Identity, Reading, Recommendations
John Beeson
Who are You?

Do you want to know God better? Know yourself better. You, after all, were made in his image. Do you want to know yourself better? Know God better.

My wife Angel and I wrote Trading Faces: Removing the Masks that Hide Your God-Given Identity in order to combat the lies we are tempted to believe about who we are and press into God’s Word to hear his truth.

Many have asked when the audiobook will release. We are delighted to share that the Trading Faces audiobook is now available!

Who are You?
Recommendations, Church, Family, Religion
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Will I ever love a church again? Brittany Allen asks, “Could I reclaim that vulnerability that once came so naturally to me after it had been used as a weapon pointed at my own heart? Could God rebuild my faith in his Bride and redeem what had been lost?”

  2. The hidden curriculum of the wilderness: Christopher Cook says, “When you’re in that space—the wilderness between who you were and who you’re becoming—you will be tempted to mislabel it; to call it punishment; to rebuke it like it’s an attack; even, to distract yourself from it.

This Week's Recommendations
Generosity, Church, Gratitude, Leadership
John Beeson
Invisible Generosity

I’m normally the second person to arrive at church on Sunday morning. Nick is always first. Nick arrives at 5am, straps on his blower, and cleans the sidewalks and patios. What a heart of hospitality: to volunteer to make sure that the church is looking her best come Sunday morning.

This is one notable act of service among countless others. A few years ago, two members of our connection group showed up within an hour of my text to help me move a jacuzzi. In our two local moves, we’ve had more than two dozen help us. Our connection group dropped off meals at our doorstep when we had Covid.

Invisible Generosity
Culture, Death, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Planned Obsolescence and My Backpack

I’ve had four bags in my (nearly) ten years of pastoral ministry at New Life. I bought a leather briefcase that was too small and came apart at the seams followed by a leather briefcase that was too large and stiff. I gave up on the briefcase experiment and for the past three years I have used my son’s hand-me-down backpack from his middle school years. My wife and kids constantly teased me about my middle school backpack. But you know,

Four years ago, I was tagging along on my wife’s shopping trip and found a backpack tucked away on a clearance rack. It was love at first sight, and not just because of the 60% off tag.

Planned Obsolescence and My Backpack
Recommendations, Christian Living, Culture, Heaven
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Four good questions to ask your tech: Tim Challies says, “We are in constant communication with our devices and through our devices. And since we are already in the habit of asking them our deep and personal questions, perhaps it would do us good to ask them some good and honest questions about themselves. Here are four questions I propose we ask of any technology that has become (or has the potential to become) deeply embedded in our lives.”

  2. Embracing the silence: Christopher Cook says, “We’re spiritually exhausted, disoriented, and desperate to hear from God. And in our desperation, we turn up the volume, hoping that more input will lead to more clarity. But the Lord doesn’t compete with the chaos. His voice doesn’t cut through the noise. It waits for stillness.”

This Week's Recommendations

Spiritual Growth

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A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 3

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A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 3

For my birthday my wife took me out on a hike. We enjoyed the beautiful Arizona morning, winding our way up into the foothills of the Catalina Mountains through the lush Sonoran desert landscape. We went on a well-traveled trail toward our destination: pools tucked into the Catalina foothills, 2.8 miles from the trailhead.

As inexperienced hikers who hadn’t hiked the trail in some 20 years, we overestimated our progress and asked multiple passersby how far away the pools were. It shouldn’t take this long to go 2.8 miles, right? Our legs grew heavy and my wife wondered if we had made a wrong turn. Maybe we should just turn around?

Finally we crested over a hill and below us lay the pools below. Our pace quickened with the pools in view and the final 15 minutes sped by. We relaxed on sun-bathed boulders, ate a snack, took some pictures, and then headed back. Knowing the terrain now and having a much better sense of how far the 2.8 mile destination was, there were no moments of confusion or frustration. The trail seemed to melt quickly behind us and we arrived back at the trail head quickly.

Knowing your destination changes your hike.

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A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 2

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A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 2

Where am I going and how am I going to get there?

Leadership books abound which ask these questions and coaching leaders to zero in on a purpose and then strategize their daily schedules to achieve this purpose.

Such intentionality in the context of the business world makes our own lack of purposefulness in our spiritual lives all the more obvious. But such a purposelessness stands in direct opposition to the purposefulness that God invites us into.

