day no. 17,323: doctrine and desire

Psalm 37:4

Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.

The pharisaical separate doctrine from desire. They put their hope in right living while indulging in wrong loving. They assume that the right answers excuse the wrong desires. They feel free to go on wanting wrong things because they continue to understand the right ones.

Mark 10:9

What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Doctrine and desire go hand in hand. You must love what is true, good, and beautiful and you must do that which is right, good, and helpful. You cannot excuse bad actions by good beliefs and good actions cannot grow on the tree of bad belief.

day no. 17,322: throwing shade at the shade

“The only liberation from accusation is to accuse the spirit of accusation. This is the only thing that can bedevil the devil.” — Douglas Wilson, All the Condemnation

If the condemner does not stand condemned, our condemnation is sure. 

Unless the accuser is accused, the accusations against us have no answer. 

If Christ does not become a curse for us, we are cursed.

The best way to rob the robber is to rob him of his crowbar. 

1 John 1:8-10

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

If we drag our sins out into the light, the accuser loses his power. Accusation grows only in the dark. If we try to pretend we are perfect, we fertilize the weeds of the wicked one, but when we pull them up by the roots in broad daylight, we are free.

Throw shade at the shade and live in the light.

day no. 17,321: when your wife has completed her forty years of testing

Happy 40th Birthday, Paige!!!

I have now known you over half of your life. I've had a front row seat to the last twenty years of your life. In many ways, you are still the same person I met in the Cornerstone Church parking lot over 20  years ago and in many others ways you are a different person. All the things I liked best about you back then are still alive and kicking and a whole bunch of new things I now like about you have come to life since that day. It is crazy to think that I was introduced to you as a teenager, married you in your twenties, raised children with you in your thirties, and are now getting ready to begin launching children out into the world with you in your forties. I've seen you in four separate decades of your life. You are my favorite show. I love all the old episodes and I look forward to the new ones that come out each day. I like being subscribed to you. 

I am proud of you. You get so much done on a daily basis. A normal day for you includes meal prep, laundry, and cleaning up after twelve people. Most days you are also teaching kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, and college. I like knowing that my children are being raised and taught by you. You are so smart and so good at asking good questions and counseling people through things. You are a teacher, a counselor, a friend, a mentor, and a coach to our kids. One of my favorite things is hearing you teach our kids through the walls as I work from our bedroom. I love knowing that they have access to you and that when they have questions and concerns that you are the one they ask. It is like having a living, breathing, God-fearing search engine in my living room that my kids get to use. What a blessing.

I like that my friends know that you are my wife. You truly are a crown and you bring me honor in the way you conduct yourself. You are beautiful and smart and funny. You ask good questions and provide good answers. You make me look good by how good you look in wisdom, stature, and favor with others. Thank you!

You are a good wife and a good mom. You take care of our home and you take care of us. You always have the things we need in stock and you always have something ready to make for us when we need it. You make our home beautiful and functional. We get things done and we get to enjoy the view as we do them. You wash our laundry and fold it. You clean our walls and sanitize our surfaces. You treat our wounds and care for our aches and pains. We have what we need and more because you take care to stock them up for us. You look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of eleven other people.

I will say it again, I am proud of you. You are doing a really good job. I am honored to be your husband and grateful that you are my kids mom. I love you and I like you and I always will.

Happy Birthday, Paige!

To mom!

day no. 17,320: american milk and honey

“Jesus is either the Messiah promised in the Old Testament, or He is not. There is no real way to split the difference on such a question. If the claim is false, then Christians are guilty of perpetuating the most preposterous fraud ever. If the claim is true, then pious Jews studying the Old Testament are like Shakespeare scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of Hamlet, but who have failed to recognize the prince of Denmark. As just mentioned, it is not possible to have Jesus be the Messiah ‘for the Christians' and not the Messiah ‘for the Jews.’ That might seem like a mild form of relativism, but relativism always metastasizes.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Either Christians understand the Old Testament better than the Jews or they don't. If Jesus is the Christ, then they understand the prophets better than the Jews. But if Jesus is not the Christ, then the Christians have utterly confused and possibly even corrupted the teachings of the Old Testament.

“After the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, all they had left were their erroneous traditions. This is why modern Judaism is best considered a heresy of the Old Testament faith, and not a representation of it. To be a Christian is to maintain that the fulfillment of the Old Testament is in the Christ of the New Testament, and not in rabbinic Judaism.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Modern Judaism is a Christian heresy. Since Jesus is the Christ, the entire Bible is Christian, thus making modern Jews heretics and apostates.

“The traditions that Jesus so violently rejected were the traditions of the first half of the Talmudic stream. Indeed, the Talmudic traditions of the elders were the reason why Jerusalem was judged so severely.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Jesus rejected Talmudic Judaism. He confronted it and was killed by it. He rose from the dead to overcome it and came back in 70 AD to put an end to it. Jesus judged Jerusalem for its sins, the primary one being its rejection of Him and secondarily being its rejection of the prophesies concerning Him.

