Joe Fontenot's Blog, page 20

The Best (Only) Spiritual Gifts Test I’ve Created (in a Single Question)

I’ve created a simply but effective spiritual gifts test. And it only has one question.

When I was a teenager, I took a spiritual gifts test. It involved a 1-10 ranking of about 40 questions. (What’s the difference between a 6 and a 7 for “how often do you share your faith?”) Needless to say, I didn’t find it very clarifying.

The pitfalls of tests like these are their subjectiveness. I had a close friend I admired. My test looked a lot like his, because all my subjective answers were skewed toward what I wanted to be–not necessarily what God had given me.

This test is (hopefully) different.

Here’s how it works. Below is a list of the spiritual gifts taken from Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, and 1 Peter 4.

Step 1: Read the Gifts

Briefly read through the below list, lingering only long enough to understand each gift:

Administration: Planning, organizing, charts, and graphs. If that makes you salivate, this one’s for you.

Apostle: Not to be confused with the big twelve (Peter, John, and those guys), this gift is apostleship is to go out and create. Church planters and missionaries fall into this category.

Discernment: Spotting the root issue: is this from God or elsewhere? And PS, there really is no middle ground. (Someone with the gift of discernment told me that.)

Evangelism: A front-line gift where you’re able to weave the Gospel into every new conversation. We’re all called to share the Gospel, but some of us just do it more naturally and more often.

Exhortation: Encouragement and building up. Your mission is to make sure we’re all operating as the best we can.

Faith: Every believer has faith, but the gift of faith is the unswerving trust in God and His ways, no matter what life throws. Like with all gifts, we still never do this perfectly.

Giving: When you look at your assets–be they money or time or talent–do you see means to support others?

Healing: God works through his people in a myriad of ways. Healing is one of those, be it physical, emotional, or mental.

Helps: This might as well be service (below). It’s the foot that moves the body so that the hands or head or whatever can move forward to do their job.

Hospitality: Making another feel comfortable in your area. Maybe that’s opening your home. Maybe it’s making new members feel welcome in your church group.

Knowledge: Data and facts and all that are the backbone of healthy decisions. You are the one who wants to make sure we’ve got all this stuff straight.

Leadership: Having a vision and motivating others to follow you in it.

Mercy: Sensitivity to those in pain. Typically you know pretty quick when you’re not this one (or maybe that just me).

Miracles: Like healing above, miracles are about being a conduit of God’s supernatural work.

Pastor: The desire to care for and nurture the local gathering of believers.

Prophecy: Speaking God’s message. This is rarely, if ever, about the future. Often it’s about course-correction.

Service: Directly putting others’ time and needs before your own.

Teaching: To help others understand the Word (and other lessons).

Tongues: A spiritual language not learned but given. It’s a way of communing with God.

Tongues interpretation: The ability to understand one of these spiritual languages and, you guessed it, fill in the rest of us.

Wisdom: The practical and relevant application of spiritual truths.

Step 2: Mark Yours

Now comes the test part.

On a scale of 1-10, which one or two gifts rank as an 11? That is, not which do you feel you should be exhibiting or is good in its own right, but which gift do you get excited just reading about?

Isolating that one or two is a good indication that you’ve found your gift(s). And here’s a hint: once you get it, it’s typically not too much of a surprise.

Step 2.5: Own It

This part is important. So important it gets its own quasi-step.

Once you’ve figured out your spiritual gift(s), pull out a pen and paper and write down–or open a browser window and email yourself–this statement:

I, [your name], was created by God and gifted to [spiritual gift].

For example, mine looks like this: “I, Joe, was created by God and gifted to teach and encourage.”

Writing it out serves as both a way to internalize and then regularly remember it.

In the body of Christ, this statement is your calling card. It’s the thing that gets you fired up, and it’s the thing you’ll do for free all day (and night) long. This is your place in the body of Christ.

The sooner you own it, the better for all of us (and that includes you).

Step 3: Redouble

If the answer to Step 2 is not immediately apparent, don’t worry. Take some time to think (and pray) through this. Asking others is helpful, too.

Spiritual gifts are not earned, they’re given. And they’re given to everyone who is a part of the body, the church.

As I mentioned in my example above, one of my gifts is exhortation (encouragement). I figured that out one day, because, despite everything around me, I found myself always stepping into the roll of encourager. I want people, more than nothing else, to see the beautiful side of following Jesus.

Another Way: Look for the Friction

There’s another way to spot your gift, and that’s by paying attention to what upsets you.

My other spiritual gift is teaching. More so than encouragement, this one caught me off guard. I found myself getting downright angry when God’s Word wasn’t being clearly explained.

My granddad helped me onto this idea one day when I was complaining about something. As I was passionately going on and on, he calmly interjected and said, “maybe that’s because that’s what God has for you to do.”

That was the light bulb I needed. From then I began to look at these kinds of frustrations as opportunities for me to step in and use my gifts. The friction became an alert bell.

What does God Have for You to Do?

I’d love to know. What is your spiritual gift? Or are you struggling to find it?

Leave me a comment below.

 

The post The Best (Only) Spiritual Gifts Test I’ve Created (in a Single Question) appeared first on Joe Fontenot.

How the Valuation of God Will Make You Think Differently

Kids are a lot of hard work.

The little ones cry a lot. They’re ruled almost completely by their emotions. And most of the time they haven’t even figured out how to use their words yet to communicate what’s wrong.

This past week we visited family. And I saw a different side of my two-year-old, Hadley, when she met her infant cousin for the first time.

As everyone–including my daughter–was focused on the baby, I couldn’t help but watching Hadley. How she mimicked my wife, Kristin. How she bent over (at not even three feet tall) to talk softly to the baby.

Having these little ones around gives us a picture into who God is.

Just like I couldn’t stop staring at my little girl, I realized, God cannot stop staring at me–and you.

That’s still a difficult concept for me to get my head around. I’ve written before, I really don’t understand grace. I accept it. And I try to pass it on. But each and every time I’m confronted by it, it seems more shocking than anything else.

Two Points and a Possible Confession

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to be compassionate? (Or, this is probably about to be a confession on my part.) That guy asking for money (“get a job, then we’ll talk”). Forgiveness (“how about some repentance first”).

We have each other–whether they are our children or strangers on the street, not for what we can get, or even for what we can give. We have each other because in some way, each of us is reflecting God.

In my small group this past week, we looked at Jonah chapter 2. It’s the part where Jonah says uncle. Okay…God, you got me. I’m overboard. I’m swallowed. I’ll do what you want now: I’m sorry.

Eric Mason calls this counterfeit repentance. It’s counterfeit because Jonah’s still only focused on himself.

Giving money to a guy on the corner, picking up chairs after church, dutifully parenting your children–these things are all morally neutral. That is, we can do them with hearts pointed toward God, or we can do them with hearts absorbed in our own goodness.

God gives us these chances, every day–sometimes every hour–so that we can refocus ourselves on him.

Grace, I believe, is a learned thing. It’s certainly not earned. That’s merit. But it is learned. In theology books, this is called sanctification–growing to be more like God.

There’s the idea that once we become a Christian (give up our lives to the greater cause of Jesus), we become different people. And we are transformed, spiritually. But then there’s the rest of us, pulling up the rear, that takes some time to get its stuff together. That’s why Christians are such a mess. Because we’re a work in progress. We’re refueling mid-air. Operating in the field.

God’s value of each of us is often not our value of each other. But God knows that.

