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. Jesus Versus the Trade-In Society: Samuel James begins his excellent article, “It seems to me that if there’s one thing that our current version of advertising-based capitalism teaches us all, it’s that everything is replaceable: everything can be reproduced, or traded in for a new and improved model. And that applies to coaches, to churches, to spouses. We live in a trade-in society.”

  2. 9 Myths About Abortion Rights and Roe v. Wade: Kevin DeYoung considers some misconceptions. For instance, “Myth #6: Our abortion laws are mainstream compared with the rest of the world. Truth: The United States is one of only 10 nations that allow abortion after 14 weeks of gestation. Only four countries allow abortion for any reason after viability: Canada, North Korea, China, and the United States

  3. The Ukelele and the Cross: J.A. Medders says, “Theologians have wrestled with the various angles that describe what Jesus did for us on the cross. Some will even argue that there is only one way to describe and define what Jesus did for us on the cross. Rather than pick sides on the theological playground, I want to propose a harmony of notes that are played at the cross of Christ.”

  4. How Not to Pray with a Hurting Loved One: Blake Glosson’s post is helpful to all of us. He says, “There’s certainly a time to give advice, but prayer isn’t the place for it. Prayer is not a free pass to share your opinions with the other person while pretending to talk to God (this is manipulative and the other person will feel it).”

  5. Constructing the Roman Road: A short video on what became a significant cause for the spread of the gospel.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Is Evangelicalism Today Truly Evangelical? It’s a good question Michael Reeves asks. His answer? Not very. “In country after country, we hear stories of abusive and self-serving evangelical leaders. And they are surely only the more noticeable symptoms of a deeper malaise. The same spiritual emptiness that causes dramatic and high-profile falls from grace also stifles heartfelt worship in the pew.”

  2. Does Romans 7 Describe a Christian? John Piper considers whether Paul’s depiction of his struggle against sin is when he was a follower of Jesus or not. “This is a response to the objection from Romans 7:24. Can a real Christian cry out,’“Who will set me free from the body of this death?” To which my response is, Can a real Christian not cry out, ‘Who will set me free from this body of death’?”

  3. If God Really Loved Me, He Would… Sarah Walton begins, “Why are we surprised when trials come? Why do we quickly question God’s goodness, love, and control when we experience the pain of this world? For me, I think it’s because there is a pervasive belief that subtly infiltrates my thought life. One that, deep down, still believes God would keep me from harm and rescue me from pain if he truly loved me.

  4. When Good Things Spiritually Harm Our Kids: Melissa Edgington considers the threat of good things to our kids’ souls. She says, “No true Christian who is a parent would ever in a million years say that an extra-curricular is worth their child’s soul. Yet, what seems like no big deal can result in a lifetime of faithlessness.”

  5. Detailed View of a Crater on Mars: The wonders in our universe!

  6. The Russell Moore Show Podcast: Rachel Denhollander Calls for a Southern Baptist Reckoning: Russell Moore and Rachel Denhollander reflect on the devastating investigation.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. What Convinced James His Brother Was God? Robby Lashua begins, “My brother isn’t God. It’s pretty obvious (we grew up together, after all), and nothing he could do or say could convince me of his divinity. I’m not God, either, and nothing I could do or say would convince him otherwise, too. Yet, somehow, Jesus convinced his brother he was God.”

  2. How Do I Know I’m Really Repentant? Jared Wilson takes on this important question. He begins, “What does a repentant heart look like? Does it just look sad? Timid? Is it simply agreeable? How would we discern the difference in ourselves between a heart turning from sin and one seeking simply to manage or alleviate the consequences of it?”

  3. Still: Chris Thomas contrasts the difference between finding stillness in our surroundings between finding stillness in our hearts. He says, “I mention that because I’ve seen it in my own children. I’ve heard their cries in the night, rushed to their room to comfort them, only to be fought off with flailing arms; their saviour isn’t seen, only the shadows and monsters of the night fill their vision. First with gentle voice, but then with firm command that carries the edge of comfort, I subdue their fight with hands that hold them tight, and a voice that is meant to remind them of my strength.”

