Advent, Christmas, Theology
John Beeson
Glory to God in the Lowest!

Last week on The World and Everything in It George Grant considered “The Wisdom of paradox.” He concludes his reflection,  that Christmas is “the greatest and most remarkable paradox of all is revealed: He who was infinite, was yet an infant; He who was eternal, was yet born of a woman; He who was almighty, was yet nursing at His mother’s breast; He who was upholding the universe, was yet carried in His mother’s arms. Thus, Chesterton exclaimed, ‘Outrushing the depth of the fall of man is the height of the fall of God. Glory to God in the Lowest.’”

“Glory to God in the lowest.” What a mind-bending truth.

Glory to God in the Lowest!
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

Jen Oshman

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What I Read in 2023 (and perhaps some books you might want to read in 2024)

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What I Read in 2023 (and perhaps some books you might want to read in 2024)

This year, Angel and I celebrated the release of our first book, Trading Faces. Any author knows how much of their heart they pour into writing and the blessing it is to have people interact with what you’ve crafted on the page. We’ve been so encouraged by those who have written us to share ways the book has impacted them. Laboring over the art of writing has made me a more charitable reader. I know how easy it is for my writing to become aimless, for ideas in my mind to become muddled on the page.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Why pineapples used to cost $8,000: Suzanne Raga with the intriguing history of pineapples, which were considered so luxurious and exotic at one time they were rented. She begins, “Though native to South America, pineapples (scientific name: Ananas comosus) made their way to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and it was here that Christopher Columbus first spotted their spiky crowns in 1493. Columbus and his crew took pineapples back to Spain, where everyone loved how sweet this new, exotic fruit tasted.”

  2. A normal life includes a great deal of suffering: Alan Noble asks us to consider, “Think about someone you know who is living the good life: someone well dressed, confident, smiling, high achieving, maybe even attractive and intelligent and funny. Nine times out of ten, they are carrying around something unspeakably painful. And often, when you learn what that pain is, it’ll be something completely unexpected. You weren’t even aware that people could suffer like that.”

  3. Standing on the shoulder of nobodies: Brianna Lambert considers the humble fiddler crab and concludes, “It’s true, our hard work may still feel small and forgotten. To the world it may look inconsequential like those tiny fiddler crabs. But we know our lives are not singular. We know that God has linked our small acts of service to an immensely valuable mission.”

  4. 14 facts about biblical life: Here is one, “Balm is a kind of resin taken from trees by cutting the bark. People used it as a perfume. And the community also considered it a medicine (Jer. 51:8). Although Gilead is mentioned together with balm (Jer. 8:22; 46:11), the substance was not produced in Gilead.”

  5. We are defined not by our failures, but by Christ’s victory: Jen Oshman tells the amazing story of a forgotten missionary couple. What appeared to be the end of the story was this (but it was far from the end!): “It’s not totally clear what happened, but records show that after 17 years Dr. Leslie and his wife were asked by local tribal leaders to leave. There had been some kind of falling out and they were no longer welcome in or around Vanga. The Leslies abandoned their mission outpost and returned to the U.S. defeated—believing they had failed.”

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. The Thing About ‘Light and Momentary’: I found Tim Challies’s reflections on suffering to be very helpful. He begins, “They are words that can be tremendously encouraging or tremendously discouraging. Said at the wrong time or in the wrong spirit they can compound hurt, but said at the right time and in the right spirit they can be a cool drink on a hot day, a soothing balm on a sore wound.”

  2. The Church’s Role in Making Abortion Unthinkable and Unnecessary: Jen Oshman shares, “Studies show that for women who have an abortion, their suicidality increases by 155 percent. Studies also show that about 80 percent of women would not have chosen abortion if they had felt more supported. So my call to the church, then, is How can we seek life? How can we come alongside vulnerable women, vulnerable children, vulnerable families, and how can we be people who help them seek life? How can we be a culture that makes abortion not only unthinkable, but unnecessary—just something that’s not even on the agenda because we are a church and a people in a community that comes around the vulnerable population?”

  3. Killing Goliath: My friend and fellow pastor at New Life, Dustin DeJong, helps adjust the way we read a familiar story. “We assume we’re David but we aren’t. You aren’t David and Goliath isn’t some problem to be solved.”

  4. My Reconstructed Faith: Philip Ryan says, “Over the past two years, we have all seen and listened to many stories of deconstruction from authors, musicians, and even YouTube personalities. Sadly, these stories are celebrated even by some Christians — the same Christians who then mock those who raised alarm over deconstruction. What I don’t often hear are stories of those who have reconstructed their faith.”

  5. A Nobody in One Country, Famous in the Next: Darryl Dash with a real story that relates profoundly to us: “Sixto Rodriguez was a nobody. He’d tried to establish a career as a musician, but it went nowhere. He showed lots of promise and had sold a handful of records, but his record label dropped him and then closed. He was working on a third album at the time, but it was never released.”

