Christian Living, Culture, Politics, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Vulgar Authenticity

Who is your favorite celebrity? Your favorite political pundit? Your favorite politician?

Why are you drawn to these individuals? Maybe it is their personality. Perhaps it is because you respect their convictions. Possibly, it is because of their unique style.

Taylor Swift might be the most beloved celebrity in the world. Many have commented that one of the reasons that Swift has cultivated such a devoted following is her accessibility and down-to-earth qualities, from what she wears to the love stories she writes about in her music.

Vulgar Authenticity
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

Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Why Pastors Must Talk About Race: Derwin Gray reminds us, “Our ethnicity is a gift from God reflecting his multifaceted wisdom. Biblical characters are not colorless or cultureless. They were people situated in real places, with real, image-bearing ethnicities, in particular cultures and times—just as we are.

  2. An Open Letter to a Distressed Sufferer: Mike Emlet offers gentle word to those who are hurting. He concludes, “I’ll close for now. Please know that your burden is my burden and I am privileged to walk alongside you. That’s another way in which you are not alone, embedded as you are in the body of Christ.”

  3. How the Gospel is Good News for Every Story: Scott McConnell with an insightful article on how the gospel speaks to every cultural worldview. He begins, “Missiologists often describe three worldviews different cultures exhibit: innocence-guilt, power-fear, and honor-shame. The innocence-guilt worldview believes being and doing right is what matters most. Much of what is considered right in these cultures has been codified in law, so following the law is very important. The power-fear worldview says overcoming fear by tapping into power matters most. Typically, that power is believed to be accessed from the spirit world. The honor-shame worldview says the honor and wellbeing of your group, tribe, or extended family matters most.

  4. Sing Your Heart Out at Church (Even if You Hate the Music): Brett McCracken begins, “I love church pipe organs and classical music. I prefer Victorian hymns and Stuart Townend songs over Hillsong and Bethel. I dislike “modern renditions” of old hymns, where the melody is slightly tweaked or a new chorus is added in between original verses. A simple piano, organ, or acoustic guitar accompaniment to “Be Thou My Vision” will do just fine.”

  5. Does God Love Me Just the Way I Am? Ligon Duncan answers the question.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. What Do I Do When I Can’t Seem to Get Over My Grief? Alasdair Groves provides a nuanced answer. He asks, what do we do with “grief that just does not relent and it aches and I did not expect it to ache this long and it seems to still be aching and I’m not sure why. I cannot seem to get over it. I want to start by saying getting over it is maybe not the best way to capture the biblical response to grief.

  2. What is Dispensationalism? Keith Mathison with a helpful explanation of an influential theological camp in America. At the heart of the difference between dispensationalism and reformed theology is this, “Dispensationalism differs from Reformed covenant theology in a number of ways, but the most significant is this idea of two peoples of God.”

  3. You Might Be a Stingy Forgiver If… Cindy Matson begins with this, “Sometimes anger just feels so good, doesn’t it? In the moment we’re letting the other person finally get their comeuppance, we find pleasure, just as we do in all sins…”

  4. When You Feel Small, Look to the Cosmos and the Cross: Philip Yancey concludes, “A God beyond the limits of space and time has a boundless capacity of love for his creations, no matter how small or rebellious they might be. As it happens, that message is best expressed not from a whirlwind, or burning bush, or smoking mountain—but rather person to person, through Jesus and his followers.”

  5. Death and Taxes: I particularly appreciated the first half of this This American Life episode that focuses on hospice care.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Don’t Date that Guy: Melissa Edgington shares sage advice she offers her 17-year-old daughter. “If I could offer one piece of advice to women who are dating, it would be this: don’t go on even one date with a man you already know you shouldn’t marry. Every marriage begins with a first date. Feelings of flattery can quickly lead to feelings to infatuation which can quickly lead to feelings of love.”

  2. Imagining Your “Well Done”: Reagan Rose reshapes advice from leaders about living a life directed toward what you want on your tombstone to living a life directed toward what you hope Jesus says to you. He says, “There’s one thing that always bothered me about the practice of writing your own eulogy. It emphasizes living a life motivated by what other people will say about you. When, instead, we should be living for an audience of One.”

  3. How to Spot Political Manipulation and Give it No Quarter: Bruce Ashford offers some helpful tools to go along with this assessment, “In the political sphere, manipulation seems to be the soup du jour. One might even conclude that some political leaders have elevated the logical fallacy to the level of their own literary genre. Thus, it is important for us to be aware of the ways in which our hearts and minds can be “stolen” by political manipulation.”

  4. As If God Ever Made an Atlantic Wide Enough: Tim Challies quotes Theodore Cuyler, who says, “There are some of us who have known what it is to drink bitter draughts of affliction, and to have the four corners of our house smitten by a terrible sorrow. At such times, how hollow and worthless were many of the stereotyped prescriptions for comfort!”

