Christa Stamper

"There are no maverick molecules in the universe," says Ben Sasse. cbsn.ws/4e5LH9T

It's a Herman Bavinck Library GIVEAWAY! The winner will receive the four volumes of Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics (@BakerAcademic), The Wonderful Works of God, and The Certainty of Faith (@westsempress). A $300+ addition to your library! How to enter: 1. Follow our account (@ReformedBC) 2. Like AND share this post 3. Tag a friend below 4. Subscribe to our newsletter: reformedcounseling.org/subscribe-to-n… The winner will be announced next Friday (5/1)! One winner will be chosen across all social media platforms. Only shipping to the continental US. #biblicalcounseling #biblicalcounselingtraining #biblicalcounselingministry #reformedtheology #HermanBavinck

@ReformedBC @gospelcareco @BakerAcademic @westsempress @jcvarner

Our upcoming teaching series on domestic abuse is now available for preorder at 10% off! For churches, that's $200 off. It’s our prayer that this teaching series equips local churches to see rightly, name precisely, and act wisely in situations of domestic abuse. Want to preview the series first? Access the first full lesson video for free here: #free-video" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">ccef.org/teaching-serie…

Ben Sasse: “...and all of that dross will be gone. We are going to be around the table with our Lord, and he's going to be the center, and we're going to be sinless, and we're not going to be trying to put ourselves on the throne, because there'll be so much more joy for us in him being on the throne. And us, who would have been willing to be servants or slaves at that feast, we're going to be sons and daughters.” @BenSasse

Former Executive Editor of Modern Reformation @BenSasse sits down with his close friend @MichaelHorton_ to discuss his cancer diagnosis, the early years at Sola, and the hope of the gospel. youtu.be/eUSRsXIqU2M

A standing ovation —in Europe!— for @SecRubio. Deserved. Very deserved. It is a wonderful speech, summoning our 250th birthday as the spine on which it is built. Listen to all 18 minutes and send to your families and friends. Every American can celebrate this.

Jesus is the center of the story. He was prefigured by types and shadows but he was literally God and man, he literally obeyed in our place, he literally died on a literal cross, he was literally raised on the third day. He literally ascended on the third day. He's literally at the right hand of the Father and he's literally, bodily. returning to judge the living and the dead. Figures? Matthew literally called Jesus the Israel who went to Egypt and came back up. Hebrews literally says that he died as our Melchizedekian high priest once for all, ending the Levitical system. John the Baptist literally called him the Lamb of God. Reformed covenant theology is satisfied with Christ and his once for all death. We've nothing for which to apologize.

Reminder that after Charlie was viciously murdered, conservatives also formed large groups across the country… to pray

Picture of one rugged individualist standing against the warmth of collectivism on June 5, 1989.

How does he not know that “collectivism” killed more people than any idea in human history? The Soviets murdered millions of “kulaks” (small land owning farmers) through starvation in 1932/33 to eradicate opposition to collectivism. Mao’s 1958 Great Leap Forward killed up to 60 million people for the same reason: to eliminate small landowners and implement collectivism. The Black Book on Communism (Harvard University Press, 1997) details the murder of ~100 million people in the last century by regimes pursuing “the warmth of collectivism.” I can only assume that he is a product of an education system that does not teach history, and he has no idea that “collectivism” is a concept as discredited and terrible as fascism.

There was a line from Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural address yesterday that took my breath away. He said he intended to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least one hundred million people in the last century. Socialist and Communist forms of government around the world today—Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, etc.—are disastrous. Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy, which people like Mayor Mamdani caricature as “rugged individualism.” In fact, it is the economic system that is based upon the rights, freedom, and dignity of the human person. For God’s sake, spare me the “warmth of collectivism.”

When God planted the trees in Eden, he was making sure there would be wood for both a manger and a cross. When God poured out oceans and rivers, he was preparing for our baptism into Christ in the waters of the Jordan. When he sowed the fields with wheat, he was readying the world for bread that would clothe Christ’s body in the meal of meals. When he made the heavenly lights, he ensured there’d be a star to guide wise men from the East, and a sun to darken when fools affixed his Son to a tree. And when the Lord made Adam and Eve in his own image, he was prophetically winking at his Incarnation, when he would make our nature his own everlastingly. From the beginning of the world, God so loved the world that he prepared it for the day when he would remake it—remake us!—in his Son. We might even say the week of creation didn’t really end until the Creator stepped out of the tomb after his Sabbath rest. ____ We read Genesis 1-3 today in Bible in One Year. Sign up and join us at 1517.org/oneyear-signup

This year to come: - Keep a weekly sabbath - Stay within your limits - Don’t try to control what only God can. - Pursue gospel community. - Let your Bible be your daily guide. - Count your blessings not your complaints. - Rest in God’s grace, - Celebrate Jesus everyday.

Why were child and adult care centers in Minnesota maxing out donations to a Somali candidate in Washington?

🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for this to be happening, the fraud must be stopped.

Friends- This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die. Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do. I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all. Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints. There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come. Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son. A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears. Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet. Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective: “When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.” I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape. But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9). With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices, Ben — and the Sasses

Whatever controls my heart will then control my behavior. A temporary solution might be to alter my words and my behavior, but permanent change will only travel through the pathway of the heart.

If I were granted three wishes, one of them would not be to know what the future holds. You can keep your crystal balls. Most of us have enough trouble wrestling with certain evil days from our past. For some of us, that evil day was when we sat in divorce court. For others, that evil day was when we drove away from a cemetery with the passenger seat empty of the love of our lives. For others, that day was actually a year or decade of abuse, addiction, prison, or the slow strangle of despair. I don’t know your story, but I bet you have one. Broken relationships, broken hearts, broken promises—they all melt into the ink of tears with which we write our stories. As I read back over those darkest years of my life, I'm reminded of the Portuguese proverb that says God writes straight with crooked lines. I stumbled down labyrinthine paths, crawled in and out of cavernous pits, got lost a million times, and somehow ended up a little farther down the road to healing. Yet in all those crooked lines I see the hand of God writing straight. I'm not saying that I finally see how God's plan unfolded in my life. I don't. I’ll never understand why some things happened. All I know is that they did. They ultimately did because I’m a deeply flawed sinner, living shoulder-to-shoulder with others who are screw ups like me, and we’re all trying to limp through life in a world where stupid and senseless things happen with predictable regularity. There are crooked lines everywhere we look. What I can tell you is that the hands that write straight with these crooked lines have everlasting scars that tell of crucified love. I can tell you that down every labyrinthine path, in every cavernous pit, wherever we’re lost, there’s a God of compassion hot on our heels. And he’s the God willing to bleed to get us back. That blood of that God, our Lord Jesus, painted the ground beneath his cross with crooked lines that write straight these words: All for you.