Christian Living, Evangelism
John Beeson
Open Dumpster Living

Along the route from my house to the church is an undeveloped intersection on three of its four corners. Two medium-trafficked two-lane roads converge at a stop sign. A while ago, inexplicably, two massive forty-yard dumpsters showed up on one of the undeveloped corners. They sat empty for a few days, and then some observant neighbors, likely determining that the dumpster didn’t have another purpose, dumped a ragged armchair in the dumpster.

The proverbial floodgates opened. Old TV sets, broken dressers, bikes, and couches filled the two dumpsters to overflowing. Over the next two months, the dumpsters were emptied multiple times and then quickly filled.

Open Dumpster Living
Recommendations, Church, Counseling, Culture
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Understanding therapy culture from different generations: This article from Sheryl Jacob resonates with my experience in the counseling room with different generations. “Millennials (born 1981-1996) grew up with therapy as mainstream - encouraged to talk about trauma, set boundaries, process their inner child, and name anxiety. While this openness is good, this generation also normalised many struggles the Church should have addressed long ago.”

  2. Be drunk with love: J.A. Medders encourages, “We get filled with the Spirit—when bottles (barrels) of the vintage gospel hit our bloodstream, our Blood Gospel Content rises above the legalistic limit.”

This Week's Recommendations
Suffering
John Beeson
Ducking Suffering

"Forgive me for all the times I needed to suffer and I ran from it, I numbed it.” The prayer caught me off guard. I looked up. Aspens bent in the wind outside the window. A small group of pastors gathered in the small community center in the tiny town of Summerhaven, located near the summit of Mount Lemmon, 5,000 feet above Tucson.

Who hasn’t avoided suffering? I’ve avoided suffering in countless ways: I’ve dodged difficult conversations, evaded serving, neglected the spiritual disciplines of fasting and silence, overspent our budget, and skipped leg day. But how often have I prayed for forgiveness for shirking suffering?

Ducking Suffering
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Grieving God's Heart

Six chapters into the Bible and only three chapters after Adam and Eve committed the first sin against God, the hearts of humanity have turned in on themselves. They desire to please themselves alone. God’s heart is broken. Listen to the narrative in Genesis 6. It’s a remarkable glimpse into God’s emotional life,

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart….

Grieving God's Heart
Recommendations, History, Nature, Religion, Wisdom
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. When God says now: Christopher Cook says, “I understand the hesitation, but you and I need discernment for this hour. We are being called to submit. Our job is not to assess our readiness (according to our perspective). It is to step forward with clean hands, a yielded spirit, and a heart tethered to the will of the Father.”

  2. The secret things: Andrea Sanborn concludes, “Someday we’ll know the secret things that our mortality can’t fathom. “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”, as the Apostle Paul explained it. But for now, it’s okay to rest in wonder. Because wonder, in the end, is worship.”

This Week's Recommendations

Spiritual Growth

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The Bible's Strange Reasons for Generosity: True Prosperity

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The Bible's Strange Reasons for Generosity: True Prosperity

The famous minister, Benny Hinn, is one of many who promises that if you are generous, God will reward you financially. “Divine prosperity is God’s will for every believer!” Hinn says, “All we must do to receive God’s blessings and abundance is to obey him.” How do we obey God? By giving. “Sow seed with great expectation of a powerful overflow in your life. Then get ready for it to be multiplied back to you abundantly. Yes, a seed may seem small in your hand, but when you sow seed in expectant faith, you release its God-given potential to produce a supernatural outpouring: ‘He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully’ (2 Corinthians 9:6).”[i]

The fourth reason Paul offers for giving is found here in 2 Corinthians 9:6, the promise that the one who “sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.” That’s a pretty wild promise. Are Hinn and the other prosperity preachers correct in asserting that God promises financial reward for those who give?

Open the Windows of Heaven

Malachi 3:10 certainly seems to echo this sentiment as well, “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.”

The answer is that God does promise a blessing for those who give, but he does not promise a financial blessing. We must understand what God means when he speaks of blessing to understand what God is promising. God is no divine IRS agent, caught in his own loopholes, forced to dole out financial blessings against his will. To think that that we can manipulate God like a broken slot machine stuck on 7’s misunderstands the character of God and the nature of his blessings. God’s purpose is to shape us to look like him.[ii] God’s blessings, then, are given just as his discipline is given: to form us more and more in the likeness of his Son, Jesus Christ.

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The Bible's Strange Reasons for Generosity: Show them God!

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The Bible's Strange Reasons for Generosity: Show them God!

