Tally Preacher

Jay: Emboldening Christians to share their faith since 2010

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

Me to Carter: “If you could know the way to heaven, would you like to hear it?”

[J.C. Ryle @JCRyle]

Check this out. Interesting development

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

Bryce Crawford Visits FSU! Let’s gooooo :: Grateful students came and listened to Bryce Crawford, a fellow evangelist. Even in the rain they came out and engaged. Asked good questions and the Gospel went out. @ibrycecrawford

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

A Christian home is a home where...

- the children repent to the parents
- the parents repent to the children
- the wife repents to the husband
- the husband repents to the wife

It's not a perfect home.
No such place exists.

It's a home full of repentance, grace, and restoration.

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

It seems that reformed/ Calvinist open air preachers now vastly outnumber any other group, including the pelagian/ shock & awe type, which is a great answer to prayer. It wasn't so 20 years ago. O that the Lord would raise up a thousand more qualified men!

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

Maybe if we preached more we wouldn't be bickering & gossiping on X like school girls 24/7.

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

Anna asks what types of questions are the hardest to answer. These types of questions can be answered theologically but people either don’t want to hear the answers or aren’t yet in a place to really talk through them and so they are not usually satisfied by a quick response.

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

@TexasPreacher Amen brotha

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

He took a Bible, spat in it, threw it away, & came back for another

This guy took a Bible, opened it up, and aggressively spit in it right in front of me. Then he walked over to a trash can and threw it away. He wasn’t done - he came back and tried to get another.

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

I helped Anna see that sharing the Gospel isn’t by our actions but using our words. When someone says this, an easy way to help them is to give them a scenario where they have just a few minutes to tell me how one is saved. She quickly was able to point to Jesus. ❤️

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

A Gospel Convo with Edgar “I have no faith” full uncut on YouTube.

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

Amazing

[Brian Sauvé @Brian_Sauve]

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

*deep breath*

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

This single juror said, “No. I’m not letting this woman get off with a fake insanity plea. She is not insane. No.” They argued with him. They thought he was arrogant. They showed him their credentials and expected him to say yes, but he wouldn’t. He just kept saying no.

This is our culture: crazy people who will not listen to no and who demand that the rest of us affirm their craziness. It is a crisis of accountability.

For years and years, parents have accepted excuses from their children instead of telling them no and holding them accountable for their actions. For years, pastors have failed to practice discipline, especially as it relates to women. If they ever got up the guts to say no and the women screamed, they would immediately back down.

Part of reclaiming a sane culture is telling people no. No, you don’t get to do whatever you want. No, you don’t get to escape the consequences. No, you don’t get your way just because you scream louder. No. We need much more no in our culture.

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

A Gospel Convo with Mako: “I’ve flirted with the idea of looking into it”

“If this was your last day on earth where would you go when you die? Heaven or Hell?” Great convo. Humble guy. Pray for him. 🙏

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

Nicodemus had been a covenant child, had been marked by the covenant sign of his day, had been living a moral life, had been a vigorous student and teacher of God's Word, yet Jesus had the nerve to tell him, ye must be born again!

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

This guy gets it.

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

Our generation is going to churn out a lot of nominal covenant children who were never told you must be born again.

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

A Gospel Convo with Kayla “Purgatory”

Kayla is one of the 100 I asked “If this was your last day on earth where would you go when you die? Heaven or Hell?” and she said Purgatory. We talk about why she and that and the Gospel 🙏

[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.

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

@TexasPreacher Amen brother

[Tally Preacher @Tally_Preacher]

“Heaven I Hope”