Christmas, Theology, Advent, Church, Hospitality
John Beeson
The Faithfulness of God of the Manger

Recently we had someone over and as the night came to a close Angel warmly offered, “Let’s do this again soon!” I wilted as I processed just how many things were on our calendar in the coming month. Just like Angel did, I wanted to be with them again and soon, but her invitation made me flinch.

 

My wife Angel and I are very different people. Angel brings light and life everywhere. People are drawn to her, and she is drawn to people. One of the many things I love about Angel is how she gets caught up in a moment with people. In that space, it’s not unusual that she shares hopes with those we are with of spending more time together. And she means it: there is no doubt of her genuineness.

The Faithfulness of God of the Manger
Advent, Christmas, Theology
John Beeson
A Humble God?

“I don’t compare myself with anybody, but nobody is better.” Michael Jordan

“They say the sky’s the limit, but I think my potential is beyond it.” Jay-Z

“I won’t be happy until I’m as famous as God” Madonna

“I won’t be a rock star. I will be a legend.” Freddie Mercury

“We’re more popular than Jesus now.” John Lennon

We tend to expect that greatest among us are also some of the most arrogant. And why wouldn’t they be? For many who make it to the top of their field, we can see how that arrogance can be a driving force for their greatness.

A Humble God?
Christmas, Forgiveness, Theology
John Beeson
The Just and the Justifier

God became flesh.

Let that sink in. Christianity asserts that God—sovereign, immutable, omnipotent, other—the eternal God who has no beginning and end—became a human being.

 Because many of us have had exposure to Christianity from our early years, it is easy to miss how massive the theological implications of the incarnation are. The incarnation lays the groundwork for a God who chooses to participate in his creation. The incarnation denies the existence of an abstract and distant God, unmuddied by his handiwork.

The Just and the Justifier
Advent, Christmas, Theology
John Beeson
The Theology of the Manger

“God did not, as the Bible says, create man in his own image; on the contrary, man created God in his own image.” Ludwig Feuerbach dropped this theological bombshell three years before Friedrich Nietzsche’s birth. Feuerbach, a name forgotten by most, but who influenced Nietzsche, wrote these words in his book, The Essence of Christianity (1841). He argued that human beings project their own attributes and desires onto an imagined deity, creating God in their own image. This for Feuerbach, is the essence of Christianity (and indeed all religions), the deification of our human ideals. “What man wishes to be, he makes his God… God is the outward projection of a man’s inward nature.”

The Theology of the Manger
Death, Gratitude, Prayer, Suffering
John Beeson
Go To a Funeral

We Westerners avoid death.

 

When was the last time you walked through a cemetery? When was the last funeral you went to? Our churches no longer have cemeteries, those who are older head to retirement communities and then to head to long-term care or assisted care facilities. The number of funerals held in churches has diminished. Death has become professionalized, antisepticised, and remote.

Go To a Funeral

Theology

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Unbelief Isn’t a Sin, or is it?

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Unbelief Isn’t a Sin, or is it?

God wouldn’t hold it against me if I don’t believe in him?, would he? Given the complexities of our world, how could he?

Is unbelief a sin? Surely not!

Culturally, we don’t take unbelief very seriously. We tend to think of unbelief as a neutral characteristic, if not even something that might show a particular strength of character. We might consider someone who doesn’t believe as being sharp minded, thoughtful, or not gullible.

Many Christians even diminish the nature of unbelief. I recently read a book by a popular pastor who claimed that Jesus didn’t call his followers to believe, but rather to love. Jesus calls us to love, but he also calls us to believe.

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Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn’t by Gavin Ortlund

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Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn’t by Gavin Ortlund

On the one hand…how can there be an all-powerful and all-good God in light of wars and pandemics?

On the other hand… how can there be no God when I experience the beauty of a sunset or the warmth of a loving embrace?

Look around our world, does it make more sense that there is an omnipotent God in control or does it make more sense that our world is a result of natural processes?

In his book Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn't, Gavin Ortlund asks this pointed question: is naturalism or Christianity the more likely option to make sense of the world we live in? Ortlund begins with this question: "Suppose Hamlet is searching for Shakespeare. He cannot find him in the way he might find other characters in the play, like Ophelia or Claudius. So where should he look?" The rest of Ortlund's book tries to answer that question. He says, "if God is real, he will be both infinitely close and infinitely far."

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Dreaming about Heaven

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Dreaming about Heaven

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” This absurd question is attributed to William Chillingworth[i], who was mocking the penchant of some medieval theologians for expending their energy debating meaningless topics.

It has famously been said, “Don’t be so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good.”

We’ve spent a number of posts discussing heaven. Do these conversations and dreaming about heaven diminish our earthly usefulness?

Is talking about heaven the equivalent of debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? What does it have to do with your life? With my life?