The more we think about God, and the more we interact with each other, watching how we hurt and heal and grow and learn, the more we begin to see each other as God does. As children. Each very specially created.

And that, undoubtedly, does changes us. It changes how we think. And, ultimately, it changes how we live.

The post How the Valuation of God Will Make You Think Differently appeared first on Joe Fontenot.

How to Spot a Con

I don’t know if it’s true, but the number one reason I hear from people who are not interested in church is that it’s full of hypocrites.

And, I agree. It is full of hypocrites. That’s the whole idea behind becoming more like Jesus. It’s a fight and a struggle, and all the failure in between is, well, hypocritical.

But there’s a difference between trying and failing and outright manipulation. A difference, I would add, that in the hands of the right people is deceptively hard to spot.

Jesus warned us on this front when He said:

“Stay alert. This is hazardous work I’m assigning you. You’re going to be like sheep running through a wolf pack, so don’t call attention to yourselves. Be as cunning as a snake, inoffensive as a dove” (Matthew 10:16).

So with that, it’s our job not only to watch ourselves, but to watch out for those who may be looking to take advantage of others. These are the manipulators–the con artists seeking to strip the sheep. As Jesus said, it’s not good enough to be as inoffensive as a dove, we must be cunning as snakes, too.

Maria Konnikova, PhD in psychology and a columnist for The New Yorker, has done something to help us here. In her book, The Confidence Game, she has dissected the con and broken it into eight parts.

Understanding this kind of thinking helps us better spot the wolves. And, most importantly, not get eaten ourselves.

So you know, here’s how it looks:

Step 1: The Put-Up

The Put-Up is the first filter the con artist uses.

As Konnikova put it, it’s “the moment when a confidence artist investigates and chooses his prey.” This first step is about finding a mark–a person with a weakness that can be exploited. And then, it’s a matter of building trust.

That trust component is what social scientist Robert Zajonc calls the “mere exposure effect.” The more you see something, the easier it is to like. The scary part is that this isn’t a warning for suckers–it’s for all of us. We’re all susceptible to this.

Liking is where it starts. When we’re skeptical, we’re on guard. But when we like someone, our defenses are relaxed. And this makes us open to the next step, the Play.

Step 2: The Play

The Play is all about the shared story. It’s the narrative we have in common.

“Stories bring us together,” writes Konnikova. “They are shared knowledge, shared legend, shared history, and, in a sense, shared future.”

Here’s a true story.

In 2013, a teenage girl was found wandering around Dublin, Ireland. She spoke only a few words of English and seemed confused. As good people do, the city began rallying around her. And as more details quietly slipped out, they began to piece together that she was a victim of human trafficking and was from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Dublin spent 250,000 euros, calling it Operation Shepherd, to help this girl get back home.

It wasn’t until an odd lead from Interpol that eventually revealed the girl to be Samantha Azzopardi–the twice convicted con artist from Brisbane, Australia. Less than a year after her deportation, she showed up in a Calgary, Alberta clinic with a powerful (but familiar) story. And the con continued.

“When we’re immersed in a story we let down our guard. We focus in a way we wouldn’t if someone were just trying to catch us with a random phrase or picture or interaction. And in those moments of fully immersed attention, we may absorb things under the radar, so to speak, that would normally either pass us by or put us on high alert.”

Step 3: The Rope

The Rope is when you begin to the see the world like the con artist–or at least like the con artist is portraying it. It’s at this point a mark becomes a victim.

As Konnikova puts it, “the put-up identified the mark…the play caught the mark’s attention and…the rope makes sure he bites.”

What does a typical rope look like? A good amount of time it’s favors. Robert Cialdini, author of the now famous book Influence, calls this the law of reciprocation.

Simply put, the rule is as the name implies: “we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us,” writes Cialdini. “Sociologists such as Alvin Gouldner can report that there is no human society that does subscribe to this rule.”

In the 1970s, the Hare Krishna Society grew remarkably with this strategy. They would walk up, give you a rose, and ask for a donation. Sounds silly. But, it worked extremely well.

What’s interesting about the Rope is that you don’t need to cognitively agree with the con artist. Techniques, like the rule or reciprocation, trigger a deep reaction that’s built into all of us.

Psychologist Joel Brockener developed something similar in the 1980s with the “even a penny helps” plea. This is called the legitimization effect.  “If you were a swindler,” writes Konnikova, “you’d ask for a lot.” But you’re not asking for a lot (“just a penny,” I’m clearly not getting swindled), then you’re probably legit.

Step 4: The Tale

In the Rope you begin to understand the world of the con artist. In the Tale, you find yourself inside that story. In business terms, this is the buy in.

The buy in is “the moment when ‘too good to be true’ turns into ‘Actually, this makes perfect sense’.”

Here is Konnikova at length:

“In the things that truly matter to us, the core characteristics that we view as central to our identity, we exhibit the greatest bias of all. We all become, in a sense [the] ‘less than one percent.’ Each one of us is exceptional in our own minds. And exceptional individuals are not chumps. Exceptional individuals are in charge. They don’t get conned. Which is precisely why the tale works as well as it does. We are ready–eager, even–to believe we will personally benefit, no matter what.”

The Tale plays to a very specific desire. It’s to be special. And so much of that is true. We are special. God has handcrafted each of us uniquely.

Where we go wrong is when we interpret unique and special to mean privileged.

“The power of the tale isn’t the strength of its logic; it’s that at the point it’s told, we’re past being reasonable.” And it’s this that blinds us to the next step, the Convincer.

Step 5: The Convincer

Life is tough. A lot of things go wrong. It’s the job of the Convincer to, well, convince us that we’re on the right track. We’ve chosen wisely. Konnikova writes, “the convincer makes it seem like you’re winning and everything is going to come out on top.”

And once you’ve bought in, this is not too hard. You’re already filtering information in this direction. But, as Konnikova notes, “no self-respecting con artist is complete fluff. There needs to be something real there to anchor the whole thing.”

In other words, there needs to be some rationale for us to grab on to. You can be blind to the danger, but if you don’t see some light, there’s no reason to keep moving forward.

The housing bubble of the last decade is a great example of this. Sub-prime mortgages are when banks lend to people with credit at or lower than the reliability threshold. Or when banks give people more house than they can really afford. And, as a result, a lot of these people (obviously) defaulted.

What does this have to do with con artists?

Think about it: who lost out? It was the mortgage holders who went bankrupt in the process. And so who won? The exact people who should have (and did) know better: the loan officers and banks approving these ridiculous mortgages.

In what led to the housing crisis, the Rope was an unprecedented availability of loans, the Tale was people realizing they could ‘qualify,’ and the Convincer was the loan officer sliding the paperwork across the table.

In hindsight, all we see were warning signs. But, in the moment, it’s a lot harder to see through the very real carrot setting in front of us. As I mentioned before, these weren’t suckers, they were all of us. So much of us, in fact, fell for these smooth lies that it sent out entire country into a financial crisis.

Step 6: The Breakdown

Ironically, the con isn’t all about good news. The breakdown is when things start to go wrong. It’s critical, however, that the Breakdown comes after the Tale and the Convincer (after we’ve started to win). Because it too is all part of the plan.

“When we should be cutting our losses, we instead recommit,” says Konnikova, “and that is entirely what the breakdown is meant to accomplish.”

This is the nervous guy at the blackjack tables who’s already cashed his paycheck and is working on collateral he can’t afford to loose. If he can just hold on, he’ll come out on top, and it’ll all be okay.

