Robert Truelove

"To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."

Bible

Tradents of truth or heresy?

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When the church neglects rigorous theology, a void is created that inevitably gets filled by an unbiblical theology and that without challenge.

We ought to be tradents of the truth and it is our duty to not only grow in the wisdom and knowledge of Christ as we receive and test (by the Scriptures) those things that have gone before, but to pass it along to future generations. As things currently stand, evangelicals have little knowledge of what has come before, little knowledge of Scripture, and no vision for tomorrow. We have created a doctrinal void that is now being filled by the most grievous of errors.

The legacy of this generation is heresy and apostasy.

We are wholly dependent upon the Holy Spirit to bring us to repentance and reformation.

Put not your trust in princes,
nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth;
in that very day his thoughts perish.

—Psalm 146:3-4

Should we teach our children to pray in Christ?

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Baptists need not resort to the covenantal argument of paedobaptists for light in regards to teaching our children to pray but nor should we react against it declaring it inappropriate to teach them to pray. The later is a more grievous error than ever was paedobaptism.
 
While we may not confess with our Presbyterian brethren that our children are members of the Covenant of Grace, we should confess them to be children of great privilege and blessing as they have been born into a home wherein Christ is nigh. Furthermore, Christian parents are enjoined in the word of God with obligations in regards to the rearing our children.
 
We are to raise our children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). Teaching them to pray to God our Father through Christ the Son is an important part of that nurture.
 
That the efficacy of prayers are dependent upon Christ’s mediation is not mutually exclusive to this duty. Rather, as we teach children to pray in Christ to the Father, we bear upon their consciences by the power of the Holy Spirit with all the more efficacy the reality of and the need for Christ.
 
The one raised in prayer from an early age has the realities of the gospel brought ever closer to him by this contemplation as he matures to the fact that these prayers are only as good as their object and, to some degree, his hold upon it. I say “to some degree” regarding the later because while efficacious prayer requires faith, none pray with perfect faith before glory.
 
It is hyper-Calvinism that would separate such means of the gospel in the Christian home from the means of grace.

The Pollution of Pride

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The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.

—Psalm 10:4

Pride is the great polluter of truth. While men may possess the knowledge of the truth, pride makes of it a canker. The man who thinks highly of himself does not fear God.

The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.”

—Psalm 8:13

Pride leaves a man without a defense for the truth. It should be an embarrassment to the arrogant, but being blinded by self-absorption it is left to the onlooker to be embarrassed on his behalf. Eventually pride will bring one low but the prideful will not acknowledge it.



When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom.”

—Psalm 11:2

Perhaps in mercy you would admonish the arrogant man? Without divine grace what will be his response other than to harden his neck and double-down in pride.

A reproof entereth more into a wise man than an hundred stripes into a fool.

—Psalm 17:10

Of all graces, humility is the greatest. Without it we cannot love, will not show mercy, nor turn the object of our faith away from ourselves and onto God. May God grant us grace to always be putting pride to death for we are nothing until we think nothing of ourselves.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. “

—John 15:5

Impartiality is a Biblical corollary to justice. “Class struggle” is not.

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For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: he doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

—Deuteronomy 10:17-19

Justice for the downtrodden means not despising the weak and not favoring the powerful nor bribes at the bar of justice (court of law).

Also note, God gives the foreigner food and clothing. That is not a reference to the “redistribution of wealth”. It is not something the state should do. It is what God does. The point is that since God loves the foreigner as is demonstrated by the fact that HE feeds and clothes him, we should love him as well.

To say this means the state should take by force from some to feed and cloth the downtrodden is to put the state in the place of God. On the other hand, since God is generous to the downtrodden, the Christian should be as well, but as an act of lovingkindness—not compulsion. Mercy is not justice.

Ideological “class struggle” is the antithesis of Biblical justice.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy

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Psalm 126:5 in the glory of the inspired writ speaks from the context of God’s judgement in the captivity of the people. We do indeed “sow in tears” at times but this Psalm causes me to consider what sort of tears I sow when I weep?

Do I weep tears of bitterness and envy or do I weep over my sin? Do I weep tears of covetousness over that which I have lost in the world or do I weep tears of woe over the loss of the sensible presence of Christ in my life?

Not all tears are sown to produce joy in the end. There are many tears shed in this world that do not end in the joys of Christ. Judas was greatly grieved in the end, yet our Lord said, “it had been good for that man if he had not been born.” (Matthew 26:24)

May we weep gospel tears, that we may reap gospel joy.