Holiness

Lack of light leads to germs while nothing cleanses more thoroughly than the sun. For these reasons Tim and I publish valid email addresses along with contact information on this blog. We also try to remain actively engaged in the comment sections of our posts rather than just on the main blog page.

We do so because we believe as pastors we must approach all of life pastorally. This medium is not the Christian equivalent of Berkeley's Free Speech Zone. It's a medium to be claimed for Christ. Which means, first, that Tim and I are responsible for what we say here; and second, that this blog is intended to be helpful spiritually to others, not just to burnish our writing skills or public reputations.

We hope those who participate actively or inactively in this blog benefit from the thoughts expressed here--and that the sum of all our words is glory to the Father through the Son.

As part of the discipline of approaching this blog pastorally Tim and I are committed to explaining--and at times defending--what we write in our posts. We want our readers to know who we are, the churches we pastor, how we can be reached and the theological commitments we bring to the table. We do so recognizing that sin is crouching, seeking to devour those who are not just as careful to obey God on the internet as they are in more personal areas of life.

We have seen the effect over time of the anonymity and pseudonymity in the closed discussion lists that are increasingly common on Reformed sites. Even when discussion is open and moderators are identified many Reformed sites degenerate into virtual ghettoes.

The smug, self-referential nature of discussion in such groups produces closed communities where arrogance and vitriol dominate. And because the internet lacks the inherent accountability...

Speaking about evangelicals’ single-minded focus on evangelism, my Dad used to say: “Evangelicals only want to see people saved. After they’re saved, they think the person might as well die and go to Heaven because it’s all over.”

Is there a purpose to our lives after we’re saved?

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)

According to Scripture, being saved is not the end of our lives, but the beginning of the work God has prepared for us to do...

(Tim) Often when I write about the slaughter of the unborn, readers grow alarmed and wonder if I might be recommending armed revolution?

No, I've never recommended armed revolution, but any and everything short of it. Little ones made in the Image of our Mighty God are being heartlessly slaughtered in our cities and we eat turkey and stuffing, then gather Lord's Day to celebrate the beginning of Advent singing, "Away in a manger, no room for a bed; the little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head."

Few times in salvation history have the people of God cultivated such a highly sophisticated ability to worship the God of justice and truth while living in the midst of unjust, oppressive bloodshed. Typical of cities around our nation, here in Bloomington approximately one out of every five children conceived in their mother's womb is slaughtered. The horror of Nazi Germany doesn't begin to approach us in numbers or the relative innocence and helplessness of its victims. Molech in ancient Canaan didn't devour twenty percent of the children of the land, nor did the death toll reach one billion children...

A voice says, “Call out.” Then he answered, “What shall I call out?”

All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, When the breath of the LORD blows upon it; Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever.

Get yourself up on a high mountain, O Zion, bearer of good news, Lift up your voice mightily, O Jerusalem, bearer of good news; Lift it up, do not fear. Say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” Behold, the Lord GOD will come with might, With His arm ruling for Him. Behold, His reward is with Him And His recompense before Him. Like a shepherd He will tend His flock, In His arm He will gather the lambs And carry them in His bosom; He will gently lead the nursing ewes. (Isaiah 40:6-11)

(Tim, w/thanks to Kamilla) One young couple gave birth to their son. They held him and cooed over him and loved him and prayed for him and sang hymns to him until, two hours later, he died. They allowed their pastor to hold their son, too. The beautiful nurses dressed the couple's son in miniature baby clothes they themselves had knit for this and every one of their babies. This was their life--they spent each day in their metro-area preemie unit serving their babies and their babies' mom and dad as they fought, then gave in to death.

After two hours of love, their son died. Mom and Dad asked their pastor to take their son to the funeral home. The pastor took him in his arms. He was dressed in the nurses' homemade clothes and wrapped in a warm blue blanket. Down the stairs and out to the car.

The pastor laid him on the passenger's seat for the twenty-minute drive to the funeral home and wondered at the beauty of these nurses...

(Tim) One young mother in our church has been encouraged by several lists of resolutions she's been reading. Among resolutions written by believers, the granddaddy of them all is the one written by Jonathan Edwards...

