grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd{background-color:#dddddd;}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-layout-overlay{opacity:0.30;}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}}
.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col,.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{column-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-sm, 1rem);}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col > .aligncenter{width:100%;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{opacity:0.3;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18{position:relative;}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}}

Subscribe to Free “Top 10 Stories” Email
Get the top 10 stories from The Aquila Report in your inbox every Tuesday morning.

The Church is imploding. The faithful masses have stopped turning up on Sundays. We are seeing the most rapid decline of Christianity in this country that we may have ever seen. Do not accelerate this with heresy. You do not have the authority to bless sin! When I hear the bishop of London on record saying these new prayers will mean priests can bless same-sex relationships, some of which will be sexual in nature, I hear the devil at work. Bishops are promoting the idea of sacramental sodomy. Let them be anathema! Repent!

I hate to break it to you, but the time when Christians play games is over. The time for trivial pursuits is long over. The time for just trying to be ‘nice’ and ‘winsome’ and not rock the boat is well past its use-by date. Instead, we are in desperate need of committed disciples of Jesus Christ to affirm truth – regardless of the reaction.
Of course, the overwhelming need for courageous truth-tellers has always been with us, since lies are everywhere and at all times found. Plenty of champions for truth could be mentioned here. Let me feature just some. The Psalmist put it this way: “I have chosen the way of truth” (Psalm 119:30).
Plenty of proverbs speak to this, such as Proverbs 13:5: “The righteous hates falsehood,” and Proverbs 29:27: “The righteous detest the dishonest.” So too Jesus: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
And again: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).
A long line of more recent truth proponents could also be mentioned, such as:
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” G. K. Chesterton
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Aldous Huxley
“People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.” Malcolm Muggeridge
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” George Orwell
But fear of telling truth is an ever-present danger. One example of a spineless wonder who is so utterly fearful and paralysed by the woke mobs can be mentioned. Recently the uber-woke New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern stepped down. That was great news, but many of us wondered if her replacement would be any better. Well, now we know. Consider this short news item:
New Zealand’s new prime minister was left struggling for words at a news conference after a reporter asked him to define the term “woman”. Chris Hipkins, who took over after Jacinda Ardern’s resignation, was asked to explain how he and his government define the word. The politician appeared to need some time to think before giving his answer.
“Um… to be honest that question has come slightly out of left field for me,” Mr Hipkins replied. “Well biology, sex, gender. Um.” He then paused again before saying: “People define themselves, people define their own genders.” When pressed further Mr Hipkins said “people identify for themselves”.
He actually said this when the question was repeated: “It is not something that I have a preformulated answer on”. Good grief, what a useless wonder. If that is too hard for him to figure out, he should not be trying to run an entire nation. He needs to go back to kindergarten and learn a few basics about life.
Talk about being a mindless woke zombie. This is the madness of living a life of lies. BTW, Hipkins was married (to a WOMAN) for two years (but is now separated), and has two children. But he is totally clueless as to what a woman is. Maybe that is why they are separated! And maybe that is why the world is going to hell so fast with utter nincompoops like him running things.
Perhaps I can offer one more example. Someone commented on my site recently that as Christians we might be “rude” if we call people by their actual pronouns. I replied:
I and others just spent some time here trying to make the case that the most loving thing we can do for others is tell them the truth, and that allowing people to live in delusion, lies and deception is not only unloving, but sinful. So I am not at all worried about being “rude” in this case. I AM worried about people destroying themselves because we might be too afraid to speak much-needed truth to them.
So many have had to stand for truth even though it has been so very costly. Consider Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Writing from Moscow on February 12, 1974, just before he was exiled, he penned a short piece called “Live Not By Lies.” If that sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Rod Dreher used it as the title of his exceptionally important 2020 book. See my review of it here.
The entire essay by Solzhenitsyn is well worth reading, but here are a few choice quotes:
Things have almost reached rock-bottom. A universal spiritual death has already touched us all and physical death will soon flare up and consume us and our children. But, as before, we still smile in a cowardly fashion and mumble with our tongues tied.
Read More
Related Posts:

It’s well understood that institutional presences like seminaries and colleges need to be protected; reputation is everything. But sometimes truth is another thing and we do need to be careful to maintain some unblinking history. The stories of the OPC and PCA are not well ordered or manicured; they were rough cut. Their men were not always angels and their institutions not always perfect.