Psychologists have termed this the confirmation bias. We know it’s going to turn around. “We can revise our interpretation of the present reality: there actually isn’t any inconsistency; we were just looking at it wrong.”

When you get this far into a con, it becomes extremely important to have good friends who know you well. I knew a woman who had some money (but not a lot), and a few decent pieces of property. She was being conned by a man in Indonesia. There was a full story behind it. He was a business man. He wanted to marry her. They’d Skype regularly and giggle about marriage and a happy life. He just needed some help with a business deal that went bad. Oh, and his government had frozen his money on some bureaucratic technicality. She was in the process of selling another piece of property for him last I talked to her.

She was a good person. I tried to tell her, this doesn’t sound right. She’d already alienated her daughter over it. For some reason, her daughter didn’t want her to “finally” be happy, she told me. “Why couldn’t she understand and just be happy for me?” she asked.

It was sad. Like watching a crash in slow motion.

If you’ve got people watching out for you, you need to be, in return, watching for their signals. They probably really are trying to help you.

My friend when I last talked to her was in the middle of step 6–the Breakdown–when her soon-to-be husband started talking about breaking things off. But she wouldn’t accept that. She wanted it too bad.

Step 7: The Send and the Touch

The Send (the victim’s re-commitment) and the Touch (the final move) is the end of the con. Coming off of the Breakdown, the you have become your own Convincer. You need this.

For two decades, ending just a few years ago, Glafira Rosales gave the art world an unprecedented amount of Abstract Expressionists artists. Works by artists like Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still. All, of course, verified and legitimate.

Except they weren’t.

Rosales supplied Ann Freedman of Knoedler Gallery with over 60 fake painting during this time, some selling for as much as $17,000,000. From a Vanity Fair interview, Freeman said, “It’s amazing to think that this institution never stopped for 165 years. It didn’t stop during the Civil War, World War I, World War II .. I kept it open on 9/11.”

But after Rosales and her incredible con, the gallery couldn’t stay open. How did this happen?

It was the Send.

Freedman came to rely on Rosales. Even after she began to question strange little misfires, it was then too late to go back. All those pieces she’d sold. Her reputation. The gallery’s reputation. That kind of second-guessing doesn’t help anything at this point. It’s best to just keep focused. And hope none there’s no reality to those feelings.

But there was. Eventually it all caught up, as it always does.

Status quo has a powerful hold over the victim at this point. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser of Boston University and Harvard University, respectively, watched how five hundred economics students made decisions about investments they’d made. What Samuelson and Zeckhauser found, despite diminishing returns and new data, was that “86 percent overall [stuck] to their guns despite the changing landscape and the new information.”

When you get this far, it’s not about logic, it’s about consistency.

Step 8: The Blow-off and the Fix

The Blow-off and the Fix, while not technically part of the con, are why we don’t hear more about these things. They are the perfect post script. And this is why con artists, like Samantha Azzopardi, are able to essentially travel from place to place pulling the same con over again.

Specifically, the Blow-off is the con artist’s getaway, while the Fix is the victim’s retribution. But there’s a catch. And it’s an important one.

As Konnikova notes, “we ourselves are the con artist’s best chance of a successful blow-off: we don’t want anyone to know we’ve been duped. That’s why the fix is so incredibly rare–why would it ever come to pressing charges, when usually all we want is for it all to quietly go away?”

In the end, the power of the con is our own reputation. What’s your wife going to think of you if you admit you were taken for $8,000 over the phone? Is your boss really going to push for that promotion when you can’t even tell the difference between a responsible investment and snake-oil?

Our reputation (and shame) present a powerful counterargument to our having fallen victim. And that, in turn, feeds the cycle.

Cons

In the end, we’re all susceptible to this stuff. The best defense is knowing what a con looks like, having good friends who watch you, and, most importantly, listening to God’s prompting.

Sometimes God turns us from paths that seem to have nothing but advantages. But they’re not good for us. Other times, after we’re licking our wounds, we wonder why God didn’t somehow warn us.

None of this is foolproof. But with every experience, good or terrible, we’re a little bit better than we were before. And with that, we share it.

And that’s really the point of this all.

The post How to Spot a Con appeared first on Joe Fontenot.

3 Months of Fasting (& Why You Might Want to Try This)

When my brother was younger, I found him sticking a paperclip into a outlet. I knocked it out his hand.

“Sam, are crazy!?”

“What? I just wanted to see what would happen.”

Later that year–unbeknownst to Sam–I was doing my own experiment with my ceiling fan and electrocuted myself. It scared the mess out of me. I was twelve.

In the eighties, when VHS tapes cost about $100 each, my dad started a business where he partnered with local grocery stores to rent them out for him. It was risky, VCRs were pretty new. these were Pre-Blockbuster days. The business folded. The Blockbuster model ended up winning–for a couple decades, anyway.

I think there’s something about experimenting that runs in my family. And most experiments, I can tell you, involve some kind of pain. This, I believe, is why saner people tend not to like to be on the front end of all that.

But I’ve recently done a few new experiments that I think you can get behind. I’ve been experimenting on different kinds of fasts, and what I’ve found is some are better than others.

3 Months of Fasting

Fasting has physical benefits. And some people do it for just that. But it’s also a spiritual discipline.

The spiritual value of fasting is that it helps us refocus from what we feel like what we need to what we really do need. When the devil tempted Jesus with food during His own fast, Jesus responded: life is more than food. Food is important, for sure, but it doesn’t affect our relationship with God. In other words, it’s important, but it’s not the most important.

FAST NO. 1: Eating

This is the fast in the Bible. And because of that a lot of people think of it as the fast. But think about it for a minute. What else did they have to give up? What other staple of life was there, beyond food? Not much. And so fasting from food was kind of the thing.

And fasting from food still has its place in the modern world of fasting.

Here’s how your stomach works: you start to feel hunger before you need food. It’s like muscle-memory. This isn’t a bad thing. It  helps your digestion stay consistent. But what it means is that your hunger pangs (assuming you’re not actually starving) are a function of habit.

There are two phases to a short (24-48hr) fast. The first part is getting past those automatic I’m hungry feelings. For me this takes about 8-12. During that time, I have to keep reminding myself: this is normal, I’m not really hungry, just stay focused.

The second (and easier) part is pressing through to the end. It’s easier to go without food once you’ve been doing for a little bit. But it’s hard (for me) to keep it to the very end. I tend to make up reasons and weird logic for why I don’t need to go to the set time.

And really, there’s nothing magical about 24 instead of 23 hours. What’s important is that it’s a discipline. You are purposely going without for an important reason.

So, what is that reason? Why do a fast at all?

In the first century, when Paul and Barnabas were setting up the new churches to function without supervision, they prayed and fasted about who to put in leadership.

A fast is about focusing (and re-focusing). It is about choosing to focus on God in the midst of other very real concerns. Going without food (a real concern) is one way to do this.

And, when you do this something strange happens.

In the midst of trying hard to focus, your focus becomes crystal clear. Your resolve seems to shift into an all-or-nothing mode. Ideas and prayers you’re wrestling with become clear. And this is why fasting from food is a spiritual discipline.

Because food is an absolute requirement for life, this kind of fasting will always have the potential to bring our focus back to our Creator.

But it’s not the only kind of fast.

FAST NO. 2: Social Media

Don’t laugh. It’s real.

A food fast lasts for a day or two or three. But this kind of fast is entirely different. A fast of something like social media is less intense, but it lasts for a lot longer than a food fast. I did mine for a full month. And that brings with it a new dimension.