(Tim) Responding to the post The invisible woman and its comments, one Titus 2 (older) woman wrote:

I recently heard from an old classmate, sombody who knew me as a teen and with whom I have had no contact for thirty five years. Having asked her to tell me about herself and her life, I received a letter telling of her early marriage that lasted seven years and ended in divorce. The marriage produced one child and so years of single parenting were combined with continuing education in pursuit of the sheepskin attesting to her qualification for the career of her choice. That career, however, turned out to be less than a "dream come true," and she shared that, having recently remarried a successful businessman who would appear to have significant material wealth, she joyfully abandoned her chosen career to work full time in her husband's office.

Her daughter is grown, upwardly mobile, and living in New York City. Her husband's children are adults. So, when her obligations in his office are fulfilled, her life revolves around travel, charity work, exercise, and entertaining. She plays the accordion, she participated in a beauty pageant last year and intends to do so again this year. (This at the age of 56!) They do triathlons together, snowmobile, and enjoy the lakes in the summer...

(Tim) Pastor Stephen Baker serves on the pastoral staff of Church of the Good Shepherd while also serving as Dean of ClearNote Pastors College--a sister institution to Christ the Word's Reformed Evangelical Pastors College in Toledo. Here is the first in a series of posts by Stephen on the necessity of training pastors for holiness--not simply the performance of public duties.

* * *

Playing a musical instrument requires hours and hours of private practice and study before it can be done in public. A man who has never touched an organ would be a fool if he thought he could publicly perform a Bach fugue on the first try. The same is true with playing basketball. One does not learn to play like Michael Jordan simply by watching from the stands. A surgeon does not perform intricate brain surgery without years of preparation. In all of these disciplines, there is a direct connection between the quality of the private preparation and the outcome of the public performance.

Excellent comments, Ken, although I'd like to tweak your statement slightly: "Christianity is a threat to the existing religious (or cultic) order because it’s a call to turn from the our worship of the cult of the state to worship the One True Living God. Mind you: He has appointed a day when He will judge all men..."

In other words, let's acknowledge not only that the US Constitution does not establish separation of church and state, but also that there's never been a politas in history that's had separation of church and state. And those who reassure themselves they live in such a politas today here in these United States are deluded.

Among a host of things proving their error is the river of Molech’s blood we swim in each day. Millions of slaughtered children—a billion worldwide, now—proving precisely which god our state worships. His name is Molech, and we remain at ease in Wheaton and Escondido and St. Louis and Manhattan.

It’s weird...

In Christless Christianity, we read the following helping us understand why Dr. Horton...

Then Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah made horns of iron for himself and said, “Thus says the LORD, ‘With these you will gore the Arameans until they are consumed.’” All the prophets were prophesying thus, saying, “Go up to Ramoth-gilead and prosper, for the LORD will give it into the hand of the king.”

Then the messenger who went to summon Micaiah spoke to him saying, “Behold now, the words of the prophets are uniformly favorable to the king. Please let your word be like the word of one of them, and speak favorably.”

But Micaiah said, “As the LORD lives, what the LORD says to me, that I shall speak.” (1 Kings 22:11-14)

(Tim) The purpose of seminaries today is to place their students in good jobs as pastors of good churches. But we live in an evil day when search committees want to hire men who will make a good show of honoring God and His Word while bending the Word at those places where the church's leaders are hard-hearted.

Say, for instance, the church has lots of women who have left submission to their husbands and service to their homes and children for submission to their bosses and service to their businesses and customers. Such a church will seek to hire a pastor who knows better than to preach on the Holy Spirit's sex-specific commands of Titus 2:3-5, that the older women are to teach the younger women to "workers at home" who are "subject to their own husbands." No one on the Search Committee will actually say it, of course--it's too important to be said.

So, search committee's doing what search committee's do, the secretary contacts Harvard Divinity School and asks for resumes. And when, depending on the church's building and location and terms of call offered, ten or two-hundred and fifty resumes arrive, the process of evaluating how precisely this or that man will posture himself between faithfulness to God and sensitivity to his congregation's hard hearts begins...

Then he began to curse and swear, “I do not know the man!” And immediately a rooster crowed. (Matthew 26:74)

(Tim) In one of his more recent comments, Darryl wrote that I'd called his "profession" into question. This is not true. I've nowhere questioned Darryl Hart's faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

So how could he think so?

My guess is Darryl can't understand how I could accuse a man of discouraging the holiness and sanctification of believers without considering that man doing the discouraging an unbeliever, himself. In other words, such an accusation is so serious that the one making it must be holding another far more serious accusation in abeyance.

Not so.

