John A. Klein

Former Reformed Baptist pastor, now part time sugar bush worker joyfully persevering. Husband of Chrissy and grandfather. Racing fan and slot car racing nut!

[John A. Klein @JohnAKlein22]

@IRA_sprints @JackReitz5 How about the recently reopened Haas Speedway in Jim Falls, Wisconsin! Great track! Great owners!

[John A. Klein @JohnAKlein22]

@thisisfoster @thespearing I am a “boomer”. I pastored for almost 20 years—church planting included. I experienced the complete opposite. Boomers could hammer through issues with no insinuations based on tone. Younger men and women, both, were soft yet critical—a most vexing position!

[Tom Ascol @tomascol @tomascol]

Good words.

[John A. Klein @JohnAKlein22]

@JamesGurne65348 Amazing craftsmanship!!!!!

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

One of the more persistent but easily debunked myths about the Puritans is that they were a bunch of dour, stiff, anti-pleasure prudes, suspicious of anything that might make a man smile.

No, no, friends. That caricature comes from Mencken's famed slander, that Puritanism was "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

This tells you more about Mencken than it does the Puritans. Read the men themselves, and/or even the scholarship, and you find the exact opposite.

Take sex, since that is usually where the charge of Puritan prudishness begins. I saw someone point out on X that William Gouge in Of Domesticall Duties (1622) commends the 3 F's of the marriage bed, frequent, fervent, and freely. That means exactly what you'd think it means. (Gouge's own phrasing is readily, willingly, and cheerfully.)

Scholar Edmund Morgan worked through the old New England records & found cases that corroborate this. The First Church of Boston excommunicated James Mattock for refusing the marriage bed to his wife for two years. Puritan ministers warned husbands and wives against depriving one another of the comfort and relief God intended the marriage bed to provide.

Leland Ryken spent an entire book, Worldly Saints, trying to correct this nonsensical stereotype. On marriage and sex especially he points out that the Puritan view was not merely that marital intimacy was permissible. It was "meant to be exuberant."

Same thing with alcohol. The Puritans weren't prohibitionists. They drank. The Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic with thousands of gallons aboard. Wine and other drink appeared at meals, funerals, ordinations, and other occasions. Increase Mather preached an entire sermon against drunkenness, which is needful, and still called drink a good creature of God. The wine is from God; the drunkard is from the devil.

Even C.S. Lewis described the sixteenth-century Puritans as "young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date."

My point in all this is that the Puritans weren't suspicious of God's creational gifts. They weren't the gray-faced killjoys we've been taught to imagine. They had an enormous doctrine of creation. God made the world. God made food. God made wine. God made marriage. God made the marriage bed. God made laughter and friendship and feasting and children and fields and homes and all the ordinary pleasures of creaturely life.

The answer to Rome's ascetic tendencies was to receive the creature and creation as being from the good hand of God, and to receive it with thanksgiving, while at the same time refusing to make an idol of it.

The Puritan was at war with disordered pleasure, yes, but never pleasure itself. Wine is good. Drunkenness is wicked. The marriage bed is good. Fornication is wicked. Food is good. Gluttony is wicked. Rest is good. Sloth is wicked. Money is useful. Covetousness is wicked. The creature is good. Worshiping and abusing the creature is wicked.

And frankly, isn't this far healthier than our present arrangement, where we congratulate ourselves for having escaped "Puritanism" while being enslaved to pornography, alcohol, food, entertainment, screens, sloth, and every appetite that promises five minutes of pleasure, which is a tendency both inside the church and outside of it.

So when someone tells you the Puritans were stiff, prudish, miserable people who couldn't stand the thought of anybody enjoying himself, you can generally assume one thing:

He's read Nathaniel Hawthorne. He has read some Mencken. Perhaps he may have read somebody spewing about the Puritans on social media. But he hasn't read the Puritans, and he hasn't read the scholarship on the Puritans.

So be a friend and patiently help him see that there's much more here than what he's been told, and even more thrillingly, there's a whole universe of 17th century treasure that he can now set forth to mine.

[John A. Klein @JohnAKlein22]

@AaronLikens Alex Palou even does precision donuts!!!

[David Land™❌ @DLand91]

Love this place!

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

We are being destroyed by agreeable men.

It's easy to like an agreeable man, at least at first. He presents himself as polite, reasonable, and warm. He avoids friction. He avoids awkward or uncomfortable topics. He smiles and nods wherever he can. A conversation with him at a backyard BBQ or in the church foyer can make for a pleasant time.

