Christian Heritage News

The Worship of Mammon — 1909 painting by Evelyn De Morgan . By Citizen Tom: "When we choose to worship money, wealth, and material possessions, we put the pursuit of money, wealth, and material possessions ahead of God, and we don’t obey God’s command to love our neighbors. We love money, wealth, and material possessions too much to do that. "Do you know anyone who loves stuff more than they love people? Is it some rich guy who seems obsessed with making money? Try looking in a mirror. How do you vote? Do you know anyone who votes (or donates money to politicians) to put more money into their own pockets instead of for a responsibly balanced Federal budget? Have you ever seriously examined the ethics of Social Security, Medicare, Public Education, the Welfare State, National Defense, and so forth? Read the entire post here.  See also: WHAT DOES THE WORSHIP OF IDOLS LOOK LIKE? — PART 2 – Citizen Tom WHAT DOES THE WORSHIP OF IDOLS LOOK LIKE? — PART 3 – Citizen Tom WHAT DOES TH

 By Stephen Steele - Posted at Gentle Reformation: Seventy years ago, on the last Saturday morning in January, the MV Princess Victoria left the port of Stranraer in South-West Scotland. She was heading for Ireland with 179 people on board – but never arrived. The flawed design of the ship meant that the car deck was flooded as ferocious waves pounded against her, in the worst storm anyone could remember . Distress messages were sent out, but the confusion of the storm meant that for most of the time, the wrong location was broadcast. Finally able to get their bearings, the radio operator stayed at his post, allowing others to escape. He broadcast SOS messages until the very end and was posthumously awarded the George Cross . The captain and ship’s officers all went down with the ship. 135 perished and only 44 survived. The sinking ship is vividly portrayed in the above painting by Norman Whitla (late father of RPTS Professor David). The painting shows lifeboat number four, containing

  Posted at The Christian Institute: Two of the most senior figures in the Church of England have revealed they believe sexual intimacy within same-sex relationships should be ‘celebrated’. Following a bishops’ report that recommends against same-sex weddings being permitted in churches but in favour of allowing clergy to bless same-sex couples, the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London indicated their approval of churchgoers engaging in sexual activity outside of marriage. In separate media statements, they both said “stable, faithful relationships” between two men or two women could be blessed – rejecting historic Christian teaching on sexual ethics. Continue here... See also: Sexual immorality is not sinful, Archbishop of York says | Church & Ministries News (christianpost.com)

 By Al Baker - Posted at Forget None of His Benefits: “. . . just as truth is in Jesus.” -Ephesians 4:21 When you read or hear about the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, what is your general assessment? If you are like most people then you view it as a major loss for the United States, an unmitigated disaster, one that yielded thousands of deaths of U.S. soldiers (we actually lost 216 men in the offensive). Our involvement in Vietnam actually began in 1954 when President Dwight Eisenhower promised aid to France after their catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu by the Communists in May, 1954. Charles De Gaulle of France warned Eisenhower not to get involved, that it would be a political quagmire. Ike did not listen. The idea was to keep the Communist Chinese out of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Ho Chi Minh was backed by the Soviet Union and China, both of whom were seeking to overrun Indochina with their Marxist ideology. The French and the United States, put Ngo Dien Diem in

By Chris Reimers - Posted at Wings of the Wind : Most people, even those who were born after the incidents on September 11, 2001, have heard of the horrific events at the World Trade Center in New York City. 2,977 victims died that day and thousands more were injured. Most people don’t know that the country of Nigeria has it’s own World Trade Center complex. I didn’t know about it until I was researching the tallest buildings in Nigeria and found the video above and others like it. In July of 2020, a fire broke out on the top floor of one of the Nigerian World Trade Center buildings in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city. Thankfully, no one was injured. Here is a video and short report of that event. Continue here...

