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.
Why do I have to keep forgiving him?
I’ve heard it many times as a pastor. It’s said with weariness and hurt, or bitterness and anger, or confusion and longing. It can mean at least four things.
“It hurts too much to keep forgiving him for repeated sins.”
“Can’t I just overlook her sin against me?”
“He hurt me so deeply that he doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”
“Why am I still hurting over an offense when I said I forgave her?”
What does God’s Word have to say about each of these situations?
Trauma is everywhere. One in four women and one in six men will be sexually abused. At least one in seven children have experienced abuse or neglect in the past year. More than one in four abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children.
Psychological research continues to demonstrate the tentacle-like nature of the impact of trauma. Effects include dissociation, panic attacks, hyperarousal, loss of sleep, low self-esteem, grief, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse.
It’s that time of year, when transitions happen: seasons close and new seasons begin. Maybe you’re a student who just headed off to college. Maybe you got a new job. Maybe your employer transitioned you. Those are some of the many natural reasons that you might have just left or might be leaving your church in the coming weeks.
Maybe you’ve left or are planning on leaving your church for entirely different reasons, though. Maybe your pastor is in a rut. Maybe the worship grates on you. Maybe you feel like you just don’t know anyone there any longer. Maybe you were injured by someone at the church and you tense up at the awkwardness of returning. Maybe you feel like you’re not getting spiritually fed there any longer. Maybe you are frustrated with how your church has handled Covid-19.
In this four-part series we will explore appropriate reasons for leaving a church, how to leave a church, how to choose a church, and how to join a church.
Let’s explore some of the most common reasons[i] people leave the church and reflect whether they are appropriate or not.
1) I feel disconnected
“The church doesn’t feel like home any longer. My friends have left and I feel like I’m at someone else’s church when I arrive.”
It’s not appropriate to leave: losing friends is hard, but we shouldn’t leave a church because our friends have left. Part of the joy of the church is that God brings together strangers into community. Do the hard work of starting a new small group or serving in a new ministry and God will surely bring about new relationships.
1. According to Research People With "Too Many Interests" Are More Likely to Be Successful: This is really interesting and runs against the prevailing wisdom, "The warning against being a generalist has persisted for hundreds of years in dozens of languages. 'Equipped with knives all over, yet none is sharp,' warn people in China. In Estonia, it goes, 'Nine trades, the tenth one — hunger.' If being a generalist is an ineffective career path, why do 10+ academic studies find a correlation between the number of interests/competencies someone develops and their creative impact?"
2. How to Move from Bitterness to Forgiveness: Roger Barrier responds to an important question that plagues so many. He begins his post with this advice, "Don’t minimize the hurts in your life. Mourn your hurts. Express them to a trusted friend or spouse and allow you to be comforted. Jesus died for those hurts. Talk honestly about them. Who has hurt you the most? With whom have you not reconciled? Who does the Holy Spirit bring to your mind when you think hurtful thoughts? Jesus said, "Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted."
3. What Does it Mean to Be Baptized in the Spirit? Clear and helpful post by Adriel Sanchez. He reflects, "Understandably, people typically focus on the miraculous signs that accompanied the Baptism of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2. In doing so they often miss the big picture the Bible gives us with regard to this significant event in the history of salvation. The Baptism of the Holy Spirit is not primarily about speaking in tongues but about the beginning of a new creation, the advancement of a new temple, the giving of a new law, and the commissioning of a new group of prophets."
4. How History's Revivals Teach us How to Pray: This is inspiring. Davis Thomas reflects on a very different sort of prayer than most of us are accustomed to, "I was confronted with how the Bible appears utterly unfamiliar with casual prayer, prayer of the mouth and not the heart. Travailing prayer—the kind of burdened, focused pressing my friends in the Hebrides described—seemed closer to the heart of prayer in Scripture. A stream of this manner of praying flows from the early church all the way through the Reformation."
5. The Best Weapon is an Open Door: Rosaria Butterfield on just how significant hospitality is. She concludes, "Perhaps our everyday lives would reveal that the hand of God reaches into the hardest situations imaginable and that nothing is impossible with God. Hospitality is the ground zero of the Christian life."
1. This is About That: That Great video on the true meaning of marriage by Andrew Wilson.
2. What Does Evangelism Look Like in Your Day-to-Day Life? Phil Miglioratti with a call to show and tell the gospel as we go.
3. 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You: Excerpt from Tony Reinke’s new book.
4. Coptic Christians Do the Unimaginable: The incredible testimony of the forgiveness of the Egyptian Christians.
5. Marriage Wounds: Melissa Edgington with a compelling reflection on marriage, scars and beauty: "But, a few days ago I looked down and realized that somehow in the course of my work, my ring had gotten knocked against my finger and had left a small cut there, hidden underneath the beautiful gold, a scar on the delicate-looking redhead’s fair flesh of my left hand. I was surprised to see it there, because in all of these years of dealing with babies and a mother’s work, I never remember my ring doing such a thing. But, there it was. A wound inflicted by the very symbol of never-ending love between a man and a woman."
It’s that time of year, when transitions happen: seasons close and new seasons begin. Maybe you’re a student who will be headed off to college in couple months. Maybe you got a new job. Maybe your employer transitioned you. Those are some of the many natural reasons that you might be leaving your church in the coming weeks.
Maybe you’ve left or are planning on leaving your church for entirely different reasons, though. Maybe your pastor is in a rut. Maybe the worship grates on you. Maybe you feel like you just don’t know anyone there any longer. Maybe you were injured by someone at the church and you tense up at the awkwardness of returning. Maybe you feel like you’re not getting spiritually fed there any longer.
In this four part series we will explore appropriate reasons for leaving a church, how to leave a church, how to choose a church, and how to join a church.
Let’s explore some of the most common reasons[i] people leave the church and reflect whether they are appropriate or not.
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