The Tulip Driven Life

By: Thomas F. Booher The Reformed church is dying at the feet of Wokeback Mountain, and some prominent ministers are beginning to erect high places on Wokeback Mountain. If you told me ten years ago, when I first became a flame-throwing, cage-stage Calvinist, or even several years later after I matured a bit, that this is where we would be at the end of 2018, I would not have believed you. The Reformed church has been cowed by the culture, especially the homosexual culture and the so-called racial reconciliation movement. The Revoice conference put this on the map for homosexuality, and the MLK 50 conference did the same for racial issues, but make no mistake, these things didn't just pop out of the ground overnight. They have been growing and festering long before I knew anything about the doctrines of grace. Nine years ago I saw it at Covenant College, which is the college of the PCA, when my psychology professor praised his gay friend for marrying a woman a...

I am listing these, not in order of most impacting or important, but chronologically. To say which was most important would be far too difficult, they have all been invaluable to me. 1.) THE Shocking Youth Message (Paul Washer)  I know several Calvinists who became Calvinists directly from this sermon preached by Paul Washer to 5,000 youth back in 2002. If sermons can be considered classics, this one will be when we look back 15 years from now and see young Calvinists teeming across America proclaiming the true gospel and denouncing the Charles Finney, Billy Graham decisionism that has plagued this nation for nearly two centuries. If you come out of the non-Calvinist, Baptist youth group setting like I did, and if you went to Christian school, this message will especially resonate with you. I had never heard preaching like this when I first heard it. I didn't know there was such a thing. It is an hour long, and I listened to it three times, back to back, i...

The battle of the Christian is a battle for joy in God. It is a real battle, it is not easy. The Christian doesn't fight for holiness because it gets him into heaven or will assure him that he will get there in the end, but rather because to not do so would be to, in effect, commit suicide. When God changes your will so that you want Him, you don't want sin anymore. The mind, the heart, thirsts for God, to know Him more, to love Him more. But our old sinful flesh still desires the sin. It craves it. It calls us to indulge in it. Sin is still pleasurable, and that's the damned problem. I think at the heart of every true Christian is the passionate desire to love righteousness and hate sin. Psalm 97:10-12 says: O you who love the LORD, hate evil! He preserves the lives of His saints; He delivers them from the hand of the wicked. Light is sown for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart. Rejoice in the LORD, O you righteous, and give thanks to his holy name! Romans ...