Last week, Justin Taylor sat down for an interview with John Piper and his successor, Jason Meyer. Piper and Meyer give a candid glimpse into the process that led Bethlehem Baptist Church to select Meyer as their next pastor. Watch this, and witness a clear testimony of God’s faithfulness to His people. (HT: Colin Hansen)
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Planned Parenthood’s Morally Bankrupt Response
In my previous post, I highlighted Live Action’s latest sting operation of a Planned Parenthood (PP) facility in Austin, Texas. A hidden camera disclosed a PP worker counseling a patient about sex selective abortion. The patient claimed that she only wanted a boy and that she intended to kill the unborn child if an ultrasound indicated it was a girl. The worker showed the patient exactly how to get this done. PP has now released a statement in response to the video. PP’s response is a moral outrage for many reasons, but I want to highlight two.
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Steel in My Spine and Fire in My Belly
The sermons you are about to hear put steel in my spine and fire in my belly almost 20 years ago when I was in college. At the time, I was still cutting my teeth theologically and was wrestling mightily with the studied claims of theological liberalism. The sermons were like an oasis of truth, and they proved to be epoch-making for me. Here I heard for the first time about the bankruptcy of liberalism, the inerrancy of the Bible, the job-description of the pastor, and the necessity of perseverance. The messages meant the world to me then, and they still do now. The preacher is Tommy Nelson, pastor of…
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Entering the Fray with Merritt and French
Jonathan Merritt has responded to David French’s “An Open Letter to Young, ‘Post-Partisan’ Evangelicals.” If you still haven’t read French’s letter, do so now. It’s provocative, good, and right. It’s no surprise, however, that Merritt disagrees with that assessment. Instead, he says that French has put forth a false choice. Merritt writes:
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Why Americans Are Becoming More Pro-Life
Ashley McGuire explains at the Washington Post’s “On Faith” site why Americans are becoming more pro-life. After noting that Gallup is now recording the lowest level of self-described pro-choicers in its history of tracking the abortion issue, she writes: Many past civil rights movements in this country, such as the move to end slavery or the fight for women’s suffrage, were deeply rooted in religious conviction. Such is the case with the pro-life movement. But with each of these movements there was a tipping point where Americans saw that one need not be a devoutly religious person to recognize the social justice issue at stake and to get behind the…
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An Open Letter to Post-Partisan Evangelicals
Since Justin Taylor linked David French’s “An Open Letter to Young, ‘Post-Partisan’ Evangelicals“, chances are that you have already seen this. But this open letter is so well done and so worth the read, I want to link it here too. I also want to add a hearty “amen” and “hear, hear” to what French is saying in this letter. The bottom-line is this. It’s hard to be cool in the world’s eyes when you’re a pro-life and pro-family Christian. Those beliefs have public policy implications that will not win you friends among the cultural elites. Here’s an excerpt:
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Justified Censure of a Reckless Pastor
The video above is going viral as I type this. It’s an excerpt of a sermon from a fundamentalist church in North Carolina. The preacher’s name is Charles L. Worley, and it is horrific. Why highlight it here if it is so bad? The video is picking up a good head of steam on the internet, and a lot of people are starting to pay attention to it and to make judgments about Christianity. Countless news organizations are pushing the video with the implication that this is how Christians in general feel about homosexuals (e.g., MSNBC, CNN, HuffPo). Nothing could be further from the truth. This pastor’s words are abominable…
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Southern Baptists, Race, and the Election of Fred Luter
My friend Lawrence Smith has produced a fantastic report for our local Fox affiliate about the upcoming election of Fred Luter as the first African American president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Albert Mohler, Paul Chitwood, T. Vaughn Walker, and Paul Simmons are all interviewed in this piece. I cannot overstate how significant this election will be in the life of our denomination. I expect as the convention approaches, we’ll be seeing lots of news stories like this one. This will be an historic vote, and I can’t wait to see it.
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A Mother’s Story of Aborting a Child with a Disability
I have never read a story like this one before. Sarah Carpenter, a married woman with two children, becomes pregnant with her third child. After finding out that the child had a disability, she and her husband Andrew make the decision to abort the child in order to spare him from having a bad life. The gut-wrenching thing about this story is that everything inside this woman—her conscience, her maternal instinct—is telling her to protect her baby. But her doctor and family members are telling her to spare her child by killing him. In other words, she has a very real sense of what she ought to do, but her…
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Dwight McKissic Debates Gay Marriage on The Laura Ingraham Show
Dwight McKissic played the part of the prophet on the Laura Ingraham show yesterday. He was on the program to discuss same sex marriage with an African American minister who supports gay marriage. McKissic did not mince words but called out the other minister as having allied himself with the kingdom of darkness. I think McKissic was right to do so. We need more prophetic boldness like this from pastors, not less. McKissic’s remarks begin at 2:45. [audio:http://www.trn1.com/uploads/mp3/showclips/051612LISUZANNESOMERS.mp3] Titus 1:7-9 “For the overseer must be… able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.”