Recommendations, Culture, Family, Sexuality, Social Media
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. I have called you friends: Alastair Roberts says, “Jesus came to make us friends of God, people with the same standing with God that our father Abraham had. As friends of God, we enjoy an intimacy with God and a participation in his work quite exceeding that of servants.”

  2. What draws me back? Three arguments for the faith on the days I doubt: Trevin Wax says, “The reason the problem of evil delivers such an emotional wallop for me is because of the bigger problem of good—the gratuitousness of beauty and goodness in our world, and the consequent ache in our hearts

This Week's Recommendations
Christian Living, Family, Hospitality, Relationships
John Beeson
A Candy Shop Owner, a Customs Officer, and a ...

We stepped into the candy shop and could feel it immediately. We were welcome here. And no, it wasn’t just the aroma of chocolate wafting through the air (although that helped!). It was in the kind eyes of the shop owner, in the smile of her employee as she swept the floor. The sign outside said the shop closed five minutes earlier. “Are you sure it’s okay we come in?” I cautiously asked. “Of course!” she said. And I could feel that she meant it.

The atmosphere in her candy shop stood in stark contrast to the cold, unwelcoming atmosphere of several other shops we had visited

A Candy Shop Owner, a Customs Officer, and a Beloved Family
Family, History, Parenting, Politics, Recommendations
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. The Chocolate Lady: Andrea Sanborn shares, “Parents of people with disabilities long for our children to be welcomed and included. Any effort in that direction can quite literally bring us to tears. But those of us who parent the socially challenging ones are especially moved when a person makes a concerted effort to befriend our children. Most people, understandably, back off when they’re rebuffed. But a precious few strive to understand and are willing to persevere to befriend our children in spite of their behavior.”

  2. Learning from King David’s midlife failure: Jim Newheiser says,

This Week's Recommendations
Culture, Faith, Parenting, Politics, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
The seat of the Scoffers

How loud are the voices of scoffers in your life? The mockers, the angry, the rude, the crass. How much ear do you give to those who tear you down rather than gently exhort or build you up?

Ours is the age of the scoffer. Election season magnifies the scorn that lies just beneath the surface. TikTok, X, YouTube, and Facebook serve our prurient interest in watching others be “slammed,” “knocked down,” and “exposed.” The equation seems simple: the harsher the persona, the more views.

The longest book of the Bible, the songbook of the people of God,

The seat of the Scoffers
Recommendations, Consumerism, Family, Gratitude, Parenting, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom, Worship
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Suffer and do not sin: Andrea Mathews says, “Our suffering has stretched us. It has caused us to cling to Christ. It has brought us a deeper awareness of our dependency on God and dismantled the illusion of control we once thought we had over our lives. But suffering also has brought a particular array of temptations to sin, and I have often succumbed.

  2. How does wonder lead us to worship and wisdom? Eric Lynum says, “To wonder, in the biblical sense, is to think about God doing what only God can do. We sense the magnitude of his creativity as we stand beneath a canopy of trees,

This Week's Recommendations

Culture

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. I have called you friends: Alastair Roberts says, “Jesus came to make us friends of God, people with the same standing with God that our father Abraham had. As friends of God, we enjoy an intimacy with God and a participation in his work quite exceeding that of servants.”

  2. What draws me back? Three arguments for the faith on the days I doubt: Trevin Wax says, “The reason the problem of evil delivers such an emotional wallop for me is because of the bigger problem of good—the gratuitousness of beauty and goodness in our world, and the consequent ache in our hearts

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The seat of the Scoffers

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The seat of the Scoffers

How loud are the voices of scoffers in your life? The mockers, the angry, the rude, the crass. How much ear do you give to those who tear you down rather than gently exhort or build you up?

Ours is the age of the scoffer. Election season magnifies the scorn that lies just beneath the surface. TikTok, X, YouTube, and Facebook serve our prurient interest in watching others be “slammed,” “knocked down,” and “exposed.” The equation seems simple: the harsher the persona, the more views.