Why do we give? The first hit when you Google “why should I be generous?” is this article which lays out four reasons:

1) Giving frees you from the “burden of materialism”

2) Giving helps you “to feel better about yourself”

3) Giving makes you less self-centered

4) Giving helps make people like you.

Do you find those reasons compelling? Two of them (1 &3) have echoes of biblical truth in them. But 2 & 4 are shockingly empty reasons.

Paul also has four reasons for giving: none of which overlap with this list. Here is Paul’s list:

1) Give because giving is a grace

2) Give because it proves your love of Jesus

3) Give because Jesus first gave

4) Give because you will be blessed.

Give Because Jesus Gave

Today we arrive at the third reason on that list: give because Jesus first gave.

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The Bible's Strange Reasons for Generosity: Giving is a Grace

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The Bible's Strange Reasons for Generosity: Giving is a Grace

Our doorbell rang – an odd occasion –I got up from the dinner table and walked toward the door. My step hitched halfway to the door as I realized it was likely a child selling something… too late. I opened the door and a high schooler stood in front of me, fundraising for his baseball team.

Being asked for money makes me uncomfortable.

There is something reasonable about being uncomfortable when we’re asked for money. The pang might speak to whether we are giving thoughtfully. But the reality is that far too often that twinge of discomfort points not to the worth of the cause, but the grip our hearts have on our money.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul tells us that God doesn’t wasn’t uncomfortable givers, he wants cheerful givers. The way to cheerfulness isn’t by willing ourselves there, it’s by reshaping our affections. In this series we’re going to unpack four transformative reasons about generosity and then unpack Paul’s instructions for how we ought to give.

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Feeling Palm Sunday

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Feeling Palm Sunday

One recent study has identified 27 emotions.[i] That might not sound like a lot until you try to start naming emotions. What emotions have you felt in the past week? Joy? Sadness? Anger? Frustration? What else comes to mind?

The enemy numbs our emotions. Most men I meet who are struggling with an addiction are numbed emotionally. Few are aware of the emotional numbness. It’s not uncommon for men to be unable to identify only a few emotions. An emotionally numbed person often struggles to identify any emotion at all. A common marker of emotional numbness is the response, “I don’t know.” “How are you doing?” “I don’t know.” “How did that make you feel?” “I don’t know.”

Worse still, someone struggling with an addiction often believes feelings are the enemy. It is their unhealthy appetites that got them into this situation, after all. “If I could only stop desiring,” the addict thinks, “then I would be free.”

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Lessons from an Anti-Hero: Speak

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Lessons from an Anti-Hero: Speak

Jonah doesn’t get much right. Not much at all. God called him to arise and go to Nineveh. Nope and nope. Jonah ran the opposite direction. But after God gets Jonah’s attention, Jonah ever-so-tentatively obeys God’s call.

The third call God placed on Jonah’s life was that he “call out against” Nineveh “the message that I tell you.” After being spit up by the fish and told a second time to “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you,” Jonah finally heads to Nineveh. We aren’t told what God tells Jonah to tell the Ninevites. The story moves ahead and we find Jonah wandering the streets of Nineveh, speaking these words, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”[i]

We don’t know whether Jonah delivered this message once or multiple times as he walked through the city. The text is ambiguous about that. What was the tone Jonah delivered the message with? Was he compassionate? Fiery? Earnest? Certainly none of these. If we look ahead one chapter, it is clear that Jonah’s obedience isn’t whole-hearted. After he delivers the message, Jonah sits perched on an overlook, anticipating the destruction of the city. If there was any pep in Jonah’s step as he delivered his message, it was anticipatory malice. He hoped that God would bring destruction, that salt would be poured on the wound of Nineveh’s disobedience.

So let’s picture the scene of Jonah’s evangelistic walk through Nineveh.

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Sex, Sexuality, and Your Identity in Christ

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Sex, Sexuality, and Your Identity in Christ

A week and a half ago, my wife Angel and I had the opportunity to share with our Student Ministries about sex and sexuality.

Here is the outline of our talk:

  • Why is sex complicated?

  • What our sexuality has to do with trusting God.

  • What do we say to “Love is love”?

  • Why our identity is found in our sainthood, not our sexuality.

  • How our sexuality is for our joy and our discipleship.

  • Q&A

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Every Week My Dog Protects Us From the Amazon Delivery Driver: On the Danger of Learning the Wrong Lesson

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Every Week My Dog Protects Us From the Amazon Delivery Driver: On the Danger of Learning the Wrong Lesson

I’m working from home today. It’s a great working environment: calm and focused. Our dog lies peacefully at my feet. Until a vehicle dares to enter our cul-de-sac, that is. Then our 25-pound Australian Labradoodle leaps to the window, both paws on the window sill, and turns into a ferocious beast.

