Death, Easter, Heaven
John Beeson
The Resurrection of Jesus: An Eyewitness Account

Happy Easter!

Today we consider the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. What follows is a compilation of the eyewitness resurrection accounts of Jesus Christ as told by the authors of the gospels. They have been edited together to maintain the flow of the narrative and do not include Jesus’ multiple appearances following his resurrection. The accounts are framed by Paul’s extended reflection on the importance of the resurrection.

He is risen! He is risen indeed!

The Resurrection of Jesus: An Eyewitness Account
Recommendations, Easter, Death, Heaven, Nature
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Eagles, fowl, and a Savior with wings: Kevin Burrell’s post makes my heart sing, “And a living, risen savior is still our covering today, to all those who by faith trust in his wings. In fact, we are clothed in his righteousness. He is oh-so willing to gather us under his wings.”

  2. Even to death: Jamaal Williams invites us to consider Jesus at the Mount of Olives, “Jesus models what it looks like to stumble into the presence of God—hurting but hopeful.”

This Week's Recommendations
Easter, Death, Heaven, Hell
John Beeson
The Crucifixion of Jesus: An Eyewitness Account

On this Tuesday of Holy Week, we consider the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. What follows is a compilation of the eyewitness crucifixion accounts of Jesus Christ as told by the four authors of the gospels. They have been edited together to maintain the flow of the narrative. The accounts are framed by the words of the 8th century BC prophet, Isaiah. On Sunday I will share the resurrection account of Jesus from the eyewitnesses.

The Crucifixion of Jesus: An Eyewitness Account
Christian Living, Church, Finance, Generosity
John Beeson
Why We Should Give to Financially Mismanaged ...

In 2007, the House Committee on Oversight investigated the “Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes and Help Hospitalized Veterans.” Something was seriously wrong with CEO Roger Chapin’s leadership (and it wasn’t just the absurdly long name of the charity). Chapin had raised nearly $170 million between 2004 and 2006, but only 25% of the money reached veterans. Over $125 million was funneled to Chapin and his cronies.

 

Whether at a national or local level, we don’t have to look long and hard for mismanagement of donations. There is nothing that breaks the trust of a donor more than seeing their hard-earned dollars misspent. We should care about where our giving goes. Churches ought to lead the way in financial transparency and accountability.

Why We Should Give to Financially Mismanaged Organizations
Recommendations, Nature, Evangelism, Parenting
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. 6 discouraging trends in global Christianity: Aaron Earls reports, “While Christianity continues to grow, Islamic growth continues to outpace the church’s growth. Christianity slightly outpaced the global rate of population growth (0.98% v. 0.88%), but Islam grew even faster (1.67%).”

  2. Wikipedia founder embraces Christianity: Trevin Wax reflects on Larry Sanger’s conversion, “Considering how many people are curious about the Bible these days, the increase in Bible sales, the interest in various philosophers and commentators providing their takes on the Scriptures,

This Week's Recommendations

Spiritual Growth

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Spiritual Disciplines and Blogging

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Spiritual Disciplines and Blogging

Today I’m thrilled to announce that our audiobook for Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World has hit the virtual shelves at Amazon. My co-author, Benjamin Vrbicek and I have lowered the price of the audiobook and the regular book for the launch, so grab a copy and share the link with someone who might benefit.

Below is a portion of one of the chapters in the book: Spiritual Disciplines and Blogging. I hope it whets your appetite! (And check out the very end of this post for an opportunity to win a free audiobook.)

SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES AND BLOGGING

I was told not to equate preparing for sermons with devotional Bible reading. There is truth in that encouragement. If we professionalize spiritual disciplines, then our spiritual life tends to become stuffy and transactional from expecting that clocking in yields certain results. On the other hand, I’ve learned if the posture of my heart in my sermon preparation isn’t devotional, then my preaching becomes dry and academic. If I am not growing spiritually through my pastoral ministry, I’m not pastoring as God intended. I would say the same thing to engineers, teachers, stay-at-home moms, and salespeople. I’d say the same thing to bloggers.

