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The World We Made: Coming soon...

UPDATE: There’s been lots of interest in this podcast, with about 2000 listens from 30 countries and counting! If you haven’t subscribed yet, we’ve added a few links to make it easier for those of you who aren’t on iTunes, which is most of you. (Welcome non-Apple fanboys.) Don't miss an episode. Scroll down and subscribe now.

"These are the confessions of American Christians recovering from American Christianity. This is the world we made."

Warhorn Media is pleased to announce a new podcast hosted by Jake Mentzel and Nathan Alberson and featuring Tim Bayly. The World We Made is designed to help ordinary American Christians think through the difficult issues we face in our culture today. Season 1 is about homosexuality.

Over the course of the first season, we talk with Tim about how we went from having anti-sodomy laws in all 50 states (just 50 years ago) to where we are today. What are the changes Tim has seen in his lifetime? What exactly do they mean? What part did the culture play and what part did the church play? How are regular Bible-believing Christians supposed to respond? What has Tim learned as a pastor to help equip us for the challenge of ministering to men and women tempted by homosexuality?

These are the questions we'll be unpacking over the course of eight 20-minute episodes. We'll start out slow and easy, and things will pick up steam as we get closer and closer to the end. You won't want to miss it, so check out the trailer (above), and go ahead and subscribe now in iTunes or Android (or wherever you listen to your podcasts—Google Play Music, Stitcher, TuneInRSS feed) so you're ready when the first episode drops (July 17). 

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Daddy Tried audiobook now available...

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Warhorn Media is pleased to announce that Tim Bayly's Daddy Tried is now available as an audiobook. If you haven't had a chance to read it for yourself, swing over to Audible.com or Amazon.com, download a copy, and have Tim read it for you.

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We're also pleased to offer a free download of the Chapter 1 audio to Baylyblog readers.

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Report of PCA Study Committee on Women in the Church (10): what the Committee should have said...

(This is the tenth and final post in a series critiquing the Report of the Presbyterian Church in America's Study Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventheighth, ninth, and tenth.)

For this purpose (God) has set elders over His church, to force the re­fractory to order; and they are not to allow sin to be freely indulged in and to rage with impunity. ...there is no reason why they should allow the church to fall in ruins because of their sloth; there is no cause why they should sit back and connive at the wicked­ness of those who try to turn everything upside down. - John Calvin 1

It's time to bring this series to an end, but one last job remains on my to-do list.

Criticism is only as good as the vision that inspires it, so let me tell you my vision. Of course, it’s not my vision. It’s the vision shared among Biblically Reformed men who have read Scripture and church history and want to die having, by God’s grace, added to the capital our faithful fathers in the faith bequeathed to us. We want to die leaving the church better than we found it. Only by God’s grace, I am zealous to add.

We want to be faithful to fight the battles of today, pushing back against the heterodoxies, heresies, and wickedness we have discovered in our own hearts placed there by the Spirit of our Age. We refuse to spend our lives carving monuments to dead men and erecting museums filled with...


The good father: so you don't like LaVar Ball?

Have at it. Everyone's put off by him so go ahead and join the haters. Loud? Proud? Profane?

Yeah.

About to set Nike and Under Armour back a few billion?

Likely.

About to give Magic a run for his money, courtside?

After Tuesday, it's done.

The executives of legacy sport brands are howling about LaVar being the worst thing to happen to sports since Tonya Harding smeared peanut butter in Lance Armstrong's helmet.

Actually, she didn't.

When USC complained about LaVar branding his sons while his oldest son Alonzo was playing ball for UCLA, LaVar faced down UCLA and the NCAA—and more power to him, I say. The execs of the NCAA up in Indy know very well what this means. Finally, they're going to have to pay their "student athletes" a few thousand of the hundreds of millions they and their Ph.D.s have been raking in from...


From Jonathan Edwards: resolutions for the new year...

By the grace of God, we now move into 2017 and here's a copy of Jonathan Edwards' resolutions to help us pursue the holiness without which no man will see God. This particular list I typed and printed for my congregation some years ago—before Baylyblog. Now I can publish it here.

Edwards adopted these resolutions at various times prior to his twentieth birthday. Numbers one through thirty-four were all made prior to December 18, 1722, when Edwards was nineteen years of age. Numbers one through twenty-one were written at one sitting and numbers twenty-two through thirty-two at another.

Notice at the outset that Edwards recognizes...


Establish Thou the work of our hands...

Here's one of the prayers of Moses. We always read this prayer at funerals and burials. Also at the end when a brother or sister in Christ is near the end of the hard work of dying.

No man can establish the work of his own hands. Only God has that power. This is as true of work raising a family and pastoring a congregation as it is work on the railroad. (This is what your hands look like after a shift as car knocker at Chicago & North Western's Proviso Yards.)

Read and pray this prayer with your family and loved ones tonight.

Psalm 90

A Prayer of Moses the man of God.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. Return, O LORD, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.


Christians whose mothers never had to worry about their self-esteem...

(NOTE FROM TB: I've removed this post and hope to repost on the same subject, but taking a different tack that holds out hope and faith.)