My reason for doing this was because whenever I find myself standing in a line, sitting down, waking up in the morning, or whatever, I’m always doing the same thing: checking my phone. And specifically, I’m checking the same social media sites.

For me, the problem was busyness. And fasting from social media helped that.

It’s a lot harder to pray in the mornings when my mind is already moving to what I need to do after that. Solitude and silence are their own spiritual disciplines. And if you find it exceptionally hard to focus on things like prayer, then you might have the same problem I do: too many inputs.

I cut out a bunch of noise when I stopped social media for a month. Here are three things I learned from that:

Lesson 1

Life is just as good. I stopped cold-turkey–didn’t tell anyone. And I kept all my friends, real and digital. It was a whole lot less traumatic than I thought it would be.

Lesson 2

It took about two weeks to break the habit of pulling out my phone. By week three I was getting the hang of it. And by week four I didn’t have much desire to go back. In its place, I was much more aware of the world around me.

Lesson 3

I use social media less now. That was several months ago. I don’t make any effort to avoid social media now, but those 30 days without it helped my brain realize it’s just not that important. I still like the sentimental parts. And so I check in for that. But most of it’s just noise, and we (me and my brain) are better off without more noise in our life.

Less noise means more focus. When I have my prayer time in the morning, I focus quicker and it’s easier to stay focused. When my kids want to show me a silly face, I’m not distracted or annoyed, I just laugh. I’m more connected to my world, and that’s better.

FAST NO. 3: Cold Showers

I’ve saved the worst for last.

This, I will tell you, is the only fast that’s actually become addictive. Here’s what I mean.

I’m a lover of the hot shower. It’s where I do some of my best thinking. And I haven’t done away with that. I’ve just started turning off the hot for the last minute or two.

Before you think that’s cheating, try it. It’s atrocious. At least to start with.

The key, I’ve learned, is to make it past 20 seconds. After that it gets much better. The first time I tried it, it was all I could do to stay under the freezing water for 5 seconds. But after a few days, I made it up to 20 seconds, and then 30, and inside of a week, I was at a minute.

So, why does this count as a fast? Because it meets the two part criteria: giving up something you really want (the comfort of hot water, in this case), in a way that allows you to re-focus on God.

That last part–using a cold shower to refocus on God–is about as intuitive as is giving up food to focus on God. But it works (albeit, for different reasons).

The shock of the cold water releases endorphins into your system. As a result, when I’m done, I don’t feel like stepping out–I feel like jumping out.

I did some researching (read: a google search), and learned (found an article that claims) that not only do cold showers make you feel better, but they burn fat and increase your immune system and circulation. No promise there. But I can tell you, if feeling is anything, then cold showers are one of the best things you can do for your day.

Here’s the spiritual part:

I was (again) having one of those arguments in my head (which, for the record, I was winning). Throughout my hot shower, I kept getting deeper in to it. Then, like I’ve started doing, I turned the shower to all-cold. I took big, deep breathes. My mind lit up with endorphins. And that argument, whatever it was about, was not only less important, but no longer interesting. I dropped it–which is what I really want to do the whole time. And my mind was peaceful.

Often times I get stuck like this. I get stuck on something negative, and even though I want to stop diving in to it, I keep coming back to it. Cold showers are like a jolt that give me the extra help I need.

For me, cold showers have become a part of my daily routine. What started as a fast is no longer that. Now, most days when I turn on the cold, it immediately feels right.

Criticism

Some people don’t think fasts from social media or hot water count. They’re not real fasts. And, in my case, the hot water one turned from a fast to a routine (no longer a fast). But the point is not to twiddle out what is and isn’t technically a fast.

The point is to think less of yourself so that you think more of God. That’s the spiritual component. Each of these fasts vary in length and specific purpose. But in the end, they’re all moving you in the same direction, and that’s what matters.

One More Thing

Jesus said, when you fast, don’t make a big deal about it. Some people turn that into a vow of silence. That’s not what He meant. It doesn’t matter if you’re the sole person on earth who knows your fasting. What does matter is that you don’t turn it into a holy-show about how great you are. In the end, a fast does the opposite: it convince you more of how great God is.

Are You?

Are you experimenting with a new kind of fast? Or thinking about starting one? Tell me how it went, or what you’re struggling with. These things are always better with friends.

The post 3 Months of Fasting (& Why You Might Want to Try This) appeared first on Joe Fontenot.

The Theology of Curse Words

I used to have a boss with a mouth like a longshoreman. He was a Christian, he told me. (Of course.) And he tried, up and down, to justify his prolific use of the f-word.

And while his arguments were silly, it got me thinking. Why are bad words bad?

God Never Said…

It’s true. God never says: Don’t say the f-word. That, and all of our four-letter-words were created long after the Bible was written.

But I’m sure there were dirty words 2,000 years ago. Why were those not prohibited?

The issue comes down to a matter of principle. God never quarantines specific words, but He does give us guidelines for us to make the call ourselves. He does this when He says, “watch the way you talk,” and “let nothing foul and dirty come out of your mouth” (Ephesians 4:29).

The general principle guides the specific instances.

It’s like telling your kids: “No more sugar.” And then later when you’re not around, they reason: “Well, he didn’t specifically say I couldn’t have candy…he just said no more sugar.” That’s not a loop hole. No sugar is the principle. No candy is the specific.

So Which Words Actually Qualify as Curse Words?

First, let me say, I’m using “cursing” and “swearing” interchangeable to mean: saying the words that get bleeped out of movies on TV. I’m not talking about witchcraft or taking oaths.

Okay, so, how do we know if a word is a curse word or not? We can wait for society to tell us. But that water flows both ways. If they tell us which words are bad, then they also tell us which words aren’t. For instance, as followers of Jesus, we believe that using His name disrespectfully is always wrong. But why would society hold to this same view? (And, they often don’t.) So we cannot simply take what society tells us. We need a deeper reason.

So, to that end, here’s a a filter, or a test, you can use. If the word passes both intent and reception, then go for it.

2-Part Test:


INTENT

Intent is about you. Ask yourself: why am I saying these words? Is it to be “foul or dirty”? Often we swear (if not just out of habit) to add emphasis to our words. But today, swearing is so common it’s hard to still make that argument. What are you trying to accomplish with these words?

RECEPTION

This is about your audience. Who’s listening? If they’re used to swearing, then they may never stop to consider what you just said. But if they’re not used to it, and it’s offensive, then is that the kind of impact you want to make?

Are the Words Themselves Bad?

I’ll come clean. I’m not a schoolboy on this issue. Sometimes when I get mad, I swear. But I’m a sinner. That’s not an excuse, just an explanation. Yet, the question still remains: is swearing itself wrong? Like, for instance, when you’re all by yourself?

I say yes. And it goes back to the #1 in our test above. When you get in the habit of swearing, it comes out when you don’t expect it. And often on accident. (Trust me.) It becomes automatic.

Is a single isolated swear word in a dark closet a bad thing? I don’t know. I guess it depends what you’re doing in the closet.

But I do know if you’re standing next to a cliff, it’s a whole lot easier to fall then it is if you’re a mile away. Is it worth it?

What About Semi-Curse Words?

Like “crap.” And some would put “hell” and “ass” in this group. What about these words?

In Greek society during the New Testament times, Paul gives the example of not eating meat that’s been offered to idols. In their day, eating the offered meat was a sign of reverence to the idol. But Paul said: it’s all fake. Eat the meat if you want. But if you’ve got a fellow believer who’s struggling on this issue, then hold off.

