Christmas, Theology, Advent, Church, Hospitality
John Beeson
The Faithfulness of God of the Manger

Recently we had someone over and as the night came to a close Angel warmly offered, “Let’s do this again soon!” I wilted as I processed just how many things were on our calendar in the coming month. Just like Angel did, I wanted to be with them again and soon, but her invitation made me flinch.

 

My wife Angel and I are very different people. Angel brings light and life everywhere. People are drawn to her, and she is drawn to people. One of the many things I love about Angel is how she gets caught up in a moment with people. In that space, it’s not unusual that she shares hopes with those we are with of spending more time together. And she means it: there is no doubt of her genuineness.

The Faithfulness of God of the Manger
Advent, Christmas, Theology
John Beeson
A Humble God?

“I don’t compare myself with anybody, but nobody is better.” Michael Jordan

“They say the sky’s the limit, but I think my potential is beyond it.” Jay-Z

“I won’t be happy until I’m as famous as God” Madonna

“I won’t be a rock star. I will be a legend.” Freddie Mercury

“We’re more popular than Jesus now.” John Lennon

We tend to expect that greatest among us are also some of the most arrogant. And why wouldn’t they be? For many who make it to the top of their field, we can see how that arrogance can be a driving force for their greatness.

A Humble God?
Christmas, Forgiveness, Theology
John Beeson
The Just and the Justifier

God became flesh.

Let that sink in. Christianity asserts that God—sovereign, immutable, omnipotent, other—the eternal God who has no beginning and end—became a human being.

 Because many of us have had exposure to Christianity from our early years, it is easy to miss how massive the theological implications of the incarnation are. The incarnation lays the groundwork for a God who chooses to participate in his creation. The incarnation denies the existence of an abstract and distant God, unmuddied by his handiwork.

The Just and the Justifier
Advent, Christmas, Theology
John Beeson
The Theology of the Manger

“God did not, as the Bible says, create man in his own image; on the contrary, man created God in his own image.” Ludwig Feuerbach dropped this theological bombshell three years before Friedrich Nietzsche’s birth. Feuerbach, a name forgotten by most, but who influenced Nietzsche, wrote these words in his book, The Essence of Christianity (1841). He argued that human beings project their own attributes and desires onto an imagined deity, creating God in their own image. This for Feuerbach, is the essence of Christianity (and indeed all religions), the deification of our human ideals. “What man wishes to be, he makes his God… God is the outward projection of a man’s inward nature.”

The Theology of the Manger
Death, Gratitude, Prayer, Suffering
John Beeson
Go To a Funeral

We Westerners avoid death.

 

When was the last time you walked through a cemetery? When was the last funeral you went to? Our churches no longer have cemeteries, those who are older head to retirement communities and then to head to long-term care or assisted care facilities. The number of funerals held in churches has diminished. Death has become professionalized, antisepticised, and remote.

Go To a Funeral

Biblical Studies

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Every Week My Dog Protects Us From the Amazon Delivery Driver: On the Danger of Learning the Wrong Lesson

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Every Week My Dog Protects Us From the Amazon Delivery Driver: On the Danger of Learning the Wrong Lesson

I’m working from home today. It’s a great working environment: calm and focused. Our dog lies peacefully at my feet. Until a vehicle dares to enter our cul-de-sac, that is. Then our 25-pound Australian Labradoodle leaps to the window, both paws on the window sill, and turns into a ferocious beast.

The Amazon delivery guy pulls up to the curb, jumps out with a package in tow, and places it at the front door. Our dog howls as though a cadre of gunmen have encircled our property. This is no sociable bark to his neighborhood doggie friends: this is a protect-the-house-at-all-costs-bay. The deliveryman hustles back to his van and pulls out of the cul-de-sac.

My dog settles back down at my feet. He’s protected the home from another invasion. In his mind, he’s batting a thousand. 849 attempted burglaries all thwarted by his fearsome presence.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Humility is the Main Ingredient in Prayer, Thanksgiving, and Repentance: This post by Thomas Schreiner is so simple but so profound! I need to read this regularly. He says, “One of the most humble prayers in the world is “Help me, Lord.” We remember the simple prayer of the Canaanite woman when everything seemed to be against her. She cried out to Jesus, “Help me” (Matt. 15:25). Prayer is humble because when we pray, we are saying that God is merciful and mighty, that He is wise and sovereign, and that He knows far better than we do what is best for us.”

