Thoughts on 20 years in the Ministry…

Thoughts on 20 years in the Ministry…
 
I am now in my 21st year of pastoral ministry and as I think back on the first two decades, my life has been one of reformation, both in the positive and the negative.
 
In the positive, I look back at the kindness of God to hem me in and move me from a seeker-driven youth minister to a Confessionally reformed pastor. That, through a series of books, mentors, podcasts, and just preaching through books of the Bible, I praise God for where he has reformed by thinking and living in conformity with his written word.
 
In the negative, I also evaluate my life through a long series of “forks in the road” requiring repentance and faith which God designed to put in front of me. Difficulties with people, the world, and the devil, the ministry has been anything but “conflict-free.” I look back and realize that every time, the dominant enemy, the primary foe, was my flesh, the hard choice between obedience in the long term and appeasing my desire for comfort, conflict-free living, and immediate success. Every conflict was exacerbated by my own fear within (II Corinthians 7:5, Proverbs 9:10, Proverbs 29:25), and the choice was often not that difficult intellectually, but it was painful spiritually. God has so loved me that he has forced me to contend with myself. Will I fear Him and obey Him, or will I give my dues to the altar of man’s approval?
 
The last 20 years have been a series of events and relationships through which God has forced me to recon with my worldly fears.
It has been a reformation of fears, a reformation of the heart.

The King’s Academy Homeschool Co-Op at Lifespring Church

 

The King’s Academy Homeschool Co-Op at Lifespring Church

 

Sharing the Purpose and Mission: Sunday, August 14 @6 in the Basement of Lifespring Church

 

Beginning in the Fall of 2022: Tuesday mornings 8:15-11

 

Primary Teachers (Lifespring Church): Eric, Bob, Noah

 

Weightlifting/Gym: Randy Mertes

 

Cost: $20/kid

 

8:15-8:45 Opening, Singing, Scripture Memory/Catechism and Creational Worldview

 

8:45-9:15–1st Class (American History, The Constitution, and Citizenship)

 

9:15-9:30—Break

 

9:30-10:00 2nd Class (The Christian Mind: Critical Thinking)

 

10:00-11:00 Gym/Weightlifting

 

Expectations:

  1. One or Both Parents Attend

  2. All work done before class (Scripture Memory and any books to read)

  3. Start on Time, End on Time

  4. No Cell Phones or impromptu Bathroom Breaks

  5. Everyone cleans up

  6. Ages: School age (younger kids can play in nursery)

 

Dates: Week of…

 

  1. Sept 11

  2. Sept 18

  3. Sept 25

The ending of Roe: Does not God writes the best and most ironic stories?

The ending of Roe: Does not God write the best and most ironic stories?

Psalms 66:5 Come and see what God has done: he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man.

In 50 years from today, what will we tell our Grandchildren about the Evil of the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling and the story of its slow overturn, culminating in the Reversal in June 2022 by 5 judges, including a black man and a middle ages mother of seven children?

Will we tell the story of how the vast majority of  Evangelicals, then very Biblically illiterate, actually approved of abortionof Roe v. Wade when it was passed in 1973?

Will we share how God used Christian thinkers, pastors, housewives, medical doctors, and technology to turn, not only Christians but the national conscience regarding Life in the womb?

Shall we recount the slow tale of a renewal of Biblical Convictions, em-flamed by discernment of Francis Shaeffer, the preaching of John MacArthur, and instruction of RC Sproul, whose children and grandchildren in the Faith pressed on with new convictions on the Gospel and the Nature of Biblical Authority?

Will we tell, with an ironic chuckle, how God directly used a Man named “The Donald”, a blunt and uncouth fellow, a billionaire businessman, hated by the elite class, who ended up being the most Citizen-friendly and courageous president in our lifetime, who kept his promise and appointed three of the justices who overturned Roe?

And dare we talk about how “The Donald” was elected? I for one will laugh when I tell how I waited until almost election day to decide to vote, with my nose pinched, for “The Donald,” and primarily because the party in power pitted a corrupt and vile woman named “The Hillary”, a terrible choice, even for them, to go against Him.

