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

Old Testament

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Gospel Hope for Self-Haters: David Powlison with a layered analysis of something many struggle with. “He is actually saying something that competes with the false voices, and it is not just something you rehearse in your own head. He’s actually inviting you to come out of yourself, out of the death spiral, the vortex of self-hatred, as we are talking about it right now.”

  2. Men and Emotions: I’ve spent a lot of time working with men on this issue (and myself!) and love Joseph Hussung’s approach. He explains, “The purpose of using these tools is simple. We need to be able to express our emotions. We need to be able to express them to our Lord, and we need to be able to express them to others.”

  3. What’s Beneath it all? Sylvia Schroeder considers her cries to God for her daughter’s life, “Were my begging pleas like the Israelites in the Old Testament in their whining complaints? Did my request resemble theirs when they craved meat and disdained manna in the wilderness? Did He grow tired of my pleas?”

  4. Banksy and Beauty from Ashes: Tim Challies with a reflection on a graffiti artist’s statement, “Not too long ago, I read that the mysterious artist Banksy had created several new murals in Ukraine. Going to locations that had experienced the fury of war, he found broken and damaged buildings and used them as his canvas.”

  5. Four Reasons to Be Early to the Sunday Gathering: I appreciate Jacob Crouch’s simple admonitions to church-goers here, “Try showing up just 10 minutes early next week. This isn’t a law from on high, but I really think this could be a prudent way to make the most of a Sunday morning.”

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Shining Idols: Uncovering Them

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Shining Idols: Uncovering Them

What are the idols of your heart? What are the ways in which you have allowed your heart which is intended to worship God, to worship the golden calves that surround us? Where else have you placed your hope?

If you’re unsure of the answer to that question, perhaps one of these questions might help diagnose your heart. What keeps me up when I’m trying to sleep? What do I fear? What do I think about? What do I daydream about? What gets me most excited in life? What do I give myself to? What do I use my time for?

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Shining Idols: What They Demand

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Shining Idols: What They Demand

Are you an idolater? I already lost you, didn’t I? Most wouldn’t raise their hand to affirm their idolatry.  

Idolatry doesn’t preach well to us 21st-century Westerners. A couple of years ago, I had someone leave the church after I preached on idolatry. “You preached for most of your sermon on the Old Testament, the law against Idolatry, and how might we be guilty of idolatry today,” she reflected. She said that the sermon didn’t connect with her and didn’t offer “spiritual encouragement.”

Oh, friends, the dangers we face when we think that biblical passages on idolatry don’t apply to us!

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The Worshipper: Jeremy Walker begins a post that comes with a twist, “He is a worshipper. His life revolves around his worship. Nothing stops him.”

  2. The Serious Business of Laughing at Myself: Seth Lewis tells a very funny story about himself and concludes, “If I can’t embrace my own smallness, my own humiliations, and my total dependence on the God who made me, then my pride has grown out of control. That’s a serious problem.”

  3. Unborn Images Matter: Alan Shlemon begins, “Abortionist Dr. Joan Fleischman says she sometimes shows her patients the pregnancy tissue she removes after an abortion. She says that post-abortive women are “stunned by what it actually looks like,” and the women “feel they’ve been deceived.””

  4. 16 Passages to Read to Fight Lust: These are worth memorizing.

  5. A Spiritual MRI of the Heart: Warren Peel explains, “In Scripture, the word ‘heart’ is used more than 1000 times, but it almost never refers to the physical organ inside our chests. The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament sums up all the usages of the term in this way: it is ‘the richest, most all-encompassing biblical term for the totality of a man’s inner nature.’ The heart is said to do a wide range of things in the Bible, but all its many activities fall into one of the three main faculties of the soul: the mind, the affections and the will. It includes the mind—our thoughts, imagination, fantasies, judgments and attitudes. It encompasses the affections—our emotions, our desires and longings, our revulsions. And it describes the will—our choices, decisions and motivations.”

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.      Almost Half of US Births Happen Outside of Marriage: Riley Griffin reports, " Forty percent of all births in the U.S. now occur outside of wedlock, up from 10 percent in 1970." In addition, " The average age an American woman has her first child is now 27, up from 22 in 1970."

2.      The Solution of Our Political Problems is Believing in Satan: Michael Bird has a surprising suggestion regarding our devolving political climate: believe in Satan. He says, " [U]nless you believe in demons, you will begin to demonize whatever political apparatus you find yourself opposing. You will treat your political and cultural opponents not as compatriots with wrong opinions, but as the ultimate enemy of the human race, and imagine that you are involved in a life or death struggle against them. And that, in turn, justifies whatever you think you need to say about them or do to them in order to stop them."

3.      5 Troubling Shifts that Mark Modern Culture: JP Moreland's list is insightful. He says, " The second shift is in the realm of guidance for living one’s life, and it goes from truth to the immediate satisfaction of desire."

4.      Don't Reap the Edge of Your Field Michael Kelley on Old Testament harvest laws and the application to our lives: "God did not want His people reaping to the edge. He wanted them to have some margin at the end of their rows. Now, before we disregard this verse as something inapplicable to us, consider why the Lord would make this command. It wasn’t just about preserving His own people. He didn’t tell them to create this kind of margin because doing so is personally healthy and psychologically balanced. He gave the command for the sake of other people who might wander into those fields."

5.      Baffling Illusionist: This is a really impressive act... a lot of fun to watch and slow down to try to figure out.

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Nonviolence and the Christian: the Old Testament

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Nonviolence and the Christian: the Old Testament

I remember the first time I had a conversation with a dyed-in-the-wool Christian pacifist. I was on an immersive backpacking trip with classmates the month before I entered my freshman year at Gordon College. Our guide, a student at Gordon, and one of the freshmen on the trip were both Mennonite and were staunchly pacifist. I had never really heard a strong argument for pacifism and was intrigued by their position.

My dad came of age during the Vietnam War and shared stories with me as a kid of his opposition to the war, an opposition that he came to see as well-intentioned, but naïve. My natural response to war was similar: war is bad, but inevitable, and if our country can intervene for the betterment of those involved, we ought to do so.

My freshman ears were intrigued by the argument, but ultimately unmoved. I would encounter Just War Theory in a philosophy class and that would become my anchor point for processing the use of violence.

When a friend urged me to pick up Preston Sprinkle’s Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence, my interest was piqued but I didn’t expect much to come of reading Sprinkle’s book. But, in a way that rarely happens at this stage of my life, I’ve found my perspective on nonviolence has changed pretty significantly over the past months as I’ve read and processed the book.

Over the course of these posts, we are going to examine a biblical perspective on violence.

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