 By Brad Isbell - Posted at The Heidelblog: It happens often—a friend or listener sends a message with the question: “Do you know of a good confessional Presbyterian or Reformed church near X?” All too often, after searching online, consulting denominational websites, even asking other friends, the answer is no. When I signed up for the life of a confessional Presbyterian churchman, I was under no illusion about the size and reach of Reformed churches in North America, but that does not make the situation any happier. Now, for a variety of reasons, people are moving from the coast to the interior, from the city to the country. Too often, however, they are destined for locales with no local churches confessing the Reformed faith and worshiping according to the scriptures. Rural and small-town America is likely to become even more of a confessional Presbyterian and Reformed (hereafter P&R) wasteland unless pastors and planters are willing to become bi-vocational or to serve multiple

 By David Brody - Posted at CBN News: While it's clear Donald Trump is all-in for 2024, his MAGA hold on evangelicals may have lost some strength. A lot has happened since last time around: January 6th; the fallout with Mike Pence; the Mar-a-Lago classified documents; the continued focus on the past election and just overall drama. So does he have work to do this time around with evangelicals? "He has real work to do, let's not kid ourselves," says his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. "I'm sure that the team has a plan, but the work with the evangelicals and others that he may have taken for granted in 2020 is very real." As it stands, some of the prominent faithful who fervently backed Trump last time are still in the pews, not yet willing to commit. There's been no official support from the likes of Franklin Graham, Jack Graham or Albert Mohler – all previous backers. As for Pastor Robert Jeffress, once a vocal Trump defender says he'

 By Diana Chandler - Posted at Baptist Press: ORANGE, Calif. (BP) – Violence against Christians is spiking in Sub-Saharan Africa, driven by violence nurtured in Nigeria by Islamic and Fulani terrorists, Open Doors U.S. said Jan. 17 in its 2023 World Watch List tracking Christian persecution globally. Nearly 90 percent of the 5,621 Christians killed in the study period were in Nigeria, Open Doors U.S. said, verifying 5,014 such killings there. “Open Doors only records the events that we can verify. In reality much persecution, including killings, happen in very rural areas, or behind closed doors or in prison camps,” Lisa Pearce, Open Doors U.S. interim CEO, said in releasing the report. “So it’s likely that the recorded figures are just the tip of the iceberg.” In Nigeria, terrorists including Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, militant Fulani and others are known for raiding Christian communities, killing, maiming, raping and kidnappings its residents and demanding ex

 By Al Baker - Posted at Forget None of His Benefits: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.” -2 Peter 3:10 On Saturday morning, October 27, 1962 (also known as Black Saturday) I was ten years old and our family was driving from Birmingham to Oak Lawn, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago) where my father was taking a new job with his company, Stockham Valves and Fittings. Most of Interstate 65 was not yet completed so the trip was much slower and we only made it to Terre Haute, Indiana by nightfall. Little did we know that on that day the world came the closest in history to a nuclear war which would have killed millions of people. The “Cuban Missile Crisis” began on Monday, October 15 (two weeks after the riot at Ole Miss about which I wrote last week) when a U-2 spy plane (they flew at 70,000 feet) had incontestable evidence of nucle

 By John Stonestreet and Glenn Sunshine Princeton University is considering a petition, signed by nearly 300 members of the campus community, to remove a statue of John Witherspoon. Princeton University is considering a petition, signed by nearly 300 members of the campus community, to remove a statue of John Witherspoon. According to the petition , “paying such honor to someone who participated actively in the enslavement of human beings, and used his scholarly gifts to defend the practice, is today a distraction from the University’s mission.” In place of the statue, the petition requests an informational plaque that would describe both the positive and negative aspects of Witherspoon’s legacy. Witherspoon was one of the university’s most important presidents and one of the most important, albeit less-known, of America’s founders. Witherspoon accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey in 1768. The Presbyterian school would not be renamed Princeton University until 1896. I

 By Samuel Sey - Posted at Slow To Write: Published January 7, 2023 Many young, Christian men have become fans of Andrew Tate because they think he’s a good example of masculinity. Most of these young men are Generation Z teenagers who are growing up in a repressive, woke culture that labels their masculinity as “toxic”. Teenage boys know they are offered only two alternatives: they must either transition from boys to “girls” or they must transition from boys to weak men. This is why a self-proclaimed misogynist like Andrew Tate is so appealing. Unlike many cowardly evangelicals, Andrew Tate doesn’t seem like a weak man. Continue here... See also: The Red Pill Antidote | See, there's this thing called biology... (wordpress.com)