The Amazon delivery guy pulls up to the curb, jumps out with a package in tow, and places it at the front door. Our dog howls as though a cadre of gunmen have encircled our property. This is no sociable bark to his neighborhood doggie friends: this is a protect-the-house-at-all-costs-bay. The deliveryman hustles back to his van and pulls out of the cul-de-sac.

My dog settles back down at my feet. He’s protected the home from another invasion. In his mind, he’s batting a thousand. 849 attempted burglaries all thwarted by his fearsome presence.

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Cactus Spines and Groaning

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Cactus Spines and Groaning

Spine: that’s the technical word for the pointy things that come out of cacti. Most Arizonans use more colloquial expressions like prickers or stickers when referencing them. Either way, they’re nothing to laugh at. If you’ve lived in the Sonoran desert for any length of time, you’ve used a pair of tweezers to yank them from your skin.

After my parents moved to Tucson, my grandfather visited from Florida. Amazed by the beautiful and seemingly soft “fur” covering prickly pear cacti, he stroked the apparently innocuous fuzz. The prickly pear gifted him with a few hundred spines that pierced his fingertips. He groaned.

Recently I was doing some yard work and got too close to a saguaro’s spine as I tried to weed around the base of the cactus. The spine pierced my fingernail. I groaned.

It has remained lodged there for over two months. Initially located at the base of my fingernail, it was impossible to remove without taking off my entire fingernail. The fingernail itself now holds the tip of the spine against the flesh under my fingernail. It’s a tiny amount of pain, but pain that will not leave. I groan.

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Teaching for Change: How I Learned to Stop Preaching

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Teaching for Change: How I Learned to Stop Preaching

When I signed up to serve as a pastoral intern during my seminary years in New Jersey, I was given the opportunity to teach our church’s adult Sunday school class. The popular and engaging regular teacher graciously handed me the reins for a chunk of the fall semester. I decided we would study the gospel of John together. I read through the gospel, paged through commentaries, crafted a syllabus, and prepared the manuscript for the class’s first week. I handed out the syllabus to the group (that included weekly homework) and launched in, hands gripped to the podium, with passion and verve.

I had mixed thoughts about how it went. On the one hand, my sermon lesson was well structured, thoroughly researched, and faithful to scripture. I intentionally added questions in the lessons, so it wasn’t just a monologue. I should have felt good about it. On the other hand, there seemed a disconnect between the class and myself that I couldn’t figure out how to bridge. My enthusiasm for the book didn’t seem to create engagement. The questions I asked were met with (mostly) silence or shallow answers. The faces in front of me seemed largely unaffected.

I got a friendly call from one of the campus ministers who attended our church (and that Sunday School class) that week and he invited me out to coffee. Over mugs at the local caffeine dive, Small World, I had a brief conversation that was worth a semester’s worth of seminary education. (Parenthetically, while I took four classes on preaching, I never took a class on teaching at seminary, and I am not sure if one was offered.) The conversation changed the way I have taught ever since.

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How to Make Your Spiritual Life Purposeful: Your Vocational Call, part 3

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How to Make Your Spiritual Life Purposeful: Your Vocational Call, part 3

What gives you purpose in seasons that feel meaningless or directionless? God does.

When you think of godly leaders, King David is in rarified air. He is, after all, the famed slayer of Goliath, the one who was known as “the man after God’s own heart,” and the greatest king in Israel’s history. But, from a human perspective, the majority of his life seemed directionless and even wasted. And yet every step had an incredible purpose. There is no King David without his journey.

As a young man, Samuel anointed David’s head and “the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward.”[i] Within a few years David defeated Goliath and was promised to Saul’s daughter in marriage. Surely David must have thought that his ascension to the throne was near. If I were in David’s shoes I would have anticipated my reign to begin at any moment.

But as things so often are in God’s economy, our expectations are not God’s. It would be many years before David would sit on the throne.[ii] David would go from the rising star of Israel, whom the people sung about in the streets, to fleeing, to exile, wandering with his motley band across the hostile terrain of Palestine. Even after so many years had passed, he twice refused to take the life of the man who not only sought his life, but blocked his anointing.[iii]

What must have sustained David for these long years was not only the presence of God, but also God’s purpose for him. Even as he ran for his life, he speaks of his trust and his purpose, “But the king [referring to himself, who wasn’t yet king] shall rejoice in God.” So it is with the power of a purposeful spiritual life for us. When we know and understand the identity and purposes God has placed on our lives, it sustains us through tremendous difficulty, which is also God’s purpose.

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