I highlighted last week the teaching of a Methodist minister running for office in Kansas. This week, let’s look at James Talarico, a PCUSA seminary student running for Senate in Texas. John Nolte of Breitbart News summarizes: “Talarico…poses as a pious, God-fearing Christian and deliberately leads people astray by preaching a heresy that twists naked sin (transsexualism, transvestitism, homosexuality, abortion, child mutilation) into something sacred, Christian, and beautiful.” (8/13 article: “Poll Shows Ken Paxton Ahead of James ‘God Is Nonbinary’ Talarico”). Talarico’s positions are well-documented in the media.

Again, these are subjects to bring up around the dinner table or at family worship. Jesus clearly taught in Matthew 19:4 that men are men and women are women: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female…?” Notice Jesus relies on the Creation account: this is the way God made the world, even 4,000 years later. As for cross-dressing, Moses clearly said a woman should not put on a man’s clothes, or uniform, for battle. Homosexuality is clearly a Sodomite story, as Paul clearly states in 1 Cor 6:9–11.

Abortion, the killing of an unborn baby, is ruled out by Psalm 139, since God is the one weaving the child in the womb; it’s His creation. Exodus 21:22–25 clearly values the life of the unborn baby as equal to an adult.

Child mutilation? Since the purpose of those surgeries is to attempt to change the sex of the child, those would be forbidden by Jesus in Matthew 19.

So we listen to the word of Jesus, which is good, beautiful, and truthful; not the word of men twisting God’s word to hopefully receive a few more votes, or pervert our understanding of God’s word.

It’s the political season, and as usual, there is a mix of unbiblical teaching going around that should be addressed around the dinner table, especially since a lot of it is being said by ministers of one sort of another.

Methodist Pastor Adam Hamilton, Democrat candidate in Kansas’s Senate race, has taught and preached that all faiths end up in heaven: “When it comes to other faiths, I believe as a Christian that…–when they get to heaven, they’re going to see Jesus and they’re going to say, ‘Ah, it was you all along that I was searching for,’ but I don’t fear that those folks will spend eternity in Hell,” (2022 sermon titled “Is the Bible True? Is Jesus the Only Way?”). Hamilton has stated that he does not believe that an individual must know or follow Jesus Christ in their lifetime in order to be saved and spend eternity with God.

This unbiblical position raises a lot of questions: “Why be a Christian minister?”, “Why evangelize people in the first place?”, “Why even be a Christian?”

This position is clearly against the Great Commission in Matthew 28, where Jesus commands his followers to teach all the nations about “him,” and not just leave them in darkness. It is directly against John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus clearly says he is the only way to the Father in heaven. This positions is against this very Father’s command at his Transfiguration in Matthew 17, where the Father says from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” Not Buddha or Allah.

Finally, the Apostle Peter, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in Acts 4:8, says clearly in verse 12, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

We often don’t take family and children advice from bachelors, but C.S. Lewis is an approved exception! In his article “The Sermon and the Lunch,” he gives several points of advice for familial living that still ring true today and will help us with our own families to honor Christ and his kingdom.

First, he reminds us that since the Fall, no organization or way of life whatever has a natural tendency to go right. The family can be offered to God, converted, redeemed, and offer a channel of blessings and graces. But like everything else that is human, the family needs redemption. Meaning, that the members must fight to put off temptations, corruptions, and miseries. He notes wisely, “Charity begins at home: so does uncharity.”

Second, while not against natural “affection,” it is not a cause of lasting happiness. “Love” in that sense can become greedy, solicitous, jealous, and exacting. There must be a deeper “love” to hold the family together, a “my life for yours” love, love based on the way of Christ: “we love, because he first loved us.”

Third, Lewis is very much against the supposed pro-family slogan “at home we can be our natural selves.” The lunch at the Vicar’s house destroyed that idea, for everyone in the Vicar’s family was rude to each other, and if those actions were practiced outside the family, they would simply be knocked down! Nowhere on this side of heaven can we simply “be ourselves.”

Finally, he asks, “must we not teach that if the home is to be a means of grace it must be a place of rules? There cannot be a common life without a regula.” The alternative to rule is not freedom but the unconstitutional (and often unconscious) tyranny of the most selfish member.