  4. Americans Most Likely to Find Identity in Family and Accomplishments: Aaron Earls reports on findings. “When asked the open-ended question, “When you think about who you are, what are the first three things that come to mind?”…More Americans mention being a parent (25%), intelligent (12%), their job (11%), compassionate (11%), husband (10%), kind (10%), trustworthy (10%), wife (8%), friend (8%), hardworking (8%) and honest (8%).”

  5. Sin is “Barbs in Your Eyes, Thorns in Your Sides”: Ryan Hawkins invites us to consider, “First, sin isn’t just wrong, but hurtful. This is basic, but understanding this is profound step in our walk with God. For if we think God wants us to love him and love others and avoid sin (all of which are what “holiness” is all about) just because it’s what we “should” do, our understanding is woefully incomplete and our motivation won’t be there. Rather, whatever is according to God’s ways is also always for our good. Conversely, what isn’t according to God’s ways will lead to our harm.”

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Why Are So Many Kids Rejecting Christianity? Look at Their Parents: Pamela Danzinger considers on what startling new survey data tells us, “The Cultural Research Center (CRC) is out with a new study comparing the number of American parents of children under age 13 who hold a biblical Christian worldview with those who adhere to competing secular alternatives. The results are a damning indictment of Americans’ rejection of or simple indifference to a biblical worldview. Across all parents of pre-teens, only 2 percent hold a biblical worldview, which is defined as “consistently interpreting and responding to life situations based on biblical principles and teachings.” Those with a biblical worldview believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God containing all moral truths.”

  2. Why ‘Consent’ Isn’t Enough for a Sexual Ethic: I think Trevin Wax’s observation here is important. He begins, “Perusing various magazines and news sites in recent months, I’ve noticed a growing number of commentators who recommend we reexamine our society’s norms surrounding sexuality. Casual sexual encounters bring more misery than happiness, they say, and “consent” isn’t a high enough standard to bring about sexual fulfillment and freedom.”

  3. 40 Random Pieces of Advice for the Christian Life: Tim Challies loads tons of wisdom in this post. I love this one, “Open your home to other people often. Help foster a culture of hospitality within your local church by being the one who invites people over on a regular basis. The living room is one of the best contexts in the world for friendship, discipleship, and evangelism.”

  4. Zombie Sins: My friend Chris Thomas consider zombie movies and sin, “Zombie sins thrive in darkness, like the Orcs of Mordor they gather in the gloom beyond the Black Gates. To fight them in the dark watches of the night, alone against the throng, our hopes fade. But we look to the East.”

  5. Well, THAT was Magic! Seth Lewis shares the story of his three-year-old son’s amazement at the automatic doors. In response he asks, “Somewhere along the way, we seem to have picked up the idea that once we can explain how something works, the magic and wonder disappear. But why should that be?”

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The Manna is Always There: Glenna Marshall is one of my favorite bloggers and this might be my favorite post she’s written. It leveled my heart. She shares, “Sometimes, the manna is found when others help me look for it. It’s always there if you have eyes to see it. I am coming to terms with the fact that life with an incurable disease will ebb and flow between seasons of healing and seasons of illness. What I really want is full trust in God’s daily provision of grace. I want it to be enough.”

  2. I Am Proud of You: Craig concludes, “Death and life are in the power fo the tongue,” according to Proverbs 18:21. So, give life with your words. Find a young person today, look them in the eye, and pronounce your life-giving blessing: I am proud of you.”

  3. Please Waste Some of Your Prayers: I love this simple admonition from George Sinclair. He concludes, “Do not say ‘God’s No’ for God. Pray for the salvation of the unlikely. ‘Waste’ your prayers on them. Oh yes, please pray for me that I will do the same.”