  2. 7 Encouraging Trends of Global Christianity: Aaron Earls reports good news emerging primarily from the global south. He shares, “Not only is religion growing overall, but Christianity specifically is growing. With a 1.17% growth rate, almost 2.56 billion people will identify as a Christian by the middle of 2022. By 2050, that number is expected to top 3.33 billion.”

  3. 6 Concerning Trends in Global Christianity: Aaron Earls shares the other side of the coin. He concludes, “At the turn of the 20th century, fewer than 900 million people were unevangelized. Today, that number is more than 2.2 billion who’ve never been told of Jesus. By 2050, the Gordon-Conwell report estimates the global unevangelized population will top 2.75 billion.”

  4. The False Philosophy of Cancel Culture: Jonathan Hoyes explains why cancel culture reduces human relationships to a power struggle, “Put simply, cancel culture is a culture of bullying. What starts with a difference of ideas ends with a willful public destruction of other human beings. Those who claimed to be the ones bullied have now become the bullies themselves, all because of a shift of power.”

  5. What’s the Tallest Thing We Could Possibly Build? Something a lot taller than I would have possibly imagined.

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Jonah the Anti-Hero

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Jonah the Anti-Hero

The anti-hero is the new hero. Walter White, the mild-mannered chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin in Breaking Bad, pulled you in as he ascended the heights of the underground world. Don Draper had you rooting for him during his self-destructive descent over the course of Mad Men’s seven seasons. JK Rowling’s pen had readers’ jaws drop to learn that the villain Severus Snape had more to him. And, of course, which lover of The Godfather couldn’t help but root for the complicated Michael Corleone? But the first anti-hero came long before White, Draper, Snape, and Corleone.

Jonah was Walter White before Walter White was Walter White. And yet that’s not how most of us learn the story as children. Jonah is the hero of most children’s Bibles. I still remember hearing the sanitized story of Jonah as a kid. Jonah runs from God, experiences a conversion in the belly of the whale[i], and with newfound fervor converts the metropolis of Nineveh. The end.

The problem with that telling is that the book doesn’t end there at all.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. No Creaky Wallet Love: Glenna Marshall considers God’s love. “I used to think that love was something God doled out with miserly resistance. I pictured Jack Arnold, the disgruntled dad of the 1988 television series, “The Wonder Years,” slowly opening his wallet, which creaked with stinginess as he forked out a couple of dollars for Kevin’s allowance. Kevin held his breath, eyes fixed on his dad’s tight-lipped grimace.”

  2. Defending Sound Doctrine Against the Deconstruction of American Evangelicalism: This is a long article from Jonathan Leeman, but helpful in engaging some serious questions confronting the church. I appreciate Leeman’s measured and non-reactive approach. He shares, “Too often I read on social media, “I don’t have time to listen to people who belong to group ‘x.’” Intentionally or not, I fear that such claims make Story authoritative over the Bible. It communicates, “My Story disqualifies whatever you might say from the Bible.” And to me, this sounds like truth-in-service-of-power.”

  3. Secularism Proves Christianity’s Influence: Glen Scrivner asks what will happen to our understanding of equality and compassion when cut off from its Christian roots, “When equality is divorced from the Christian story, it risks becoming a radical individualism.”

  4. Yes, You Need to Talk to the Manager: Samuel James shares a generational difference that younger generations might want to reclaim from our elders. He says, “If you ask to speak to the manager, you are a “Karen,” which is what the Internet calls someone who is ridiculous and overbearing. But in real life, often times it is the most cringe, most apparently overbearing responses that actually do achieve meaningful redress. By contrast, the contemporary spirit is to get revenge on the people and places that offend you by working remotely for their destruction. Don’t actually speak to them, don’t actually complain, don’t actually risk your sense of self in the (misplaced) hope that they will fix it. Speak about them, complain to others, make the solution both obvious and unworkable, and bask in the affirmation of your peers.”

