Warhorn Blog Posts: Recent Episodes
Tim Bayly
Audio versions of the blog posts on Warhorn, usually read by the author. If you like these, don't miss the Out of Our Minds Podcast featuring pastors Tim Bayly, Max Curell and Lucas Weeks in weekly conversations about relevant and interesting topics!
Excerpt:
It’s always volatile to discuss sinful motives in condemning sinful actions, but how could a pastor place himself in any greater danger of causing resentment and conflict than speaking of the reasons a mother pays another woman to nurse her child? The pastor of any modern reformed congregation will do well to avoid even the slightest statement concerning mothers’ duties to their infants and young children. And even more so, their duties to nurse and care for their children at home rather than, say, pumping at the office.
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
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Excerpt:
So the point is, start a Christian school; and then, don’t get wrapped around the axle if it goes bust. The doctrine of Original Sin needs to make a comeback in the Reformed church today—especially in our aspirations concerning the education of our children.
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
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Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
This is what I mean by pastors apologizing for God’s Word and truth. To proclaim “God hath said” followed by “I wish God hadn’t said” undercuts God’s authority and Words.
Yet this is the habit of even the most conservative pastors today. They do it unconsciously, I think, but they do it relentlessly. Usually it is not as direct as what my friend said above. More typically the pastor will pepper the times he says God’s “no” in his sermon with hedge phrases like, “that’s what it says” and “we all see it” and “this might make you uncomfortable.” There are endless ways of distancing ourselves from God, leaving Him to be the ogre and us simply the bearer of His nasties.
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
Support Warhorn here.
Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
In the gatherings of our Lord’s flock, God’s truth must always possess the seat of honor. Without it the church dies. But the church has often betrayed the preeminence in worship of the proclamation of God’s truth, and has often trimmed it. Concerning the preeminence of the preaching of God’s Word in the gathering of the church corporately for worship, this has been done most frequently by displacing the preaching of Scripture, subordinating it to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
Support Warhorn here.
Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
Pastor Keller claims “nothing is more subversive and prophetic” than proclaiming Jesus as “the truth.” How subversive and prophetic would it be to proclaim God’s hatred for the bloodshed of innocents? Keep in mind Manhattan leads the nation in this slaughter of our Lord’s little ones:
41% of all New York City pregnancies end in abortion…. New York City’s 2019 abortion rate was 27.2 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44, approximately double the national rate…. The largest portion of New York City abortions were performed in Manhattan (44 percent).
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
Support Warhorn here.
Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
Fr. Bill again:
Starting with egalitarianism, the founders of CBMW sought to distance themselves from egalitarianism only by the absolute minimal amount, a minimal distance which they could (supposedly) defend by reference to a handful of verses in the New Testament.And:
What will “follow” complementarianism?The only valid possibility is a full-throated, unapologetic, comprehensively Biblical patriarchy—both in terms of a full-orbed theology of the sexes and also in terms of viable communities where Biblical patriarchy governs cradle to grave life in those communities.
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
Support Warhorn here.
Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
How do we evaluate the sincerity of our prayers? Is sincerity just a feeling we have while we pray? And does God simply assess that feeling by gazing into our hearts and judging our prayers accordingly? What criteria does He use for gauging whether or not our hearts are in our prayers?
Scripture has a prominent answer to this question, and it’s not just that God looks into our hearts and knows what’s there. One of the most consistent ways the Lord judges the sincerity of our prayers is by seeing whether or not we obey His commandments.
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
Support Warhorn here.
Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
This is my account of one mother in Israel, and no one reading this will wonder at my public confession that I was strengthened in my work and ministry by Sharon Dykstra.
Is it too much to ask that pastors in other conservative reformed and presbyterian denominations will be as faithful as this dear woman? Must she suffer male intimidation and its attendant discouragement while celebrity preachers receive their accolades in response to their sophisticated trimming of God’s truth? Is there any legitimate reason why male church officers should depend upon women from rural communities married to the town barber to call other godless church officers to repentance?
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
Support Warhorn here.
Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
Here’s an excerpt from the fifth volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus, a lengthy history of the Russian Revolution titled The Red Wheel. Note the revolutionaries’ utter disdain for the peasants, and thus the soldiers they were depending upon to keep fighting in their defense during World War I. Then too, remember Stalin’s slaughter of the kulaks, years later.
Those who love and work the land are always a grave threat to intellectuals and revolutionaries...
Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
Support Warhorn here.
Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
The Gospel Blimp continued to resonate, though. It sold and sold and sold. Eventually another publisher even deigned to republish it. Soon it was even being made into a movie, with Shorty Yeaworth, best known today for his cult classic The Blob, directing...
Intro and outro music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.
Support Warhorn here.
Check out New Geneva Academy, a seminary for men aspiring to serve the church as a shepherd of God's flock. New Geneva's training is not a scholarly head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Students don't need to move. Contact us for more information.
Excerpt:
I must confess that my heart was filled with reverence and awe as I walked into that stunning cathedral. It made me want to be a part of whatever goes on there. I wanted to stay for hours and gape at the galaxy of artistic detail that enveloped me as I sat in the beautiful oak pews.
But there was one catch: the entire sanctuary was filled with idols.
Intro and outro music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions. The rest of MSAL's recorded Psalms can be listened to here.
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If you aspire to shepherd God's flock, check out our New Geneva Academy. We feel the weight of responsibility for Christ's sheep and train pastors to bear that responsibility—by faith. New Geneva's training is no head trip, but personal, spiritual, and Biblical. Students don't need to move. Contact us.
When men disrespect civil authority, you can bet a couple things. First, they are often bad husbands and fathers, whether that failure is passivity or being overbearing. Second, they are often bad at honoring and submitting to their elders, also. Third (and almost always), they aren’t nearly as speckless in their relationship to their boss at work as they are to the civil authority or their elders, and this because they love security and money, and they’re fully aware of the ever-present possibility that their boss will fire them.
Here’s Trinity Reformed Church’s (then Church of the Good Shepherd) historical statement of what, at the time, the elders wanted people to know we did not believe.
We need to be firm on husbands being the head of their wives and the head of their household, but there’s room for disagreement on the matter of women elders and pastors.”
There it is. The lie.
The first part of the sentence was how I quelled my conscience over the second half of the sentence. “At least I’m standing on male headship in the home,” I said to myself. “That’s something.”
In time I was called by that yoked parish of two churches in Cambria (R0sedale Presbyterian Church) and Pardeeville, Wisconsin (First Presbyterian Church), where I had sent my PIF. After an ordination examination by John Knox Presbytery, I was ordained and installed to serve as their parish pastor on October 23, 1983. We were happy to be there and loved the congregations and ministry.
Still, let the reader understand that, as we arrived, the majority of the elders comprising the sessions of these two congregations were women.
For quite a while now, conservative reformed pulpits have been quiet about subjects that are controversial in our political context—particularly abortion. Here is a short article written by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian (PCA) in New York City, giving his explanation of this silence. The subject goes much deeper than the politics of abortion. It goes to the very heart of our understanding of the Gospel and the place of the Law in Gospel proclamation and Lord’s Day worship.
Remember, the first of Luther’s 95 Theses was aimed at restoring repentance to the church. To believers. To ourselves.
He warned that if we don’t preach repentance, our people will lose any compunction (tenderness) of conscience, and thus in worse condition than the souls under the wickedness of the Roman Catholic mercantile sacramentalism of the high Middle Ages.
Would I continue pursuing ordination and a call in First Pres’s presbytery and denomination, or leave and seek ordination and a call in the newly founded Presbyterian Church in America which was a work of reform, refusing to ordain women pastors and elders?
This younger generation of sophisticated, terminally degreed Evangelicals running Gordon-Conwell and professing there (as well as running most Evangelical seminaries, reformed or otherwise) had never had the privilege of suffering shame as they pursued their degrees and hood.
It was my dad and father-in-law; it was their earlier generation who had suffered in the battle for the authority and inspiration of Scripture, the virgin birth, the penal substitutionary Atonement, regeneration, and a host of other truths sheep cling to and know are inseparable from faith in the Lord Jesus and His Word.
Then there arrived a generation of princes who knew not fundamentalists; a generation who shamed them for being needlessly confrontational, and ignorant to boot.
The temptation of a newly ordained and installed pastor is to think he himself is God’s message, so he burnishes his appearance, taste, conversation, clothing, educational credentials, and most especially his sermons, to the end that his present and prospective customers will see his desire to please them, which he thinks of as his desire to love them.
But true love is discriminating in the objects it chooses as well as the work it does, and true love never forsakes God’s “no” in service to God’s “yes.”