“So according to Christ, the rabbis had been supplanting the teaching of the Word of God for the sake of their traditions, and they had been doing this for centuries [Mark 7:6-13]. To be clear, what Jesus is talking about here is a gradually forming Talmud.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

The perverting of God's Word had been ongoing for sometime, but it did not fill up the measure of its sins until it met Jesus and rejected Him. Not only that, but it plotted against him and jury rigged a case against Him in order to snuff Him out. It did not merely reject Him for their own purposes, but it tried to ensure His wholesale rejection by having Him killed.

“Many Christians, particularly some in the dispensational tradition, regard our differences with the Jews as extreme denominational differences, but still somehow within the pale. But modern Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament. It is something else entirely. It is not the biblical faith with Jesus left out.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Judaism is not just the Old Testament faith marching past Christ until our present day. The Old Testament faith culminated in the coming of Christ. Adam was a Christian. Abraham was a Christian. Moses was a Christian. David was a Christian. They looked forward to His day.  There was no way to hold the Old Testament faith that did not involve looking ahead to the Messiah. You cannot reject the Messiah and say that you are still in the Old Testament faith. To reject Jesus is to admit that you were never part of the Old Testament faith. Whatever you believed and continue to believe at that point, based on your rejection of Him, is apostate, heretical, and antichrist in its inception. Any form of Old Testament religion that continued after the ascension of Christ was antichrist by nature. It was based on a rejection of Him. That was the foundation of the faith. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD removed any attempt to pretend differently. The old system came to an end. The only way to perpetuate something beyond that was to hold to a heretical version of it you already had for such a time as this.

“The New Testament warning, delivered to the Gentiles, is [to] not become like your persecutors. Do not turn into your adversary. If you turn into what you hate, it indicates you only thought you hated their sleek arrogance of power. You didn’t hate it—you envied it.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Christianity hates Judaism the way it hates Islam. Both are Christian heresies and both should be met with fierce opposition. But we do not hate the Jews the way the Jews hated Jesus. We do not hate the Muslims the way they hate us. We hate Allah because we hate evil. We hate Judaism because we hate evil. But we love our enemies. We love them well by opposing them well. And it goes without saying that supporting their efforts is not opposing them well because it is not opposing them at all.

day no. 17,319: apostasy and liberty

"Religious liberty was a development that grew up out of the Protestant West. It is our baby. We invented it. So people shouldn’t talk as though a decided Protestant culture is the enemy of such liberty . . . it is the historic foundation for it. So a Protestant approach to religious liberty will preserve the maximum amount of religious liberty, including for Catholics, while an absolutist and blind embrace of the idol 'religious liberty' will destroy religious liberty. We must have fences; we must have form and freedom together. Christ can provide that, while the Void provides nothing." — Douglas Wilson, Virgin Mary Parades in a Free Republic

We live in a time where people utilize their freedom of speech to deride the thing that gave them that freedom. That is permissible, but it is foolish. They should be allowed to be stupid, but their stupidity should not go unchallenged. You can make an idol out of the second commandment just as you can make one out of the first amendment. There is a way to use a regulation to cause irregularities. There is a way to use freedom to restrict freedom. 

Freedom of conscience and freedom of speech are not secular values. Time and chance acting on matter do not produce "diversity is our strength." Only apostasy can create such a thing. The secular West is merely the apostate West. It is like the prodigal son spending all its inheritance on worthless things. It has money in the bank because of where and when it was born, but it can only waste its inheritance on loose living. It cannot build any capital that way. It will have nothing to pass along, even the freedom of speech and conscience that it has enjoyed will be taken from its children if it does not come to it senses in the midst of the pig slop.

Unless the West returns to Christ, it will starve to death.

John 6:35

And Jesus said unto them, "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”

day no. 17,318: wickedness and weakness

"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.” — G. K. Chesterton

Civilizations undefended lead to barbarism unintended. 

Weakness is worse than wickedness. Good men who are not good at being men are no better than wicked men. Wickedness, for all its faults, never skips leg day. It is always raring to go and it keeps its eye on the prize. Goodness, for all it virtues, sometimes gets soft. It prefers peace to war and so it sometimes forgets that it is in war. Wickedness never forgets.

“Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.” — G.K. Chesterton

Society's are smashed from without because they have gone soft from within. They end up with rosters rounded out by round men who cannot rise up to defend their people. Civilization, if it is not in shape, will be overcome by barbarism.

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” — Thomas Sowell

If civilization cannot or will not use force, it will be conquered by that which will. Barbarism is brutalitarian. It believes that might makes right and if the right have no might to debate with, the battle will soon be over. The good, the true, and the beautiful can make a better case for their way of life being better, but if they cannot meet the force of the bad, the false, and the ugly, their force will overrun civiilization.

