A thread on one of the silent plagues destroying churches today: Cowardice.

Cowardice prevents Christians from having hard conversations with others with whom they find fault.

1/6 Cowardice therefore creates gossips—who love to whisper their brother's faults to everyone except their brother.

Cowardice keeps pastors from confronting the most pressing sins in the congregation, knowing the cost will be high to do so.

2/6

Extended thoughts on women, polemics, public teaching, women's ministry, the culture war, and sundry other uncontroversial issues.

Yes, this will be long, and I will break my own rule by making you click the "Show More" button at several points. Look! There it is below, mocking… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1. Women not only can be, but must be students of Scripture. They must be catechized and discipled to be clear and disciplined thinkers, able to refute error and hold fast to the truth once delivered for all the saints. This is obviously true and only fools would say otherwise.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

A thread on ocean mysteries, a new show about the weirdest stuff you've ever heard, and that time I almost got lost at sea off the coast of Italy.

⬇️🧵⬇️ It was a glorious summer in the late 90s, before iPhones, Instagram, and helicopter parenting.

My family was about to move from England to Utah, so we took a lengthy trip around Europe in our trusty minivan before we left.

This trip is one of my greatest childhood memories.

When your husband or your wife sins against you, a perennial temptation will be to reach for the tools of the flesh to fight back:

Sarcasm
Harsh words
Raised voice
Cutting speech

The draw is strong. They seem helpful when you're sinned against. They feel righteous.

They lie. The works of your flesh will never conquer the works of the someone else's flesh.

What leads us to repentance?
What makes us new?
What makes us change?

The kindness of God. His longsuffering. His mercy. His love.

Today's episode of @brighthearthpod—on defending the home—is one of our most practical yet. I believe there is at least one action item in there for every household.

Here are five big ideas from the episode via our expert guest, Joshua Adams: 1. You don't want the first time a security issue happens to be the first time you think about it and respond.

Securing what is worth defending—your wife, kids, livelihood—isn't something to do reactively.

Get ahead.
Plan well.
Strategize.
Practice.

Great question asked multiple times:

How did we move from contemporary, band-led music to rich, four-part singing from a hymnal/psalter?

Three steps:

https://twitter.com/Brian_Sauve/status/1571847913667534849

1. I decided to figure out how to lead this change, even though I couldn't then read music and didn't know where to start.

This is an important first step—just deciding to go for it even if you're not "ready."

People who start figure stuff out. People who don't start never do.

Five reasons to learn parts singing at your church:

1. Singing in parts allows everyone to sing within their vocal range.

Many modern unison arrangements are too high for the average man to sing. You discourage men in your congregation when you ask them to sing like Bon Iver. 2. Singing in parts is beautiful.

Personal musical taste aside, the sound of skillful human voices singing in harmony is difficult to outdo. For example:

Who can listen to that without being moved?

The God we worship today is no pragmatist.

He is not concerned with bare minimums, or with the cold efficiency of what is merely necessary. No, again and again our Father goes above and beyond.

He doesn’t merely care for truth, but for goodness and for beauty. He could have made a world with black and white—yet instead he made ten trillion colors.

He could certainly have made a world with just one flavor in all the food—yet he made a world with butter and sugar and prime rib and heirloom carrots and a few hundred varieties of apples.

12 Theses on Christian Political Theology:

1. The political realm is one ordained by God, and therefore civil rule—though often corrupted by man’s sin into an evil—is a positive good.

2. It is impossible to get a godly civil government out of a godless people. 3. Godly city fathers are to rule with respect to God’s objective standards, not man’s subjective inclinations.

4. Godly city fathers are to be just that: Fathers, not mothers.

5. Because we love our neighbors, we ought to desire Christians—and not pagans—to rule over them.

One of the mistakes that Christians make in their abortion rhetoric is to talk a lot about caring for women with unwanted pregnancies, etc.—but never talk about calling men and women to repent of their rampant sexual promiscuity.

The world God made has hard, sharp edges. It has edges that will cut you when you run into them. Things like reaping and sowing, wisdom and folly, sin and righteousness.

Sinners sow sin and reap death.

Part of our message MUST be the recovery of the kind of spine that preaches the bleakness of sin and death.

The most significant theological shift in my life has been the move from eschatological pessimism to eschatological optimism.

I used to believe that the story of history was a story of decline—the long, slow, and ultimately catastrophic decline of creation into cataclysm. I used to think of the goal of the Church was a return to the power and purity of the early Church—that the people of God from the Apostolic age to now is the story of lesser sons of greater sires.

