Tim Yarbrough’s War on the Ninth Commandment
Tim Yarbrough’s War on the Ninth Commandment
When “Christian Leaders” Divorce Scripture and Destroy Families, Part 2
[This is Part 2 of a three-part post chronicling a real-life nightmare scenario that would benefit greatly from prayers and help from the Church. If you haven’t read Part 1, you will need to read it to understand this one. Here is a link to Part 1: Tim Yarbrough’s Ministry of Abuse. Those with questions or an interest in helping are encouraged to text (if you have my number) or email me directly at Scott@FireBreathingChristian.com. Thank you!]
When “Christian Leaders” Divorce Scripture and Destroy Families, Part 2: Tim Yarbrough’s War on the Ninth Commandment
By What Standard?
The Ninth Commandment stands above many other passages that could be used as reference points in this story. Since the FPCNA Elder leading the “ministry” (along with most of his loyal sycophants) claim to be Reformed Presbyterians, what better place to start diving into theology than by exploring the Westminster Longer Catechism’s detailed elaboration on The Ninth Commandment?
Here is how the commandment is covered in the form of three question-answer sets (please read slowly and take it all in as you go):
“Q. 143. Which is The Ninth Commandment?
A. The Ninth Commandment is, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.Q. 144. What are the duties required in The Ninth Commandment?
A. The duties required in The Ninth Commandment are, the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things whatsoever; a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them; discouraging talebearers, flatterers, and slanderers; love and care of our own good name, and defending it when need requireth; keeping of lawful promises; studying and practicing of whatsoever things are true, honest, lovely, and of good report.Q. 145. What are the sins forbidden in The Ninth Commandment?
A. The sins forbidden in The Ninth Commandment are, all prejudicing the truth, and the good name of our neighbors, as well as our own, especially in public judicature; giving false evidence, suborning false witnesses, wittingly appearing and pleading for an evil cause, outfacing and overbearing the truth; passing unjust sentence, calling evil good, and good evil; rewarding the wicked according to the work of the righteous, and the righteous according to the work of the wicked; forgery, concealing the truth, undue silence in a just cause, and holding our peace when iniquity calleth for either a reproof from ourselves, or complaint to others; speaking the truth unseasonably, or maliciously to a wrong end, or perverting it to a wrong meaning, or in doubtful or equivocal expressions, to the prejudice of the truth or justice; speaking untruth, lying, slandering, backbiting, detracting, talebearing, whispering, scoffing, reviling, rash, harsh, and partial censuring; misconstructing intentions, words, and actions; flattering, vainglorious boasting, thinking or speaking too highly or too meanly of ourselves or others; denying the gifts and graces of God; aggravating smaller faults; hiding, excusing, or extenuating of sins, when called to a free confession; unnecessary discovering of infirmities; raising false rumors, receiving and countenancing evil reports, and stopping our ears against just defense; evil suspicion; envying or grieving at the deserved credit of any; endeavoring or desiring to impair it, rejoicing in their disgrace and infamy; scornful contempt, fond admiration; breach of lawful promises; neglecting such things as are of good report, and practicing, or not avoiding ourselves, or not hindering what we can in others, such things as procure an ill name.”
Now ask yourself whether The Ninth Commandment, especially considering the above Westminster commentary, is compatible with actively promoting and funding a divorce without even speaking with the easily accessible husband in the marriage while claiming to be that husband’s “trustworthy friend” and a church appointed “man of God”?
To be clear, I am a big fan of Presbyterianism in general. As I already mentioned, I am a Reformed Christian myself and many of my favorite authors come from a Reformed Presbyterian perspective. That said, for the life of me, I have no idea how this man’s conduct can be reconciled with even “entry level” basic Christianity, much less the rigorous Reformed theology that Yarbrough and many of his enablers claim to hold.
It should also be noted that I bent over backwards to accommodate Yarbrough’s claims to Christian brotherhood even after it became clear to me that he was an active enemy of the Kingdom (at least in his conduct against my family). Even after I had mountains of solid evidence of him as a Woke huckster, I tried to consider him a Brother in Christ and acted accordingly. In this I took The Ninth Commandment seriously while Yarbrough spit on it at every turn.
