Christian Living, Biblical Studies, Religion, Spiritual Growth, Theology
John Beeson
The Faith of Unbelief

Bart Ehrman has perhaps done more to undermine the credibility of the Bible than anyone else in my lifetime. But his story didn’t begin that way. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and skeptic. Ehrman grew up in a Christian home, attended a conservative Bible school, and then found his way to a liberal seminary where his faith in the God of the Bible unraveled. That seminary happens to be the seminary I would attend a couple of decades later.

For Ehrman, everywhere he looks he sees holes in the biblical story. The inconsistencies that he sees have led him to determine that he cannot trust in the God of the Bible.

The Faith of Unbelief
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Don't Numb Your Feelings

“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”

“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”

In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.

Don't Numb Your Feelings
History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

Marshmallows and Friends
Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

Happy election day!

In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.

 As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.

Uprooting Our Political Identity

Benjamin Vrbicek

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How To Flee the Trap of Lust

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How To Flee the Trap of Lust

Let’s be honest: the standard Jesus calls us when it comes to lust can feel profoundly unfair. It is God, after all, who created us as physical beings. It is God who created us as sexual beings. It is God who gave us desires. God gave us libido. And God gave us an imagination.

And in all this, God has created us in his image! God is the being with the most powerful desires in the universe! What kind of image-bearers would we be if we did not also have desires?

In recognizing that God created us as desiring beings, we acknowledge that God has called us to direct those desires to himself and his righteousness.  

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Could lust send me to hell?

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Could lust send me to hell?

Our culture toys with lust. We know the power of sexual desire so well that we use it to sell hamburgers, cars, and beer. I mean, seriously. Step back and consider how crazy that is. We take things that are already attractive and then add sex to them to sell them better! Burgers, sports cars, and beer! We crave these things on their own! And yet advertisers are still compelled to add an ingredient to make them even more desirous: sex. On the flip side, you never see sex requiring anything else to sell it. Your local strip club isn’t trying to lure people in with their mouthwatering hamburgers.

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Does Jesus tell us we “can’t get no satisfaction”? Our struggle against lust for something greater

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Does Jesus tell us we “can’t get no satisfaction”? Our struggle against lust for something greater

According to one survey, more than 75% worldwide agree that adultery is wrong. The vast majority of us agree: adultery hurts marriages and children.

And yet, simultaneously, our culture encourages us to pursue our desires and fulfill our passions. There are cracks in that approach. The #metoo movement uncovered the devastating impact of some men living out this sexual philosophy.

Jesus pointed to the crack in this moral pavement two thousand years ago. He says that our sexual offense, our sexual sin, doesn’t begin with the action but with the heart:

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The Universe Demands a Cross: This post by Samuel James is brilliant and moving. Please read it. Here is a taste, “The sterilized metaphysics of Western spirituality, the liturgies of eat-pray-love, are sieves when it comes to the bloodiness of reality. I could, if I chose, close my eyes and insist on believing in the inherent goodness of man, the brotherhood of all, and the common destiny of all but the worst people. But I could not close my eyes hard enough to un-see the blood of vaginal delivery. The blood does not merely sit there. It calls out, just as the blood of Abel cried “out from the ground.” It calls out for reckoning.”

  2. 200 People Left Our Small Church: my friend Benjamin Vrbicek asks, “How does a pastor keep his heart from growing cynical when, over 350 weeks of pastoring the same church, I have lost an average of one person each week? And why are these congregants leaving our church anyway? What role might I play, even unintentionally, in sending sheep to what they perceive to be greener pastures?”

  3. An Open Letter to Death: Cindy Matson begins, “Dear Death, I’m writing to you today with a simple message: Stop boasting. I realize that you have some reason for pride. You have had your way with nearly every human to ever live. (Do Enoch and Elijah keep you up at night?)”

