I have marveled this week at the level of distortion in straight news reporting about transgenderism. It all started with a report in The New York Times about the Trump administration’s plans to reverse an Obama-era directive. The distortion starts in the very first sentence of the report: The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law. Let’s just fact-check this one sentence. How many claims are in error here? All of them.
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Are prophecy and tongues still for today?
Yesterday at our church, I took a break from verse-by-verse exposition of 1 Corinthians in order to address an important question about prophecy and tongues. The sermon has three points: What Is the Gift of Prophecy? What Is the Gift of Tongues? Are Prophecy and Tongues for Today? My answer to the last question is “no.” My contention is that prophecy and tongues are revelatory gifts that are foundational to the church but that are no longer operative within the church (Eph. 2:20). You can download the sermon here, subscribe to the podcast, or listen below. –For more reading on this, I recommend two books, both of which I rely…
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Transgender bathroom policy leads to sexual assault of 5-year old girl
? From WORLD magazine: The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced last month it was investigating a parental complaint alleging a Georgia school district’s transgender policy led to the sexual assault of a kindergartener. City Schools of Decatur parent Pascha Thomas claims her daughter, known by the initials N.T. in public documents, was sexually assaulted last year by a male classmate in an Oakhurst Elementary School girls’ restroom. Thomas said her 5-year-old daughter complained of vaginal pain the evening of Nov. 16, 2017. When Thomas asked more, the girl said she was leaving a restroom stall when a little boy in her class came in, pinned…
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How pastors can avoid becoming “humanism-soaked sponges.”
David Bahnsen writes about the aftermath of the Kavanaugh imbroglio in which he opines on the situation that conservatives find themselves in—including those conservatives who happen to be Christians. There is one part of Bahnsen’s piece that jumped out at me when I read it. Bahnsen writes: It would be nice if conservatives of faith had some support in the church, that allegedly spiritual institution of Christian community, doctrine, and practice. If you want to know what the church will look like in 3-5 years, look at what the culture is doing now. If you want to know what the culture looked like 3-5 years ago, look at the church…
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The Enduring Vision of Albert Mohler at Southern Seminary
This week we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Dr. R. Albert Mohler’s tenure as the President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I am so grateful for his leadership at Southern and in the Southern Baptist Convention writ large. I am more grateful than I can tell for his influence in my own life. I would not be doing what I am doing today if it weren’t for him. The faculty and the board of trustees had a banquet to honor the anniversary on Monday night, and the video above was premiered at that event. It was a special evening, and here is one piece of it we can share…
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What the Kavanaugh Conflagration Was Really About
I walked into Senator Mitch McConnell’s office three weeks ago on a Friday. I take my interns to DC every year for a conference, and I always walk over to the leader’s office on Friday morning to pick up House and Senate gallery passes. The Kavanaugh hearings were over (or so everyone thought), and the office was virtually empty except for two staffers, both of whom were from Lexington. So we chit-chatted about Kentucky. As I was about to leave, one of them said giddily, “We will have a confirmation vote for a new Supreme Court justice on Thursday!”
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The Kavanaugh Nomination: “An Absolute Political Acid Bath”
Albert Mohler comments on the controversy surrounding Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. He notes that opponents of the nomination are now saying that Kavanaugh is too “political” to be confirmed. Mohler responds: It is the United States Senate that has the constitutional authority of advice and consent. It is that process that over the last several decades has devolved into an absolute political acid bath. Thus, it’s politically and intellectually dishonest now to argue that partisanship has entered into the equation. It has always been right there under the surface. But, ever since the Bork hearings in the 1980s, it’s no longer under the surface… It’s intellectually…
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Senator Ben Sasse on #MeToo and Kavanaugh Nomination
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska delivered a powerful speech on the floor of the United States Senate yesterday. It is not a partisan diatribe. It is the thoughtful reflection of a statesman who sees the big picture. Senator Sasse acknowledges that we have witnessed some disgraceful moments over the last two weeks in the Senate Judiciary Committee. There have been ugly smears and worse. But Senator Sasse doesn’t get into all that in this speech. He is simply making an important point about what the coming vote on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination means. He rejects the premise that the vote is about whether or not we care about women and abuse:
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What does it mean that “God is the head of Christ”?
Paul’s teaching about head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 stands out as some of the most difficult material in all of Paul’s writings. This is not only because there is disagreement over what the head covering means, but also because commentators debate what the covering even is. Even though there are some obscure points in this passage, I would argue that the main point of the passage is clear enough. That main point is Paul’s teaching about headship. Verse 3 reads as follows: 1 Corinthians 11:3 “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the…
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Azusa trustees reinstate ban on homosexual relationships
The board of trustees at Azusa Pacific University have reinstated a ban on homosexual relationships among students. The trustees released a letter earlier today announcing a return to their original policy. Read it below. This is good news for Azusa. There will be tough days ahead as they still have students who support homosexual relationships and who will be disappointed by this news. Nevertheless, the trustees made the right decision. Let’s hope and pray they stick to it.