Shall we tell how the Lord used another Man, a career big-government politician named Mitch who, for whatever reason, held his ground until the election of Donald J. Trump to allow a new justice to be confirmed?

Shall we tell about this political party, which crashed and burned, called the Democrats, who became so stupid and foolish in their quest for power that they allowed the demonic leftists to write their script, continually attacked families, people, and workers with endless propaganda of Gay rights, transgender-ism, accusations of racism, murder of infants, and those constant threats actually served to bring a coalition of normal people out of their slumber and support life and truth?

 Will we recount how God choose June, the sacred month of festivals to the God of secularism, Pride month, to become that of emancipation for the babies in our land?

Shall we tell how this issue revealed and thankfully, ended an entire pharisee class of liberals, called “big Eva,” and their political stooges named David the French, Christianity Astray, and the Moore Twins (Russell and Beth) and, how they assaulted the Christian conscience with relentless false guilt and showed how much they feared man rather than God? Shall we tell how God worked this victory in spite of the dominance of the therapeutic takeover of much of evangelicalism? How men became effeminate and women dominant and many churches acted like regional spiritual resource centers rather than a place where warriors gather.

Shall we tell of this, God’s victory and blessing, in spite of the judgment our nation deserved for taunting him and attempting an all-out 60-year assault upon his truth by trying to re-write creational rules and norms?

Oh, the Irony of how God writes the Stories, and how he used crusaders and ruffians to win his wars and advance his Kingdom. Rejoice friends and toast the King of Kings, whose works of glory and surprises of providence continue to marvel and inspire awe and gratitude.  Praise Him!

7 thoughts on how the Transgender tyranny ravaging our society is necessarily good for us

7 thoughts on how the Transgender tyranny ravaging our society is necessarily good for us:

It is my conviction that the tyranny of transgenderism is the number one issue, the bottom line facing us today. We are nearing the bottom of perversion and now are seeing the results. We must fight injustice. Sin is horrible and when sin is protected and promoted, much injustice is furthered which harms many people. This is true, yet Satan will not reign, and now is the time we must believe God and turn to Him. We simultaneously heed and take hope. Here are 7 convictions, all true yet not exclusive to the ways God will bless us if we turn to him.

Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is Just?” (Genesis 18:25) 

We know that all things work for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28)

  1. It is good to face the reality of what the gods of secular materialism deliver—a destruction which is increasingly unavoidable—in which we must choose which god to serve in reality, not just “spiritually” (Joshua 24:15, I Kings 18:21)

  1. It is good for people to face God’s judgment as seen in this earth, according to what he promises to do, It is good in that we can see the chaos of Man’s sin working to produce chaos and irrelevancy in our institutions (Romans 1:18-32, I Peter 4:17)

  1. It is good to be faced with God’s mercy to convert to him. You either accept all of God’s terms of humanity, or you must accept that self-identity is the final arbitrator of truth—it is an either/or. Sola Scriptura or solus-feelings. Self-identity or the full counsel of God in his word, both old and new testament. (Psalm 50:21)

  1. It is good to be forced to evaluate how we got here and repent. This is the result of our society’s (you and me) rebellion against God by re-creating reality from basic definitions of humanity (Genesis 1-2).  This is God’s world and ideas have consequences, particularly rebellious ones.  You cannot repent of transgender-ism unless you repent of being ambiguous on sodomy/lesbianism. You cannot repent of supporting the same same-sex-ism unless you repent of feminism. You cannot repent of feminism until you repent of egalitarianism. You cannot repent of egalitarianism unless you go back to the sin of the garden—where Men actually believe in God and hold to his standards, not being passive or giving into lies in the face of temptation. We will have to think and act, feelings and hyper-spirituality won’t cut it. You will either live in God’s world of Genesis 1-2 or continue to live in the covenant and curse of death (Genesis 3)

  1. It is good that this issue forces Men to actually stand up, both teaching and against this injustice..you will have to (Romans 14:23, I Corinthians 16:13))

  2.  It is good in that we will either work to reform these institutions or replace them—they will die—either quickly or slowly by their irrelevance (Jeremiah 29:5-7). Now is a great time to be like Boaz (Ruth 2-4), cultivating our fields and blessing our workings. By building churches, families, businesses, educational institutions, good art, etc, in the time of judgment where everyone else is doing as they see fit and the legacy institutions are becoming an irrelevant joke.