 By Tim Challies It’s hard to remember or even believe, but there was a time when social media consisted solely of blogs. Blogs were the way writers escaped the gatekeepers of old media to gain a voice of their own on the marvelous new medium we called the World Wide Web. Blogs were an interactive form of communication in which communities of writers would engage with one another while readers would provide feedback through comment sections. It was far from a perfect setup, but it worked well enough and a lot of good came from it. However else we tell the story of the rise and spread of Reformed theology in the early part of this century, for example, we cannot tell it apart from blogs. But eventually alternative forms of social media sprang up and began to displace blogs as the next big thing. Twitter and Facebook were most prominent, but there were many others besides. Then came the rise of video, first on YouTube and then on Vine and Instagram and TikTok and other “reel” formats. Po

By insanitybytes - Posted at  See, there's this thing called biology… : So I am an avid conspiritress, I often enjoy a good conspiracy theory, and I’m grateful to see people question narratives and think for themselves, however odd or confused they may appear on the surface. On a grand scale however, I am also keenly aware that the ability, the freedom, the innocence required to chase after conspiracy theories lives somewhere among the sheltered, naive, and protected. The privileged. People who are busy just trying to survive don’t have time to try to see what’s going on behind the scenes. What’s going on right in front of them is usually more then they can handle. Does a child being sex trafficked spend hours on Twitter trying to expose the truth about how the world is being run by elite pedophiles? They do not, because they are there, already living it. You don’t have to tell the victims of the Tuskeegee Syphalis experiment that government and public health officials can be ver

 By Al Baker - Posted at Forget None Of His Benefits: “. . . how unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways.” – Romans 11:33 The 1962 Ole Miss Rebels football team, led by their great quarterback Glynn Griffing, won their first game of the season on September 22 against Memphis State University (now called University of Memphis) by a score of 21 to 7. Ole Miss would go on to have an undefeated season, the only one in their illustrious history, plowing through all their opponents on their way to a 10 and 0 season, including a win over Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl. The AP and UPI polls had Ole Miss finish at number three in the nation while a lesser poll, the Billingsley Report, had them as national champions. Whilet Ole Miss was winning week by week, dominating their opponents by giving up only 53 points for the season while scoring 247 points, the campus was in turmoil. The 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education, rendered unconstitutional the southern

 By Bob Smietana - Posted at Baptist Press: (RNS) — At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly every congregation in the United States shut down, at least for a while. For some Americans, that was the push they needed to never come back to church. A new report , which looked at in-person worship attendance patterns before the beginning of the pandemic and in 2022, found that a third of those surveyed never attend worship services. That’s up from 25 percent before the start of the pandemic. The pandemic has likely led people who already had loose ties to congregations to leave, said Dan Cox, one of the authors of the new study and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. “These were the folks that were more on the fringes to begin with,” said Cox. “They didn’t need much of a push or a nudge, to just be done completely.” Continue here...

 By Pastor Andrew Webb - Posted at The Aquila Report: Published January 6, 2023 How the “MeToo” movement poisoned the possibility for true justice in the church. There is also the problem that when allegations of abuse are made, those who see abuse as endemic in that community tend to automatically assume that the allegations are automatically true, and view even a reasonable defense of the accused as the community corruptly attempting to protect guilty members of “the tribe.” At a time when the number of Conservative Evangelical Christian men committed to the church, orthodox doctrine, and their families, have never been lower; and when higher percentages of men NEVER attend church than attend once a week (35% vs. 31% according to Pew); I’m seeing an increasing stream of internet articles attacking them from other professing members of Reformed denominations—in which they are made out to be a huge pool of sexual predators, misogynists, spiritual abusers and basically the greatest thr

 By Jonathon Van Maren - Posted at Reformed Perspective: There is no series of historical events that have impacted every human being living in the West – and beyond – more than the Sexual Revolution. And yet, while many of us may be familiar with the term, few can explain what the Sexual Revolution really is and was. Legal abortion; digital pornography everywhere; the LGBT movement; hookup culture; gender ideology; threats to religious freedom – all are either an aspect or a direct result of the Sexual Revolution. It has also shaped virtually everything that emanates from our screens, from popular TV sitcoms (which had a hand in mainstreaming revolutionary ideas) to mainstream Hollywood films, produced and directed by the revolution’s most powerful storytellers. Continue here...