  5. Cacti in Bloom: So cool.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Nothing Bitter, Only Sweet: Brittany Lee Allen considers whether we will miss the good things of earth in heaven. “Will we look back longingly at our life before eternity? …The truth is, we will leave behind treasured gifts when we enter heaven, but our minds can’t begin to imagine the treasure it will be to be with Jesus.”

  2. A Giant Space Rock and Sodom: Archaeological evidence now confirms the biblical account of Sodom. “As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).”

  3. ‘One Anothers’ I Can’t Find in the New Testament: Ray Ortlund explains why we can’t find the following “one anothers” in the New Testament: “sanctify one another, humble one another, scrutinize one another, pressure one another, embarrass one another, corner one another, interrupt one another, defeat one another, sacrifice one another, shame one another, marginalize one another, exclude one another, judge one another, run one another’s lives, confess one another’s sins...”

  4. Jephthah and the Dangers of Deficient Theology: Russ Meek begins his insightful post on a passage I just preached on with this, “The book of Judges is a minefield for even the most experienced Bible readers. Idolatry, civil war, incest, and rape—and that’s just God’s people. Jephthah’s story in Judges 11–12 is particularly disturbing.”

  5. TobyMac Talks About Loss: It’s worth listening to what TobyMac says about navigating grief after the death of his son.

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Cactus Spines and Groaning

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Cactus Spines and Groaning

Spine: that’s the technical word for the pointy things that come out of cacti. Most Arizonans use more colloquial expressions like prickers or stickers when referencing them. Either way, they’re nothing to laugh at. If you’ve lived in the Sonoran desert for any length of time, you’ve used a pair of tweezers to yank them from your skin.

After my parents moved to Tucson, my grandfather visited from Florida. Amazed by the beautiful and seemingly soft “fur” covering prickly pear cacti, he stroked the apparently innocuous fuzz. The prickly pear gifted him with a few hundred spines that pierced his fingertips. He groaned.

Recently I was doing some yard work and got too close to a saguaro’s spine as I tried to weed around the base of the cactus. The spine pierced my fingernail. I groaned.

It has remained lodged there for over two months. Initially located at the base of my fingernail, it was impossible to remove without taking off my entire fingernail. The fingernail itself now holds the tip of the spine against the flesh under my fingernail. It’s a tiny amount of pain, but pain that will not leave. I groan.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. What Was Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh? Dane Ortlund shares, “The presence of God will sustain Paul; the power of God will strengthen him. What we must not miss is that it is not Paul’s strength but God’s. Paul’s contribution is weakness. But this is not a concession; it is precisely what God needs. This is the mystery, the wonder, the glory, of apostolic Christianity: our weakness attracts, not repels, God’s own power. Our lowness and incapacities, which we naturally fear and flee, are precisely where God loves to dwell.”

  2. 22 Vital Stats for Ministry in 2022: This is a loaded post. I’ll be thinking about many of these. This is one important data point, “Few American adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (5.6%), according to Gallup, but the numbers are much higher among younger generations (15.9% of Gen Z). Almost every Christian student will have an LGBTQ friend or classmate, so church leaders must speak on issues of sexuality with truth and love.”

  3. Endangered Attention: Scott Hubbard reminds us that, “When we give someone our full attention — our patient, focused, self-forgetful gaze — we look a little like God.”

  4. Shall We Cancel the Theologians? Carl Trueman asks how we should respond to the fact that many Christian heroes have significant sins: Jonathan Edwards owned slaves, Martin Luther hated Jews, and Martin Luther King Jr was a womanizer, for instance. He asks, “The question—and it is a very legitimate question—is whether we should continue to take seriously such men who failed so signally to conform to moral positions that we now regard as self-evident and, indeed, a consistent application of the Christianity into which they both had such signal insights. Should we cancel them?”

  5. We Just Wanted to Be Bad Guys: This kid. Hilarious.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. My Cup Overflows: HB Charles Jr. reflects on a familiar text with fresh insight, “Psalm 23 is not the boast of a spoiled youth. This is not the testimony of a trouble-free life. It is not the memoir of a peacetime king. David was a neglected shepherd boy in his father’s house. David was a fugitive from the murderous ways of Saul. David was a father whose rebellious children broke his heart. David was a wartime king who faced one enemy after another. David was an exile whose own sought to overthrow him, Yet David exclaims, ‘My cup overflows.’”