The list of Evangelical religious leaders who have worked hard to build their constituency through political sectarianism has been a constant within the American church, but not until the past couple years of conservative religious leaders crying “tyranny” over masks, vaccines, and the theft of the 2020 election have I felt duty bound to condemn this abuse of the Gospel ministry, as well as the Name and Bride of Christ.
Certainly there are those who would want to say some of these causes, movements pushed by Evangelical pastor-politicians and religious leaders are unlike the others.
Three books I read just after seminary had a critical impact on my thinking and kept me from succumbing to the Evangelical deus ex machina.1
But first, some explanation of the world I lived in.
Bill Hybels was all the rage back at home, where I grew up just down the road from Hybels’s Barrington. Lots of people with itching ears found he was saying what they wanted a preacher to say and doing at Willow Creek what they wanted a church to do. In fact, he told everyone that was his key to success—finding out what people wanted and doing it.
So the sheep were tuned to his siren song and leaving their smaller, less sophisticated churches. The Hybels machine grew and grew.
We know there are elders across the PCA who endorse Side B and Revoice. From the moment Revoice reared its head, it was obvious this mainstreaming of Side B homosexuality had grown under the encouragement, and enjoyed the protection, of leaders across the denomination. We knew this from the fact that Revoice's Side B promotion wasn't immediately squelched. We knew it from the fact that there were defenders of Revoice who immediately painted any opposition as slanderous, mean-spirited, homophobic, and legalistic.
If you can’t bring yourself to read, by all means listen to books. Don’t waste all your time on podcasts. They’re cheap like cotton candy, especially the punditry ones making observations and complaining about people out there who do it and think it and tell it wrong without addressing you and calling you to repent and believe God’s Word and truth.
The one thing I hope Warhorn is faithful in with all our writing and podcasting and books is helping those who entrust us with their valuable time and attention to grow, becoming more sanctified themselves. We never want those reading or listening to leave us merely thinking about how screwed up everyone else is.
Moses wasn't anyone's hero until after he died. Same with the Apostle Paul. You should doubt yourself and all the others who share with you your certain preference for heroes. Democracy might be the best method of government, but if so, it's certainly not because the people are always right.
It's the masses who make heroes, and right now the masses of Christians are vomiting our great men, doing so on the pages of the New York Times. Take a lesson.
The church has never needed heroes. She just needs humble, smelly shepherds who take it personally when wolves come after their sheep. Not because it's their flock, but because those sheep were bought with the precious blood of God's Own Lamb.
I was at a college practice, once, and suddenly it struck me how much spandex was in the room. Every girl had layers of spandex on under her clothes, trying to artificially squish her body. To put it delicately, they were trying to restrain their bodies in places that their bodies were clearly trying to announce their sex. Many of them had spandex from their knees to their shoulders. That was when it struck me that these weren’t girls anymore; that every woman there was trying hard to make her body do the unnatural. And they all looked a little bit silly.
One Sunday, his pastor was walking up the center aisle following the service and the elder sidled up and cleared his throat before saying, “Pastor, I was wondering how old you thought was too old to spank a child?”
This is a long piece on the future of the Presbyterian Church in America in light of the PCA’s institutional endorsement of Side B self-affirming gays as church officers. What has brought this matter to a head is Covenant Theological Seminary’s alumni holding Side B Revoice conferences each year.
We have now seen the denomination’s final refusals to say “no” or discipline any of Revoice’s principals, including Covenant Theological Seminary, Missouri Presbytery, Memorial Presbyterian Church, Greg Johnson, or the other PCA institutions and men who have created and promoted this evil.
A brother in Trinity Reformed Church, Bloomington, sent an email yesterday, asking:
I recently shared, on Facebook, your article about the bad state of Presbyterianism in Indiana. A friend of mine, whom I believe is a member of (one of the churches that were the subject of your article), objected to several statements in the article about (her church). …I’m interested to hear any responses you may have…
After responding to the questions, I asked the brother for permission to post the exchange, and kindly received it. Here then are the questions about my earlier article, with my responses:
May I put it this way: women should not be fighting other women to provide men and women entertainment. A woman should not be kicking another woman to provide men and women entertainment. A woman should not be punching another woman to provide men and women entertainment. A woman should not appear publicly in a bra and short shorts and proceed to kick and punch another woman dressed in a bra and short shorts to provide men and women entertainment. Even if she gets paid a lot of money to do so. What she is being and doing is a provocation to breaking the Seventh Commandment and thus is immoral. Those who watch her are, by that act, provoked toward violating the Seventh Commandment, and thus committing sin by watching her.
