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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
Imagine if God came to you in a vision tonight and said that he is giving you a choice: you could live the rest of your life with Jesus as your neighbor and best friend, but you wouldn’t have the Spirit, or you could keep the Spirit, but wouldn’t meet Jesus face-to-face until heaven. How many of us would choose to keep the Spirit? But Jesus says option B is the better option.
“Christ has risen!” “He has risen indeed!”
Millions of Christians around the globe greeted one another with those triumphal words on Easter Sunday. And yet, many of us who declared that marvelous truth two days ago, functionally disbelieve in the resurrection.
Do you ever despair of the grip of sin on your life? Does it feel as though you will never shake that addiction or stronghold?
Six freshmen squeezed around a cafeteria table during orientation week, voices competing with the din in the room. We were all posturing in our own ways, trying to impress our peers. A moment of rare silence passed, and then she shared about her parent’s recent divorce. Her voice wavered, and her eyes welled with tears. It was a crack of vulnerability in a conversation marked by ego and self-protection.
“We don’t go there.” I’ve heard many express that sentiment about their family. I think of couples who refuse to talk about sex, or the family that hides dad’s explosive anger. When such toxic behaviors become normalized, they turn into dysfunction. From the outside, anyone can recognize these areas of avoidance as a sign of dysfunction. The pain of pressing into such challenging areas hinders the full formation and growth of healthy familial relationships.
Little kids love re-watching movies. The movie might play in the background as a sort of interactive wallpaper, as their attention is locked on playing with the nearest doll or a truck. Then they’ll freeze, attention rapt on the screen, “This is my favorite part!” The movie is no longer the wallpaper; it is a focal point.
Many of us have faith that latches onto specific parts of the Easter story. But the gospel includes every part of the story. Is there an aspect of the Easter story that you focus on? Over the next two weeks, we will consider five parts of the Easter story and reflect on how each component can enrich our faith.
I was eleven years old and our Little League season had just come to an end. At my insistence, my parents dropped me off at the mall with my teammates to hang out. Not long after the parents had left, my friends hatched a plan: they wanted to go to see the hit new movie Die Hard 2. A knot formed in my stomach as the plan was hatched. Die Hard was rated R. I’m not sure I had seen a PG-13 movie. I told them that we couldn’t see it because we were too young. My friends scoffed: “I go to rated R movies all the time! They never stop me.” I shrunk back. We paid and walked in.
I felt sick through the whole movie and afterward. When my parents picked me up and asked what we did, I doubled down with a lie, “we just hung out.” I felt sicker.
Even after asking for forgiveness, the cloud over my heart remained. Guilt was gone. Shame remained.
Shame has power.
Shame is one of the most destructive forces on this earth. Shame is destructive because it attacks our spiritual and emotional life.
Who wouldn’t want to be Johnny Depp?
And yet, all it takes is a quick scroll through the news to see that this man’s life inspires more pity than envy. Johnny Depp’s ex-wife, Amber Heard has accused Depp of domestic abuse. Depp has fought back with a lawsuit charging Heard with abuse. Whatever the truth of who initiated the violence, one can’t help but be sad for Heard and Depp. Physical endangerment, drug and alcohol abuse, and violent, vulgar words marked their toxic and tumultuous relationship.
It has also been reported that Depp managed to blow through $650 million of his $800+ million net worth. One can’t help but scratch your head and wonder how spending that kind of money in a decade is even possible. One gets the sense that Depp has become the living version of his big screen caricature: intoxicated and unmoored.
Who would want to be Johnny Depp?
I think of my daughter and her friends in the final months of their senior year. These are days where they are peppered with questions about their future, “What are your plans?” “Where are you going?” “What are you going to do next?”
Setting one’s sights even slightly off course can result in significant error down the path. Air navigation experts refer to the one in sixty rule, which means that for every degree a plane veers off course initially it will miss its target destination by one mile for every sixty miles flown. The results can be fatal.
Maundy Thursday, 4pm, 2018
“Angel, give me a call ASAP. We need to talk.”
This is not a text you want to receive from your DCS case worker.
We called immediately.
“We’ve decided to move Lily to a home closer to her half-sister.”
We hadn’t been notified that was even a possibility.
“Can we pick her up tonight?”
We talked the case worker out of that idea and into waiting until Monday.
We hung up the phone and sat in silence, shocked.
Jesus took the unleavened bread that Passover night and he gave it to his disciples, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”[i]
Our bond with Lily had come so naturally. She had been with us less than four months, but we were a mutual admiration society. After a couple of weeks of trauma-induced non-responsive behavior, she opened up (I reflected on that miracle here). It wasn’t long before her squeals and belly laughs filled our home. We kissed her, squeezed her, and sung and prayed over her.
We dreamed of the possibility of adopting Lilly. We didn’t know if that would be possible, but we knew that the case would be a long one. We would get to enjoy her for at least another year.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
What emotions do those seven words invoke in you? How does the resurrection make you feel?
What if we could feel more like God? What if we could allow God into our emotional life? This series of posts invites us to consider Holy Week as revelatory to us not just in its spiritual impact, but also its emotional impact (perhaps next year we might walk through Holy Week and consider the ramifications it has for our bodies!).
1. Is Easter Believable? Des Smith begins, “Is Easter believable? That’s a question people have been asking for 2000 years. It may be a question you’re asking.”
2. Is Christianity Bad News for Women? Jen Oshman responds, “[T]he Christian culture in the first century then becomes this safe place and harbor for women. Women turned to Christ, and the Christian community has been predominantly female ever since.”
3. Faith Like a Beach House: Chris Thomas begins this moving extended metaphor this way, “The excitement ebbed away with my first breath. Now, to be honest, I’m not an overly excitable guy; I’m fairly reserved in my displays of emotion, but I had been undeniably excited, that much was clear. But not any more. A week or two earlier, my wife and I had purchased on old van, circa late 70’s, that had been permanently parked on a slab of concrete”
4. An Open Letter to a Christian Disheartened by Temptation: Don Carson and John Woodbridge begin, “That you are experiencing rounds of temptation is not as unusual as you might suppose. From the inception of the church believers have found this pilgrim way to be strewn with multiple temptations.”
5. Were You There? A beautiful rendition by the Three Mo’ Tenors.
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