Jesus himself lived an incredibly purposeful life. If you pick up the gospel of John, you see that Jesus is very sensitive to discerning and following God’s purpose for his life. A purpose which leads ultimately not to self-fulfillment but to self-giving at the cross. In John 17:1, Jesus prays, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.”

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A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part I

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A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part I

What plan do you have for your spiritual life? That’s a real question. Pause and answer it. Where do you want to go spiritually? And how are you going to get there?

My hunch is that most of us don’t have a plan for our spiritual life. Most of us live as if we hope that we’ll drift into a better spiritual life. But that is a faulty assumption. Have you drifted into losing weight? Or becoming a better father? Or into your CPA?

For some reason we think that even though we make plans for improvement and we set goals in other areas, it's not necessary or spiritual for us to set out these kinds of plans for our spiritual walk.

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Why You Should Go on a Mission Trip

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Why You Should Go on a Mission Trip

I recently returned from a short-term mission trip to Senegal, Africa, where our church has had a partnership with a mission agency and a local village pastor for about five years. It was the twelfth short-term trip that I’ve participated in. Each has impacted me in different ways and they have collectively shaped me. I am significantly indebted to short-term missions. 

While there are all sorts of ways that short-term mission trip experiences can be tainted, whether by our own motivations, or by our expectations, or even by the planning of the trip itself, there is still an important place for these trips and good reasons to go on one.

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Why You Shouldn't Go on a Mission Trip

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Why You Shouldn't Go on a Mission Trip

In 1998 I went on a short-term mission trip to Honduras following the devastating impact of Hurricane Mitch. I still recall the stunning site of inches of mud caked over the entire cityscape of Tegucigalpa. Unbeknownst to me, sociologist Kurt Ver Beek was watching. He conducted a study surveying 162 short-term mission participants who, like me, traveled to Honduras in 1998. He later published a devastating report on these relief efforts.[i] Among his findings were that short-term groups spent $30,000 per home to build homes equivalent to homes built by local organizations for $2,000 apiece. There was no discernable difference between the homes or in the impact of them being built by short-term gruops. And perhaps, more disheartening, one year later there was no significant change in the generosity of those who had gone on the trips. Ouch!

Next week I’m going to tell you why you ought to participate on a short-term mission trip (full disclosure: I just returned from a short-term trip to Senegal). But today I’m going to explore why you shouldn’t go on a short-term trip.

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Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham

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Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham

I have thumbed through this book many times before, skimmed chapters, and recommended it to many people. It's about time I finally dove in and worked through this masterpiece. And it really is a masterpiece. Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is jaw-dropping in its scope and the force of the argument Bauckham puts forth.

Bauckham's thesis is fairly simple: the four gospels represent a compilation of eyewitness testimony of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and as such need to be taken seriously as we consider the Jesus of history. To the conservative such a thesis might seem rudimentary while to a liberal such a thesis might seem untenable. Both audiences shouldn't dismiss Bauckham quickly, though.

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Good and Angry by David Powlison

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Good and Angry by David Powlison

David Powlison’s Good and Angry is a powerful book. In the book Powlison dives deep into what anger is and then gets very practical about how to biblically deal with your own anger issues (issues, he assures us, we all have). 

From the outset, Powlison makes it clear that anger, while dangerous, can be handled to produce good. “At its core anger is very simple,” Powlison says, “It expresses ‘I’m against that’” (39). Powlison says that each of us handles anger differently. Some of us freeze over, some of us quietly brood, some of us simmer, some of us explode. Powlison encourages us not to look at the way others mismanage worse than us, but rather, how do we mismanage anger? Each type has their own blind spots.

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Soul Depths and Soul Heights by Octavius Winslow

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Soul Depths and Soul Heights by Octavius Winslow

Written 140+ years ago (1874), the Puritan Octavius Winslow's collection of sermons on Psalm 130 is fresh, deep, and timely. 

Winslow walks through Psalm 130 phrase by phrase, following the ardent prayer of a man who is distressed by God's anger against his sin. Winslow follows the earnest penitent turning to God, and longing for forgiveness. The trajectory of the Psalm is upward: depth; prayer; conviction; light; hope; waiting; watching; longing; confidence; assurance; and joy. 

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