In short, a civilization can only be defeated by the inferiority of chaos by forfeiting its strengths. If it adopts a "diversity is our strength" mentality, they deserve the whooping they're about to get.

day no. 17,317: a charitable esteem of our neighbors (exhortation outline)

Christ Church Leavenworth

WLC 144: A Charitable Esteem of Our Neighbors

March 22, 2026

A Charitable Esteem of Our Neighbors

INTRODUCTION

This morning we are continuing our study of Q144 of the WLC which asks, “What are the duties required in the ninth commandment?” The ninth commandment, as you recall, is “You shall not bear false witness” and the duties associated with it, according to the answer provided by the Westminster divines, are as follows: “the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbour, as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things whatsoever; a charitable esteem of our neighbours; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for, and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them; discouraging tale-bearers, flatterers, and slanderers; love and care of our own good name, and defending it when need requireth; keeping of lawful promises; and studying and practicing of whatsoever things are true, honest, lovely, and of good report.”

The phrase on which we will be focusing this morning is, “a charitable esteem of our neighbours” and the text we will be using to frame our discussion is Ephesians 4:29, these are the words of God: “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.”

There are two ways to love our neighbor with our words. One is to not say hurtful things about them or to them. The other is to say encouraging things about them or to them. One of the most discouraging things you can do to your neighbor is to speak ill of them to others in their presence. Conversely, one of the most uplifting things you can do is to praise them to others in their presence.

So, fathers, make sure you are regularly praising your children. Look for things to reward with kind words. Do not allow yourself to become the stereotype the Freudians say that you are. God the Father is not cold or distant, and you should not be either. This is, however, a besetting sin of fathers, as the Bible points out. In Ephesians 6:4, it says this: "Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord,” and in Colossians 3:21 it says this: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.” In both cases, you end up with an angry, discouraged child. Father hunger is the result of too many critical words and not enough encouragement. So, look for ways to charitably esteem your kids. Do not raise them in doubt. Believe the best about them. Raise them in faith by showing them how to have some. Do not camp on the most difficult parts of their character. If you are tempted to think of your children in terms of their cost, do better PR work for them in your own soul. Do not let your heart run a smear campaign on them. Block those messages.

We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. And whose sins do we know better than our own? Yet we still love ourselves and that is because love covers a multitude of sins. Let us then do for others what we’re already doing for ourselves. We should think as well of our neighbors as we can. Granted, some of them make this harder for us than others, but we aren’t talking about their duty to be as lovable and respectable as they can this morning, we are talking about your duty to give them as much love and respect as you can.

We should do our best to make a case for our neighbor because building a case against them in our hearts is a sin. In fact, it is satanic. Satan is “the accuser of the brothers” according to Revelation 12:10. He does not carry water for anyone. He spends his time looking for things to be upset about, and as a result, he is always upset. And if we are not careful, we can fall into those same satanic trap. When we envy others, we are slow to see their merits. Why did they get that? They don’t deserve it. When we are bitter towards others, we are eager to entertain accusations about them. Ugh, that sounds like something he would do. We often convict our neighbors of wrongdoing in the courtrooms of our hearts without giving them a fair trial. We accept speculation as testimony, we allow hearsay to be submitted into evidence, and we don’t allow them to defend themselves. We don’t make a case for them. But that is not how God deals with us. 

Psalm 103:13-14: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” Remember your neighbor’s frame. He gets scared, just like you. He gets stressed out, just like you. He fails to plan sometimes, just like you. He says things he shouldn’t, just like you. He forgets to say things he should, just like you. He even forgets to use his blinker sometimes, just like you have. If you need any help being charitable with your neighbor, look no further than the charitable esteem you give to the neighbor you know the best: the one that looks back at you in the mirror each morning. And then remember how much charity our Father in Heaven extends to that guy. Who are we that God is mindful of us? How have we captured His attention and even gained His affection? He extends a charitable esteem to us. That’s how. He loves the unlovely. He is kind to the unkind. He remembers that we are dust, but He doesn’t treat us like dirt. He knows that we are beneath Him, and so He bends down to be with us. And that is how we must treat our neighbors. Remember their frame and then frame them in the best light possible.

CALL TO CONFESSION

Well, since we are better at looking to our own interests than we are at looking to the interests of others and since we are better at giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt than we are at giving that benefit to others, we are reminded of our need to regularly confess our sins, whether they be related to this duty or to others. So, if you are able, please kneel with me and confess your sins, first privately, and then corporately using the prayer found in your bulletin.

CORPORATE CONFESSION

Almighty and merciful Father, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We justly deserve Your present and eternal punishment. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us. Renew us and lead us by Your Holy Spirit so that we may delight in Your will and walk in Your ways to the glory of Your holy name. Amen.

DECLARATION OF PARDON

Arise and hear the Good News! The assurance of pardon today comes from Galatians 2:16 “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” We are not loved because we were lovely, we are becoming more and more lovely because God has loved us. He has not treated us as our sins have deserved. He has been charitable in His esteem for us. While we were yet sinners, He died for us and while we were still His enemies, He looked for ways to be friendly. O, what a friend we have in Jesus, for in Him our sins are forgiven… THANKS BE TO GOD!

Now let us ascend to the presence of God in all worship and praise.