Blogging ought to grow us in holiness. When we blog for God’s glory, the discipline of writing becomes integrated into the web of our spiritual disciplines. We believe blogging can be cultivated as a companion to spiritual disciplines and even as a spiritual discipline in its own right. Before we consider this, we want to send up a warning flare: challenges for the Christian blogger abound.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Mindfulness, Narcissism and the Solution to Self-Centredness: Stephen Kneale shares the report that current research shows that, despite the best intentions of those teaching mindfulness, the results backfire without the gospel, “The study reveals a paradox behind routines that are supposed to help people resist narcissism — they tend to pump up their sense of self-worth.”

2. Are Churches Losing the Battle to Form Christians? Brett McCracken lays out the challenges of pastoring in the digital age well. He says, “Any church that conceives of itself primarily as a deliverer of content—giving people great sermons, top-notch worship music experiences—will eventually be a dead church.”

3. The High Stakes of a Hard Heart: Excellent word from Jen Oshman. She warns, “No one wakes up with a sudden urge to divorce, or embezzle, or murder. Those urges start out with seemingly small, selfish acts. The selfishness grows like a snowball in the corners of our hearts where no one sees. But if it’s not stopped, it will roll and roll into an avalanche and cause real destruction.”

4. Five Ways to Stop Discouragement from Getting the Best of You: Some sage advice from the good people at the Biblical Counseling Coalition. They begin: “Be honest. It does you no good to pretend you don’t feel what you feel. You can’t take action against a negative feeling until you first admit you have it. A strong Christian is not someone who never experiences negative feelings. It’s someone who has learned what to do with them when he or she has them and how to process them biblically.”

5. The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: How did that coffee arrive in your hand?

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. 11 Things You Might Think are in the Bible, But Really Aren’t: #11 is particularly insidious.

2. Bible Reading and Church Attendance Drops During COVID-19: Barna just released a report that confirms what I’ve been hearing anecdotally: many are spiritually floundering during this season. The reality is that 2020 has just sped up the decline in basic spiritual disciplines.

3. Let Bible Reading Get Back to Basics: To that end, Jen Wilkin suggests five basic tools that can assist your Bible reading. I particularly appreciate her suggestion to keep a Bible timeline.

4. Christian, You Are Able Not to Sin: Zach Howard turns to Augustine for advice when we enter this familiar place, “Sinning as a saint can cause two opposite (and equally) wrong reactions. On the one hand, we can respond with prideful presumption in our power to overcome sin. On the other hand, we can react with helpless despair in the face of our persistent sin.”

5. Were the Gospels Meant to be Taken as Historical Narrative? Do the gospels fail the test of providing historical attestation? Timothy Paul Jones responds to to Reza Aslan's accusation that the gospels, "are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe."

6. Iceland: The Land of Fire and Ice: Who wants to take a trip with me?!

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Why I Stopped Playing Video Games: Reagan Rose explains, “Gaming had become an idol for me, so I had to smash it. For you, it might be sports, politics, social media, or something else. As Christians, we must be willing to lay aside anything that keeps us from full-hearted obedience to our Master, Jesus Christ, even especially if that thing is something we really love. For me, that was video games.”

2. “Obedience Will Make You Miserable”: Scott Hubbard reflects on this tired lie Satan loves to tell us. He shares that, “Like the elder son in Jesus’s parable, such people follow the Father’s rules with a sigh (Luke 15:29). Their holiness is all pursed lips and sober glances. “Such is the cost of righteousness,” they remind themselves. “We must relinquish pleasure on the path to heaven, you know. Holiness, not happiness, is the true good.”

