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

porn

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Does Bach’s music prove the existence of God? Trevin Wax thinks so, “The inconsolable longing we feel when we encounter true beauty, when the soaring symphony swells toward a melody’s resolution, is the window to another world, whispering to us, singing to us, ‘There is something more.’”

  2. Lessons from a Job season: Travis reflects, “Whether you have suffered more, suffered less, or your suffering is still to come, none of us lives a life free from the difficulties that are part of a world marred by sin and curse. Sometimes the troubles seem unexplainable, uncontrollable, and unending. Like Job, we may relentlessly call out to God, and, like Job, we may not receive quick relief or quick answers.”

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Dune is a Majestic Defense of Going to the Movies: Samuel James shares not only what makes Dune a great movie (I can attest it’s certainly that), but one that makes an argument for why the big screen can be better than the small screen. He says, “You only get films like Dune—ambitious, ponderous, beautiful films—when you have filmmakers who believe their audience can experience such a vision. And there is no such vision possible on a smartphone or laptop screen. Dune is an argument that cinemas are worth saving.”

2. Porn is Bad for You: Katherine Dee explains, “It’ll impact your taste; your openness to certain behaviors; the language you use to talk about sex; the lens you use to think about it. And for some people, like the kid who eats chocolate cake every day or the person who attends too many lavish parties, it might just start to bore you. You might desensitize yourself to sex all together.”

3. When the Beauty Never Leaves: A gorgeous piece of writing by AW Workman. It concludes by pointing us to God’s glory, “Steady on, my soul. One day the beauty will come – and it will never leave.”

4. How to Unite a Divided People: Carey Niewhof says, “The future doesn’t show any signs of uniting people automatically. In fact, left unattended, the divisions will likely only grow deeper and wider. One of the key tasks of leadership is to unite people around a common cause. That’s what leaders do.”

5. Best of the Beatles Cover in 6 Minutes: Another fun one from Walk off the Earth.

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Christmas Eve Recommendations

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Christmas Eve Recommendations

1. Is Christmas a Pagan Rip-Off? Kevin DeYoung explains why what we’ve learned about the date that was chosen to celebrate Christ’s birth is wrong. He concludes, “While we can’t know for certain that this is where December 25 came from—and we certainly can’t be dogmatic about the historicity of the date—there is much better ancient evidence to suggest that our date for Christmas is tied to Christ’s death and conception than tied to the pagan celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus.”

2. Five Misconceptions About the Christmas Story: Michael Kruger explores the ways we get the story wrong. Spoiler alert, #5 is the same as DeYoung’s article above.

3. Vaccines and the Christian Worldview: Albert Mohler considers how Christians should think about vaccines. He offers seven points for consideration. He begins, “First, Christians do not believe in medical non-interventionism. Instead, we believe in the moral legitimacy of medical treatment.”

4. Mary’s Visit to Elizabeth: Warren Peel reflects, “Can you imagine the weight that must have rolled off Mary’s shoulders when she heard Elizabeth’s greeting?”

5. The Thrill of Hope for a World in Sin and Error Pining: Thanks for this, Benjamin Vrbicek. “Behind each idol our hearts could create for worship—whether the idol of work or money or sex or approval or power or whatever—is a pining for something deeper, something we know we want but can never seem to grasp. Perhaps to describe pining we could use the language of “thirst” and “desire,” as Revelation 22:17 does: “And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.”…Long lay the world pining—then and now.”

6. Ten Hilarious Church Christmas Fails: The kid with #7 in the Twelve Days of Christmas is my favorite. Or the kid who yell-sings. So funny.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Will We Remember Our Life in Heaven? Even the Trauma? Wyatt Graham answers this question well. He begins, "Imagine entering into heaven. Joy fills your soul. But you see some object that triggers a traumatic memory from your life. What happens to that joy now? Or say you had lived a life without trauma, yet your loved one did not share your faith. Can you rightly enjoy heaven when your spouse, child, or loved one perdures in eternal perdition?"