The same works for us here. Some words or language are offensive to some but not others. When in doubt, err on the side of caution. As Paul said, “Remember, they have their own history to deal with. Treat them gently” (Romans 14:1).

Focus on Being Healthy

There’s nothing magical about these words. They are not intrinsically evil. But that doesn’t mean we should use them.

Jesus said words come from the heart, not the other way around (Matthew 15:11). In other words, what we do is just a reflection of who we are on the inside.

I think the bigger issue is not to focus so much on the words, but to think instead about why we’re using them.

Thoughts?

Thoughts, questions, dirty words? Leave me a comment below

5 Lessons I Learned About Ministry from the Rolling Stones

I’m not a Rolling Stones fan because of their music (or their sweet spirits). I only became a fan, if you could call it that, after I read Rich Cohen’s wonderful (and sometimes irreverent) book, The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones.

What struck me was how human and mortal and, often, mediocre, the Rollings Stones were (and still are). These guys have persisted to near legendary status, but yet, they’re not legends. They’re not even that special. They’re just people.

The same is often true for us–followers of God–called to serve and to be a part of a task much, much larger than ourselves (that, by the way, is what ministry is–living out the life God’s called you to).

Diving behind the scenes of the Rolling Stones, I realized that they are us. It is true, they are completely misguided–chasing all the wrong things, like a car going 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

But, in a way, aren’t we all?

Here are the 5 lessons I learned from the Rollings Stones about life and ministry:

1. Everybody’s Small on Day One (and Day 1,000, too)

They were amateurs. “Jagger’s talent began in mimicry,” writes Cohen. Even Mick Jagger wasn’t Mick Jagger in the beginning. He was pretending to be like the black blues musicians from Chicago.

And Dick Taylor, the original bassist, said, “Keith wanted more than anything to sound like Elvis’s guitarist, Scotty Moore.” (Thankfully, he worked through that.)

Most of us start as a nobodies wanting to be somebody else. And that’s okay.

Jesus didn’t call us because we’re great. Even the ones we look at as great, when we get behind the curtain, they’re not. The truth is, He called us because we’re not great.

Paul wrote:

Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God (1 Cor 1:27-29).

It’s okay to be small. In fact, it’s usually better.

2. Mess-ups Are a Fixture of Success

Even Stones fans agree, they had about five years of greatness (1968-1972). Spanning their over-fifty year career, that’s only ten percent.

But what’s interesting is why they had so many mess-ups. It was because they were constantly trying to reinvent themselves. To push through their previous limits. “The Stones have lived and died so many times,” said Cohen, “they might as well be immortal.” By the time of their “Golden Run” they were on their third life. And after that, they would go on to more.

In Spring, 1968, while recording, Bill Wyman, the bassist, played what would become the riff of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

Keith started laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

Keith said, “You recognize it, don’t you?”

It was “Satisfaction”–the heart and soul of their last identity as a band–played backwards.

Innovation often comes like this. Steven Johnson in his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, talks about this as the “adjacent possible.” Innovation doesn’t come by starring at a blank white screen. It comes from taking what we know and contorting it and mixing it and breathing newness into it. That’s the soul of innovation. And that’s what the Rolling Stones were doing, for the third time, in the Spring of ’68.

The problem with this is that it’s risky. There’s always the chance something can happen when you leave the camp to explore the wilderness. But, as we all very well know, that’s where the good stuff is.

And truly, this is where Jesus called us to be.

On the road someone asked if he could go along. “I’ll go with you, wherever,” he said. Jesus was curt: “Are you ready to rough it? We’re not staying in the best inns, you know.”

Jesus said to another, “Follow me.” He said, “Certainly, but first excuse me for a couple of days, please. I have to make arrangements for my father’s funeral.” Jesus refused. “First things first. Your business is life, not death. And life is urgent: Announce God’s kingdom!”

Then another said, “I’m ready to follow you, Master, but first excuse me while I get things straightened out at home.” Jesus said, “No procrastination. No backward looks. You can’t put God’s kingdom off till tomorrow. Seize the day” (Luke 9:57-62).

Mess-ups are built into the fabric of following Jesus. Our job isn’t perfection–our job is obedience.

3. Perseverance Only Works with Support

The problem with perseverance is that it’s delayed gratification at its core.

You can push through most things for a little while, but what makes you stick with it for the long run is a deep want for it. The heart here is the want. You have to want this thing more than anything else. That’s how perseverance work.

This, at first, seems like the hard answer (how do you begin to want what you don’t already want?). But it’s not. The trick is simple: you can’t go it alone. The ones who do almost never make it. Instead, you need help.

For Mick and Keith, they both wanted Rock and Roll. But it wasn’t until they worked together that they have a chance.

Mick and Keith knew each other as kids. But on October 17, 1961, on the 8:28 to London, they accidentally reunited. Mick, enrolled at the London School of Economics at the time, wearing a suit and carrying a stack of records (his family had money), gave up a common-sense future in business.

Keith, in art school and who did “not remember where he was going” (be it metaphorically or literally) was equally driven, but less enabled. “Keith played rock ‘n’ roll for the same reasons as Church Berry–because he loved it and because there was nothing else he could do.”

It wasn’t until the two teamed up (credit goes, by large part, to their manager, Andrew Oldham, who saw this long before they did) that they both got what they wanted. For a time, anyway.

For us, it’s the same. A year ago, Perry Noble, the pastor of a South Carolina megachurch, was fired for alcohol abuse. He said, “I began to depend on alcohol for my refuge instead of Jesus and others.” It’s so easy for this to happen.

In a charge to the Church, Paul wrote:

Those of us who are strong and able in the faith need to step in and lend a hand to those who falter, and not just do what is most convenient for us. Strength is for service, not status. Each one of us needs to look after the good of the people around us, asking ourselves, “How can I help?” (Romans 15:1-2)

There’s no way we can make it (or sustain what we have made) without each other. That’s the whole point of the Church coming together.

4. Principle: Be Shaped

Andrew Oldman, the Stones first manager, locked Mick and Keith in a room and said, make songs.

It wasn’t this way before. Mick was the singer (but he wasn’t the front man). And Keith was talented (but he wasn’t a song writer). When they began, the Stones were fronted and driven by Ian Stewart, a guy none of us has heard of. He was passionate. The Stones was his band.

Of the Beatles, it’s said that George Martin, their manager, was the fifth member. He managed and shaped and guided them. He told them where they were going to fall down, and he told them what parts they were doing exceptionally well at.

Andrew Oldman was that for the stones. He knew Mick needed to the be the front man. He knew Keith needed to be right next to him. And he knew Ian Stewart needed to be fired. Oldman saw from the outside what none of the Stones (on the inside) could.

None of us can see ourselves objectively. Not really. We each need someone who can shape and guide us. A teacher.

From the ancient Proverbs:

Start with God—the first step in learning is bowing down to God;

only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning. (Prov 1:7)

The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life,

so, no more drinking from death-tainted wells! (Prov 13:14)

It’s better to be wise than strong;

intelligence outranks muscle any day.

Strategic planning is the key to warfare;

to win, you need a lot of good counsel. (Prov 24:5-6)

Success is about having the right people around, and then listening to them.

5. Heroine and Cocaine are Not the Worst Drugs

The Stones know, because they did them. All of them. But these kinds of drugs are just a cover-up for something worse: pride.