The longest book of the Bible, the songbook of the people of God,

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Two ways to worry about AI: Alan Noble begins, “If you’ve followed some of the news in AI recently, you might be feeling scared. Concerning stories have been coming from two leading AI companies this summer.”

  2. What gratitude was never meant to do: Tracy Harper says, “We run into problems with gratitude, though, when we use it as a countermeasure to avoid the thoughts and emotions that disappointment brings to the surface. God was prompting me to sit with the deeper question of why this mattered so much to me, and I couldn’t use my list of blessings to avoid going there with him.”

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How Can I Excuse Myself

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How Can I Excuse Myself

You’re running a day care center that closes at 5pm. You notice a handful of parents pick up their children late. Every time a parent arrives late it impacts you: you must stay late—family dinners and events are lost. What do you do? Realizing that your honor system isn’t cutting it, you start charging a fine for arriving late.   

And then the unexpected happens: the number of late-arriving parents doubles.

This experiment was run by economists trying to help an Israeli daycare. The results confounded the researchers.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Three things stress reveals: Michael Kelley says, “And maybe you, too, know what that bursting feels like – it’s when something small that ordinarily shouldn’t have bothered you as much as it did just sets you off. And you find yourself overreacting to that single incident because of the accumulated pressure from the other circumstances.”

  2. Seraphim may be flying serpentine creatures: Wyatt Graham challenges how we envision these angelic beings, “The word saraph occurs only seven times in the Hebrew Bible. Its verbal form means “to burn,”

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Can We Choose Our Identity?

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Can We Choose Our Identity?

I was fourteen years old, 5’9” and 130 pounds. My backpack hung loosely over my shoulders and butterflies filled my stomach. It was the first day of high school. I navigated the path from my fourth period class toward the cafeteria in a sea of three thousand mostly new faces. Who would I sit with? I saw the group of guys I had hung around with in middle school: jocks who had made those three years fairly miserable for me.

I scanned the grass and picked out the groups: band kids, several kids playing chess, kids playing pick-up basketball. I saw one gathering playing Dungeons and Dragons.

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The Mark of the Beast and The Mark of God

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The Mark of the Beast and The Mark of God

We are all familiar with the mark of the beast. Fear and confusion surrounding it seem to swirl around it. As a child, I remember hearing a preacher declare that the birthmark on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s head was the mark of the beast. We were warned that Visa cards or barcodes might be the mark. Today, rumors abound that the mark is a QR code, a vaccine, or something connected to artificial intelligence.

Such speculation dramatically misunderstands John’s explanation of the mark of the beast in the book of Revelation.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The grief we learn to carry: Stacy MacLaren says, “Grief research has given us language for something grieving people have known in their bones forever: losing someone you deeply love isn't like sustaining an injury that eventually disappears once you've healed correctly. Grief is, in part, a massive act of learning.”

  2. Some of the strangest Old Testament laws and what they mean: Christine Palmer explains, ““You shall not eat any flesh with the blood in it. You shall not interpret omens or tell fortunes” (Lev. 19:26). To remain in right standing with the Lord, under no circumstances may the cove­nant people eat meat with its blood,

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Why the internet is making men and women hate each other: Samuel James writes, “We’re on the threshold of a vicious cycle. Men and women are declining relationships with each other, which means they are more likely to be suckered in by the algorithmic gender silo. But the more they take in a biased, imbalanced view of the other, the less interested they are in relationship.”

  2. Mutant virtues: Jacob Crouch says, “These mutant virtues parade themselves out in the public square as though they are the real thing. So-called justice, instead of being the righteousness of God on display,

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The exhaustion that comes from chasing rest: Aimee Joseph begins, “Americans are notorious for needing vacations from their vacations. We work extra hours to save up an exorbitant amount of money so that we can plan an extended vacation for rest. During this “restful” vacation, we try to see all the sites, snap all the pics for all the posts, and eat at all the highest-rated restaurants. If our step counts outpace our spending, we have succeeded!”

  2. Are you as connected to the church as you want to be? Benjamin Vrbicek says, “The biggest wet blanket in ministry

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