  4. Does Predestination Mean God is the Author of Sin? Michael Horton handles this challenging question with clarity and simplicity. He explains, “God created Lucifer, but he didn’t create Satan. He didn’t create an evil opponent; he created a wonderful, beautiful, godly, righteous, and just servant, who then of his own free will turned away.”

  5. What a Tangled Web: Carl Trueman points out where we’ve become culturally confused regarding life and gender. He begins, “Confusion over what it means to be human continues to dog public life in the West. Soon after Anneliese Dodds, the Labour party shadow secretary for women, revealed that she does not know what a woman is, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson deferred the same question to biologists.”

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Let the Global Church Give You Perspective: This is really helpful advice from Trevin Wax. He begins, “Stay connected to the global church if you want to hold on to orthodoxy…and if you want to hold on to your sanity.”

  2. God Does Not Despise the Small Things: Ed Welch begins, “Zechariah 4:10 says, ‘Who despises the day of small things?’ Indeed, everything we do is a very small thing.”

  3. Does God Give Us Only What We Can Handle? My friend Caroline Albanese reflects on a tumultuous three years in her family’s life. She says, “All these events took place in rapid succession. The emotional toll on our family is incredible. Suffice to say, the weight on our souls has felt absolutely unbearable, and we’ve been clinging to Christ for dear life.”

  4. Does ‘Love the Sinner Hate the Sin’ Still Work? Carl Trueman explains how the cultural shift to expressive individualism creates an argument where this posture is intolerable. He clarifies, “The old chestnut of “love the sinner, hate the sin” simply does not work in a world where the sin is the identity of the sinner and the two cannot be separated even at a conceptual level. In a time when the normative notion of selfhood is psychological, then to hate the sin is to hate the sinner.”

  5. Escape from Kabul: Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra tells the story of Christians fleeing Kabul, Afghanistan in this gripping podcast. Despite facing persecution and as the country implodes, they still shared Jesus with so many. But, how?

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

As LGBTQ Identification Rise, Conversations More Important: Aaron Earls reports, “Today, 10.5% of millennial adults identify as LGBTQ, whereas 5.8% did so 2017.”

  1. Young Adults Have Complicated Relationship with Money: Marissa Postell reports that, “The typical Christian young adult donates more than three times as much as non-Christians over the course of a year ($1,820 v. $556).”

  2. How to Work With a Domineering Boss: Joseph Grenny at Crucial Conversations responds to this question in a surprising way, “I have a domineering boss who micromanages everything I do. He has no filter when speaking to me and often is just outright rude. Whenever I send out a piece of work, he finds fault with it and tries to undermine my confidence. Having read online about his characteristics, I truly believe he suffers from narcissism. The sad fact is that he gets results and senior management love him, so he is untouchable. How can I deal with this aside from leaving the company?”

  3. No, Christianity is Not as Bad as You Think: Josh Howerton responds to five cultural narratives. He begins with this one, “Cultural narrative #1: Christians aren’t really pro-life; they’re just pro-birth. Christians are sometimes accused of being pro-birth more than pro-life. They pretend to be passionate about the lives of the unborn as a political weapon, the argument goes, but they don’t really care about children once they’re born. But the data tells a different story.

  4. The Liturgy of Powers: Carl Trueman begins, “The trans revolution reached new heights of absurdity last week when the BBC asked Anneliese Dodds, the Labour party’s shadow secretary for women and equalities, to define “woman.” Dodds proved singularly incapable of doing so; after saying that “it does depend what the context is,” she equivocated for several minutes and refused to give a direct answer

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The Universe Demands a Cross: This post by Samuel James is brilliant and moving. Please read it. Here is a taste, “The sterilized metaphysics of Western spirituality, the liturgies of eat-pray-love, are sieves when it comes to the bloodiness of reality. I could, if I chose, close my eyes and insist on believing in the inherent goodness of man, the brotherhood of all, and the common destiny of all but the worst people. But I could not close my eyes hard enough to un-see the blood of vaginal delivery. The blood does not merely sit there. It calls out, just as the blood of Abel cried “out from the ground.” It calls out for reckoning.”