Reading through the account of Passion Week from the Gospel of Matthew last night (as is our congregation's habit on Palm Sunday evening), we were confronted by the Disciples' utter failure as Jesus went to His death...

(Tim, w/thanks to Yoseph) Psychotropic drugs have a place, I'm sure, but this short article (very unfortunately, where Arianna and her buddies huff and puff against God) demonstrates there are druggies on both sides of the legality fence. Whether the addict is getting his drugs from dealers, pain clinics, or psychiatrists, the cost to society and the drug-addled zombies and their families is terrible. Of course, like most sins of our culture, this one too is an epidemic among confessing Christians.

One in every forty-five adults of working age is getting money from taxpayers for a mental illness disability. And the number of children receiving federal payments for mental illness jumped from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007.

But maybe this explosion of legal drug use allows men to function as more productive members of society?

Apparently not...

(Tim) Over at ClearNote Blog, Jake Mentzel posted an introduction and has been putting up paraphrased excerpts from John Owen's Mortification (The Killing) of Sin in Believers. If you refuse to forgive others, look longingly at men's or women's bodies, wish you had your neighbor's Kubota, are prayerless, comfort yourself with ice cream, numb yourself with alcohol, bale hay during worship, and are bitter against God, this book's for you...

(David) Under the Labor Party that governed prior to the last general election, Great Britain finally achieved what had escaped her for hundreds of years of empire. She became cool. Though frequently stuffy, stubborn, vindictive, generous, arrogant, wise and pigheaded, she had never come close to the detached affect of cool. Cool was Gallic. Anglo Saxons did blood sweat and tears. And then Tony Blair defeated John Major, ushering in Cool Britannia and ending Rule Britannia not with tears or a funeral but with a decade-long party.

So too, the Reformed movement in America appears to be dying in a spasm of cool. Being young and Reformed in America has become the one thing it never was, hip. And the central pillar of the Cool Reformed movement is a celebration of grace as the all-in-one Swiss Army knife solution to the onerous problem of God's moral law. Cool Reformed is comprised of legions of young (and not-so-young) self-proclaimed ex-fundamentalists who claim to have found deliverance from the demons of legalism in a newfound Reformed understanding of the Gospel of grace. 

Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord: Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God... (Hebrews 12:14,15 KJV)

By way of Wes White, here's a post from someone who's been thought to be a standard-bearer for confessionalism's ridicule of the pursuit of holiness in which he states clearly that there is no necessary conflict between doctrine and piety. But rather that, historically, those who have written and affirmed the Reformed confessions have been at the forefront of the pursuit of holiness. Thank you, Michael Horton, for this post which may do some much-needed work among us.

Imagine a fortress, absolutely impregnable, provisioned for an eternity. There comes a new commandant. He conceives that it might be a good idea to build bridges over the moats—so as to be able to attack the besiegers.

Charming! He transforms the fortress into a country retreat, and naturally the enemy takes it. So it is with Christianity. They changed the method—and naturally the world conquered. [1]

My wife ran into a friend in the supermarket whose husband works for a large parachurch organization. Their small talk went from this to that, eventually turning to the friend listing for my wife a number of churches she and her husband had attended the past few years. Our friend had nice things to say about each church. Then she brought her list to a conclusion with the chipper exclamation, "Saving people—that’s what church is all about, isn’t it!”

This drew my mind back almost thirty years to an observation my Dad used to make about evangelicals’ single-minded focus on evangelism: “Evangelicals are only interested in getting people saved. And after he's saved, as far as they're concerned he might as well die and go to Heaven because it’s all over.”

Is there a purpose to our lives after we’ve placed our faith in Jesus? Does God have any larger plan for us...

This post has been retitled, "Sin, temptation, and the Campuscrusadification of the Church...." Read it and you'll begin to understand why no one cares if you're holy--no one but Almighty God.

(TB)

Is Holiness Possible Today (With a Warning from Esau)

Along with a number of other dear brothers (Ron Scates, Gary LeTourneau, Jim DeCamp, Terry Schlossberg, Ben and John Sheldon), my friend Rev. Marty Radcliffe continues to languish in the heretical PC(USA). Pray for him. Marty was a godly encouragment to me in the work of the ministry back in the early eighties when we both were ordained and served within the PC(USA)'s John Knox Presbytery up in Wisconsin.

Marty just commented under the post, "Death of an eighteen-year-old brother...," that he'd recently listened again to my Dad's final sermon given from the pulpit of College Church in Wheaton a few weeks before he died. After Dad's death, I had three-hundred cassettes of this sermon duplicated and sent them out to many friends.