3. Two Ways Every Christian Can Be Pastoral: My friend Benjamin Vrbicek offers two great ways every Christian can pastor. He concludes, "Paul writes that when each part of the body of Christ works properly, the body “builds itself up in love.” I often think of this as a beautiful reversal of the game of Jenga. When you play Jenga, as the wooden structure gets taller, the whole thing becomes less stable. But that’s not the way Paul says it should be in local churches. When each part engages in pastoral ministry, the church gets more stable, not less."

4. 4 Ways to Get Students to Be Ready to Be Adults in Church: Josh Hussung provides sound advice for a serious problem--young adults leaving the church after high school. He says, "I’m convinced that at least part of the awkwardness of that transition has to do with students not fully being integrated with the broader church body before they leave."

5. Building the Perfect Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder: Here is a twenty-minute (!) video of silliness that I loved. Mark Rober builds what amounts to an America Ninja course for squirrels. Rober’s delight and ingenuity is infectious.

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Keep Praying for Safety (Especially this Kind...)

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Keep Praying for Safety (Especially this Kind...)

Are you praying a lot for health these days? I am.

How many of your prayers are for your or others’ health or safety? I imagine if you were to take every prayer prayed in America a large percentage would be for health or safety.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with prayers for health and safety. We are invited to pray for our and others’ health and safety. There are many prayers for protection in scripture. Here are a few:

[M]y God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,

my shield, and the horn of my salvation,

my stronghold and my refuge,

my savior; you save me from violence.

I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,

and I am saved from my enemies. -2 Samuel 22:3-4

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Maundy Thursday Recommendations

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Maundy Thursday Recommendations

1. Little Known Facts About the Last Supper: Today we celebrate Maundy Thursday, the day before Jesus was crucified and Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples and washed their feet. Julia Blum considers some surprising truths about that night. She shares, “A man carrying a water jar could only have been an Essene. From Jesus’ words, his disciples understood they had to enter Jerusalem through the Essene’s gate. Since Essenes used a different calendar, their guest rooms were still available. That’s why the Teacher knew that a room would be available for the Last Supper.”

2. Why Were there Three Crosses? Andree Seu Peterson reflects, “This eternally ordained encounter of three men on crosses on a skull-shaped hill in Jerusalem, was it not for a testimony—for the sakes of all the men and women who will ever live, who have wrecked their lives beyond all human help? Eleventh-hour rescues, these, who when all hope was lost, yet asked of Christ, and were received, just for the asking.”

3. COVID-19 and the Top 15 Causes of Death in the US: Sobering infographic that captures the spread of COVID-19 in the US.

4. What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage: Will Oremus says there is a different explanation than hoarding for the toilet paper shortage. “Story after story explains the toilet paper outages as a sort of fluke of consumer irrationality. Unlike hand sanitizer, N95 masks, or hospital ventilators, they note, toilet paper serves no special function in a pandemic. Toilet paper manufacturers are cranking out the same supply as always. And it’s not like people are using the bathroom more often, right?”

5. My Journey Through Doubt: On Easter we celebrate a man coming back to life. We shouldn’t pretend Christianity is easy to believe. My childhood pastor, Roger Barrier reflects on his journey through doubt. He concludes, “I wish I just believed and never entertained misgivings. I wish I were more like my wife, Julie. Unfortunately, I traveled a different path; but, fortunately with similar results. My protracted, intense struggles produced a strong faith. Simple, unwavering childlike faith is lovely to behold. But, so is complex, hard-earned, mature faith that takes years to formulate and resolve.”

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What Books Can Help me Talk to My Friend about Their Questions for God?

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What Books Can Help me Talk to My Friend about Their Questions for God?

In the coming months at New Life we are looking forward to stepping into a series called Questions for God. In the series, we hope to openly and honestly engage the most difficult questions people have about Christianity. For some those questions keep them on the outside looking in. For others, it causes them to wrestle with their faith.

We hope that Questions for God invites everyone into the conversation no matter where you are spiritually. It is our aim to address these questions with respect and honesty. And it is our hope that some might lean in to engage their questions in a safe environment. It is hope as well that it might serve as an opportunity for Christians to open the doors for conversations with friends and family members.

