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

Spiritual Growth

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Do You Want to Change? There’s Only One Way

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Do You Want to Change? There’s Only One Way

Are you stuck? Do you fear that you will never be able to change, never break free from the sin that has you in its clutches? You can change! I promise. No matter what the sin is, you can break free from its clutches.

The most rewarding gift pastors and biblical counselors receive is the treasure of watching God transform hearts. God has blessed Angel (my wife, a counselor at Whole Hope Christian Counseling) and with the opportunity of seeing many break free from the shackles of sin.

Let me share with you one story of change. Kimberly (she has given me permission to share her story and her words, although I am changing her name), was trapped in bitterness toward God and her husband and ensnared by sexual sin. Her heart raged with hatred toward her husband: for the ways he had neglected her, not treasured her, and abandoned her spiritually, emotionally, and physically. In a desire to experience freedom and to make her husband pay for his neglect, she began to hook up with men and eventually had a series of affairs.

After years, the tip of the iceberg of her indiscretions were discovered. Despite her hardness of heart and spiritual blindness, Kimberly was willing to meet with her husband for counseling. Her rage so blinded her that she was unwilling to repent of her sin. She demanded that her husband repent to her, recounting detail by detail of his offenses to her numb husband. In fact, we would later learn that she was continuing on in her adultery even through our counseling. If you would have met Kimberly in this season, you would have likely thought Kimberly was a lost cause. Any time spent on her was wasted effort.

Many friends and family of hers voiced this opinion. Without the Spirit, they were right.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. What Is the Unforgivable Sin? How to Know if You’ve Committed It: Clear and concise explanation by Murray J. Harris. Harris compares the two different references to the unforgivable sin. He concludes, “In sum, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable, not because God is unwilling to forgive but because the repentance that is the necessary precondition for God’s forgiveness is absent. The heart has become so hardened that no need for repentance is recognized, and so no request for forgiveness is offered.”

2. Why Sexual Immorality is a Big Deal: Darryl Burling begins, “Western society argues that the human body is insignificant. We are told that our bodies are of no value in determining identity and that sex is purely a physical need—of no significance to our personhood.”

3. Only the Christian Faith Begins at the Top: Tim Challies with an astute observation, “A plumb line hangs from a point that has been fixed above it. As long as the laws of gravity remain intact, that line will always hang perfectly straight so that whatever parallels it will be equally straight…But imagine if the builder of that tower had taken that same line and anchored it below instead of above.”

4. What Do You Pick Up From Your Pastor’s Preaching? It’s true, isn’t it, that you pick up on what stirs your pastor’s heart? What do you pick up from my heart?

5. How to Respond to the Problem of Evil: In this brief video Greg Koukl illuminates why the existence of evil supports the existence of God.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Meant to Be: How a World War II veteran cheated death four times to find love. Bonnie Allen’s story on Reg Harrison is absolute perfection. It begins, “Reg Harrison slides his leather wallet out of his pocket and removes a weathered black-and-white photo of a beautiful woman. ‘I've been carrying that since 1946,’ said the 98-year-old. ‘Our love story? I think it was meant to be.’”

2. iGeneration and iDentity: Kyle Borg with a sobering warning to Generation Z on what the impact of them being formed by social media will mean: “Young people aged 8 to 12 spend an average of six hours a day on technology, and teenagers aged 13 to 18 spend an average of nine hours a day streaming videos, looking at pictures, listening to music, and playing games. That's more social time in a given day than is spent with parents, peers, or sports teams.”

3. Americans Less Optimistic About Race Relations: Aaron Earls reports, “A new study from Lifeway Research conducted prior to the 2020 election finds U.S. adults are less likely now than in 2014 to agree with the statement “We have come so far on racial relations.” Today, 46% say we have made worthwhile progress—28 points fewer than in 2014 when 74% said the same.”

4. Just Keep Going: David McLemore urges us forward. He encourages us, “But God is not letting up on us because he’s not giving up on us. His call is not to take it easy when it gets hard but to press in all the more, especially when it’s hard. The Lord loves us deeply, but he doesn’t coddle us, and he won’t let us coddle ourselves either. He knows the cancer that time is to our zeal, but he has fresh mercies every morning.”

5. In Defense of Um, Er, and Like: Such an enlightening video on why we have verbal hesitations and how they can, like, help.

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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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