Dreaming about heaven is no worthless theological debate over angels on the head of a pin! Our anticipation of heaven has the power to radically reshape our lives to be more like Christ, looking toward the joy set before us.[ii]

Dreaming about the new heavens and the new earth bends our hearts toward God’s heart. The most significant positive impact dreaming and anticipating heaven has on us is shaping our hearts to value that which lasts. Heaven is why we can't seek ultimate fulfillment in this life. And heaven is why so many things that seem like a waste from our perspective are of immeasurable value.

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What is Heaven? It's Perfect Community

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What is Heaven? It's Perfect Community

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre re-envisions hell in his play “No Exit” as a drawing room where three people are trapped together. They await an executioner who will never come and begin to realize that being trapped in one another’s presence is hell. The play concludes with these sobering lines, “You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE!”

Sartre has it wrong. Hell is the ultimate estrangement and loneliness. Heaven is perfect community.

In the West we have been taught that the purest form of spirituality is self-led.

I recently sat with a young man whose wife was having an affair on him. She was confused, unsure which partner she wanted to be with: her husband or her boyfriend. Her husband explained that she wouldn’t see a pastor or counselor because she said, “I need to discover myself and find my own way.” We have been sold a lie that the truest version of ourselves is self-discovered. We desperately need others.

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What is Heaven? Welcome to the Feast

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What is Heaven? Welcome to the Feast

Some of the most surprising and revealing passages in scripture are the glimpses we have of the resurrected Christ. In these snapshots, we have brief previews of what our bodily resurrection will look like. In two of these snapshots we see Jesus eating fish with his disciples.[i] What? The resurrected Jesus is eating? He sure is.

And with our resurrected bodies, we will eat too! One of the most powerful images in scripture of heaven is tucked away in Isaiah 25:6

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine – the best of meats and the finest of wines.

That, friends, is a party! I don’t know about you, but the idea that we get to eat for eternity is very attractive to me. Can you imagine all the new types of food we will taste? Exotic dishes we will experience?

I can smell the steak grilling and the bacon sizzling now.

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What is Heaven? A Place of Learning

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What is Heaven? A Place of Learning

When you enter heaven, how much will you know? Will you have all knowledge as it pertains to your life? Perfect knowledge as it pertains to everything?

Can we learn in heaven? According to one survey, only 18% of Americans believe that people will "grow intellectually in heaven.”[i] It makes sense. We should know everything in heaven, right? In the presence of God, won't all knowledge be ours?

I don’t believe so. I think that Scripture sides with the 18% who believe we will be learners in heaven. Paul says, “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace” (Eph 2:6-7). Do you catch the presumption of active learning in heaven in that verse? God is going to show us the incomparable riches of his grace… in the coming ages!

What are the incomparable riches of his grace he will show us? The list is endless. We will certainly understand the wonder of God’s grace on the cross more perfectly, but we will also be shown more profoundly God’s grace in creation, in art, in science, in beauty!

America’s greatest theologian Jonathan Edwards rejoiced in the progressive increase of our knowledge in heaven, “The number of ideas of the saints shall increase to eternity.”[ii]

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What is Heaven? It is also a New Earth

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What is Heaven? It is also a New Earth

When I trusted Christ as a young boy, I remember thinking that the one downside of being a Christian was the boring afterlife that now awaited me. “I hope Jesus doesn’t return before I go to high school… before I get married… before I have kids,” I thought. There is a classic Gary Larson cartoon that captures my worst fears about heaven: “Wish I’d brought a magazine," the bored saint reflects.

I recently asked a group of sixth grade boys what they thought heaven would be like, and their picture of heaven mirrored what mine was at their age: a worship service that never ended, standing around the throne of God and singing song after song after song after song.

I mean, I liked church more than the average kid. I even sat through “big church” with my parents and liked the singing and preaching. But doing that forever? In the words of the old hip hop group OutKast, “Foreva eva?”[i]

Good news, friends. This won’t be the sum of heaven.

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God's Promise that 80% of Christians Miss Out On

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God's Promise that 80% of Christians Miss Out On

600 years ago a church service looked far different than it does today.

The Medieval mass truly was a performance. The priest turned away from the congregation for most of the congregation and spoke (by some reports, “mumbled” is a more apt description) the service in Latin, a language the commoners didn’t speak and often the priests themselves didn’t speak.[i] The congregants observed the mass in silence. There was no participation.

600 years later much has changed. And yet much remains the same.

In the American evangelical church, our liturgy looks about as different from the liturgy of the church of the Middle Ages as you could imagine (and yes, while we don’t have a formalized liturgy, we share a collective informal liturgy – you can go to just about any evangelical church in America this weekend and expect a similar service). But church, as much as ever, is an experience those who attend come to watch. Like the church in the Middle Ages, attendance is declining, with a faithful churchgoer now coming to service once every three weeks or so.[ii] That has been exacerbated by Covid, which pushed many regular church attenders online.

Perhaps even more importantly, most Christians remain on the sidelines when it comes to service. Approximately 20% of those who attend church are engaged in service

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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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Need a Book for the Pool?

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Need a Book for the Pool?

Summer is here! Looking for some good books to dive into this summer? Here are some of my favorite books I’ve read over the first half of this year that I think you’ll love.

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