This is the sort of preaching almost completely absent from the PCA and other conservative Reformed circles today. And it's tragic. Out of fear of being labelled a "pietist" by godless hypocrites who persecute those pursuing the sanctification without which no man will see God...

Several months ago, in part 1 of this post, I wrote about the difficulty of calling men to follow Christ in an age which has reduced discipleship to constant repetition of the mantra, "I believe in Jesus." Though Scripture warns, "Without holiness, no man shall see God," modern evangelism leaves out the call to holiness or obedience.

In part 1 I mentioned the problems of using Evangelism Explosion's famous "Two Questions," to call men and women to Christ. Modern evangelism stresses belief and ignores obedience, leaving us without response when those we're seeking to evangelize claim to know Jesus as Saviour, yet show no fruit of the faith they claim.

In part 2 my intention was to introduce a system I grew acquainted with years ago when it went under the name, "The Ten Cannons of the Law." 

Taught by Ray Comfort, a man I respect, the Ten Cannons approach seeks to rehabilitate the Law of God as a primary tool in evangelism. I believe Ray Comfort's "Ten Cannons of the Law" now goes by the name "The Way of the Master."

The problem with the Ten Cannons/Way of the Master approach is that though it begins with the Law and thus is far superior to the average Evangelical call to salvation, it doesn't end differently. 

My nephew Joseph Bayly, pastor of ClearNote Church Indianapolis posted a comment earlier today about "The Way of the Master" that says everything I was going to say about the "Ten Cannons" and more. And so I happily place it here as the long-delayed conclusion to my initial post.

(DB)

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First things first. The "Way of the Master" material is good in many, many ways. Most significantly, it correctly identifies the need to proclaim the law of God before offering people grace and salvation. Grace is graceless, and salvation is meaningless unless we see our guilt before the Holy God. And the 10 Commandments is ground zero for declaring God's law. This is something that has been lacking in many evangelistic "techniques" for some time. The 180 movie is also an excellent resource for ideas of how to interact with people and show them the horror of abortion. It gets at many truths, makes people think about difficult questions, and I'm quite thankful that it is available. I could spend more time talking about the good things, but these clearly demonstrate that I am serious when I say it is good in many ways. 

(TB: This pic taken of my mother-in-law, Mrs. Ken (Margaret) Taylor, yesterday on the front lawn of her house in Wheaton was on the occasion of our celebration of Mom's ninety-fifth birthday. The following post first ran here on Baylyblog back in 2004. It is a tribute to Mom Taylor and David's and my mother, Mrs. Joe (Mary Lou) Bayly. Both are mothers in Israel and we give God thanks for them.)

My mother-in-law studied for her degree in Home Economics during the late '30s and early '40s, graduating summa cum laude from Oregon State University. After marrying her childhood sweetheart, she gave birth to 10 children in 14 years. Her husband, engaged for most of the years when the family was young as editorial director of a religious publishing house, brought home low wages, so frugality was a necessity and the degree served this young mother and her family well.

This past Tuesday ESPN aired a documentary on Lolo Jones, American hurdler extraordinaire. In the interview she mentioned she is a virgin which led to the internet and air waves echoing with snickers...

But Abraham said, "Child, remember that during your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony" (Luke 16:25).

Lately I've been thinking about addictions, whether they be fixations on fantasy or money or knowledge or alcohol or prescribed drugs or illegal drugs or sex. Solomon gave himself to these tasty pleasures: "All that my eyes desired I did not refuse them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure... (Eccl. 2:10). The Temple he built had it's songs and sacrifices but Solomon's palace was rockin'. He concludes that there is no mountaintop-experience, no lasting high: "All a man's labor is for his mouth and yet the appetite is not satisfied" (Eccl. 6:7). In the end, all that this fallen world offers—all of it's vacations and tastes and pleasures and buzzes and escapes—are merely pleasure for a moment. Everything under the sun is only vapor and a striving after wind (Eccl. 1:14).

Yet,  that vaporous moment is goooood, no? Let's string together moment after moment, and we'll get through this alright...

Thy words were found and I ate them... - Jeremiah 15:16

You accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe. - 1Thessalonians 2:13

My dear children: Throughout much of our lives, we have read the Bible together. Why did we do that? Why should you do it on your own?

Reading the Bible plunges us into a spiritual bath...