  2. 200 People Left Our Small Church: my friend Benjamin Vrbicek asks, “How does a pastor keep his heart from growing cynical when, over 350 weeks of pastoring the same church, I have lost an average of one person each week? And why are these congregants leaving our church anyway? What role might I play, even unintentionally, in sending sheep to what they perceive to be greener pastures?”

  3. An Open Letter to Death: Cindy Matson begins, “Dear Death, I’m writing to you today with a simple message: Stop boasting. I realize that you have some reason for pride. You have had your way with nearly every human to ever live. (Do Enoch and Elijah keep you up at night?)”

  4. True Humanism: Jesus, Marx, or Jenner? Bruce Ashford considers the options to Christianity in contemporary culture, “[T]hese thought leaders often pose as anthropologists who find Christianity dehumanizing and as tea-leaf readers who discern in the anfractuosities of history a movement toward a more “humanized,” Christ-less future.”

  5. Tom Brady in Retirement: Football fans out there will enjoy this.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The Universe Demands a Cross: This post by Samuel James is brilliant and moving. Please read it. Here is a taste, “The sterilized metaphysics of Western spirituality, the liturgies of eat-pray-love, are sieves when it comes to the bloodiness of reality. I could, if I chose, close my eyes and insist on believing in the inherent goodness of man, the brotherhood of all, and the common destiny of all but the worst people. But I could not close my eyes hard enough to un-see the blood of vaginal delivery. The blood does not merely sit there. It calls out, just as the blood of Abel cried “out from the ground.” It calls out for reckoning.”

  2. 200 People Left Our Small Church: my friend Benjamin Vrbicek asks, “How does a pastor keep his heart from growing cynical when, over 350 weeks of pastoring the same church, I have lost an average of one person each week? And why are these congregants leaving our church anyway? What role might I play, even unintentionally, in sending sheep to what they perceive to be greener pastures?”

  3. An Open Letter to Death: Cindy Matson begins, “Dear Death, I’m writing to you today with a simple message: Stop boasting. I realize that you have some reason for pride. You have had your way with nearly every human to ever live. (Do Enoch and Elijah keep you up at night?)”

  4. True Humanism: Jesus, Marx, or Jenner? Bruce Ashford considers the options to Christianity in contemporary culture, “[T]hese thought leaders often pose as anthropologists who find Christianity dehumanizing and as tea-leaf readers who discern in the anfractuosities of history a movement toward a more “humanized,” Christ-less future.”

  5. Tom Brady in Retirement: Football fans out there will enjoy this.

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Maundy Thursday Recommendations

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Maundy Thursday Recommendations

1. Is Easter Believable? Des Smith begins, “Is Easter believable? That’s a question people have been asking for 2000 years. It may be a question you’re asking.”

2. Is Christianity Bad News for Women? Jen Oshman responds, “[T]he Christian culture in the first century then becomes this safe place and harbor for women. Women turned to Christ, and the Christian community has been predominantly female ever since.”

3. Faith Like a Beach House: Chris Thomas begins this moving extended metaphor this way, “The excitement ebbed away with my first breath. Now, to be honest, I’m not an overly excitable guy; I’m fairly reserved in my displays of emotion, but I had been undeniably excited, that much was clear. But not any more. A week or two earlier, my wife and I had purchased on old van, circa late 70’s, that had been permanently parked on a slab of concrete”

4. An Open Letter to a Christian Disheartened by Temptation: Don Carson and John Woodbridge begin, “That you are experiencing rounds of temptation is not as unusual as you might suppose. From the inception of the church believers have found this pilgrim way to be strewn with multiple temptations.”

5. Were You There? A beautiful rendition by the Three Mo’ Tenors.

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