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Maundy Thursday Recommendations

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Maundy Thursday Recommendations

1. Is Easter Believable? Des Smith begins, “Is Easter believable? That’s a question people have been asking for 2000 years. It may be a question you’re asking.”

2. Is Christianity Bad News for Women? Jen Oshman responds, “[T]he Christian culture in the first century then becomes this safe place and harbor for women. Women turned to Christ, and the Christian community has been predominantly female ever since.”

3. Faith Like a Beach House: Chris Thomas begins this moving extended metaphor this way, “The excitement ebbed away with my first breath. Now, to be honest, I’m not an overly excitable guy; I’m fairly reserved in my displays of emotion, but I had been undeniably excited, that much was clear. But not any more. A week or two earlier, my wife and I had purchased on old van, circa late 70’s, that had been permanently parked on a slab of concrete”

4. An Open Letter to a Christian Disheartened by Temptation: Don Carson and John Woodbridge begin, “That you are experiencing rounds of temptation is not as unusual as you might suppose. From the inception of the church believers have found this pilgrim way to be strewn with multiple temptations.”

5. Were You There? A beautiful rendition by the Three Mo’ Tenors.

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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.      Few Churched Teens are Devout as Young Adults: Aaron Earls has been unfolding this important LifeWay Research study recently. He shares, " Those who stopped attending church for at least a year are more likely to say they believe in God, but are uncertain about Christianity (17 to 8 percent); say they consider themselves spiritual, but not religious (13 to 5 percent); say they’re uncertain about their belief in God (7 to 3 percent); and say they don’t believe in God (6 to 1 percent)."

2.      4 Ways to Avoid the Church Dropout Danger Zone: Aaron Earls responds to the findings about young adults dropping out of church with some helpful advice: "Most parents don’t realize the impact their words and actions have on their teenagers. They wrongly assume their children aren’t listening and wouldn’t care. If parents make church a priority for the family, students will pick up on that. If parents treat church as if it is simply another activity to take or leave, students will pick up on that as well."

3.      Faithful with a Few: Jen Oshman with an important question for each of us, "How will you respond to the few? Every Christian must confront these questions because every Christian has a ministry, from the senior pastor to the children’s minister to the lay mentor who disciples young adults over coffee."

4.      The Importance of the Bible's Best Description of Salvation: Julie Canlis shares, " Paul says something far more often: He uses the phrase “in Christ” 165 times. The Bible’s favorite way of describing our salvation is one we rarely use. For Paul, salvation was simple: It was being joined to Jesus Christ."

5.      5 Lessons Jordan Peterson Has Taught the Church: Esther O'Reilly has read Peterson deeply and has great insights on what the polarizing sociologist can teach us: "1. The Church must authentically meet men’s emotional needs… Peterson speaks with a voice that is at once authoritative and encouraging to men. He offers tough love that tells men they aren’t living up to their potential, without swinging to the other extreme and shaming them for it. He praises and exemplifies distinctively masculine virtues. And crucially, these virtues do not exclude emotion."

6. How PreachersNSneakers Exposes All Christians: Brady Shearer takes a look into the popular Instagram account that calls megachurch pastors out on their expensive shoe tastes. 

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.      5 Ways Your Personality Changes in the First Year of Marriage: Cari Romm reports on a recent study in Developmental Psychology, "Overall, it’s kind of a mixed bag — the very beginning stage of a marriage can change people for the worse, but also for the better. A better takeaway, then, might be the fact that they change at all."

2.      How to Make a Marriage: Gary Thomas with wise advice on the long process of making a healthy marriage, "In fact, one study suggests that it takes from nine to 14 years—at least a decade, and sometimes a decade and a half—for two individuals to stop thinking of themselves as individuals and to start thinking of themselves as a couple. That’s right—the journey from “me” to “we” takes years to achieve."

3.      What is Wrong? Americans' List is Shrinking: Aaron Earls reports on a new Gallup poll that reports that across the board, Americans approve more of extramarital sex, divorce, cloning, suicide, gambling, same sex relationships, etc than they did ten to fifteen years ago.

4.      Simplicity for the Sake of the Gospel: I found Jen Oshman's article very convicting. She shares, "We feel glutted—overstuffed on overabundance. We are sick of our calendars and Amazon shopping carts being jammed full with far more than we need. Maybe less is more, we think. A decluttered entryway. Leisurely evenings. A reduced pace of life. We’re searching for the simple life. But to what end? What is it we’re after? What will fill the void created by our new, simple lives? When my husband and I sensed God calling us to plant a church in our new neighborhood, the man we consider our spiritual father had some wise words for us. 'Do not get busy,' he said. 'If you want to minister to your neighbors and your community, you need to be home. Don’t make a bunch of commitments. Just be there. They will come.' I didn’t believe him." 

5.      Safari Botswana: I dare you to not want to go on a safari after this up-close-and-personal video.

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