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

Ezekiel 47:1-12

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A Healing Place

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A Healing Place

It was a long week. I felt sniped at by a handful of complaints from congregants. I was fighting for a spirit of gratitude as frustration grew in my heart. I stepped into a meeting and did my best to be present, but the inner critic’s voice was loud. I asked a simple question to kick things off: “Where is God growing you?” Tears welled in the eyes of the woman across from me. “New Life is my safe place, my growing place. New Life is my healing place. Every time I come to church, it feels like a hug.”

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The Bible is Our Source

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The Bible is Our Source

Recently we were helping my mother-in-law look at properties. One of the first questions you need to know about a property is if it has water. There is some beautiful land not far from our home that can’t hook up to city water and whose wells have dried up. Unsurprisingly their value has plummeted. What use is a property with no water source?

Not much.

Many are living in a spiritual house with no water source.

What do you draw from as your spiritual source? Most draw from many sources: their conscience, self-help gurus, counselors, friends, podcasts, and news sources.

There is nothing wrong with any of these. But they are not the source that we depend on for truth.

THIRSTY

In Amos, God warned of a coming famine. “’Behold, the days are coming,’ declares the Lord God, ‘when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord’” (Amos 8:11).

You don’t take a Coca-Cola on a hike. You don’t water your garden with saltwater. You don’t rehydrate with a glass of wine. We depend on fresh water.

STREAMS OF PURE WATER

In the first Psalm, we learn of the blessed man. We are told, “He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither” (Psalm 1:3). These pure streams of water were there in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:10). Ezekiel prophesied that one day God would flood his land with these pure streams (Ezekiel 47:1-12). And in John’s final revelation, we see that this crystalline river of life will take center stage in eternity, “flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city” (Revelation 22:1).

What is this source? What were we made to draw life from and always will depend on?

This source of nourishment is our spiritual water and bread, it is the Word of God.

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