Announcement: I am a Sunday School Teacher Now!!!

Me @ RTS (Mclean, VA) on April 26, 2014 for an open house.

A couple of weeks ago my pastor asked me if I would be willing to teach the high schoolers and middle schoolers at our church in Sunday School. I gladly said I would consider it, and ultimately accepted the offer.

So I am pleased to announce I will be teaching The Westminster Confession of Faith and using "Confessing the Faith: A Reader's Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith"  (2014) by Chad Van Dixhoorn of Reformed Theological Seminary starting on Sunday, September 19, 2021.

The topic was the pastor's choosing.

My copy I just received last Sunday!

What's interesting is that the year this book was published I visited, but ultimately did not apply to, Reformed Theological Seminary. I can't recall if I met the author. I did, however, meet some of his colleagues mentioned in the book, such as Peter Lee of RTS and Scott Redd.

I will be publishing my weekly Sunday School Notes here at The Goins Report. 

These will be references for my students but also general readers who want to follow along with both the Confession of Faith book by Dixhoorn and the actual Confession of Faith text itself.

While this series will not initially be recorded, it may be recorded in the future, or the next go around.

However, I plan to have a couple of video series (potentially on Youtube or Udemy at no cost, initially; or some free and some at low-cost) potentially on the following topics:

• The Evidence of Christianity and the Evidence of Prophecy
• Loving the Old Testament
• Biblical Theology
• Sermon on the Mount 

P.S. I am a huge, huge fan of Biblical Theology as my growing collection of BT books attests to. But my first introduction wasn't an explicitly BT book per se. It was this one. The introduction and the first chapter are gold. And then some people at my church also introduced me to the now-defunct Northwest Theology Seminary which has a BT Primer on their website. 

John Murray on God's Loving Nature

"It is necessary to underline this concept of sovereign love. Truly God is love. Love is not something adventitious; it is not something that God may choose to be or not be. He is love, and that necessarily, inherently, and eternally. As God is spirit, as he is light, so he is love.

Yet it belongs to the very essence of electing love to recognize that it is not inherently necessary to that love which God necessarily and enternally is that he should set such love as issues in redemption and adoption upon utterly undesirable and hell-deserving objects. 

It was of the free and sovereign good pleasure of his will, a good pleasure that emanated from the depths of his own goodness, that he chose a people to be heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. The reason resides wholly in himself and proceedes from determinations that are peculiarly his as the "I am that I am." The atonement does not win or constrain the love of God.

The love of God constrains to the atonement as the means of accomplishing love's determinate purpose."

~John Murray, "Redemption, Accomplished and Applied"

Douglas Wilson on the Five Smooth Stones of Theocratic Libertarianism

Reformed writer Douglas Wilson proposes five things that must be done in order to reform the government and, by extension, American society. 

He stresses that liberty is a Christian value. Therefore, he wants liberty for secularists not because secularism is a good thing in itself; it isn't, even if some things within secularism are biblical and reflect the heart of the creator. I have always thought that if secularism is true, then it should be able to withstand free debate (no coercion). Truth wins out, right?

Read Wilson's The Five Smooth Stones of Theocratic Libertarianism

Note that the first stone is not the same as the fourth. Formally professing that Jesus Christ is Lord (the first stone) is not the same as fourth (allowing preachers to be free to preach the gospel).  But a formal declaring is necessary, he argues, and I agree.

Also, professing mere areas of agreement is not the same as establishing a national church. He wants none of the latter.

Here are some notable quotables:

If you protest that this would kill the great secular experiment that is America, I would reply that the great secular experiment that is America appears to have already gone out behind the barn and shot itself.

….we must have countless preachers of the gospel, faithfully declaring the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. The role of the government here is to stay out of the way, allowing such preachers free access to the people, and thereby encouraging them to have at it. 

There is a straight line blessing that runs from free grace to free men, and from free men to free markets.

Using their own money, voluntarily donated, the secularists and atheists may build their own schools, write poems and novels, produce plays and movies, build cathedrals, compose concertos, and so on.

The Most Calvinistic Spoken Word Poem (feat. NIQ)

NIQ spits the most Calvinistic spoken word poem I have ever heard. I wonder if she even knows that she delivered such as thing.



Did you just say that even each time the opposition scores it's a part of a fixed game? ~NIQ


WOOOWWWWW!!! ~The crowd's reaction.


Does the crowd know?



Her poem "Not Even Sin" starts around 3:37 after the male poet.

What would a biblical government look like?

Via Darash Press:

Therefore, in seeking a Christian reconstruction of the institution of civil government, it is imperative that we make our standard the only inspired, infallible model on godly civil government that we have: the Hebrew Republic established by God through Moses. 

Note that we use the term “model.” This is because the Hebrew Republic had elements unique to its own time and place in redemptive history. Hence, it is an error to seek to reduplicate today, in all of its particulars, that Republic (e.g., hereditary kingship, a central tribunal presided over by Levitical priests, cities of refuge, some of the laws of inheritance and warfare, a division of the nation into 11 tribal units, or the exact jurisdictional unit of the city and its gates, etc.). 

The Hebrew Republic does not provide us with a detailed blueprint for all the specifics of civil government or civil law, but it does give us a sufficiently clear model for framing a government and laws that are according to the will of God. We must remember that every detail of the Hebrew Republic was based on the unchanging righteous standard of God’s moral law. Our interest is in discovering, through proper historical-grammatical exegesis, the moral law that informs each particular, and then applying that law to the nations of the New Testament dispensation.

 The Biblical Model For Civil Government, William Einwechter

Video: Dr. Carl Trueman on John Owen (Westminster Video Library)

Westminster Theological Seminary's Dr. Carl Trueman discusses John Owen. I recently read Owen "The Mortification of Sin" and it has been really helpful to me in killing sin. God provides tons of arrows in our quiver to combat sin, the flesh.

You can buy the book here from Banner of Truth.

Here is my favorite excerpt from the Banner of Truth edition:

"Let a man seek as he will for healing and peace, let him go to the true Physician, let him seek in the right way and let him quiet his heart in the promises of the covenant. Yet when peace is spoken, if it is not attended with hatred and abhorrence of the sin which caused the wound and was the reason for all the trouble, then this is not God's peace, but a peace of our own making.

It is but a covering over the wound, while the infection underneath continues to fester, corrupt and corrode, until it breaks out again with greater foulness, vexation and danger. Let not the poor souls that walk in this path ever think that they will have true and solid peace. They are more concerned with the trouble of sin than the pollution and uncleanness that accompanies it. They call to the Lord Jesus Christ for mercy, but they still keep the sweet morsel of sin under their tongue!" John Owen, The Mortification of Sin, pages 105-106

Video: Intro to Reformed Theology (Feat. Jackie Hill Perry) | THAT ON3 VLOG