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

Mission

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Partners in the Gospel

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Partners in the Gospel

“We won!” If you’re a sports fan, you might have bellowed those words when your favorite team emerged victorious from an epic showdown.

But of course, we know that we didn’t win at all. I sat on my couch and cheered for my Chiefs. But it was Andy Reid who drew up the play, Patrick Maholmes who threw the pass, and Travis Kelce who caught it.

They, not we, won.

Many of us have come to believe the opposite lie regarding the church. It’s easy to think they are doing the work of the gospel. In a celebrity culture, it’s easy to get sucked into thinking that pastors do ministry and preachers do gospel work. This isn’t true. God’s ministry is advanced by his people collectively.

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Lessons from an Anti-Hero: Speak

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Lessons from an Anti-Hero: Speak

Jonah doesn’t get much right. Not much at all. God called him to arise and go to Nineveh. Nope and nope. Jonah ran the opposite direction. But after God gets Jonah’s attention, Jonah ever-so-tentatively obeys God’s call.

The third call God placed on Jonah’s life was that he “call out against” Nineveh “the message that I tell you.” After being spit up by the fish and told a second time to “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you,” Jonah finally heads to Nineveh. We aren’t told what God tells Jonah to tell the Ninevites. The story moves ahead and we find Jonah wandering the streets of Nineveh, speaking these words, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”[i]

We don’t know whether Jonah delivered this message once or multiple times as he walked through the city. The text is ambiguous about that. What was the tone Jonah delivered the message with? Was he compassionate? Fiery? Earnest? Certainly none of these. If we look ahead one chapter, it is clear that Jonah’s obedience isn’t whole-hearted. After he delivers the message, Jonah sits perched on an overlook, anticipating the destruction of the city. If there was any pep in Jonah’s step as he delivered his message, it was anticipatory malice. He hoped that God would bring destruction, that salt would be poured on the wound of Nineveh’s disobedience.

So let’s picture the scene of Jonah’s evangelistic walk through Nineveh.

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The Courageous Multiplication of God’s Church in India

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The Courageous Multiplication of God’s Church in India

We just returned from our second trip to India and it was another unforgettable experience. I’ve been blessed to have been able to participate on quite a few mission trips over the year, but as powerful as each of those trips have been and as many God-glorifying organizations I’ve worked with, nothing compares with these trips to India.

Through a series of providential connections, New Life has connected with Mission Voice Network, an organization of indigenous church planters in Southern India, where fewer than 2% know Jesus. Mission Voice Network’s heart is to plant churches where 80% of India’s 1.2 billion people live: in the rural communities of India. This is needed because 80% of funding for church planting in India is being sent to India’s cities.

This vision is being carried out in a country with significant persecution. A month ago Open Doors released their latest ranking of the most persecuted countries for Christians and India ranked #10 with the additional designation of being the country in the world with the worst physical or mental abuse directed at Christians.

Mission Voice Network packs our time from morning to late in the evening, allowing us to visit many pastors and congregations. We attended pastors’ homes, evangelistic outreaches, baptism services, evangelism training services, church services, regional pastors’ gatherings, and Mission Voice Network’s Director’s conference. Every pastor has a different story, many converted from Hinduism, and many highlighted by God’s miraculous intervention. I shared a few of these stories last year.

One of the sweet blessings of a return trip is reconnecting with the many godly pastors and digging deeper relationally. We were also able to visit many new churches. One of those pastors, William, is one of the few second-generation Christians in the network. But that doesn’t mean William’s[i] life has been easy.

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The Gods Fight for Your Devotion

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The Gods Fight for Your Devotion

The competition for your devotion is fierce.

We just arrived in India: it’s my second time visiting this beautiful nation. One of the first thing that strikes you as a Westerner is just how different religious devotion manifests itself in this country. In this Hindu nation, the competition for devotion is manifested in the temples—some lavish, some simple—erected to the 33 million Hindu gods. The gods scuttle for devotion based on geographic region, power, and personality.

If Hinduism is foreign to you, you might roll your eyes at the idea of 33 million gods clamoring for your devotion. It might as foolish as believing that leprechauns are at the end of a rainbow or that there are unicorns sipping water in faraway forests.

American Gods

And yet, is our context any different? There are no fewer gods fighting for our hearts in America than there are in India.

Many Christians would be on guard in a Hindu context. You might even feel a measure of oppression passing in front of a Hindu temple. Perhaps it would make you pause and pray. And yet, the gods of the Western world barely register in our daily lives.

What gods am I speaking of? The gods of self, pride, respect, lust, comfort, distraction, law, religion, bitterness, fear, and anxiety fight for our hearts. The demigods of money, vocation, social media, job titles, cable, internet, sexuality, cell phones, productivity, health, pornography, education, body-image, cars, spouses, children, friends, sports, and on and on can do the bidding of gods.

33 million doesn’t seem like such an overwhelming number all of a sudden.

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A Persecuted, but Thriving Church

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A Persecuted, but Thriving Church

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi won re-election this past May in a critical victory that has been a blow for religious protection in India. Narendra Modi is part of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party with many in the party who have pressed for India to be a Hindu-only nation. BJP’s president and Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah called Muslim immigrants “infiltrators” and “termites” and promised to “remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha, Hindus, and Sikhs.”[i]

Other members of the BJP party include Pragya Singh Thakur, who is currently facing terrorism charges connected to a bomb attack on Muslims. Indian President Ram Nath Kovind declared that “Islam and Christianity are alien” to India.

