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

racial reconciliation

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Meant to Be: How a World War II veteran cheated death four times to find love. Bonnie Allen’s story on Reg Harrison is absolute perfection. It begins, “Reg Harrison slides his leather wallet out of his pocket and removes a weathered black-and-white photo of a beautiful woman. ‘I've been carrying that since 1946,’ said the 98-year-old. ‘Our love story? I think it was meant to be.’”

2. iGeneration and iDentity: Kyle Borg with a sobering warning to Generation Z on what the impact of them being formed by social media will mean: “Young people aged 8 to 12 spend an average of six hours a day on technology, and teenagers aged 13 to 18 spend an average of nine hours a day streaming videos, looking at pictures, listening to music, and playing games. That's more social time in a given day than is spent with parents, peers, or sports teams.”

3. Americans Less Optimistic About Race Relations: Aaron Earls reports, “A new study from Lifeway Research conducted prior to the 2020 election finds U.S. adults are less likely now than in 2014 to agree with the statement “We have come so far on racial relations.” Today, 46% say we have made worthwhile progress—28 points fewer than in 2014 when 74% said the same.”

4. Just Keep Going: David McLemore urges us forward. He encourages us, “But God is not letting up on us because he’s not giving up on us. His call is not to take it easy when it gets hard but to press in all the more, especially when it’s hard. The Lord loves us deeply, but he doesn’t coddle us, and he won’t let us coddle ourselves either. He knows the cancer that time is to our zeal, but he has fresh mercies every morning.”

5. In Defense of Um, Er, and Like: Such an enlightening video on why we have verbal hesitations and how they can, like, help.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Are We Seeing the First Non-Christian Generation? Aaron Earls shares recent findings, "In America, at least two-thirds of Generation X (67%), Baby Boomers (76%), and the Silent Generation (84%) say they’re Christian, according to new analysis from Pew Research. Among millennials, however, slightly less than half (49%) identify as Christian. A similar number say they’re not Christian."

2. Christians, Please Stop Labeling One Another: Shai Linne urges Christians, “These days, the labels are flying around like crazy, often used pejoratively and almost always unhelpful. ‘SJW [Social Justice Warrior], ‘Woke,’ ‘Marcist,’ etc. or from the other standpoint, ‘Karen,’ ‘White Evangelical,’ ‘Trumpers,’ etc.”

3. The Three Hardest People to Disciple—and How to Reach Them: Ken Braddy gives some excellent advice on how to disciple the “know-it-all,” the “time-compressed,” and the “spiritually myopic.” Super helpful stuff here! He concludes this way, “The one thing I’ll always want to remind myself is this: I am most likely someone’s difficult person, so I must be quick to extend grace for I need it as well.”

4. A Compassionate, Counter-Cultural Christian Response to Racial Division: Kevin Huang with a nuanced and well thought out response to the current racial turmoil. He concludes, “The Gospel addresses sin. Sin is at the heart of all of society’s problems. Therefore, addressing sin with the Gospel is not a superficial answer. Rather, addressing society’s problems without the Gospel is a superficial answer. May we not be ashamed of the Gospel as God’s all-sufficient tool of salvation for all ethnicities, both Jew and Greek.”

5. Redeeming Pastoral Ambition: My friend Benjamin Vrbicek reflects on the current fires in Arizona and the dangerous fires of ambition in pastors’ hearts. He shares, “Notice the exact phrasing: “servant of all,” not just servant of the greats, like servant of a famous pastor or a seminary president. His point is that the greatness of our service is enhanced not diminished by the lack of greatness of those we serve.”

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This Week's Reflections

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This Week's Reflections

Typically in this space, I point you to some of the best articles I've found that I hope will edify you. During this challenging week that has seen our country torn apart in the wake of a series of injustices against black men and women that received national attention, I offer reflections from men and women I am listening to and learning from. Some of those below are personal friends.

I recognize that the issues are complicated. There are no easy answers. As a Christian I believe that not only is every individual a sinner, but every system in this world is broken as well. There is no just person and there is no just system.

Furthermore, while every person is sinful and every system is broken, there are godly men and women who are protesting and there are godly men and women who are serving in law enforcement. I’m grateful for every fellow believer striving to live out Christ’s prayer, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Our only hope is in our God who can unite Jew and Gentile, change the heart of the murderous Paul, and who will bring about perfect justice on that final day.

Your co-laborer,

John

"Evangelicalism needs a more humble posture of receiving and learning. Allow the church that has been deemed the other, the marginalized church, to be the teacher at this moment, and to have the most dominant form of the church in America be the student who is learning to share power."

Efrem Smith

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7 Ways to Fight Well

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7 Ways to Fight Well

We all have conflict in our lives. Have you ever slammed a door or punched a wall? Have you ever hung up on someone? Have you ever sent off an email or a text with the jab of an angry finger?

We walk through conflict every day: we have disagreements with our spouses, with our parents, with our children, with our co-workers, and with our neighbors. But how do we navigate conflict and come out the other side in one piece? How do we not become the worst version of ourselves in the midst of conflict? What if conflict actually provided an opportunity for us to grow as people, but also to glorify God?

There’s a passage in the Bible that shows just how well conflict can go when we respond out of humility instead of pride.

There’s a massive conflict that is brewing in the early church that has the possibility of destroying the church.

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