  4. True Humanism: Jesus, Marx, or Jenner? Bruce Ashford considers the options to Christianity in contemporary culture, “[T]hese thought leaders often pose as anthropologists who find Christianity dehumanizing and as tea-leaf readers who discern in the anfractuosities of history a movement toward a more “humanized,” Christ-less future.”

  5. Tom Brady in Retirement: Football fans out there will enjoy this.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The Universe Demands a Cross: This post by Samuel James is brilliant and moving. Please read it. Here is a taste, “The sterilized metaphysics of Western spirituality, the liturgies of eat-pray-love, are sieves when it comes to the bloodiness of reality. I could, if I chose, close my eyes and insist on believing in the inherent goodness of man, the brotherhood of all, and the common destiny of all but the worst people. But I could not close my eyes hard enough to un-see the blood of vaginal delivery. The blood does not merely sit there. It calls out, just as the blood of Abel cried “out from the ground.” It calls out for reckoning.”

  2. 200 People Left Our Small Church: my friend Benjamin Vrbicek asks, “How does a pastor keep his heart from growing cynical when, over 350 weeks of pastoring the same church, I have lost an average of one person each week? And why are these congregants leaving our church anyway? What role might I play, even unintentionally, in sending sheep to what they perceive to be greener pastures?”

  3. An Open Letter to Death: Cindy Matson begins, “Dear Death, I’m writing to you today with a simple message: Stop boasting. I realize that you have some reason for pride. You have had your way with nearly every human to ever live. (Do Enoch and Elijah keep you up at night?)”

  4. True Humanism: Jesus, Marx, or Jenner? Bruce Ashford considers the options to Christianity in contemporary culture, “[T]hese thought leaders often pose as anthropologists who find Christianity dehumanizing and as tea-leaf readers who discern in the anfractuosities of history a movement toward a more “humanized,” Christ-less future.”

  5. Tom Brady in Retirement: Football fans out there will enjoy this.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Why Religion is Good for Us: Mark Clark gives a great recap of some interesting data on why religion is a force for good in the world. For example, “In 247 studies done between 1944 and 2010: religion has a positive effect on society in regard to crime, deviance, and delinquency.”

  2. Long as the Curse is Found: An evocative piece from my friend Benjamin Vrbicek. He reflects on the new year and God’s grace, “A rain barrel, as it were, positioned by God’s grace, sits under my hands and captures more sacred moments than I realize. As a new year will be here in just a week, maybe I should be more excited about the prospect of catching new moments, a huge cupful of them. After all, a new year with new mercies awaits. How can that not be exciting?”

  3. Wisdom for Those Dating or Engaged to Someone Who Views Pornography: Jenny Solomon has a number of helpful things to say here. It starts here: “[Y]ou aren’t the solution to another person’s porn problem. He doesn’t look at porn because he wants/needs to have sex with you but can’t yet. He looks at porn because he lacks self-control. Your honeymoon won’t be a wand that waves over her porn issues and turns them magically into contented married sex.”

  4. 4 Predictions: Samuel James offers four predictions about Christians both conservative and liberal. He concludes, “The group that will be left in most local churches will be an ethnically mixed group.”

  5. Building Trust Through Forgiveness: Angel and I were grateful to be able to share some of our story with our friends at Romans 12 Ministries. I hope it encourages you.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. The Solution to America’s Theological Salad Bar: Paul Peterson deconstructs the 2020 State of Theology Findings that leave any astute reader scratching their head. How is it the case that 72% of Americans agree that “There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.” And yet, “52% of Americans claim, ‘Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” The results are baffling. Peterson tries to make sense of the mess. He explains that, “It helps to know what most Americans believe, but even more so, we must grasp how Americans believe, if we might engage them with the truth. Those cultural Christians who attend church on Christmas and Easter can select orthodox-looking statements about God on a survey. Still, their approach to knowledge prepares them to depart from Christian teaching further down the salad bar line. A culture that ingests “Be yourself” will also absorb “Believe yourself.””