  3. We are eternal people. It is good for all men to have to face eternity and judgment. We will be judged by God’s law and live accordingly—either by Grace in Jesus Christ as savior and Lord, who earned new life for us, or continue by man’s law—earning deserved judgment in Hell and seeing an increasing preview through the hell on earth which the chose of god’s Judgement is. Believe in the Gospel of eternal hope and restoration and repent to God. (Acts 17:32) 

What is Holiness lived?

Humans are distinct from animals
 
Men are distinct from women
 
Marriage and sex in marriage is distinct from all other human relationships
 
This is holiness/sacredness as created by God.
 
Sin begins when my feelings become sacred and I rebel against God’s sacred distinctions.
 
Anger is God’s right and Holy response to the rebellion of his creatures.
 
Judgment is both earthly and eternal
 
Righteousness through Jesus Christ re-establishes God’s holy creational distinctions
 
Repentance is coming to my senses, agreeing with God with holy sorrow, and returning to his holy order.

Thoughts on self-respecting manhood and the use of public language.

Thoughts on self-respecting manhood and the use of public language. 

I Corinthians 16:13….”act like men”.

There are some things that have struck me over the past couple of years, as it relates to men in our culture. That is, the jettisoning of manly self-respect in what is said and what is not said public-ally. I think, by both common grace and saving grace (as a Christian has received), there is a distinction in manhood on how we see ourselves and the world around us. There are things that are unmanly, necessarily including the tone and content of our speech. Over the past generation, through the unrelenting assault upon men, the result has been an increasing class of men who seem to be willing to public ally emasculate themselves in their talk. There seems to be a void of self-respect as related to being a man, in our dress but also, particular to this post, in our language. For example, here are some types of statements and tones I have noticed that my conscience recoils against and will not allow me to participate in:

  1. I cannot give public “COVID” safety lectures (as written by the safety czars) beyond the basic reiteration of “use common sense.” I cannot lie nor give manipulative narratives regarding love or safety.

  2. I cannot make generalizations based upon a person’s ethnicity.

  3. I cannot use strawmen to gain authority, particularly when clarity is called for.

  4. I cannot make general public apologies according to the law and language of the culture.

  5. I cannot use the therapeutic language of “brokenness” “Lament” “trauma” or “toxic masculinity” to describe problems and solutions

  6. I cannot, as a pastor (and as a man) virtue signal via using the language of “weeping” or “lament” or “mourning” about general cultural situations in which I am not directly involved.

  7. I cannot use and will not sing effeminate, breathy songs in public worship.

 

Call me a product of toxic masculinity. There are some things which I, fundamentally, as a man, recoil against and cannot participate in, and when I see other men (particularly pastors) doing these things public ally, it screams as phony, insincere, and deceitful. Conversely, when a man turns to Christ Jesus and begins to take real responsibility, facing his fears, his language changes to simple, clear, bold, nuanced, and manly.    

Nothing new under the sun

There is nothing new under the Sun. You can either continue in a religion and worldview which will meet the same end with the same results, or turn to the Living God, the Holy Creator, who came into History through a virgin birth to redeem his creation. In the Lord Jesus Christ, there is true hope, the forgiveness of sin, and meaning.
 
Consider the words of famed British journalist Malcom Muggeridge, written a couple of generations ago.
“We look back upon history and what do we see?
Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulating and then disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of the “rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.”
In one lifetime I have seen my own countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that “God who’s made them mighty would make them mightier yet.”
I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius.
I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of military weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests.
All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind.
England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.
Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy.
Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominate for some three decades.
America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victories of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.
—Malcom Muggeridge, “But Not of Christ,” Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, ed. Cecil Kuhne (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 29-30.