In 2010 Keith released a memoir called Life. “After reading it,” Cohen said, “your first thought is, that’s the end of the Stones, there no way they can work together again.” In it Keith roasts Mick for selling out, laughs at his solo work, and even makes fun of his “tiny todger.” (Would you have expected any less?)

Today the Stones–Mick and Keith–are still a band. But their bond is only a shell of what it used to be. “When you see Mick and Keith onstage, leaning together like Butch and Sundance, you’re seeing actors.”

For the Stones, music is what they do. It might have started out as their passion. And in some way, it might still be. But the years have been hard. And pride has been harder. They still do exist, technically. But they’re not the same. They’re not the Mick and Keith that met on train platform in 1961.

That’s what pride does. It leaves enough of you standing so that you can still be framed, the one left holding the bag, while it always gets away, like an escaped criminal. But pride is the real enemy here. We don’t wrestle against each other, we wrestle again the spirits and powers that need us to fail (Eph 6:12).

God saw this coming a long time ago. Early in His law He gave His people this:

If you start thinking to yourselves, “I did all this. And all by myself. I’m rich. It’s all mine!”— well, think again. Remember that God, your God, gave you the strength to produce all this wealth so as to confirm the covenant that he promised to your ancestors—as it is today (Deut 8:17-18).

Humility is a lot harder than pride. Pride is natural. It’s easy. And it makes sense. Humility isn’t any of that. Sam Cutler, a tour manager for the Stones, said, “they’re going through the motions. Making millions.”

But what kind of life is that? Is anything worth the hollowness of going through the motions?

Your Lessons?

The lessons here from the Rolling Stones are lessons about life. In my early thirties, that’s something I’m still new at. Leave me a comment. Tell me the lessons that have shaped you. I want to know.

 

The post 5 Lessons I Learned About Ministry from the Rolling Stones appeared first on Joe Fontenot.

Should We Trust the Gospels? (And Other Semi-Heretical Questions)

In my last article I looked at the reliability of the resurrection from a purely historical point of view. Instead of saying: it must be true because God said it (which, by the way, I believe), we looked at what history reports.

But that leads to this natural follow-up question: how do we know the four Gospels that we currently have give an accurate picture of Jesus? Have they been corrupted over the years (as many claim)? Or was there a conspiracy to hide the true versions, leaving our four Gospels as the “official” (but false) version?

This is the topic of Mark Roberts’ book, Can We Trust the Gospels?

At the core of this issue is the question: Why did the early church come to accept these four Gospels as, well, gospel? I’ll answer that below. But before I do, there are a few other questions we have to look at. You can think of them in two groupings: external (e.g. has the record been preserved?) and internal (e.g. are there contradictions among the Gospels?).

While these two issues (what I’m calling external and internal) were not a problem for the early Church, they are often the topic of the media today. So to get to the early Church, we first have to go through this tunnel.

EXTERNAL

Getting to the source

Do we still have the original Gospels?

Before we can analyze our data, we have to know that it hasn’t been corrupted. In other words, even if the original Gospels were God-inspired, how do we know the Gospels we read today are those?

The Telephone Game

It is often argued that the Gospels were passed down much like the telephone game–a bunch of kids line up and whisper a message in each other’s ear, passing it on down the line, until the last kid shouts out the message (which is always some bizarre version of the original). And so the argument goes, the Gospels have been corrupted in a similar way.

But there are a couple problems with this analogy.

First, the telephone game doesn’t make sense if the original statement is shouted out for all to hear. It has to be whispered for the corruption to happen. Much of the original church was still an oral culture. Reading (and certainly writing) was rare. So the picture of these documents being passed around in secret is just not accurate.

As Roberts notes, “they were teaching about Jesus in the public square and in the church. Their stories about Jesus and their accounts of His saying were part of the public record.”

But that’s not the only problem with the telephone game analogy. For the parts that were written down, they weren’t linear. It was not a single document passed around that was reproduced when it got old. There were thousands of copies passed around simultaneously.

When, for instance, Paul sent 2 Corinthians to the Church “in Corinth, and to believers all over Achaia province,” they undoubtedly made copies (if they had the means), and then the original and its messengers moved on to the next Church group. We know this because of the thousands of manuscript copies we still have.

“The number of Gospel manuscripts in existence,” says Roberts, “is about 20 times larger than the average number of extant manuscripts of comparable writings.”

But, interestingly, it’s because we have so many copies still in existence that we know about the discrepancies.

Discrepancies?

Right. Bart Ehrman, New Testament scholar (and skeptic) has famously stated that there are more errors (called “variants”) in the New Testament than there are words. There are about 140,000 words in the Greek New Testament, and there are between 200-400,000 variants.

How does this happen?

Well, think about it like this. This article is about 2400 words. If I made 5700 copies (which is how many manuscript copies of the Gospels we’ve found), and if each copy of my article had just one unique typo, that’s 5700 variants–or over twice as many errors as words.

You see, what sounds like a bad thing (more errors than words) is actually a blessing, because with that many copies, textual critics (scholars who compare ancient documents to determine the original wording) are able to work back to the original.

“Text critic Daniel Wallace concludes that ‘only about 1% of the textual variants’ make any substantive difference. And few, if any, of these have any bearing on theologically important matters,” says Roberts.

And here’s the key: “If you actually took out of the Gospels every word that was text-critically uncertain, the impact on your understanding of Jesus would be negligible.”

In other words, what scholars (Christians and non-Christian alike) have found is that we have an excellent record of what the original four Gospels said.

So, do we have the original Gospels? No and yes. No, we don’t have the original documents themselves. But yes, we know what they said.

INTERNAL

Among the Gospels themselves

What about contradictions between the Gospels?

It is common at Easter and Christmas to see media specials hinting at or outright discussing the apparent contradictions among the Gospels.

On such example is Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. Following the inauguration of His ministry–His baptism by John the baptist–He immediately spends 40 days in the wilderness. At the conclusion, the Devil finds Him and offered three temptations: turn stones into bread, throw Himself off the temple, and then worship him.

Or was it to turn stones to bread, worship the Devil, and then throw Himself from the temple?

The chronology is mixed up when we compare Matthew (the first case) with Luke (the second).

This might seem trivial, but, as the old saying goes, if we cannot trust the little details, how can we trust the big one? The question is: which is the accurate record? Either his second temptation was to worship the Devil or to throw Himself from the temple, but not both.

This answer, as it turns out, comes down to what kind of literature the Gospels are. Once upon a time we used to think they were historically unique. No other literature was like them. But what we’ve found is that they are actually a form of what’s called a Hellenistic biography.

One facet of Hellenistic biographies is the emphasis on theme. As the Gospel of John concludes: “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

The Gospels each have a theme they are presenting. “If Matthew and Luke were seeking to present what really happened but in more of a thematic way rather than in chronological order, then it would be unfair to say they contradict each other.” It’s a matter of considering the source.

When direct quotes aren’t direct

If you were to share this article with a friend and put in quotes something I said, only, when you quoted me, you changed the wording, we’d all agree that was false. Quotes mean: these are the exact words Joe said.

But in the Gospels we see a different picture. For instance, when Matthew (13:22) quotes Jesus as saying:

“the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word,”

But then Mark (4:19) quotes Him as saying:

 “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word.”

Both are quotes, but either Matthew leaves out something Jesus said, or Mark adds it. The answer, though, comes not in looking at how we do things today, but how they did things then.

“In the ancient world, before there were transcripts, take recordings, and podcasts, biographers and historians exercised greater freedom in paraphrasing or slightly altering spoken words for stylist reasons. A good historian,” Roberts continues, “if he knew that a character had made a speech at a certain time, would get available information about that speech and then write the speech with his own words as if these words had been utter by the character.”