Whatever difficulties historic Biblical Christianity of reformed and presbyterian commitments has had historically in Indiana, we took body blows these past two years in the form of two separate sex scandals which got statewide publicity. The scandals were written up repeatedly in the Indianapolis Star and Bloomington’s Indiana Daily Student. The Star and the IDS both ran multiple investigative pieces demanding action by the presbyteries of jurisdiction, providing and linking to lots of supporting evidence. The Star focussed on an RP church and its Great Lakes Gulf Presbytery while the IDS focussed on a PCA church and its Central Indiana Presbytery.
Tragically, both papers are now widely recognized to have wrestled with the presbyteries and their higher judicatories’ judicial commissions long and hard enough out there in public that both the RP and PCA ended up having to take corrective action, although quite belatedly.
Calvin was not ignorant of the arguments made for paedocommunion by the anabaptists of his time. What’s interesting is how many of those arguments are still used by the paedocommunion party today.
What we must understand about Isaiah and Jesus is that God has called men to a difficult work. Why difficult?
Because their work will yield no fruit. When they preach and give pastoral care, those they preach to and care for will not see, will not hear, will not understand because their hearts have become dull. Because they have closed their eyes. Thus they will not return to the God Who made them, and He will not heal them.
It may surprise some, but I would not have voted for these overtures at General Assembly. Nevertheless, it’s also true their defeat at the presbytery level is bad news for the restoration of Biblical commitments to the denomination.
Why do I say I would not have voted for Overtures 23 and 37 at General Assembly? But before answering…
What Greg Johnson Won’t Tell You About “Double Repentance”
In his new book Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality (Zondervan, 2021), PCA pastor Greg Johnson gives a history of the “ex-gay movement.” He believes it utterly failed and bemoans the fact that many evangelicals today still think homosexuality can be cured. In the conclusion of the book, Johnson gives what he sees as a new path by way of an old path: double repentance.
Quoting from an obscure 1978 book by Richard Lovelace, the idea of “double repentance” is essentially this: homosexuals in the church must repent of homosexual behavior and the rest of the church must repent of homophobia. It is a path that Greg Johnson claims evangelicals were on before their views were hijacked by the false hopes of the “ex-gay movement” and the fearmongering of the culture war that fought against the normalizing of homosexuality in America.
In short, “double repentance” is what the church should be about in the 21st century...
Abortuaries are shutting down. Planned Parenthood’s abortuaries kill about forty percent of the babies while independent abortuaries kill sixty percent. Since 2016, 113 of the independent abortuaries have closed their doors. There were 510 independents in 2012, but only 358 remain.
One might think this is cause to rejoice, but no, it’s not good news. Closed abortuaries do not mean fewer abortions. They only mean fewer surgical abortions.
Abortuaries are shutting down because pharmaceuticals are taking over...
In the middle of this Psalm 78 account of the rebellion of the sons of Israel in the wilderness, a particular rebellion is condemned:
And in their heart they put God to the test By asking food according to their desire. (v. 18)
Dane’s bestseller popped back into my mind: “food according to their desires.”
This is the perpetual sin of the people of God. We are not willing to eat the table God sets for us, but demand to set the table ourselves. We are unwilling to be content with the food God sets before us but demand to choose and be served the food we prefer.
In his book Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund mentions a sermon by Charles Spurgeon opening up Jesus’ promise recorded in Matthew 11:29, “I am meek.” From Spurgeon’s sermon, we read:
Our Saviour, who never sought the praise of man, says of himself, “I am meek,” because he desired to remove the fears of those who trembled to approach him…
But why would anyone listening to Him be trembling to approach Him? This question is clarified by looking at this “gentle and lowly” text’s context, so let’s examine what Jesus did and said earlier in Matthew 11, just before His tender entreaty to sinners.
Here then is the problem with this book and it’s not complicated. Gentle and Lowly teaches the false doctrine that some of God’s attributes are more essentially His nature than others, and those attributes which are most essential are gentleness and lowliness.
To teach this is to lie about God.