I also took Matthew 18 prescriptions seriously and have shared my concerns not only with Yarbrough first individually (when he started the whole laughable “the woman made me do it” defense for writing the check to promote my divorce), and then with others in conversations who heard many of the claims I am making here. Since those conversations have not resulted in Yarbrough’s repentance (he only shamelessly doubles down on the approaches catalogued here), I am now using the Lord’s wonderful provision of the Internet to reach the true Church so that biblical justice and discipline might finally be brought to bear.
After two years of this YBS, I am asking publicly, and will continue to ask for as long as God gives me breath and ability: How can this man be allowed to operate this way as a member in good standing at a Reformed Christian church?
Christianity vs. Yarbrough Religion
Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself …love your neighbor as yourself …do not bear false witness, but err on the side of grace and goodness whenever possible with one another …
These are summaries of the living, loving, and life-giving Nature of God as revealed in His Law. These are cornerstone concepts of true Christianity. I am thankful for the opportunity to cling to them even as I commit to seeking full and true justice by any legitimate means that the Lord sees fit to deliver.
If there is no miraculous repentance-fueled turnaround, I intend dive deep into every detail of Yarbrough’s lie-drenched operation and involvement with my wife’s unbiblical divorce, and I will provide polygraph test results (and publish full polygraph reports) addressing each and every key claim made along the way.
This is not a contest between equally valid truth claims. Not even close. It is a contest between someone who is speaking truth on these issues and another who is pushing lies on the same.
When “#Agency” Becomes a License to Lie with Impunity
One clear mark of my wife’s (hopefully temporary) conversion to Yarbrough’s Woke religion has been her repackaging of lies and injustice as beautiful expressions of virtue and “agency” on the part of “victims” of “the patriarchy”. Agency is a key concept in this Woke narrative. Woke ideology (as with most anti-Christian worldviews) is well known for repurposing terms by morphing them into something diametrically opposed to their original meaning and then weaponizing the repurposed version into something that we all must worship and obey without question. As a result, everything from love and hate to truth and justice (and even boy and girl) have been fundamentally redefined in large part because cowardly Christians just lazily sit by and let it happen. (Probably while praying for God to send someone else to “do something” to help.)
Now we have “agency” to add to the list of Yarbrough-style repurposed buzzwords, with its Woke definition being something like: The freedom and license to lie and abuse families (and even our own children) with impunity while kicking our “agency hampering” Bibles to the curb whenever they get in the way.
It is important to note that since “ministries” like Yarbrough’s are faking Christianity, their Woke activists use Scripture often – just not consistently or truthfully. Instead, they use Bible passages selectively, often to advance concepts explicitly argued against in Scripture (like Woke perversions of truth and justice). They use Bible passages like Lego pieces, discarding those they don’t like and grabbing those they need to build whatever they want in any given moment. This gimmick helps them maintain a veneer of Christianity wile waging active war on the Kingdom of God and its people.
This perversion of “agency” is basically the same switcheroo managed by leftists related to the terms “liberty” and “freedom”, which have both been severed from their grounding in biblical truth and personal responsibility to God, and reinterpreted to mean “the ability to do whatever you want” in accordance with “your truth”.
Converts to Yarbrough-style religion are proud of their new “agency” to ignore Scripture, abuse others, and lie not only with impunity, but with the full support and financial backing of their teacher and his “ministry” allies. The next time you see one of Yarbrough’s disciples talk about their “new found agency” thanks to him helping them find true “freedom”, remember the way that these terms are redefined by Woke religion and remember the polygraph test results that I have demonstrating exactly what has happened in this Yarbrough-promoted nightmare scenario.
The “freedom” that Yarbrough is actually helping them to find is: Freedom from obedience to the Word of God.
That is not freedom at all. It is just the opposite.
It is slavery.
In this case, it is not just generic slavery but slavery specific to the new “ministry” and Woke worldview that captures its disciples’ minds and makes them dependent on perpetuating its narrative. This slavery is not accidental. It is there by self-serving design. The maintenance and growth of Yarbrough’s ego, status, and “ministry” depends on it.
Yarbrough Religion: Grooming the Next Generation of Religious Abusers
If my polygraph-supported claims are correct, then one big takeaway is that, under cover of “Reformed Christian” religion and with the support (for now) of the FPCNA, Yarbrough is grooming a new wave of Woke activists to undermine truth, justice and families in the name of their versions of “freedom”, “liberation”, and the “agency” to do whatever they like.