  5. Earthrise, Then and Now: Beautiful footage of the earth rising and setting on the moon.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. How Shohei Ohtani Made Baseball Fun Again: This whets my appetite for baseball again. Ohtani is so much fun: a starting pitcher and a designated hitter, he is a unique talent who is a joy to watch. Daniel Riley begins his story this way, “Not since the days of Babe Ruth has one of baseball's greatest hitters also been one of its finest pitchers. Now, the reigning MVP is opening up for the first time about his singular place in modern baseball.”

  2. Rejoice in Suffering: Guy Richard with a powerful observation, “[Jesus] could not be there [in Colossae] physically, and, as a result, the Colossian church could not witness the sufferings of Christ for themselves in person. Paul’s sufferings, therefore, made up for this “lack” by showing the Colossian Christians the afflictions of Christ in his own suffering.

  3. Toward a Better Discussion About Abuse: Kevin DeYoung brings some much-needed clarity to a thorny topic. He says, “[T]he current discussion about abuse—as it is being played out online, in articles, in books, and in churches—gets quickly twisted and tied up in knots.”

  4. Three Obstacles that Hold Leaders Back (and How to Overcome): Steve Brown has several strong points in this article. In telling us to choose what we are listening to he says, “You have both the choice and ability to shut down unhealthy mindsets. As Dallas Willard writes in Renovation of the Heart, “The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow our minds to dwell upon.”

  5. After Disruption: Andrew Roycroft reflects on what Covid means for the church in the West, “This means that regathering is not a sifting through the shrapnel of hard experience to reconstruct what we once had, but fashioning new materials which speak our past in plaintive and appreciative tones. That reconstructive work can prepare the church for the new adventure of being a people regrouped, reorganised, and reorientated towards what God would do in our present, building on our broken past, and holding fast to our certain future.”

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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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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. 1 in 7 Global Christians Faced Persecution in 2021: Aaron Earls shares the sobering Open Doors Report, “In the past year, 360 million Christians, or 1 in 7 believers around the world, suffered significant persecution for their faith. Every day in 2021, an average of more than 16 believers were killed for following Jesus. With close to 6,000 total martyrs, 2021 saw a 24% increase in Christians killed for the faith.”

  2. Escapism and the False Narrative of Shame: Brady Goodwin explains, “Whatever its expression, escapism reflects a response flowing from within us. Deep in our hearts, we seek to escape from what we find unbearable. For some of us, such choices come in response to the everyday challenges of life. For others, it is the very perception of ourselves that we flee.”

  3. Whose Purpose in Your Suffering Will Prevail? Randy Alcorn explains that every time we come to the crossroads of suffering we meet the choice between God and Satan’s purposes, “The very thing Satan intended for Job’s destruction, God intended for his betterment and ultimate reward (though certainly at a terrible cost).”

  4. Why Most People Avoid Conflict and Why You Shouldn’t: Todd Linaman says, “By avoiding conflict, you miss opportunities for growth. Growth always involves change, and even positive changes often involve some level of tension and discomfort. To choose to avoid conflict is to choose personal stagnation – the opposite of growth.”

  5. Did Jesus Die for the Sins of Every Person? Helpful video that considers this challenging question.

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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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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Want a Happy Relationship? Go to Church Together: New research by the Institute of Family Studies. Aaron Earls reports, “More than 3 in 4 regular church-attending couples (78 percent) say they are “very happy” or “extremely happy” in their relationship.”

  2. 12 Ways to Help a Pastor Stay in Ministry: I appreciated this article from Scott McConnell, which highlights ways both pastors and congregants can keep pastors in ministry. For instance, speaking to the need for a pastor to be humble, McConnell notes that, “In [a] study of pastors, a one unit increase in level of agreement (from somewhat agree to strongly agree, for instance) that “the church would not have achieved the progress it has without me” corresponds to being over three times less likely to remain in pastorate.”

  3. Stop Eating Spiritual Candy: Amy Gannett warns, “Christians frequently exchange the nourishing truths of God’s Word for “sweeter” substitutes. Particularly when life wears us thin, we can lean on half-truths about our own resilience rather than on reminders of God’s sovereignty and sufficiency.”

  4. Death Comes in Slow Drips: Chrys Jones speaks of the danger of allowing sin to drip into our lives, “Then it happened. He fell “in love with this present world” and deserted Paul (2 Tim. 4:10). While there is some debate as to whether Demas was an apostate or not, the fact remains: Demas chose sin instead of supporting Paul in the work of the ministry. Falling in love doesn’t happen in an instant. Demas chose to dwell on the world day by day, drip by drip, until he made the decision to walk away.”

  5. What Animals Kill the Most Humans Each Year? I found this article from World Atlas interesting. I’ll give you a preview: #4 at 25,000 deaths is the dog, #5 at 10,000 deaths is the Tsetse fly.

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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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