Pastor Steve Viars is in an unenviable position. He needs to oppose this law, but he also needs to tow the Biblical Counseling party line as laid out by his own Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC) and Al Mohler several years ago, when they said that reparative therapy was bad.
No wonder “complementarians” of the ilk of Dr. Mounce “can’t think of a specific word that means ‘lord’ that would still “convey respect without violating …love.”
Dr. Mounce and his fellow complementarians have thrown in the towel on the Fatherhood of God and man. They’re little men with little male perquisites they sometimes defend—bud oh so very timorously.
Nothing any complementarian has ever written bears the slightest resemblance to the Apostolic witness of the New Testament.
Must we wait quietly in our offices hoping and praying for visits from new converts before we unburden our consciences and finally ‘fess up to our true convictions about each of these stumbling blocks that lead our sheep to Hell?
When did we decide that, in our preaching of the Gospel, we would no longer trust in the power of the Holy Spirit? Every one of us should be scandalized by Pastor Keller’s betrayal of the grace of the law in Gospel preaching.
This is a large part of the true impact of Tim Keller on the Church of Jesus Christ in our time.
This schlock consuming Evangelicalism and the Reformed church today reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon decades ago picturing a middle-aged pudgy bald man sitting at the bar with a drink, saying to the bartender patiently listening:
I had a happy childhood. My teenage years were happy. I have a happy marriage, happy children, and a happy job. I’m having a happy middle age and my old age will be happy, too. Then I’ll have a happy death and I’ll go to happy heaven.
It’s funny to the pagans subscribing to the New Yorker, but to the Christian it’s terribly tragic—especially the Christian shepherd of God’s sheep.
This gets me thinking about reading so let me put out there four rules for Christian readers.
Rule 1: Don’t waste your time reading living men telling you what dead men said. Read the primary sources.
What are primary sources? Back in 1977...
Three Bayly brothers sat under Prof. Roger Nicole at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. We’d agree he was the high point of our seminary education.
Justice Harry Blackmun was the author of the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade legalizing the slaughter of the unborn. In 1994, Justice Blackmun retired and Dr. Nicole took that occasion to write Blackmun a letter.
Nicole blind-copied me on his letter and I post his letter here as my commentary on the death of Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade who is currently being lauded by all the filthy, bloodthirsty media of the Western world.
A quarter-century ago, my father-in-law sent me a One Year Bible. Inside, he’d inscribed it, “RX: once a day.”
Dad was godly and I wanted to obey him, but most of my life I found my flesh opposing my spirit in this matter of daily Bible reading. I believed in it, but didn’t do it—to my constant regret and shame.
Is there any part of Holy Scripture that presents infancy, womanhood, femininity, and motherhood more beautifully? Such tenderness toward mothers and children is characteristic of the history written by Luke, who was a physician.
What does Scripture say about capital punishment? We find that after the Flood, God commands that capital punishment be used against a murderer. He issues the following command to Noah and, though He didn’t need to, God gave us a very important reason for it:
“Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.” (Genesis 9:6 NASB 1995)
This was not a special command given only to Noah or only to God’s people. And it was not repealed by the New Testament. It is a universal command to all men, in all places, for all time. No society, this side of Heaven, will ever grow or “evolve” beyond the need for this command.
Here we meet a basic principle of Christian sanctification: hearts matter more than appearances, actions, and words.
When entering the ministry back in 1983, I had Dad’s wise counsel to help my beginnings. His counsel ran the path of short and pithy statements, one of which was “a home visiting pastor makes a churchgoing people.”
This came to mind when I was writing yesterday about our graveyard in Rosedale and mentioned visiting our church patriarch, Sam Westra. Taking Dad’s advice, I made it a habit to visit the flock there in rural Wisconsin, and those visits were indispensable to my care for their souls.
Back then pastoral visits were still possible in a way they aren’t as much now. Rosedale was a farm community, so if I stopped in to see the couple, the man of the house was often in the barn or milk parlor and could come in...
What’s the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard?
The word “cemetery” is from the Greek κοιμητήριον (sleeping place) and is simply a place for burying our dead. A graveyard, though, is a kind of cemetery distinguished by being a part of the churchyard surrounding the church-house.
When I took our first call to pastor a yoked parish in Wisconsin, our country parish was Rosedale Presbyterian Church in Cambria, Wisconsin, and Rosedale had a graveyard. It butted up against the back and extended some distance to the east and west of the church-house.
The setting was instructive...