Before we move along, we must realize that this is a very marketable “ministry”. Offering people the cover of a Christian veneer while also delivering the power to lie, cheat, and abuse others with impunity is a major draw to people who want to appear virtuous while abusing others.
Lies + Lawfare = Financially Devastated Targets
I would offer to pay for the polygraph testing of my wife, and I can if absolutely necessary, but thanks to the every-front war that Tim Yarbrough’s ministry of abuse has waged on me for nearly two years, I am left scrambling from week to week for enough to survive. I work between 80 and 90 hours each week just to try to cover the cost of carnage resulting from Yarbrough’s many perversions of justice. I work and stay fit by exercising in the house and by walking around the block. (One benefit of this nightmare is that I’m in the best shape I’ve been in 20+ years.) Working my job and working on staying fit is 80% of my waking life as I wait for the next weekly 30-minute Zoom call with my kids, who adore me and miss me as I miss them.
I pray and cry out to God every day from the first moments of consciousness in the morning ‘til I try to go to sleep at night, waiting for the storm to end and marveling at how much destruction can be done by “Reformed Christians”.
On my wife’s side alone they have racked up nearly $80,000.00 in attorney costs (all of which they want me to cover), and I had to let my lawyer go long ago (with no funds to hire another), so it’s not hard to see the great advantage of the Lies + Lawfare combination employed by Yarbrough & Co.
The irony of this is that if the lies and legal nightmare weren’t dominating life right now, my family would have plenty to live quite well on with my income alone. We would have it made. The kids would not be in public schools, we would have a beautiful home in a great neighborhood with two reliable vehicles, and we would be able to enjoy a solidly middle-income American life. But again, thanks to Tim Yarbrough’s promotion of an ever-growing black hole of anti-justice, everything has been swallowed up, at least for now.
While I am forced to run all day every day like a hamster in a ball to pay bills, my wife benefits greatly from handouts, taxpayers, and all manner of gifts any time she needs anything. Between welfare-state programs, tons of donations solicited through lies, and other financial support through Yarbrough’s “ministry” and its allies, my wife has taken in a small fortune while I have been pummeled (and taxed to help pay for the government handout part of the “ministry” plan, of course).
One intended consequence of this approach is to cement loyalty to the “ministry” narrative by making people in my wife’s position financially dependent on keeping that narrative alive. And it works. How much financial benefit would my wife or anyone like her stand to lose if they repented of their lies and acknowledged that they had terribly abused the justice system to get where they are?
To say that this Woke anti-Christian lawfare has been financially rewarding for one side and devastating to the other would be an understatement.
True Justice and the Impartial Application of Church Discipline
Abusive “Reformed Christian leaders” like Yarbrough often promote strict biblical rules of conduct that include church discipline to the point of excommunication where there is no repentance and restitution for damage done by sinning against another. Ironically, they also effortlessly toss Scripture right out the window when it gets in the way of what they want to do in any given moment. The Bible passages that they very selectively apply are used to punish, control, and sometimes excommunicate others in the name of “preserving the purity of the church” and honoring the Word of God.
I generally agree with these biblical concepts of church purity and discipline, though it seems clear to me that unless these rules are impartially applied to Tim Yarbrough and his “ministry allies”, they amount to little more than another tool of extreme abuse and control in the hands of men and women who view themselves as little gods (in practice) entitled to do whatever they damned well please.
One of the great ironies in this case is how Yarbrough uses these tools of abuse and control to promote a lie-drenched narrative about how I am “abusive” and “controlling”.
How many ways can you trash The Ninth Commandment? This seems to be a question that Yarbrough’s “ministry” is (unintentionally?) dedicated to working out in real time.
Reformed Christians vs. “Reformed Christians”
I am a Reformed Christian of the Baptist variety. Even though the nightmare scenario described here has been brought on largely by “Reformed Christians”, my core beliefs have not wavered, but have instead been strengthened by the grace of God through what has now been a nearly two-year long trip through hell that has been charted, promoted, and funded by a gaggle of abusive “advocates” who, for the most part, also claim to be Reformed Christians. Without getting into the weeds on what exactly a Reformed Christian typically believes (that will be detailed as part of future posts), here is a simple way of explaining how I understand being a Reformed Christian under the broad umbrella of Christianity in general:
As a Christian, I not only intellectually understand but directly experience that the Holy Spirit literally lives within those who are truly His people. All true Christians have the Holy Spirit – the third Person of the Trinity – living within them. This is one of the supernaturally inspired but very real lines of demarcation between true Christians and all other people.