Does this “re-writing” change the validity of the record?

Not at all. Today, as I mentioned, our standard is to reproduce direct quotes identical to the original. If I wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, I would have to preserve his words exactly.

But I wouldn’t for a moment consider what kind of book cover he would prefer. That’s a matter of style (and attracting readers).

Hellenistic biographers (and the Gospel writers) were essentially doing the same thing. They were not changing the message of the person they were quoting (in this case, Jesus), but they were putting it in the style that was consistent with the account they were writing. In short, it is a style over content issue.

How many women at the tomb?

A final (and important) example is how John and Matthew report the women who first discovered the empty tomb. John (20:1-2) only reports that Mary Magdalene discovered the empty tomb, but then Matthew says that it was Mary Magdalene “and the other Mary” (28:1).

So, do we have a discrepancy?

If we read a little further in John’s account, we see an emotional exchange between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. While Matthew’s account references the conversation with Jesus, it doesn’t go into detail. And his emphasis is on getting the message to the disciples, not the personal exchange.

This is, to some degree, hypothesis. Are these the exact (and only reasons) John and Matthew included and excluded what they did? Probably not. But the point is that theme is what is driving the editing of the events. Each Gospel writer was writing for a slightly different purpose (hence, why God inspired four Gospels and not one).

When we peal back the cover just a little we see what is so often touted as “contradiction” is nothing of the sort. Taking the time to ask Why? is often the best path to better understanding what really Is.

Leaving in the tension

“It is also worth noting,” writes Roberts, “that the second-century Christians didn’t ‘clean-up’ the four Gospels.”

This kind of thing is important when we consider that our documents are original and not contrived.

THE CANON

What is and isn’t Scripture

Why Did the original Church trust these 4 Gospels?

Now we have seen that the Gospel records we have are accurate, and that the internal problems some point to are often more an issue of us not understanding past customs and practices than negligence on the part of the Gospel writers.

So here we get to the core of the article. Why did the early church accept these four Gospels as inspired Scripture? There are three main tests for this:

1. They were universally used

2. They were theologically consistent with the Old Testament

3. They were written by people who knew Jesus (or they based their facts on people who knew Jesus)

1. UNIVERSALLY USED

In order for a New Testament work to be considered inspired by God, it needed to be universally used. That doesn’t mean every single person like it (otherwise we wouldn’t have heretics), but it does mean, in general, all the regions did.

This is a kind of group recognition, spreading across culture and states.

James Surowiecki exposed the phenomena of how this works this in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. “When our imperfect judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent.”

We see this same kind of wide distribution in the early Church, as well.

2. THEOLOGICALLY CONSISTENT

The New Testament documents were not created in a void. While the Jewish leaders rejected Jesus for many reasons (like pride, greed, and power), they didn’t do it because His teachings were inconsistent with the Old Testament.

To this point, Roberts notes, “the authorized Gospels, unlike the heretical ones, all affirmed the same basic truth.” When we look at the New Testament, we see a logical and consistent extension from the Old Testament.

3. CLOSE WITNESSES

All of the New Testament authors either knew Jesus personally or based their work on someone who did know him. Matthew, John, and Peter were disciples. Paul met him on the road to Damascus. And Jude and James were other sons of Mary.

The only two who didn’t know Jesus personally were Mark and Luke. Mark it is widely understood was the same Mark who traveled with Peter (Acts 12 and possibly 2 Tim 4:11). As such, his Gospel record is built around Peter’s firsthand account. And Luke, as both his Gospel and Acts introductions state, was an investigator who pieced together the account by interviewing primary sources. Mark and Luke likely didn’t know Jesus personally but talked to those who did.

Other Issues

This is a scratch on the surface. I hope it’s helped point you in the right direction. A good starting point is Roberts’ book, Can We Trust the Gospels? I highly recommend it. F.F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? and Dan Wallace’s Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament are also top-shelf works (though Wallace’s gets a bit deep into the technical).

What I didn’t cover here were all the competing gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter. If you read them it becomes pretty apparent that they are on a different level from the four Gospels in the Bible. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (different from the regular Gospel of Thomas), for instance, talks about Jesus killing other children when He became annoyed with them. And it talks about Him showing up His teacher out of ego. These are other reasons to reject them (one of which being their dating–they come a bit after the original four).

Bart Ehrman has compiled them all in a single helpful volume called Lost Scriptures. And Darrell Bock (The Missing Gospels) and Philip Jenkins (Hidden Gospels) have done a great job at fleshing out why these are not contenders for the true story of Jesus.

Other issues often brought up are whether Emperor Constantine had a role in determining which books were “authorized,” or whether third and fourth century counsels (like Nicaea) are who determined which books made and which didn’t. But, again, these are often sensationalized accounts of what actually happened. Constantine did have a role, albeit a small one. He was the first Roman emperor who supported Christianity. And, as far as determining the canon, counsels didn’t do this. They merely stated for the record what the church had already, organically decided.

Comments?

There’s a lot of thorniness here. If there’s something here you’d like to hear more about, or a point I didn’t make clear, let me know in the comments below.

The post Should We Trust the Gospels? (And Other Semi-Heretical Questions) appeared first on Joe Fontenot.

Two Thumbs Up: How the Resurrection Passes the Historical Test

When the Jews got mad at Jesus for referring Himself as God, He told them:

“Put aside for a moment what you hear me say about myself and just take the evidence of the actions that are right before your eyes” (John 10:38, Msg).

In effect, He was asking them to put their worldviews on the shelf and look at the facts plainly.

Each year at this time, TV specials and magazine covers come out throwing sideways glances at the resurrection. Some, like the article by Jay Parini on Salon entitled, “What Really Happened?” settle for a more mystical conclusion. There was a resurrection, he believes, but it wasn’t the full, bodily deal the Gospels mention.

Others, like Robert M. Price of the Jesus Seminar, go in the complete opposite direction and cull out all of the miraculous. (Thomas Jefferson was of this stripe 200 years ago when he literally cut out the portions of the Gospels that referenced the supernatural.)

But, as is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The Resurrection is Central to Our Hope

Paul once made an argument for Christianity, and he put Jesus’ bodily resurrection as the central pin, pointing out that if Jesus didn’t rise bodily from the grave, then “we are of all people are most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).

He puts the resurrection at the heart of his message, because, from it all of our hope springs. Jesus paid the way for us on the cross and then paved the way with His resurrection.

The resurrection is not a side issue, or even a secondary issue. It’s a central issue. And so Paul told the Corinthians, go and verify it.

So what happens if we do that today? What will we find if we treat the resurrection like any other historical event? Is it as well-attested as Paul says? Or is it some combination of legend and mysticism?

Gary Habermas, the noted theologian and scholar on the resurrection, along with Mike Licona, in their book The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, have compiled what they call the minimal facts method to answer this question. By taking only the criteria virtually all scholars who have studied the resurrection agree on, they’ve been able to show that the resurrection not only happened, but that it’s the most likely explanation of the data.

Historical Investigation: the 5 Rules

History, by definition, is gone. We cannot reproduce it. So there are certain guidelines historians follow to determine whether something really happened or not.

The minimum facts method takes these rules into effect.

First, it needs to be reported by multiple sources. A single source could be faking it. But multiple sources give us a better indication something really happened.

Second, it helps when an enemy says it. Your Mom will always tell you you did a good job. But when you hear it from an enemy, it carries a different weight. It’s the same with history.

