God is too loving to be unkind and too wise to make a mistake. We can trust him even in the dark times. If we do not know what tomorrow holds, that is OK, because we know and love the one who does. And again, that should be very reassuring and comforting, on the most practical of levels. 

In this piece I want to discuss both theological and pastoral aspects to how we believers are to live in the light of the God that we serve. Our God is an infinite, eternal God who is not caught by surprise at what happens. But we are finite, time-bound creatures who can only take one day at a time.
You and I live in time and we cannot fully know the future. But we do have Scripture telling us in broad-brush strokes – as well as in some detail – what the future will be like. There is a big difference between knowing a bit about the end from the beginning and knowing the One who does know the end from the beginning. While we may not know what tomorrow holds, we serve a God who does.
For finite Christians, there is always some uncertainty, apprehension and even fear in what is coming next, both in big matters and little matters. As for the big picture, while we know that one day Christ will return, we may not know how bad things will get first, say in Australia or the West. We may not know if the threat of Putin to engage in nuclear war will materialise in the coming days. We do not know who will win the next American presidential election, and so on.
And on a smaller scale, we do not know all sorts of things. Will I still have my job tomorrow? Will my kids one day accept Christ? Will my friend’s marriage last? Will I make it through this bout of cancer? If successfully treated, will the cancer come back some other time? Will I ever see an overseas loved one again? There are zillions of variables and possibilities in our own lives that we just do not know about and how they will transpire.
So we need faith and confidence in a God who does know about all these things. Let me here use a sporting analogy, then look at a bit of theology, and then try to make a practical conclusion to all this. As to the analogy, I often think about some great sporting event, whether a World Series, or a Grand Slam tennis final, or an AFL Grand Final.
If you happen to strongly support an individual or a team, and you watch the event live – either in person or on the television – it can be a real rough experience. The more emotionally committed you are to the team or player, the more nervous you will be and the more on the edge of your seat you will be. Will he or she win? Will my team prevail?
Let me at this point get a bit personal. I just went through this a few days ago, as have many others. As some of you might know, I am probably 95 per cent cerebral, and perhaps 5 per cent emotional. Not much gets me very stirred up emotionally. But since coming down under I have managed to end up supporting, somewhat passionately, one AFL team.
And as many will know, Saturday the Geelong Cats played in a Grand Final. Given the bad luck they have had over the past decade with finals footy, fans would rightly have been a bit worried. I was, so it was with some fear and trepidation that I sat down to watch the match.
I must have had a bit of emotional investment in the game, because even my stomach was feeling a bit churned up at the start. By halftime things were looking a bit more reassuring, and by the middle of the third quarter we knew it was going to be a big win, so we could then relax and enjoy the rest of the game.
And it was a big win indeed – go Cats. And for die-hard fans, the game is usually replayed the next day. So I watched it a second time – but minus all the angst and anxiety. Because I knew exactly how the game would end, I could sit back and enjoy it from the opening bounce. It was quite different viewing than how it was the day before.
But imagine if a game is much tighter and closer, where the winner is not known until the closing seconds of the game.
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In July, the Department of Education awarded 71Five several grants worth over $400,000. But three months later, a state official notified the nonprofit by email that their grants were being taken back, saying that the nonprofit was disqualified from the grant programs because of its hiring practices.

An Oregon youth ministry is challenging state officials after the state Department of Education revoked several of its grants. Youth 71Five Ministries said officials stripped the nonprofit of its funding because of the ministry’s practice of hiring staff and volunteers who agree with its Biblical beliefs.
71Five is a youth mentoring program that serves young people of all religions and backgrounds through a Christ-centered perspective, said Bud Amundsen, executive director of the ministry, which has operated in the Rogue Valley area for 60 years.
Staff members mentor young people who face challenges such as poverty or a family member’s addiction, providing vocational training and recreational activities in group homes, detention centers, and the ministry’s own centers. The ministry hires employees and volunteers who align with 71Five’s mission and beliefs, he added. The nonprofit’s 30 employees and more than 100 volunteers all signed a statement of faith before joining the organization.
Since 2017, 71Five has received multiple grants from the Oregon Department of Education’s Youth Development Division that support the nonprofit’s work.
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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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