I believed that we are Gondor at the end of the Third Age, a people in decline.

I am friends and co-belligerents with Christians who are Premillennial, Amillennial, and Postmillennial; 2K and Theonomic; Credobaptist and Paedobaptist—and a bunch of other things.

But if you refuse to fight where the enemy is actually attacking, we will part ways. If you are impossible to disagree with because you can't be bothered to represent your interlocutor's position accurately, we will part ways.

If you are a perpetual theoretician who does nothing—yet hammers everyone else—we will part ways.

Many of the ills plaguing the modern American church can be traced to the revivalism and decisionism of the 19th century.

Here are a few of the problems:

First, an essentially Pelagian view of conversion gave rise to a virulent pragmatism. If you believe (as did Chuck Finney, father of modern revivalism) that man's will was not in bondage to sin, and could therefore be persuaded into conversion by mere human efforts—then you quickly conclude that the right words, the right music, and the right methods can convert.

Quite a few men and women who would likely identify as liberal feminists have recently taken quite the interest in my Twitter account. Welcome! I'm glad you're here.

I have a question I'd like your thoughts on: Many of you feel moral indignation at my frank expression of applied Christian sexual ethics. May I ask you a question about your sexual ethics?

I'm very clear on mine—basically a historic Christian sexual ethic. But I'm wondering: Are you as clear on yours as you think?

A brief 🧵of exhortation to my Christian brothers in light of the absolute tsunami of sexual temptation they face every day.

Brothers, you have no choice but to live in a world where even some of your professed Christian sisters parade their bottoms and breasts in front of you. I know this is the world we have no choice but to live in, because every time I give commonsense exhortation to Christian sisters concerning modesty—things that would have been uncontroversially obvious to most Christians living prior to the 20th century—the response is absurd.

Speaking as a Postmillennialist, I don't recognize my own view or that of my Postmil brothers in Tom's characterization.

It strikes me as akin to the straw-man Dispensationalists build against Amillennialism—that they "don't take the Bible literally."

Here are my issues:

https://twitter.com/TomHicks1689/status/1487999212331708416

Let me put it negatively and then positively.

Negatively, Tom is just not correct when he says that PM hopes "in a primarily natural eschatology, the shalom of the city, this worldly transformation, etc."

The words "primarily" and "natural" are where the issue lies.

I've had several men reach out this week after my post directed at women was shared fairly broadly—most asking for advice on what to do if their wives aren't doing a good job of what I encouraged (respect, warmth, resilience).

Here's the basic outline of what I've said: "Hey brother, thanks for reaching out.

That sounds like a very hard situation. I just prayed for you and your wife. Be strong and rest in the Lord, not your own resources. Loving your wife when it is difficult is the test, not when it is easy.

Ladies, get Proverbs 14:1 down cold: "The wisest of women builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down."

A perennial temptation every woman will face is to try to win by destroying:

Belittling.
Nagging.
Bitterness.
Unforgiveness.

Embrace these and wither away. You can't help your husband become a better man by disrespecting him, manipulating him when he sins rather than forgiving him, or cold-shouldering him.

You will only tear your house down.

Here are three things to do instead that absolutely will build your house:

Don't take the black pill.

It's easy to look at the world around you honestly, see the rampant folly and wickedness, and become a bitter cynic.

Don't.
Do.
It.

All of the great tales are great precisely because they pass through bleakness death. Well, you're in such a tale. So what are you going to do? Complain at the world? Fuss?

Sorry, that's just masturbatory cynicism—maybe it makes you feel better, but it certainly isn't going to bear fruit.

I'm not advocating naivety. Don't paste Thomas Kinkade scenes to the inside of your eyeglasses.

Men, if you are a proud hothead, you need to stay miles away from any kind of ministerial office until you deal with that.

Our session has dealt with this almost comical archetype of the hotheaded theology buff again and again over the last years.

It is so tiresome. These guys will learn a few scraps of theology here and there, immediately convince themselves that they are experts, and then start reviling and dividing and destroying the fellowship of the church wherever they go.

How to recognize them (even in the mirror) and respond:

At the end of this recording of "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence," (one of the greatest hymns of all time in my opinion), I included a short Christmas song—one I originally started writing maybe 5 years ago.

Here are the lyrics:

https://twitter.com/Brian_Sauve/status/1472941666692591626

The King is come
The King is come
Veiled in flesh
Flesh to redeem

The Son of God
And Son of Man
Is bringing sons
of men to God

He tramples darkness
Bright now—the dawn!
And with his coming
Death’s gloaming comes