What do we think this man of God would want said? All glory to God!

Ligonier Ministries is joining in the celebration of John Calvin’s 500th birthday (July 10) by offering special deals all week.

Carl Trueman nails it. For all the folks who “can’t stand the heat,” don’t get out of the kitchen. Man up and “get yourself some trousers.”

Expressions of hurt are too often really something else: cowardly attempts by representatives of a cosseted and self-obsessed culture to make themselves uniquely important or, worse still, to bully and cajole somebody they dislike to stop saying things they don’t want to hear or which they find distasteful. My advice to such is akin to that of the counselor in the Bob Newhart sketch: Stop it! If somebody’s writing or speaking hurts you, ask yourself “Why?”, don’t whine about the discomfort. Get a grip, get yourself some trousers, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and please, please, please, don’t hide behind the aesthetic pietisms of the tiresome and clichéd `feel my pain while I process my hurt’ posse. Have the backbone, have the decency – nay, have the honesty – to take your licks and move on, either to addressing the substance of the argument or to some area of endeavour that is, well, perhaps less painful and hurtful for you.

Read the whole thing. But put on some pants first lest you get hurt.

From John Piper:

“Prick Bunyan anywhere and he will bleed Bible.” Let it not be said of the king’s heralds: Prick him and he bleeds movies.

Could it be that the reason so many of our Reformed churches are so weak is that the preachers talk more about movies than preach God’s word?

Welcome to ObamaNation.

From Fox News:

An Idaho community had secured an Air Force flyover for its local festival every year for more than 40 years, organizers say, but this year, the Air Force turned the request down over the festival’s religious focus.

The God and Country Family Festival in Nampa, Idaho, applied to the Pentagon for the flyover but was denied in an e-mail, board member Patti Syme told KTBV. Syme said the e-mail from a defense official informed her the Pentagon prohibited support of special interest groups.

“I called him immediately and just said, you know hey we’ve been doing this for 42 years, we’ve had flyovers, what is the problem?” Syme told KTBV. “And he said, well we have looked up your Web site and everything on your Web site seemed to focus on Christianity, ministry booths. And he said, in fact, ma’am it sounds like it focuses on Christianity. And he said, in fact, it would be great to go to, in fact, if I personally, could come I would, but we can’t endorse such an endeavor, so they couldn’t do the flyover.”

A defense department official told FOX News the Air Force denied the request because it violates a Pentagon policy against supporting any event “that provides a selective benefit to any individual, group, or organization, including any religious or sectarian organization, ideological movement, political campaign or organization, or commercial enterprise, to include a shopping mall or motion picture promotion.”

The Air Force was in charge of the decision-making process, meaning neither the secretary of defense nor President Obama weighed in directly, the official said.

And although the Air Force wouldn’t dispute the festival board’s claim of longtime military participation, the military doesn’t keep records on this type of event, the official told FOX News.

Capt. Tom Wenz from Air Force public affairs told FOX News that past participation was due to the fact that the event was described only as a “patriotic tribute,” and the Air Force wasn’t aware until now of the apparent focus on Christianity, despite the festival’s name.

Here.

Eureka! For those who are struggling to figure out where the Church “went wrong”…and needs to be re-crafted, re-defined, and re-Confessed, Phil Johnson has cleared the air!

Check this out!

TODAY ONLY, Ligonier is offering a black leather Reformation Study Bible for a donation of any amount. This is a call-in offer only and is not available online. To take advantage of this special one-day offer, call 800-435-4343 today from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST. (No substitutions. Color maps not included.)

This GREAT post by Rattlesnake slipped by me back in June. He has another installment coming soon, so why not catch up on the first post: The Arrival of the Evangelical Left: Poster Boys and Liberal Theologians. Here’s a taste:

Blue Like Jazz is The Shack lite. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but it is truly a pitiful apologetic for the Christian faith. What rubs salt in the wound is the fact that Campus Crusade for Christ spent a ton of money placing copies of BLJ in the packets for incoming freshmen on college campuses.

In case you missed the invocation at the 2008 Democratic Convention, it was delivered by Miller, who also actively campaigned for Mr. O’Bama. Some might be asking themselves why a Christian would actively campaign for a man who has a 100% approval rating from Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and every other pro-abortion group on the planet. That’s a good question. Miller’s reply, according to Tooley’s article went like this: “Barack is the only candidate willing to talk about his faith in Jesus.” It must be nice to be on a first name basis with the President. It still remains a mystery to some of us how Mr. O’Bama could sit for twenty years under the preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and not know that the man is an advocate of the kind of “liberation theology” that liberates no one because it is Marxist. Rev. Wright parrots James Cone and Gustavo Gutierrez. It is also a bit of an enigma why the President has not found time to attend worship since his inauguration. He must be too busy talking about his faith. As a matter of fact, those of us on the Right—as well as those on the Left—would be hard pressed to indicate when Mr. O’Bama has made serious reference to his faith since being in office.

[Miller] now attends a “socially conscious church in Seattle.” Ah! There are the magic words: socially conscious. Of course, any student of history and of the Reformation will tell you that the Reformers were very socially conscious and had scriptural reasons why they were that way. The early Puritans built universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a host of others), hospitals, orphanages, as well as providing for the poor and needy. So exactly what kind of social consciousness is Miller talking about? In all likelihood, it’s the Social Gospel nonsense of Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, and other Emergent church movement gurus. Reading Wallis’s and McLaren’s “ethics” books, you have to laugh and wonder if anyone takes the slipshod or non-existent exegesis they pretend to do seriously. Apparently, Miller does.

Oh, and Rattlesnake tackles the idiocy of the attempt to at the last PCA GA to saddle us with deaconesses. This post is a must read!

Even a cursory reading of the Belhar Confession reveals its inadequacy. Richard Mouw gives a reason:

South Africa’s Uniting Reformed Church has been debating same-sex issues, and the black theologian Allan Boesak has spoken strongly in favor of granting full rights in the church to persons who are active in same-sex relationships. Indeed, Boesak is so committed on this issue that when the church’s synod recently voted against the document he had drafted on the subject, he announced that he was resigning from his official positions in the church.

Boesak was also instrumental in drafting the 1986 Belhar Confession, which I welcomed at the time as an important confessional statement about race relationships. He now appeals to that document in support of his advocacy for gay-lesbian ordination. In a recent insightful blog posting, “The Belhar Confession & God’s Final Revelation,” Violet Larson argues that this is a good reason to question the theological adequacy of the Belhar Confession, precisely because of the use to which it is being put these days by proponents of full inclusion on same-sex topics. I agree with her. While that document spoke forthrightly against the injustices of apartheid, it did not explicitly appeal to biblical authority. That it can now be seen by some of its drafters as capable of being extended to the full inclusion of active gays and lesbians in ministry says something about the weaknesses of Belhar—not as an important prophetic declaration in its original context, but as a statement that can stand on its own as a normative confession. (bold added)

And there is its weakness. While I would not be in full agreement with Mouw in many areas, I agree on this subject.

Kevin DeYoung also has a helpful critique.

One day only, in celebration of the 500th birthday of John Calvin:

At Ligonier Ministries, we’re having a week-long celebration of John Calvin’s 500th birthday (July 10) by having special one-day offers all week long.

Today only for a donation of any amount, you can receive a one-year Tabletalk subscription for yourself or someone else as a gift. This is a call-in offer only and is not available online. Available for US addresses only. To take advantage of this special one-day offer, call 800-435-4343 today from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST.

Read or purchase the July 2009 issue of Tabletalk on John Calvin.