Christian Living, Prayer, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
The Questions Jesus Asked

We ask God a lot of questions.

·        “Why do bad things happen?”

·        “Why is there only one way to heaven?”

·        “Why are some people who follow you hypocrites?”

·        “Why don’t you make it more obvious that you are God?”

God invites questions. These questions haunt some. For others, the questions create confusion and stall their faith journey. For others, these questions deepen their faith as they wrestle them through with God.

But the line between us and heaven is not one way.

Did you ever consider that God might have questions for you?

The Questions Jesus Asked
Recommendations, Culture, Evangelism, Family, Parenting, Relationships, Vocation
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. How the West became pagan—again: Derek Rishmawy says, “When you think about your average non-Christian today... It’s far more likely to be someone who never went to church, checks her astrology chart, likes nature, takes an interest in breathwork because it connects her to reality, and maybe believes in the simulation theory.

  2. Our sorrows keep getting more sorrowful and joys keep getting more joyful: Christopher Ash says, “ Far from the life of faith, gradually steadying to some calm mid-point between sorrow and joy, the sorrows deepen, and yet are infused with stronger joys. It gets, if I may put it loosely, both worse and better.”

This Week's Recommendations
Counseling, Identity, Sexuality, Suffering
John Beeson
When Trauma Turns to Wickedness

Trauma is everywhere. One in four women and one in six men will be sexually abused. At least one in seven children have experienced abuse or neglect in the past year. More than one in four abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children.

Psychological research continues to demonstrate the tentacle-like nature of the impact of trauma. Effects include dissociation, panic attacks, hyperarousal, loss of sleep, low self-esteem, grief, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse.

We tend to associate trauma with those who were assaulted or were involved in military combat,

When Trauma Turns to Wickedness
Recommendations, Christian Living, Culture, History, Prayer, Religion
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Soul is making a comeback: Wyatt Graham begins, “Everything seems to suppress soul. We live to catalyze efficient products. Our labour is counted, quantified, and measured. Human resource departments view us as human resources. They measure our performance by mechanical standards, and our salary relies on whether or not we have added value to a corporation. Work commodifies humans as resources; it is why HR departments exist. You are coal to be mined.”

  2. Gen Z women struggle to find their way in Christian faith and community: A recent Barna study reports, “Currently, young adult women report the lowest rates of Bible reading, prayer and church attendance among their peers.”

This Week's Recommendations
Fear, Forgiveness, Identity, Wisdom
John Beeson
Breaking the Power of Shame

Shame has power.

Shame is one of the most destructive forces on this earth. Shame is harmful because it attacks our spiritual and emotional life. Unlike guilt, shame can come from actions that aren’t even wrong. People experience shame over their body and over their family of origin. Shame is a visceral and physical experience that can manifest itself in depression and self-medicating. Shame tells us totalizing truths about ourselves, often truths that cannot be remedied. “You’re always,” “you will never” shame whispers.

Shame is different from guilt in that where guilt is connected with our actions, shame is connected to our identity.

Breaking the Power of Shame

Theology

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Beware the Lure of Sensuality

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Beware the Lure of Sensuality

Perhaps the most uncomfortable thing about Christianity is not that God exists, and not that God sent his Son to the earth. It’s not the miracles: did God really make the universe out of nothing? Did Jesus really rise from the dead? It’s not even that its ethical stance on sexuality feels behind the times.

The most uncomfortable thing about Christianity is unequivocally our call to not just believe in, but to grant God authority in our lives and live faithfully and righteously.

In 2 Peter 2, Peter admonishes the church to beware of those who are false teachers and prophets. He says, “And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.” It’s interesting that he uses the word sensuality here. He doesn’t say, “And many will follow their false beliefs,” he says, “And many will follow their sensuality.”[i]

The result, not the cause, of our sensual desires is believing in false teaching.

The hook of false beliefs is rarely the beliefs themselves. Atheism, frankly, isn’t a very attractive belief system on its own merits. By its very definition, life contains no meaning: the brutal and blind hand of the natural world is all that is. It raises more questions than it solve: from the question of creation to the problem of evil to ethics. The hook of atheism is sensuality. If there is no God, there is no one you have to cede authority of your life to.

It’s why agnosticism is much more popular than atheism[ii] You get the same freedom and don’t have to swallow nearly as bitter a pill.

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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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