Blaise Pascal: fire...

He died in 1692 when he was 39 years young. Eight years before death, he left his brilliant career as a physicist and mathematician for the monastery where he defended the Jansenists against the Jesuits. He explained the change:

Reason has its own sphere, mathematics and the natural sciences… but the truths which it is really important for man to know, his nature and his supernatural destiny, these cannot be discovered by the philosopher or the scientist. I passed a long time in the study of the abstract sciences, but the scant communication which one can have in them (that is, the comparative fewness of the people with whom one shares these studies and with whom one can communicate) disgusted me. 

A brother in Christ sent me this...


The loss of a precious child...

Fr. Bill Mouser is one of my heroes. He's an odd bird, no doubt. God has shown me that sanctification always produces greater oddities in saints. Never greater conformity. Barbara loves her husband and it would be hard to find a Priscilla/Aquila married couple today who have done better work strengthening the church against the greatest heresy of our day, the repudiation and denial of the Fatherhood of God.

Some years back, Fr. Bill and his dear Barbara suffered the loss of their little daughter, Francesca. I've heard snippets through the years about their loss. Recently I asked Fr. Bill to write a little bit more for us. Here it is from the kindness and generosity of his heart. I trust you will be strengthened reading it, as I was.

* * *

When my eight-year old daughter Francesca (hereafter "Cheska") was diagnosed with an inoperable brainstem tumor on January 9, 1996, we knew two things...


When faith-talk wounds instead of healing...

Over on his FB page, Graham Roberts posted this short piece by Dad Bayly, and I repost it here for our readers. There are a couple problems with the view that Christians should squeeze every last bit of faith for healing we can marshal from ourselves until the moment our loved one's heart actually stops beating and he is pronounced dead.

First, God often shows us that in this particular case He is not going to heal our loved one. Are we not to listen to Him and submit to His will? Is it godly to demand otherwise?

Second, if we refuse to stop "believing" or "having faith" for our loved one's healing until he's dead, how do we ever begin to do the work of preparing for death? For that matter, how does he himself do the work of preparing for death when all his loved ones surrounding him are...

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Steph Curry on the All-Star Game: like preachers, like people...

Everyone is congratulating each other over the NBA's supercilious Adam Silver yanking the All-Star Game from Charlotte. He was taking a stand against North Carolina legislators who had passed a law against sexual predators posing as women and using women's bathrooms. People who matter had been Hoosiering the state over its law for a while, now. It took a little longer than expected but sexual debauchery won the day and the NBA canned Charlotte. The scuttlebutt is New Orleans will be the new host city.

People are morally indignant that a man isn't allowed to pee in the Lady's Room in Charlotte so they send their game over to the city where Lent is celebrated by women baring their breasts. This is our country, today—a nation filled with Christians like Steph Curry.

Turns out Charlotte is Steph's hometown... 


Suffering: God's scalpel...

If you call our church office, you'll usually be helped by Katie (Mrs. Ben) Walker, our office manager/secretary/Grand Poobah. Katie's a delight to all of us, but that doesn't quite say it. Katie is a gift to all of us—a gift from God. We are grateful to God for Katie, but also grateful for two Reformed Presbyterian churches near Purdue University, the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Lafayette and Immanuel Reformed Presbyterian Church in West Lafayette, Indiana. These were the pastors, elders, and congregations who loved and led Katie through her years of suffering. Recently, God saw fit to operate on Katie again by taking her father, Rev. David Long, away from his loved ones and the veil of tears that is this life, to the presence of the Lord and the exceeding glory that is the life eternal.

Katie was the speaker at our women's retreat a couple months ago and she spoke on suffering. At a tender age, Katie knows her subject well. But better, Katie is willing to relive her suffering in order to serve her brothers and sisters in Christ. Our Warhorn site just published Katie's testimony and I hope you'll all go on over there and read it.

Here's an excerpt...


A psalm for Easter...

Let's celebrate Easter
with the rite
of laughter.
Christ died and rose
and lives.
Laugh like a woman
who holds her first baby.
Our enemy death
will soon be destroyed.
Laugh like a man
who finds he doesn't have cancer
or does but now there's a cure.
Christ opened wide the door of heaven.
Laugh like children
at Disneyland's gates.
This world is owned by God
and He'll return to rule.
Laugh like a man
who walks away uninjured
from a wreck
in which his car was totaled.
Laugh
as if all the people in the whole world
were invited to a picnic
and then invite them.

-Joe Bayly


Watergate and the Resurrection of Jesus...

(TB: Chuck Colson wrote this helpful piece on the Resurrection of Jesus.)

After I became a Christian, my lawyer’s mind demanded evidence regarding the Bible. Was it legend, or could it really be taken as God’s revelation?

I read some excellent books. But ultimately it was my experience in Watergate, strange as that will sound, that convinced me the Bible is the authoritative, inerrant revelation of God. Let me explain...


China's single men: 32,000,000 and counting...

(CORRECTION: The 32 million was back in 2005. By now it's probable the number is around 45 million.)

The amendment of China's one-child to a two-child policy isn't likely to improve their ratios of old to young or men to women. Stuart Gietel-Basten, Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Oxford, writes:

...questions will undoubtedly be asked about the legacy of the one-child policy. While its likely role in driving down fertility has probably been overstated, its role in shaping the highly skewed ratio of boys born compared to girls is widely considered to have been significant. In 2005 there were 32m more men under the age of 20 than women in China.

...What is the likely psychological impact of 35 years of constant messaging extolling the benefits of one-child families? And how is that internalised? We shall see.

Looking elsewhere in Asia, though, the Chinese government may find that it is much easier to “encourage” people to have fewer children than to have more.

Gietel-Basten links to a study exploring the connection between China's one-child policy, its sex ratio, and abortion...


If your church doesn't teach you to fear God and obey Him, run for your life!

Romans begins and ends with the phrase, "obedience of faith." Chapter one, verse five reads, "we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles." Then the Apostle Paul brings the letter to an end with these words:

Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith; to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be the glory forever. Amen.  - Romans 16: 25-27

Intriguing, isn't it, that the Apostle Paul starts and ends his letter with this pairing "obedience of faith?"

We'd never word it this way. We'd speak of the confession of faith, the grace of faith, the blessing of faith, the certainty of faith, justification by faith, the assurance of faith—anything but the obedience of faith. As we see it, in Christianity faith has displaced obedience from the pride of position it holds in all man's religious schemes of salvation. Further, any talk of obedience is dangerous because man's pride is always chomping at the bit to turn away from dependence upon God's grace, returning to dependence on his own self-righteousness.

"It's all of grace! That's what it means to be Protestant and Reformed! Catholics and Arminians talk about obedience because they believe in salvation by works, but all of us know they're wrong. Grace is everything!"

And yet, there the phrase is at the beginning and end of the book of Romans: the obedience of faith. We must admit it surprises us. If we didn't know it was there, we'd not think it wise for the Apostle Paul to speak this way. We'd warn him that a phrase like this will be used by some people...


In film exposures of Planned Parenthood, do ends justify means?

Pastor Doug Wilson recently did a helpful post exploring the ethics of tactical deception on the part of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). He got me thinking about what constitutes a moral obligation of full disclosure and whether parameters for godly deception can be marked out.

I have had discussions with Christians who are very pleased by CMP’s work, but are conflicted regarding tactical deception. They wonder if they’re giving into saying “the ends justify the means.” In addition to this, there are R2K proponents criticizing CMP for their “unethical” methods for infiltrating PP. The former are understandably conflicted, the latter are selectively squeamish—dare I say pietistic—about operating within the “common” kingdom.

Adding to the mess is the media’s selectivity in reporting on CMP's videos while also reporting names linked to a website dedicated to facilitating adulterous liaisons...


Screwtape's take on current events...

Yesterday I read an Acts 29 pastor's rebuke of a man for calling Christians in his church to turn away from their vain pursuits on social media, spending some of their bandwidth instead on expressing their Christian compassion for the unborn. The pastor said the usual things ordained men without conviction or faith would say to unordained men having both graces: the writer should wait until he had no sin to speak to others about sin; the writer is judgmental/Phariseeical; the writer is making abortion and Planned Parenthood into the only moral issue when there are lots of moral issues; the writer shouldn't exhort church members to speak against Planned Parenthood's sale of dead babies' body parts when those same members have shown their great Christian faith and witness by going on two-week jauntlets to foreign countries; and so on.

Abortion and Planned Parenthood will never end until pastors realize God will hold us accountable for our intensely defended indifference to the innocents being slaughtered down the street from our church-houses. It's no wonder simple Christians living under the authority of such pastors are silent about Planned Parenthood's murder of little babies. Add the R2K ridiculosity and the witches brew is vintaged finely.

Daughter Mrs. Benjamin (Michal) Crum wrote a reflection on the silence of Christians, taking on Lewis's artifice of speaking of these things from Screwtape's perspective. The title of her FB post is "Screwtape's Take on Current Events." Read it and post it yourself...


A judge judges righteously and is judged for it...

Here in Toledo, Municipal Court Judge C. Allen McConnell seeks to perform his duties in accord with his Christian faith...and he says so, forthrightly in the midst of a ruckus caused by his declining to "marry" a lesbian couple. 

As can be expected, many are incensed by his nonconformity:

Although the initial motivation for McConnell's refusal was vague, his subsequent statement not only makes clear the religious motivation for his abdication of duty, but also indicates that he plans to continue seeking some sort of "religious exemption" from performing the duties required by his title.

Please keep Judge McConnell in your prayers. He is not only a professing Christian he is an elder within what appears to be a Bible-believing church...


Independence Day...

If you’re a Christian and a patriot mourning this week over the unjust weights and balances of our nation’s highest law court, now’s a good time to remember there is one kingdom that will be left standing after all others fall. 

Take comfort this Independence Day in the inevitable, the irrepressible, the inexorable, the indomitable, and the interminable rule of Christ promised us in Psalm 2 (versified for singing by some of our Clearnote musicians).

Listen and be wise…

With thanks to Phil, Jake, Nathan, and Nate

[Download the audio free at Noisetrade]