2. How Much Money is Enough? (And Other Wisdom from Proverbs): We just finished a series on the book of Proverbs. There are some excellent little gems Geiger has in here we didn’t even get to!

3. The Wait of All Waits: Brittany Lee Allen reflects on waiting and then asks these convicting questions, “All of our waiting points to the wait of all waits. Jesus is coming back. We will see him face to face and leaving all this world behind us, we will live in eternity with our Savior. Do we yearn for that day as much as we do for earthly things? Do I long for Jesus to return more than I do for another baby? Sometimes I wonder if I hope to see his face more than I hope for healing from chronic pain?”

4. Congregations of Bruised Reeds: My friend Benjamin Vrbicek shares that we all are the bruised, but serve a God who sees our bruising. He offers this pastoral wisdom, “Over the last decade of pastoral ministry, I have learned the time required to heal from abuse and other trauma is always longer than I would have guessed.”

5. Shadows in the Sky: I’m a total sucker for videos that display a sliver of the breathtaking glory and power of our Almighty God. Don’t multi-task when you watch this one.

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How to Find Your Purpose as a Writer

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How to Find Your Purpose as a Writer

About four years ago, my co-author, Benjamin Vrbicek, helped me think through what it would take to launch a blog: navigating me through the logistics, the challenges ahead, and my reasons for blogging.

Today, Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World releases. The seeds of this book were in those conversations. Our hope is that the book would serve as a guide for other writers and aspiring Christian writers. Have you ever considered blogging? I think this book will serve you well.

Below is the first chapter, a chapter that addresses these questions: why am I blogging, and who am I trying to reach?

Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World

CHAPTER 1: PURPOSE

I got the itch to write when I was a fourth grader in Ms. Reeves’s class. We had free writing time and once a week we read our creations to the class. I was reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the first time and had a serious case of Middle-earth-itis. Another boy in my class had caught the Middle-earth bug as well.

We were off, each of us writing facsimiles of The Hobbit. Only, he had the imaginative horsepower to create something that could stand on its own two feet. He wove into his story students in our class, our teacher, and our principal. When he took the storytelling stool, he sat up straight, his eyes sparkled, and the class leaned forward in anticipation.

Is Blogging Dead?

Is Blogging Dead?

On November 3, my friend Benjamin Vrbicek and I will release our book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World. Our prayer is that the book helps encourage aspiring Christian writers to blog, provides them guidance along the way, and makes sure that all the while, our eyes stay focused on God and his glory.

One of the most fun parts of this project was the communal aspect of the book. Benjamin and I were able to have conversations with dozens of Christian bloggers who were so generous to offer their wisdom and perspective. Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World offers not just Benjamin and my knowledge, but input from some of the best bloggers we know and follow.

One question that we asked everyone in this group was whether or not they believe that blogging is dead. Is the era of blogging past, replaced by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube? Are we crazy to write this book? We received such thoughtful engagement around this question, we included it as an appendix in the book.

Enjoy the free download below. And if you have ever considered blogging, or know someone who writes, maybe you might consider grabbing Blogging for God in a Clickbait World.

Want to Join the Team?

Want to Join the Team?

On November 3 my first book will hit the shelves. Whether you know it or not, you’ve been an important partner in writing this book. The book is co-authored by my friend and fellow blogger, Benjamin Vrbicek and it is on the topic of blogging. Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World is a guide for bloggers or aspiring bloggers, pointing them back to the goal of Christian blogging and providing helpful practices and tips.

For those of you who have an itch to write, I hope this book provides a nudge and a road map. For those of you who have friends who are bloggers or who might blog, I hope that you consider gifting this book to them as an encouragement.

You’ve been here with me through this journey of blogging and I would be honored if you would consider joining our Launch Team. Here is what it will mean.

If you are willing to serve on the launch team, we will send you a digital version of the book in the next few weeks to give you time to read it before its November 3 launch.

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