In this environment, religious hate crimes have risen dramatically. In the past decade, 90% of the hate crimes have been committed since Modi was elected in 2014.[ii] A group of leaders have vowed to rid the country of Christians and Muslims by 2021. The group’s leader and member of the BJP party, Rajeshwar Singh proclaimed, “The Muslims and Christians don’t have any right to stay here. So, they would either be converted to Hinduism or forced to run away from here.”[iii]

And yet, in the midst of this hostility, God’s church is flourishing in India. Only 2% of Indians are Christian, and yet even that number is miraculous. Many of those who have come to Christ out of Hindu backgrounds have suffered rejection and beatings from their families.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.      Poll Shows that Americans Like the Idea of the Bible, but Don't Actually Read it: Lifeway reports, " About half of Americans (53 percent) have read relatively little of the Bible. One in 10 has read none of it, while 13 percent have read a few sentences. Thirty percent say they have read several passages or stories."

2.      More Than a Quarter of the Deaths in Holland are Induced: This sobering report by John Burger finds that, "Fifteen years after the Netherlands decriminalized euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, more than 25 percent of all deaths in the nation are induced, rather than by illness or other natural causes."

3.      My Declaration of Faithful Disobedience: Dr. Wang Yi, Chinese pastor who was imprisoned in December, wrote this manifesto. Please read it. Among the many jewels in the letter, Yi writes, " As a pastor, my disobedience is one part of the gospel commission. Christ’s great commission requires of us great disobedience. The goal of disobedience is not to change the world but to testify about another world."

4.      The Importance of Clarity in Leadership: My friend and pastor Glen Elliott with a great post: " There’s too much noise and too many distractions in our world and anything short of being crystal clear won’t be heard. More than ever, folks want and need the clarity of a compelling vision, mission and purpose. And great leaders provide that."

5.      Hearing His Voice: Please watch this marvelous story of an unreached people group who are introduced to the Word of God. It's 25 minutes of encouragement.

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The Faces of God’s Movement in India

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The Faces of God’s Movement in India

Just last month the updated world watch list was published. The list ranks countries that have the highest level of persecution of Christians.[i] Sandwiched between Iran and Syria, India ranked as the country where Christians endure the tenth most persecution in the world. That’s worse than Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and China. India is a very difficult place to be a Christian.

Numbers are one thing, faces and stories are another. Over the past two weeks we had the privilege of meeting hundreds of God’s saints in India who are not merely enduring extreme persecution, but doing so joyfully. Over the course of two weeks we had personal conversations with dozens of these pastors and their wives. Only one said he had not experienced significant persecution and opposition. Every other couple we met lived under the constant threat of violence and most had been beaten and thrown out of their homes at least once.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,”[ii] Jesus said.

Let me tell you some of the stories of these blessed ones[iii]:

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Heading to India

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Heading to India

This Friday we depart Tucson at 12:35pm and will arrive in Trivandrum, India late on Saturday after over 21 hours in the air. This will be my first time to India and I can’t wait to see what God has in store for us as learners and teachers.

India is one of the most populated countries in the world (its population is a third of the land mass of the United States and yet has more than four times the US population!) and is a predominantly Hindu nation (80%) with another 13% of its population Muslim.[i] The country has been highly resistant to the gospel with a mere 2% of the population claiming to be Christian.[ii] 80% of India’s population lives in rural villages. It has been estimated there are 700,000 villages in India and that there is no church in 600,000 of those villages.

New Life forged a relationship with Pastor Vijayan (an Indian pastor) about six years ago. At that time Pastor Vijayan had been instrumental in discipling and organizing support for 78 Indian pastors in the state of Tamil Nadu, located in southern India. Most of those pastors are converts out of Hinduism with little formal training who now are leading house churches. Theirs is an uphill struggle against persistent poverty and persecution.

Six years later, by the grace of God, Pastor Vijayan’s work has exploded. He now supports a network of 1,000 pastors throughout southern India. It’s mind-boggling how God has used Pastor Vijayan and humbling that he reached out to us asking if we would be able to help with their biggest need: providing these pastors and their wives biblical training.

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Port au Prince and Antioch

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Port au Prince and Antioch

It was only 72 hours ago I was on Haitian soil. I have the vivid memories and the jet lag to prove it. 48 hours ago, on Tucson soil, Pastor Greg preached out of Acts 11 about the Antioch church and our call to be a church on God's multiplying mission. The sermon hadn't been planned to coincide with the return of our team, but the timing couldn't have been more perfect.

I'll return to Antioch in a second, but first let me share about a little about our trip. We had two primary objectives in our partnership with Cross to Light Ministries. The first was that we led a group of students through a week-long study of the book of Job (this study filled our mornings). The second was that we hosted medical clinics in the afternoon. By God's grace, both were successful.

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Headed to Haiti

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Headed to Haiti

Haiti was thrown into the public spotlight recently under unfortunately circumstances. It is disputed whether or not President Trump called Haiti “a %*$&hole country,” but it is not disputed that those sentiments reflect the attitude of many Americans toward Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.  

Friday I head off with a New Life group to Haiti. It will be my first time in Haiti, but Haiti has been close to my heart for many years. Our church in Princeton had a close relationship with Haiti and we have a friend who currently serves as a missionary in Haiti I have been hoping to be able to visit for many years.

I would be grateful for your partnership in prayer as we continue our partnership with Cross to Light Ministries. Cross to Light trains up indigenous pastors and has planted dozens of churches in Haiti (below is a picture of Pastor Kyle with students at the Bible Training Center from a previous trip). I look forward to teaching at the center with Pastor Kyle, helping at medical clinics in the tent cities and villages, and assisting in construction projects.

Haiti has struggled as a people and country for over two hundred years.

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