There are a lot of secrets in the theological world. The secrets aren’t really being kept from you. They are esoteric secrets of the guild and priesthood because they are strange and hard to understand, in a different language and sit in institutional cultures. It’s not that different from the way we hire lawyers and doctors that know the procedures and a special language they’ve memorized. We would love have everyone understand but it takes a lot of work to get in on the game.
I’ve served in the OPC, the PCA and the ARP but first I was in the PCUSA. And that’s the way a life in the church often is; we are where we are because we don’t know any better at the time. We grow through different phases and end up in different places. Each church and denomination has its own theological culture but more than that its own social culture. You hear people say, “Why do the people at that church act that way?” When you know the denomination you know there are social traits of that group that are manifesting themselves in that individual church. The social culture is something you can’t learn in a book and there are unwritten rules against exposing the soft underbelly of presbyteries and synods. We understand in secret what must have been going on at those famous assemblies we read about in the histories. The meetings of the Westminster Divines. The Synod of Dort. The writing of the Nicene Creed must have been a hoot; so many intense personalities!
Coming into the OPC some 30 years ago I was introduced to a gathering of minsters and elders as, “He’s a Sproul guy…” There was immediate concern and one audible groan. That was the official inoculation at the Presbytery level against Sproul guys. I didn’t know what it meant or how deep that well went but it stuck. I didn’t understand the deep contrast between the PCA tradition and the OPC tradition and why they were often fire and water. As the years went by I found that it was true. I was indeed a Sproul guy… according to the unwritten rules that come along with being Presbyterian. And it came with invisible fences; you can’t have some free range Sproul guy walking around causing theology.
Sproul and Gerstner had recently published their celebrated, “Classical Apologetics” criticizing Van Til’s apologetic methodology. Sproul and Gerstner were mother’s milk for me; I loved them so much but I wasn’t from that hometown. As a kid I attended Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, Hal Lindsey’s Tetelestai and John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church. Like many that grew up in eccentric theological environments I might have become an agnostic if not for an intervention. Mine was by Francis Schaeffer. I read his books and watched his videos “How Shall We Then Live” and felt that someone had meaningfully heard my serious questions about the Christian faith. Schaeffer and MacArthur led me to Sproul and that was my segue into the reformational world.
And it is a world to itself, a separate and distinct theological and cultural enclave. People tend to think they’re just joining a church but really they’re joining a church, a presbytery and a denomination that each have their own “personality”. Which presbytery and Synod or General Assembly you join will have an effect upon your spiritual well being and that of your family, so it’s good to take these things seriously. The individual church you join will not be able to shield you from the consequences of the institutional setting in which they exist.
In the reformed world there are birthright economies and deep traditions, a kind of a deep state of theological institutions and positions of influence. In the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, one is being Dutch. It’s not that you have to be Dutch to thrive but it doesn’t hurt. You have to go to the right schools, study under the right people, marry into the right families and approve of the right names. Van Til is so influential that he is written into the OPC Book of Church Order itself as presenting the uniquely OPC apologetic methodology.
But the big name in the OPC is Gresham Machen and all of us love Machen. Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism” was formative upon me from my theological youth. But in pretty obvious ways Machen was cut from a different cloth than the later development of the institutions he created. He was a man of the conservative Princeton wing and that’s not a controversial claim. He was trying to go backwards to get forward and the birth of the OPC and Westminster Philadelphia can’t be understood without him. He was a 1920s Presbyterian conservative in an era of theological liberalism looking back at the very best of the tradition and watching its disintegration.
In 1923 when things were going to pot Machen said:
“So it is with faith. Faith is so very useful, they tell us, that we must not scrutinize its basis in truth. But, the great trouble is, such an avoidance of scrutiny itself involves the destruction of faith. For faith is essentially dogmatic.
Despite all you can do, you cannot remove the element of intellectual assent from it…. Very different is the conception of faith which prevails in the liberal Church. According to modern liberalism, faith is essentially the  same as “making Christ Master” in one’s life; at least it is by making Christ Master in the life that the welfare of men is sought. But that simply means that salvation is thought to be obtained by our own obedience to the commands of Christ. Such teaching is just a sublimated form of legalism. Not the sacrifice of Christ, on this view, but our own obedience to God’s law, is the ground of hope.
In this way the whole achievement of the Reformation has been given up, and there has been a return to the religion of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, God raised up a man who began to read the Epistle to the Galatians with his own eyes. The result was the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith. Upon that rediscovery has been based the whole of our evangelical freedom. As expounded by Luther and Calvin the Epistle to the Galatians became the “Magna Charta of Christian liberty.” Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Liberalism”.
We could go on with this in great detail but we can say this, for Machen and all of the theological conservatives of his era that faith was essentially about what you believe and that replacing that with ethics, morality and the lordship of God was the essence of liberalism.
The integration of legal obedience into our justification was exactly on point as the disease because when that shift takes place it will consume everything. Nothing of the Gospel will survive. Machen had the diagnosis but he was also aware that the golden age had passed. He looks back 100 years earlier when he says Western Civilization was still passively Christian and laments that in his day the culture was already dominated by paganism. He said this came first theologically then culturally. He started Westminster Theological Seminary to hold ground with an intent of retaking the castle.
In this of course, Sproul was part of this Machen lineage, not as being in the OPC but very self consciously from a similar perspective on the Bible as the word of God, faith as believing the Gospel and salvation as by grace alone through faith. Faith not being interpreted as good works or legal obedience to the moral law but faith taken as the condition of the covenant of grace, as distinguished and different from the nature and conditions of the covenant of works which requires perfect obedience to the law.
Keith Mathison, professor of systematic theology at Reformation Bible College writes this:
I recently watched a short video of a lecture by my mentor and former pastor Dr. R.C. Sproul… He said that the broad evangelical church has been “pervasively antinomian.”… One of the doctrinal issues that separates broadly evangelical theology from confessional Reformed theology is covenant theology… This is where Dr. Sproul’s charge of “pervasive antinomianism” arises. Reformed theology historically has a way of approaching ethical questions. This approach includes careful examination of God’s law as revealed in Scripture. It includes examination of biblical wisdom literature. It includes consideration of natural law. It includes examining how other Reformed pastors and theologians of the past dealt with similar issues. In other words, it looks at Scripture as understood within our Reformed theological and confessional heritage. As an example, if an ethical question not explicitly addressed by Scripture arises, the Reformed would first go to the biblical law and wisdom literature to find applicable biblical principles. Natural law issues would be taken into consideration. Then we would look at how our confessions address this issue. The questions and answers on the Ten Commandments in the Westminster Larger Catechism, for example, are a rich resource on ethical questions.”
Read More
Related Posts: