Power of the Tongue; Renewing Our Minds and More

Posted on March 26, 2025 by RC

From our home on the range, where seldom is heard a discouraging word. Saddle up and listen up. It might do you some good.

This week’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast

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Rebels Without a Cause: Fighting the World With Its Weapons

Posted on March 25, 2025 by RC

It was Marx who argued that, rather than man shaping economic realities, it was the economic realities that shape man. Despite his manifold and manifest follies, he had something of a point here. Setting aside for a moment the chicken and the egg issue, wouldn’t hard times, for instance, give rise to strong willed and stiff backed men? Wouldn’t economic blessing tempt us to softness?

Might this be why Agur cries out in Proverbs 30 “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God” (verses 8-9). Doesn’t it make sense that the greatest generation, the one that made so many sacrifices during World War II, was likewise the generation raised in the heat of the Great Depression? Doesn’t it make sense that the post-war prosperity of the next generation would give rise to whining hippies?

Elbow Room

The nature of colonization and westward expansion in our early history would create or attract, a peculiar mindset. People content to collect a paycheck by pushing papers or stamping out widgets need not apply. American individualism didn’t arrive out of the American experience de nova. Nor from the writings of Horatio Alger. Rather it sprung from the hard scrabble of the frontier and the prairie. It was forged in the cold tundra of winters. Uncharted territory never opens wide before the effete, but challenges the hearts of men.

That economic reality in turn shaped the artistic reality, America as a nation of lone wolves. James Fennimore Cooper brought us the Leatherstocking Tales, a collection of novels about a frontier hero. Natty Bumpo was Daniel Boone before Daniel Boone. He lived off the land, did right by his neighbors, but aspired mostly to be left alone. That Daniel Boone was real enough doesn’t explain our country’s abiding interest in him. He was a hero to us because he went out on his own and built a life for himself.

Mark Twain continued the same pattern as Huck Finn only begins his adventures as he heads west, on his own, to make his mark. That Holden Caufield inhabits the city and spends his sophomoric days whining doesn’t change that he too is the lone wolf, alone, with no body to catch the body falling through the rye.

Whaddya Got?

Of course, truth be told, we have by now virtually run out of frontiers. In turn we aren’t exactly overrun with opportunities for vision quest, for soul-shaping heroism. But that doesn’t mean we have run out of rebels. Marlon Brando at one point virtually owned the franchise. Stanley Kowalski, of the torn t-shirt, may have been torn between two women in A Streetcar Named Desire, but he was yet a man on his own.

In The Wild Ones Brando played the leader of a motorcycle gang. They blow into a small town, where a waitress asks Brando’s character, “Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” With his trademark sneer Brando replies, “Whaddya got?” James Dean would later be but a pale imitation.

To Be is To Be on TV

The pattern is only now beginning to fade, but for all the wrong reasons. The modern world is regimented, a well-oiled machine. Naturally the hero longs to escape such a prison, to rebel not against nothing, but against everything. But in the postmodern world, the only answer we can give Johnny is, “Nothing.” The only prison the would-be rebel must escape is the inescapable reality that there are no prisons. There are no laws to break in a lawless culture, no taboos to transcend when the only taboo is to hold on to taboos. All we have left is the aching desire to be seen, to get on camera.

Breaking Free

In the Matrix movies, Neo, the new man, had to discover that he wasn’t in a postmodern world, but still just a cog in a machine, so that he could in turn set himself, and others free. He had to discover that there actually was a reality before he could break free of it. And once free, they would be right back where we’re starting from.

Fish Swimming Upstream

Which is why we must be careful. How easy it is to feed ourselves on these images from the world around us, as an inspiration to rebel against the world around us. We are rebels with a cause, but sadly we are more excited about being rebels than we are about the cause. We are Jesus Freaks who are more interested in being freaks than we are in Jesus.

How worldly we are when we boldly, like any hero from Bumpo to Neo, stand against the tide of the world, so that we can be heroes. When we do such we are not only not swimming upstream, but are being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. When we boldly bring forth a new paradigm, or when we boldly fight for the old paradigm, I’m afraid we too often are looking at ourselves in the mirror to see how bold we look.

Our Hero

To be counter-cultural it isn’t enough to fight the culture with the culture’s tools. We must instead fight the culture as Jesus would have us do. We are called, though one can hardly expect to receive garlands and have folk songs written about those who do such, to live in peace and quietness with all men, as much as is possible. To be counter-cultural is to stop worrying about how we look, and to start worrying about Whom we obey. Our hero must be He who obeyed His Father, even to death on the cross.

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Study Concludes Tonight- The Greatest Commandment

Posted on March 24, 2025 by RC

Tonight we conclude exploring the greatest commandment, asking, “who is my neighbor.” All are welcome in our home at 6:15 eastern for dinner, and for the study itself at 7:00. The study will be live-streamed on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.

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Is the church getting worse? Dreaming Dreams

Posted on March 24, 2025 by RC

Because we are given to complaining, we need to be reminded to give thanks. Complaining comes naturally to us. Giving thanks is a supernatural activity. Consider, for a moment, our propensity to complain about the state of the church. In Reformed circles we have far too many “whispering Calvinists,” men in the pulpits of Reformed churches who affirm the system of doctrine found in the Westminster Confession, but whose preaching seems unaffected by that system.

On the other side of the spectrum we have the cranky Reformed. These are men who preside over bitty little congregations of bitty little hearts. They spend their time and energy sifting through the subtle theological nuances of their enemies, other Reformed pastors. It’s not a pretty picture.

We would be wise, however, to remember that once, not too long ago, there was no Reformed world to complain about. Outside of Grand Rapids, the mecca of the Dutch Reformed, and the greater Philadelphia area, where a then very young Westminster Seminary sent its grads, seventy-five years ago the only Bible believing Presbyterians you could find were fundamentalists given to dispensational eschatology. And even they were hard to find. That we have big troubles in the Reformed world is the result of now having a big Reformed world. And that is something to give thanks for.

The same principle applies to the church at large. How hard is it to find something to complain about in the evangelical church? Turn on Christian television. Turn on Christian radio. Pick up your average evangelical magazine. Attend a conference. Chances are you will find a hodge-podge of squishy, feel-good goo-gah. You will find men in pulpits who not only don’t teach the Reformed faith, but won’t teach the plain teaching of the Bible. You are more likely to find the spirit of Madison Avenue at work than the Holy Spirit.

Once again, however, we need to remember that not long ago the evangelical church was a tiny backwater institution, dwarfed to insignificance by big churches overcrowded with parishioners who did not know or did not care that their pastor did not believe Jesus was raised from the dead. While there is great room for growth in the evangelical church, praise God we live in an age where it is the mainline churches that are insignificant shells.

Might we be still more grateful if we were to look back to that church which has so radically departed from the faith. We were once a part of the one true church known as Israel, the people of God. While our fathers may have worshipped in mainline mausoleums, our spiritual great-great grandfathers gave over the worship of the living God for the worship of the Baals- over and over again.

Read through our family story and we will find there repeated ad nauseum, “And King So and So did not fear God but established high places throughout the land… Then King So and So II, like his father before him, did not humble himself before the Lord, but welcomed the priests of Baal to his table.”

Apostasy wasn’t a surprise to the children of Israel; it was a way of life. Over and over God sent foreign lands to oppress His people, that they might turn to Him in repentance. Time and again God sent His prophets to call His bride back to fidelity. And then something amazing happened. God sent the prophet Joel. He too spoke against the sins of Israel. He too lamented the judgment of God. Famine would come. The Day of the Lord was at hand, a day of darkness and gloom. A nation would come in conquest like none that had come before:

“The earth quakes before them; the heavens tremble. The sun and the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining. The Lord utters his voice before his army, for his camp is exceedingly great; he who executes his word is powerful. For the day of the Lord is great and very awesome; who can endure it?” (Joel 2:10-11).

God calls His people to repentance, promising to forgive them, and to restore them. But then He makes this astonishing promise:

“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophecy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit” (2:28-29).

This is a promise of a whole new world. For all our failures and weaknesses as the modern church, we are the church indwelt by the Holy Spirit. For all our infidelities, and flirtations with the world, we will remain as the bride. Institutions will come and go, but the bride of Christ will never turn away. She will be spotted and wrinkled, but she will have within her the living Spirit of God.

This promise was inaugurated at Pentecost, and is still coming to pass in our own day. We are the people of God, but with this difference. We are His people, indwelt and empowered by His Spirit. We dream dreams and we see visions.

The Spirit that indwells us is at work driving far from us the spirit of grumbling and complaining. He is teaching us to give thanks, and we would be wise to begin by giving thanks that He is teaching us. We should be dreaming this, a dream that, for all her weaknesses and failures, the church will grow ever more faithful. Our vision should be forward looking, driven by gratitude and hope. This is why the Father spoke these words through Joel. This is why the Son told us that it was better for us that He should ascend. This is why He sent His Spirit, that we would rejoice and give thanks.

We live in the new and improved. Our calling is to make the new newer still, and the improved still more improved. We march from victory to victory. And in the end we will dance, bride and Groom together, forever and ever.

This is the thirty-seventh installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday March 30 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.

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Mourning, Dancing and the Hope in Between

Posted on March 21, 2025 by RC

Paul tells us that it is right and appropriate, in times of hardship, that we should mourn. Hardship, though it be for our good and His glory, is still hardship. It is hard. And so we mourn. But, Paul tells us, we do not mourn like the world. They mourn without hope, while we mourn with hope. The two dance together.

There is an immediate and sound deduction we can reach here. Why would our mourning differ from the world around us? We know where we are going. We know what end is in store for us. Any sadness or hardship that we experience is, on any appropriate scale, brief and mild. Our suffering, after all, cannot be compared with the eternal weight of glory (Romans 8:18). The suffering of those outside the kingdom is but a prelude, a small taste of an eternity of agony. Our suffering, on the other hand, is but a speed bump on the way to Glory Road.

What we must not miss, however, is the reason for our different ends. Our grief is infused with hope not merely because we have a bright future. Instead our grief is infused with hope because of our past. We look forward, in the midst of our grief, in hope, because we look backward, in the midst of our grief, with joyful gratitude.

My future is bright because the wrath that I am owed has already been spent. The difference is in the cross of Christ. Whatever sorrow God calls me to go through, He calls me to go through for the express purpose of remolding me into the image of His Son. Judgment lies behind me. Glory lies before me. Because of Jesus.

Stephen, while he was being martyred, saw heaven open up. He beheld the glory of Christ, as He stood, a witness for this witness. The joy was not merely that Stephen would be found innocent, not simply that Stephen would be with Jesus. The greatest joy was that Stephen knew that what he saw, that he would become. John, remembering that we ought not to mourn as those who are without hope, gives us this greatest hope, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears, we will be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

He knows the plans He has for us, plans to give us hope and a future, a future so grand that eye hath not seen or ear heard, nor has it entered into the mind of man. May we be blessed with the courage to believe His promises, even in the midst of hardship. May the world witness us, the witnesses of Christ, as we attest to His goodness, through mourning with hope. May they behold His glory, as we move from mourning to dancing.

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Fool Me Once: None So Blind as Those Who Won’t See

Posted on March 20, 2025 by RC

Americans are not so much a forgiving people as we are a forgetting people. Great evils are not so much atoned for as they are moved on from, especially in the political sphere. The news cycle is a rinse cycle. My hope, however, is that I might serve as a remind-er, one who reminds. That some of you, for reading this, might better remember. And just maybe, we won’t get fooled again.

Here is a list of people and institutions who were caught in the most egregious lies imaginable, prevarications so destructive that it’s hard to fathom that such people would ever open their mouths again.

1. The Covid Karens

Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, NIH and WHO didn’t merely make a mistake in their assessment of COVID, its origins and the safety and efficacy of the vaccine but a. knew they were lying and b. nearly destroyed the world. How far down the chain of command this goes I couldn’t say. My family doctor encouraging the jab didn’t do wonders for his credibility, but I still basically trust him. The higher ups are bald-faced liars.

2. The Jack’s a Jills

It seems every day there’s a new study coming out from the Institute for the Obvious telling us that the sexually confused are a few queens shy of a full deck. Ya think? Yet we have government school bureaucrats telling us that a. this is normal b. this must be accommodated in the bathroom and the sports field c. it’s nothing some experimental drugs and a scalpel can’t cure and d. they should get to decide what to do rather than parents. The kids may be confused. Those pushing the confusion are not. They are evil.

3. The Climate Chicken Littles

It is an inconvenient truth that every single prediction of impending doom solemnly announced just a few decades ago is drowning not in rising sea levels but rising barnyard substance levels. They made a critical mistake in their strategy. As long as their models and science was over our head, they could fool us a bit. But it couldn’t make us care. So they switched to doomsday scenarios we could understand, and deadlines we would soon face, only to have the calamity go back in its hole like Punxsutawny Phil after seeing his shadow. They haven’t delivered the bads. Because they are lying and they know it.

4. The Maxwell Smart Brigade

When 51 current and former high ranking intelligence officials assured us, days before the 2020 election, that the Hunter Biden laptop looked like a Russian disinformation op, they missed it by this much. If by “this much” we mean all the way from here to Russia. Some of those same men had already demonstrated their credibility when they treated the Steele dossier as Holy Writ rather than what it was, fan fiction emailed from Hillary’s private server.

5. The Sharp as a Tack Confederacy of Dunces

In the run up to his walking away from the 2024 presidential race, dozens of Dems parroted their talking point that President Biden was as sharp as a tack. While they knew he was as dumb as a box of nails. They asked the entire country, “Are you going to believe us, or your lying eyes?” And the media played right along.

Lying as a strategy only “works” if either the lie has enough credibility to be believed, or if the audience forgets when its been lied to. Don’t believe the hype. Never, ever again.

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Must I Love Myself to Love Others? This Week’s Study

Posted on March 19, 2025 by RC

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Slander; Finding Your Mind; Joe’s Bros; Assault & Flattery

Posted on March 19, 2025 by RC

Take some time. Tune in. Learn a thing or two. Share with friends. It’s not too complicated. I know you can do it. The question is, will you?

This week’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast

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Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places…

Posted on March 18, 2025 by RC

We must not allow our grasp of total depravity to lead us to miss in us God’s image. We are plenty bad. Sin touches every part of us. We’re unable to do anything in ourselves pleasing to God, including coming to faith. We do not, however, run in precisely the opposite direction of where we ought.

Romans 1, wherein Paul’s chief goal is to explain the universal guilt of man, for instance, tells us not that man in his sin, made to worship God, merely refuses to worship God, but rather says we worship the creature rather than the Creator. Because we’re fallen we won’t worship God. Because we bear His image, however, we will worship. Even at Babel they didn’t merely turn their back on the dominion mandate but rather twisted it. They built the tower because of God’s image. They built it for their own glory because of their depravity.

Distortion, Not Destruction

The same principle, that many of our desires (to work, to worship) are good and proper but because of sin, misdirected, applies to our desire to be loved. We are relational beings, just like our Father in heaven. It is not good, He told us, for man to be alone. Wanting to be loved isn’t a shame, weakness, a failure. Looking for love in all the wrong places, however, is a shame, weakness, a failure.

Seeking, Not Finding

When we are men pleasers, ear ticklers, hungerers for the approval of the world we are seeking love where we ought not, and missing the love that we have. When we commit adultery, indulge in pornography, escape into fantasy we seek love where we ought not, and miss the love that we have. When we gossip, slander, bear tales, we are seeking love where we ought not, and missing the love that we have. When we use social media to present our lives as one glamorous success after another, we look for love where we ought not and miss the love that we have.

Our Hearts Are Restless…

The one thing that will satisfy our hunger is the Father who sent His Son. To dwell with us, be our Husband, feed us. If I am in Christ, I am His beloved, and in turn beloved of the Father. The Spirit is ever with me, encouraging me. If I am in Christ I have all I could ever ask or hope for. In my sin I’m like the beloved son of the world’s wealthiest man, going to the seedy part of town to pick through dumpsters to fill my belly. My Father’s table is heavy laden with the choicest delicacies laid out for me, and I’m looking for a pizza crust in a trash can.

Full and Famished

My shame is not that I am hungry, for I was made to eat. My shame is missing what my Father has given me. My weakness is not that I want, but that I don’t recognize that I have. My failure isn’t that I long to be loved, but that I’m wrong to not know I am infinitely loved. He is my beginning- I bear His image. And He is my end- I will be with Him always.

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Study Continues Tonight- The Greatest Commandment

Posted on March 17, 2025 by RC

Tonight we continue exploring the greatest commandment. Tonight we continue to loving our neighbor as ourselves. Is this a command to love ourselves? All are welcome in our home at 6:15 eastern for dinner, and for the study itself at 7:00. The study will be live-streamed on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.

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