As a Reformed Christian I have certain views as to how and why God does things.
Point #1 is infinitely more important than Point #2.
Reformed theology is a system of beliefs that any person can learn, mimic, proclaim, and even claim to love, at least enough to fool others into viewing them as a Christian when they are in fact not supernaturally saved and indwelt with the Holy Spirit of the living God. The same applies to all systems of belief. The difference between real Christians and false converts is not necessarily their theology (though their theology can certainly be a major tell). The difference between true Christians and false converts is that the former have the Spirit within them (along with the love and fear of the Lord that inescapably comes with it), and the latter have no such Spirit within them (and therefore no true love for or fear of the Lord, as is often evidenced by the way they unrepentantly violate His Word and abuse His people).
Many Reformed Christian leaders seem to have knowledge of Reformed theology while not having the Spirit of God actually within them, based on their lack of true love of the Lord or healthy fear of the Lord in practice. They can spout theology and toe the Reformed rhetorical line with ease and even delight as unregenerate eggheads looking to prove their theological superiority, but they have no interest in consistently submitting themselves to things like The Ninth Commandment because, apparently, the Spirit that would compel them to do so out of love is not actually living within them.
If we truly love professing Christians who act in such an unbiblical manner, we will not brush their abuses aside and pretend that they are good to go. Instead, we will lovingly call them to repentance and, should they refuse to repent and make restitution for their sin, we are to honor the Lord by formally removing them from recognition as members of the visible church of King Jesus. That is my understanding of what Reformed Presbyterians generally believe and impose on members who are found to have done harm to others by sinning against them.
One of the most important things that I have come to appreciate as a perpetually reforming Reformed Christian is the reality that every Christian is a work in progress and that none of us are saved by our understanding of theology (thank God!). All who are saved are saved by the grace of God alone. That said, if we really are saved, we will inherently seek out truth on God’s terms and adjust accordingly as we go.
Repentance vs. Clinging to Anger and Lies
One thing that has become clear to me after years of seeing up-close how Yarbrough operates is the way that biblical repentance is not only foreign to his religion, but his religion is openly antagonistic to it in practice. He encourages his disciples to hold onto anger and act out on it like no other “Christian” I’ve ever known. He encourages his victims/disciples to use their pain or anger as justification for abusing others and never considering repenting for anything they might do, since their “trauma” more than justifies whatever they “have to do” to express their new Woke “agency”.
This contempt for biblical repentance makes things like restoration nearly impossible, which is great for perpetuating “ministry” cohesion and growing the ranks of dependent Yarbrough disciples, but terrible for families, culture, and the Kingdom of God.
Justice Pursuing Christian Ministry vs. Justice Abusing “Christian Ministry”
As part of tackling the abuse covered here, I will be working with other ministries while also building online resources aimed at helping others who have suffered similarly at the hands of “church leaders” who trample biblical justice and oppose the true Gospel.
I will have more to share on these things soon. For now, I can say that one of these resources will focus on encouraging a Spirit-necessary understanding as to what a true Christian is and how the Spirit of God within His people is essential to a full and proper understanding of His Word. This principle is universal and cuts across things like denominations and local churches, so I hope that it will be helpful to people who are trying to understand (and recover from) damage done by theologically cunning hucksters in positions of authority.
This resource will be found at JesusChristianity.com. (Landing page to come soon. In the meantime, the URL redirects to my FBC site.)
Please Pray for the Free Presbyterian Church of North America (FPCNA)
In keeping with the Spirit that inspired The Ninth Commandment, I am assuming the best about the FPCNA. I am assuming that upon getting word of this situation, they will act wisely and expeditiously to maintain the purity of the Church.
Please pray that denominations and local churches will awaken and respond to the challenge of Woke religion in a biblically sound manner so that Woke “Reformed Christianity” will not overtake and replace biblical Reformed Christianity any more than it already has.
Click here to read Part 3: Tim Yarbrough’s Woke “Christianity”
Click here to return to Part 1: Tim Yarbrough’s Ministry of Abuse
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