2. The Pornography Pandemic: Rosie Makinney reports on a much quieter spiritual pandemic sweeping the world. On just one porn site, traffic increased between 21.5%-95.3% worldwide.

3. Gaining Victory Over Temptation: H.B. Charles Jr. offers ten pieces of sound advice on how to be victorious over temptation in your life.

4. Religion and Households Around the World: Pew Research provides an interesting look at the difference of households around the world. The report begins, "Worldwide, Muslims live in the biggest households, with the average Muslim individual residing in a home of 6.4 people, followed by Hindus at 5.7. Christians fall in the middle (4.5), forming relatively large families in sub-Saharan Africa and smaller ones in Europe. Buddhists (3.9), Jews (3.7) and the religiously unaffiliated (3.7) – defined as those who do not identify with an organized religion, also known as “nones” – live in smaller households, on average."

5. How to Stack Playing Cards: I dare you to not want to try to stack cards after watching Wired’s profile of Guinness Record holder Bryan Berg.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Like Lovers, Parted by War: Rebecca McLaughlin compares the departure of an American soldier in WWII to the socially distanced church. She concludes, “While we’re forced to be apart, let’s long for the day when we come together again. Let’s long like Steve Vlaskamp longed for his wife, and like Captain Harville longed for his family. Let’s set our sights on the soon-to-come day when we’ll be back in church once more. And in this time of short-term deprivation, let’s long for the long-term: when we’ll gather from every tribe and tongue and nation to worship Jesus as one body together (Revelation 7:9), when the Lamb will be on his throne, and final peacetime will – at last – have come.”

2. Banning Plastic Bags Isn't Going to Save the Planet: Bjorn Lomborg with a controversial opinion about why this slogan doesn't deal with the actual issue.

3. How the Virus Got Out: This is stunning work by the New York Times that visually depicts the spread of COVID-19 from one seafood market in Wuhan to every corner of the globe. You need a NYT account, but can get one for free right now.

4. How Porn Kills Healthy Sexual Relationships: Tim Barnett begins, "Neuroscience is clear: porn affects your brain. But it does more than that. It also affects your heart. That is, it changes how we relate to other people... For instance, husbands who regularly use pornography have trouble connecting sexually with their wife."

5. 5 Signs Your Character is Slowly Imploding: Carey Niewhof shares that we need to be aware of the gap between our public and private life, "Character rarely implodes suddenly. Instead, there’s almost always a slow erosion until eventually your character implodes. Consequently, wise leaders keep an eye on any gaps between what they say publicly and how they live privately."

6. There Once Was a Farmer: Are you struggling with discouragement? This post by Christ Thomas is one of the best pieces of writing I've read in a while, and profound.

7. The Deep Sea: This interactive page is fabulous! You're going to love it.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       Free Throws Should Be Easy. Why do Professionals Miss? I enjoyed this story from Wired: " On paper, the free throw could not be more straightforward. It's a direct, unguarded shot at a hoop 18 inches across, 10 feet off the ground, and 15 feet away."

2.       Have you Talked to Your Kids About Sex? Helpful encouragement: "The sex and gender conversations in your home don’t have to be big, awkward productions. They don’t have to be embarrassing. And they certainly don’t need to be all planned out. But they do need to happen. The sooner the better. And they need to continue, the more often the easier. They absolutely must be rooted in biblical truth about how God designed our bodies and gave us the gift of gender and sex."

3.        How Relationships Spark Spiritual Growth: This is a really helpful matrix that will help any leader consider how they can grow their group relationally. Dan Mancini says that this process will, "remove hurdles to your growth... And you’ll get down into the root of the junk you’re carrying around in your life, and it will reveal motivations, appetites, and beliefs that no one (including you) knew you were carrying around.

4.       3 Things to Do When Someone is Suffering: Chris Hulshof considers what we can learn from Job's friends: " What does it look like to show up when someone is suffering? It looks like joining them right where they are and getting dirty with them amidst their grief and sorrow."

5.       8 Questions You Must Ask as you Fight Pornography: Deepak Reju offers great counsel. Two of the eight questions are "what lies are you believing?" and "will you be radical or passive about cutting out your sin?"