As we prepare for this series, I would commend the following books. Maybe one of these piques your interest. I would encourage you to pick it up and start reading it in the next few weeks.

 

Two Books That Engage the Broader Questions

Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin

Deep thinkers have pointed questions for Christianity. “Aren’t we better off without religion?” “How can you say there’s only one true faith?” “Doesn’t religion cause violence?” “Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?” “Isn’t Christianity homophobic?” “How could a loving God send people to hell?”

In Confronting Christianity, Rebecca McLaughlin takes those questions seriously. As a former skeptic, McLaughlin brings both empathy and clear reasoning. She does three things particularly well:

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Celebrating God's Rescue

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Celebrating God's Rescue

This past Sunday at New Life we had the privilege of celebrating the baptism of eight. Baptisms are one of the most precious celebrations for the family of God. It doesn’t matter how many I’ve done, each is as fresh and as joy-filled as my first.

These testimonies are too powerful not to share.

Here is one nugget:

“What do I love about Jesus? What’s not to love? I love that he loves me… That’s what I love most about our Lord, that he is so gracious and merciful despite how far we walk away from him.”

Make sure you watch to the end. How good is our Heavenly Father?

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9 Ways to Flee From Lust

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9 Ways to Flee From Lust

The past two weeks we’ve looked at Jesus’ difficult words about lust in the Sermon on the Mount. Let’s be honest: the standard Jesus calls us to can feel profoundly unfair. It is God, after all, who created us as physical beings. It is God who created us as sexual beings. It is God who gave us desires. God gave us libido. And God gave us imaginations.

And in this, God has created us in his image! God is the being with the most powerful desires in the universe! What kind of image bearers would we be if we did not also have desires?

And so, in recognizing the reality that God created us as desiring beings, we recognize that God has called us to direct those desires at himself and his righteousness.  

Is it possible to never lust? No. Not in this life.

But it is possible to fight against anger and lust? Yes.

Tolerating sin is not okay. We must fight with everything we’ve got, small and large.

Knowing what is at stake, Jesus calls us to take radical measures to flee from lust. He says:

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30)

Let’s be clear what Jesus is and isn’t saying here. Jesus isn’t calling for self-mutilation. But Jesus is telling us to treat our twisted desires with the utmost seriousness. In fact that little phrase “causes you to” that Jesus applies to our right eye and our right hand is the same word for a trap in Greek. Jesus tells us to treat temptation to lust like a spring-loaded trap. Stay away!

The first two weeks we’ve addressed two large camps of how to do battle: 1) fight for the greatest pleasure of all (God himself); 2) consider the stakes of giving into our lust.

Today, let’s conclude by considering nine practical ways to battle lust in our lives[i]:

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Can Lust Send Me to Hell?

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Can Lust Send Me to Hell?

Our culture toys with lust.[i] We know the power of lust so well that we use it to sell hamburgers and cars and beer. I mean, seriously. Step back and consider how crazy that is. We take things that are already attractive and then add sex to them to sell them better! Burgers, sports cars, and beer! We crave these things on their own! And yet advertisers are still compelled to add an ingredient in to make them even more desirous: sex. On the flip side, you never see sex requiring anything else to sell it. Your local strip club isn’t trying to lure people in with their mouthwatering hamburgers.

Last week we considered Jesus’ difficult words about lust. Jesus takes the Old Testament standard of sexual purity of not committing adultery to a radical place: the heart. Jesus says that we are called by God to not even entertain lustful desires in our heart.

Jesus takes lust seriously. He takes lust seriously because when we lust we reveal that our heart is aimed at gratifying ourselves, not honoring God.

We tend to fear the wrong things when it comes to lust. We fear what a life of unfulfilled desires might look like. We fear the relational consequences of getting caught looking at pornography. We fear having our reputation marred.

But there are things we should really fear: the state of our soul, for starters. And of course, we should fear our Maker, God himself.

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