2. Into the Waves: Andrea Sanborne reflects, “It is tempting to shift our weight a little in an attempt to be more comfortable in the dominant culture. To build our house there, on the soft sands of acceptance. Since childhood we have all struggled to fit in with the group holding power, whether that be the popular girls at the lunch table or the consensus at the board meeting. But when the storm comes, we will regret not building our lives on something more solid.”

3. Not Just Doctrine, but Culture and Friendship Too: Ray Ortlund urges us to not reduce what God invites us into, “I believe that orthodox doctrine, gracious culture and lasting friendships, if widely shared among our churches — by God’s grace, for his glory alone — can accomplish something profound in our generation. Much more could be said, of course. But I don’t see us making progress without these threads wonderfully woven together by us, among us.”

4. Now More Than Ever: Here is cause for encouragement from JK Wall, “For people who are pro-life, there has never been a time as good as this. All Christians should celebrate.”

5. Worst Year Ever: The folks at Radiolab ask the question: what was the worst year ever? You will be surprised by their answer.

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How to Make Your Spiritual Life Purposeful: Your Vocational Call, part 3

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How to Make Your Spiritual Life Purposeful: Your Vocational Call, part 3

What gives you purpose in seasons that feel meaningless or directionless? God does.

When you think of godly leaders, King David is in rarified air. He is, after all, the famed slayer of Goliath, the one who was known as “the man after God’s own heart,” and the greatest king in Israel’s history. But, from a human perspective, the majority of his life seemed directionless and even wasted. And yet every step had an incredible purpose. There is no King David without his journey.

As a young man, Samuel anointed David’s head and “the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward.”[i] Within a few years David defeated Goliath and was promised to Saul’s daughter in marriage. Surely David must have thought that his ascension to the throne was near. If I were in David’s shoes I would have anticipated my reign to begin at any moment.

But as things so often are in God’s economy, our expectations are not God’s. It would be many years before David would sit on the throne.[ii] David would go from the rising star of Israel, whom the people sung about in the streets, to fleeing, to exile, wandering with his motley band across the hostile terrain of Palestine. Even after so many years had passed, he twice refused to take the life of the man who not only sought his life, but blocked his anointing.[iii]

What must have sustained David for these long years was not only the presence of God, but also God’s purpose for him. Even as he ran for his life, he speaks of his trust and his purpose, “But the king [referring to himself, who wasn’t yet king] shall rejoice in God.” So it is with the power of a purposeful spiritual life for us. When we know and understand the identity and purposes God has placed on our lives, it sustains us through tremendous difficulty, which is also God’s purpose.

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How to Make Your Spiritual Life Purposeful: What is Your Destination? Part 2

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How to Make Your Spiritual Life Purposeful: What is Your Destination? Part 2

A few years ago my wife and I took a hike for my birthday. We enjoyed the beautiful Arizona morning, winding our way up into the foothills of the Catalina Mountains through the lush Sonoran desert. Creosotes, palo verdes, mesquite trees. barrel cacti, cholla, ocotillos, and saguaros sprang out of the mountainous terrain. We went on a well-traveled trail toward our destination: pools tucked into the Catalina foothills, 2.8 miles from the trailhead.

As inexperienced hikers who hadn’t hiked the trail in some 20 years, we overestimated our progress and asked multiple passersby how far away the pools were. It shouldn’t take this long to go 2.8 miles, right? Our legs grew heavy and my wife wondered if we had made a wrong turn. Maybe we should just turn around?

We finally crested a hill and below us lay the still, emerald pools. Our pace quickened with the pools in view and the final 15 minutes sped by. We relaxed on sun-bathed boulders, ate a snack, took some pictures, and then headed back. Knowing the terrain now and having a much better sense of how far the 2.8 mile destination was, there were no moments of confusion or frustration. The trail seemed to melt quickly behind us and we arrived back at the trailhead quickly.

Knowing your destination changes your journey.

This is a series about fixing a spiritual destination, and doing so changes our spiritual journey.

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