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.     The Way We Prepare For Marriages is All Wrong: Aaron Earls considers cultural trends that undermine marriage and the data that undoes those trends: "In recent decades, however, new advice began to take root. It argued you will be most ready for marriage if you delay marriage into the 30s or later, “sow wild oats” before you’re ready to settle down, find someone with whom you share “sexual chemistry,” and live together with potential spouses to determine if the relationship is ready for the marital commitment. At the Institute for Family Studies, professor and researcher Jason Carroll analyzed data that confronts each of these points of accepted cultural wisdom."

2.     6 Ways Watching Pornography Affects Your Mental Health: Among those issues, Brad Hambrick points out is, "Mindfulness – the ability to willfully focus one’s attention during adverse circumstances – is a significant contributor to mental health. Pornography is nearly the complete opposite of mindfulness. Pornography uses sound, site, and tactile sensation to pull an individual from their actual world into an artificial, fantasy world. Combining multiple senses with an enticing narrative makes it increasingly difficult for less stimulating activities (which is most of life) to hold an individual’s attention."

3.     The Sabbath as a Radical Act: This is as good an article as I've read in some time. William Black argues that, "There was a reason the fourth commandment came where it did, bridging the commandments on how humans should relate to God with the commandments on how humans should relate to one another. As the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann points out in his book Sabbath as Resistance (2014), a pharaonic economy driven by anxiety begets violence, dishonesty, jealousy, theft, the commodification of sex and familial alienation. None of these had a place in the Torahic economy, which was driven not by anxiety but by wholeness, enoughness."

4.     Watching Rain: Need a stress reliever? Click on this simple and relaxing website and play around a little.

5.     The Science Behind Why Walking on Legos Hurts More Than Walking on Fire or Glass: Parents everywhere will feel validated reading this article from Smithsonian. 

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Thanksgiving Recommendations

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Thanksgiving Recommendations

1.      How Much Money Do You Save by Cooking at Home? Priceonomics analyzes the cost of buying groceries and cooking at home compared to restaurants and meal kits. The old fashioned way wins by a landslide.

2.  When You Don’t Feel Like Giving Thanks: An Thanksgiving reflection from Sabrina MacDonald, full of grace and wisdom, “Even when you don’t feel like giving thanks, God is honored by what the Bible calls a “sacrifice of praise.” Hebrews 13:15 (NASB) says, “Through Him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.” A sacrifice is an offering that hurts to give. Thanksgiving in good times is simply a response to the goodness of God, not a sacrifice. But to honor God in times of suffering, that is an offering far more valuable.”

3. A Time of Reckoning for the Sexual Revolution: Mary Eberstadt suggests that the #MeToo Movement has made the emptiness of the sexual revolution undeniable: "What the MeToo moment proves above all is that the time for magical thinking about the sexual revolution is over. Until now, many people simply accepted the realities of the post-Pill world as non-negotiable facts. It’s time to challenge that worldview as one that lacks moral and intellectual maturity."

4.      What the 40 Year Old Famous Christian Leader Would Tell His 20 Year Old Self: I so appreciate David Platt's wisdom, "My encouragement to my twentysomething self, or other twentysomethings — or anybody, for that matter — is to surrender to the Lord, abide in him, and rest. Trust him as he leads and guides and directs. And Lord willing, our lives will be spent for his purposes."

5.       3 Ways Porn Injures Us: Among those ways, Jesse Mason tells us is how porn punishes, "The person who does awaken from the degradation of porn will inevitably be crippled from running away. The brain will insist that in order to cope with distress or “low” feelings, it must have more porn to “boost” the good hormones. If someone can move beyond that and somehow wrestle those demons (via accountability or a recovery program), the biggest hindrance still awaits at the door: shame." 