 By Tim Challies - Posted at Challies.com: There is something morbidly fascinating about watching dictionaries slowly but surely change their definitions of common words. It raises some questions, not the least of which strike to the very purpose of a dictionary. Is a dictionary meant to be an objective arbiter of the meaning of words? Or is a dictionary meant to subjectively list the ways in which words are used among the speakers of a particular language at a particular time? These are valid questions, especially in moments when certain key words are being intensely debated. It is not without significance that Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2022 was woman. “It’s one of the oldest words in the English language,” they say. “One that’s fundamental not just to our vocabulary but to who we are as humans. And yet it’s a word that continues to be a source of intense personal importance and societal debate. It’s a word that’s inseparable from the story of 2022.” They explain that sea

 By Al Baker - Posted at Forget None of His Benefits: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” – Romans 8:28 In the fall of 1960 a representative from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and General Reid Doster of the Alabama Air National Guard, 117th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing located at the airport in Birmingham, met with Alabama Governor John Patterson on a very important mission. The CIA was planning to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro who had come to power in January, 1959. Doster and the CIA were asking for Patterson’s permission to recruit pilots and service personnel from the 117th to train Cuban exile pilots for the invasion. Patterson agreed as long as the Alabama airmen were not required to engage the enemy. They could serve as advisors but nothing more. Doster and the CIA agreed. Why the Alabama Air National Guard? Because they flew B-26 bombers, leftovers from World

 By Zachary Garris - Posted at Knowing Scripture: RESTORING 1 CORINTHIANS 14:34-35 AS A PARALLEL TO 1 TIMOTHY 2:12 Most of the debate today over the role of women in the church centers around 1 Timothy 2:12 , where Paul prohibits women from “teaching” or “exercising authority” over men and instead commands them to “remain quiet.” Based on a variety of arguments, egalitarians conclude that 1 Timothy 2:12 does not prohibit women today from serving as pastors or elders or preaching to men. However, among those that hold 1 Timothy 2:12 does place restrictions on women in the church today (often called “complementarians”), there are differing conclusions. Complementarian Disagreements The narrowest complementarian position holds that 1 Timothy 2:12 only prohibits women from holding the office of pastor or elder, which would open the door to some women preaching. However, since Paul prohibits teaching and exercising authority and not just being a pastor, most complementarians understand Pau

 Posted at Reformation Scotland: David Dickson (c.1583–1662) was a Professor of Theology at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh who wrote commentaries on many different books of Scripture. He opposed the unbiblical worship and church government foisted on the Church in Scotland by Charles II and this cost him his position. As humans we are constrained by time. The passing of one year to the next is something entirely out of our control – all we can do is mark dates and recognise milestones. The only constant from one generation to the next is God. He is outside of time, because time is something that He created. The amazing thing is that as He stands outside of time and remains entirely unaffected by the passing of moments and millennia, He has chosen to make Himself a safe haven for sinful creatures vulnerable to change and decay. This thought was a tremendous comfort to Moses, the man of God, in his prayer to God in Psalm 90. David Dickson in this updated extract identifies the

Posted at Grace Gems: Preached January 1, 1760  "Knowing the time—that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." Romans 13:11 TIME, like an ever-running stream, is perpetually gliding on, and hurrying each of us into the boundless ocean of eternity! We are now entering upon one of those imaginary lines of division, which men have drawn to measure out TIME for their own convenience; and, while we stand upon the threshold of a new year, it befits us to make a solemn contemplative pause; though time can make no pause—but rushes on with its usual velocity. Let us take some suitable reviews and prospects of time past and future , and indulge such reflections as our transition from year to year naturally tends to suggest. The grand and leading reflection is that in the text, with which I present you as a New-Year's Gift: "Knowing the time—that it is now high time to awake out of sleep!" The connection of our t