And those pleasant times can keep on rolling, unless you disturb what the agreeable man mistakes for peace. That is something he will not tolerate. In many cases, he'll simply avoid anything disagreeable. He would truly rather be in the room with a repugnant man who plays along with his desire for agreeableness than with a virtuous man who won't. Tolerance and avoidance are the twin pillars of his modus operandi. False peace is his idol.

But when the agreeable man's idol is touched, and he is forced to confront friction he can no longer avoid, the façade quickly evaporates. He lashes out. What follows is usually an irrational, emotional warpath. And because violating the shallow rules of decorum is, in his mind, the greatest sin, he must lie. He must misrepresent. He must spin the story lest the bystanders see him for what he really is. His goal is to preserve the appearance of reasonableness while shutting down and driving away those with reasonable objections that inevitably create discomfort.

He is an enemy of the reformer, who must press the issue and do so forthrightly. He is a friend of the smiling subversive who quietly corrodes institutions under the camouflage of false peace.

He is a destroyer.

[Keith Foskey @YourCalvinist]

If you're a pastor who preaches God's Word without compromise and speaks the truth even when it's hard, you'll eventually be the villain in someone's story.

You have to be ok with that.

[John A. Klein @JohnAKlein22]

@sevier_nick Congratulations!!! Well done—to the glory of God! And…thank you for your much needed posts!!!!!

[Nick Sevier @sevier_nick]

Why in the world would Christians want to borrow anything from completely discredited and ineffective fields like secular psychology and psychiatry?!

Makes no sense.

[Owen Strachan @ostrachan]

Even as we grieve, we must be clear.

The experience of homosexual desire is sinful.

This is not unloving to say.

This is loving to say.

There is nothing about homosexuality that is righteous.

There is no such thing as a "gay Christian."

Love requires us to teach the truth.

[Melissa the Hopeful🏠Homemaker @BiblicalBeauty]

Reposting because Rosaria’s comments are relevant to the troubling news out of Immanuel Church. No one should be gleeful about Sam Alberry’s sin. It is a tragedy, and he needs prayer.

Churches that have misled others on the “same-sex attracted” issue need to go back to the clear teaching of God’s Word. The desire itself is a sin that must be put to death.

As Rosaria says here, “Worldviews have consequences. Bad ones have casualties…

The reason there should be no such thing as a same-sex attracted pastor is this: Homosexuality is found in the flesh. It’s forbidden in the Law. It’s overcome by the Savior.”

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

Most Reformed today preaching is just lecturing, not preaching. I blame it on the idolatry of the redemptive historical method. Untethered from experimental application, it leaves both saint & sinner untouched. It doesn't apply, doesn't press the conscience, doesn't woo, doesn't cut & heal, doesn’t search the heart. It's just data dumping. It's a seminary lecture in a pulpit. It comes across as either a lengthy theological paper better suited for a PhD dissertation, or vague and mushy platitudes. The result is dead orthodoxy, puffed up heads, & antinomian tendencies. That's why experimental preaching is needed more than ever in our day of cold, cozy, formal religiosity. And before you think this is a shot at everyone else, I'm talking about my own pulpit ministry as well. Lord, help us to preach a felt Christ!

[Nick Sevier @sevier_nick]

God does not intend to relieve all pain and remove all suffering in this life.

But, here’s the good news.

When your hope is in Christ, pain and suffering cannot rob you of peace, power, joy, and contentment.

Indeed, God makes your hardship a servant of your ultimate good.

“I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world (John 16:33).

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:9-10).

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28).

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

A plumber with his Bible is smarter than 20 Ivy League PhD's, any day.

[John A. Klein @JohnAKlein22]

@joethorn Providence Baptist Church in Eau Claire Wisconsin. My wife and I live in Chippewa Falls, but we fellowship at Providence. Chippewa is in desperate need of a sound church! If they desire to connect, tell them to look for an older bald guy with a kind long beard 😊

[John A. Klein @JohnAKlein22]

@FordRacing So now…why not partner with Indy Car to provide engines? #Indycar

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

The trouble today is that we have too many Reformed folks who don't believe in the Holy Ghost!

[Joe Rigney @joe_rigney]

Pastor @jonathanparnell writes about the invasion of his church a month ago.

“They were here to incite violence. The spiritual dimension of it all came into focus. A malevolent darkness was behind this—the same darkness behind the murder of pre-born children, and the mutilation of children’s bodies, and the manipulation of children’s minds. Those were all evils our children had escaped, so now the weapon was terror.”