6. The Grind of School Debt: This long-form first-person article by MH Miller may not seem like it's worth the investment of time, but Miller does a great job of helping you to feel the weight of the impact of educational debt to an average middle class American. In the midst of his struggles, Miller asks, "I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last decade shifting the blame for my debt. Whose fault was it? My devoted parents, for encouraging me to attend a school they couldn’t afford? The banks, which should have never lent money to people who clearly couldn’t pay it back to begin with, continuously exploiting the hope of families like mine, and quick to exploit us further once that hope disappeared? Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realize it was a mistake to spend roughly $200,000 on a school..."

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.      Why Winning the Lottery is So Dangerous: J. Warner Wallace reflects, "Most of us recognize the relationship between satisfaction and duration. The longer something lasts (and the longer we enjoy it), the more satisfying we typically find it to be. In seeking the next big lottery jackpot, most players hope to win enough money to last the rest of their lives. Why? Because they are seeking satisfaction that will last a lifetime. But if the Christian worldview is true, each of us are eternal beings, created in the image of God, and destined to live forever – well beyond the temporal lives in which we could spend our lottery winnings... That’s why winning the lottery can be so dangerous. It takes our eyes off the goal. Not the physical, emotional or behavior goal, but the spiritual goal: to seek and find the true source of eternal satisfaction."

2.      The Math Language of Revelation: Barry York talks about how we ought to make sense of all the numbers in Revelation, "When it comes to the book of Revelation, you quickly find the presence of many numbers. These numbers add (no pun intended) to the mystery of the book. Yet, similar to the example above, remembering the Bible has a "math language" of its own can help in understanding the passages containing the use of numbers. Here are five of Revelation's math language rules to follow."

3.      The Crisis of Porn: Tony Perkins sounds the alarm, "What our kids are stumbling on isn’t your grandfather’s pornography... These are raw, violent, and nauseating videos that they don’t have to sneak into a store for. Every child has a world full of porn at their fingertips... Porn is everywhere, and the research is grim... Americans on both sides of the aisle are realizing: this is an actual catastrophe...These sites, the same ones teaching kids a distorted and twisted version of sex, get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined." 

4.      4 Myths About Responding to Spousal Abuse: Three pastors team up to debunk some hurtful pastoral responses to abusive situations. They put their finger on the pastor's tension: "Pastors who wish to support, protect, and counsel survivors of abuse are often left wondering how best to minister to them. They know abuse is a multi-faceted evil. They want to provide the best counsel possible. But several misconceptions around the issue can cloud the thoughts and guide the actions of well-intentioned church leaders."

5.      11 Common Phrases You Didn't Know Were From the Bible: This is fun. Some phrases you might be surprised by: "by the skin of your teeth," "a drop in the bucket," "a leopard can't change his spots," and "bit the dust."

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       Let's Ban Porn: Ross Douthat with a bold proposal, "[W]e are supposed to be in the midst of a great sexual reassessment, a clearing-out of assumptions that that impose misogyny and impose bad sex on semi-willing women. And such a reassessment will be incomplete if if it never reconsiders our surrender to the idea that many teenagers, mostly young men especially, will get their sex education from online smut."

2.       Ten Lessons on Parenting Big(ger) Kids: Great advice from Tim Challies. All ten are good, but I particularly like his final piece of advice, " Focus more on sharing experiences than exchanging stuff. The things you and your children remember and celebrate as the years go by are far more likely to be experiences you shared together than gifts you exchanged."

3.       Wishing He Were Your Husband: Sabrina Beasley McDonald on the dangers of emotional infidelity and what to do when that wishing begins: " If you're thinking of a man right now and you're wondering if you're in danger of an emotional affair with him, then you probably are."

4.       Vocation in Retirement: Gene Veith, one of the best authors on vocation, considers what vocation means in his retirement: " Retirement underscores two important facets of the doctrine of vocation: the purpose of every vocation is loving and serving our neighbors. And the way we make our living is only one of our vocations and not even the most important one."

5.       Does the Bible Endorse Slavery? This charge is often made against the Bible by atheists and agnostistics that the Bible supports slavery? Is that true? Dr. Matthew Hall responds.

6.       Can a Christian Be Demon Possessed? Dr. Stephen Wellum says no in this helpful video.

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