Third, similar to the second, if it’s embarrassing, it’s easier to believe you’re not making it up. This was a key in the Gospel reports. The news was first reported by women. At the time, in both Jewish and Roman culture, the word of a woman was equivalent to the word of a thief. If they were making up the story, they likely wouldn’t have put it in the mouths of women.

Fourth, eyewitness is better than second-hand. This is kind of obvious. Did you talk to the person who saw the wreck? Or did you see the wreck yourself?

Fifth, in time, the earlier the better. I can tell you what I had for breakfast this morning, but not so much last week this time. And definitely not a year ago. Big, significant events are the same way. Details fade over time.

Not Ignoring the Spirit

Some are uncomfortable with ignoring divine inspiration as a proof or testament. This method is not meant to remove God and His work, but rather to show the skeptic–or any of us, really, who are so far removed from the events–that history bears out the resurrection. It’s meant to show that we can, in fact, rest on this event in the same way that Paul did in 1 Corinthians 15.

The Minimum Facts Method (4+1)

The first four facts virtually all scholars of the resurrection–both Christian and non-Christian–agree on. The last is attested by an impressive majority (3 out of 4). Together they make up the minimum facts method.

FACT 1. JESUS DIED BY ROMAN CRUCIFIXION

The certainty that Jesus lived and died by Roman crucifixion is well-attested in historical literature. Josephus, a Jew who defected to Rome, wrote about it. Tacitus, the Roman senator, wrote “[Christ], from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus” (Annuls 15.44).

Lucian (a greek writer), Mara Bar-Serapion (a Syriac philosopher), and the Talmud (a collection of Jewish teachings), all mention Jesus’ death.

FACT 2. JESUS’ FOLLOWERS TRULY BELIEVED IN THE RESURRECTION

Habermas and Licona note “nine early and independent sources” that claim Jesus rose from the dead. Nine might not seem like a lot, but when we consider that there are entire Roman emperors who do not even have that many primary sources (Trajan, to name one, who reigned almost 20 years in the first century), then nine is an abundance.

Beyond claiming it, the followers of Jesus lived it out. And died for it. Habermas and Licona write:

The skeptics might object, “Followers of other religions and causes have willingly suffered and died for their beliefs. Even atheists have willingly died for the cause of communism. This does not mean that their beliefs were true or worthy.” Agreed, but this misses the point: The disciples’ willingness to suffer and die for their beliefs indicates that they certainly regarded those beliefs as true. The case is strong that they did not willfully lie about the appearances of the risen Jesus. Liars make poor martyrs.

FACT 3. PAUL’S 180: FROM PERSECUTOR TO BELIEVER

Paul, the former persecutor of the church, did an about-face. He went from being a workaholic (on the persecution front), to defending (and ultimately becoming a martyr for) the cause he used to hunt down.

What’s most interesting here is his reason for doing it: because he had a personal experience with the risen Jesus.

FACT 4. JAMES, JESUS’ BROTHER: SKEPTIC TURNED MARTYR

Like Paul, James was a life-long skeptic. But unlike Paul, James grew up in the same house with Jesus (he was His younger brother). He knew Him all of his life. Yet, it wasn’t until after he saw His resurrected body that he became a believer.

While his conversion is not as dramatic as Paul’s, James rose to become the leader of the Jerusalem church. When Paul and Barnabas were sent to Jerusalem to get a ruling on their missionary approach, it was James who gave the final verdict (Acts 15:1-29).

James eventually died a martyr.

FACT 5. THE TOMB WAS EMPTY

This point gets a lot of airtime, but its case is really quite solid.

When the disciples began spreading word that Jesus had resurrected, it would have been simple for the Jewish leaders to dig up the body if it were still there. What did they do instead? They made up a story about it being stolen, because the body wasn’t there.

But say He didn’t rise. As I mentioned above, each Christian account mention women first discovering the empty tomb. This called the principle of embarrassment. If they’re lying to get a movements started, this is the exact opposite tact they should have taken. The testimony of women–according to Josephus (Antiquities 4.8.15)–was not even admissible in a court of law. If they’re making up a far-fetched story, it had better be credible.

If, on the other hand, they were reporting–at no hyperbole–the greatest miracle in history, then does it really matter who broke the news?

Pulling it all Together

Taking all this together, we have an extremely strong historical case that Jesus died on a roman cross, and that after He was buried, His body disappeared. But only for a short while.

After a few days, a consistent (and widely attested) set of stories began cropping up: He’s not dead, I’ve seen Him. For all their frustration, His enemies couldn’t disprove the story that was spreading. If they could only get their hands on the body, all would be squelched.

And to add insult to injury, many of those loyal to the Jewish leadership began now claiming they too had seen the resurrected Jesus.

A couple decades later, the argument Paul used on the other side of the Mediterranean was that this resurrection can be verified. Hundred of the originals who saw Him are still alive.

How to Use this Method

This article has been about the secular (or non-inspired) evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. That’s not because inspired Scripture is any less valuable–God’s Word is one of the primary guiding lights for the Christians walk.

Instead, the point of the minimum facts method is to help non-Christians digest one bit at a time. If the resurrection happened, then, perhaps, there’s more that’s true in the Bible.

P.S.

As the authors of The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus note, when talking about something as central to Christianity as the resurrection, it’s easy to diverge into other issues, like: I don’t trust the Gospels because they are full of errors. This is why the minimum facts method exists.

But, that leaves a pretty important question lingering. Namely, are the Gospels full of errors?

In my next article, I’ll be looking at that question.

Comments?

If you enjoyed this article, leave me a comment below. Or, if you thought it was a load of…well, you know, leave me a comment about that, too.

What I Learned from Alcoholics Anonymous

In 1935, two guys started a group to help people make character changes in their lives. These character changes were the tools needed to help broken people make a new and successful way in the world. Today, the organization these guys started is active in over 160 countries. It’s called Alcoholics Anonymous.

The twelve principles Bill Wilson and Bob Smith wrote down over 80 years ago have, at their core, the same principles Jesus taught 1,900 years before.

What I learned reading AA’s book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions is that Alcoholics Anonymous is not just for alcoholics.

It’s for us all.

We’re all either lost or recovering, because each of us has wandering off the path. Being followers of Jesus means we’re receiving from the addiction of our own selves.

Here how it works:

Have a Clear and Present View

Without a clear and present view of where we are, we’ve got nothing.

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Jesus said, “unless you return to square one and start over like children, you’re not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in” (Matthew 18:3, Msg).

Later the Apostle Paul reminds: “Examine yourselves…test yourselves” to see where you stand (2 Cor 13:5, ESV).

This is a daily–sometimes hourly–process.

Your Life is About More Than You

Your destination is your purpose.

Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Your life is not merely about you. When you’re the best thing you’ve got going for yourself, you’re on a free fall. It’s not going to end well.

Jesus said, “Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met” (Matthew 6:33, Msg).

Don’t Hide Your Faults

Don’t hide your faults. Instead, focus on fixing them.

Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Jesus told the story of two men who went to worship. The self-indulgent holy man. And the sorry sinner. It was the second who was honest about who he was. And it was the second who “went home made right with God” (Luke 18:9-14, Msg).

Relationships are Golden

Proactively start fixing the things you’ve broken.

Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

To the feisty Corinthians, Paul wrote: “The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! …All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other.”

Follow the Truth…Everything Else is a Lie

Follow truth, wherever it leads.

Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

God is fair and just;

He corrects the misdirected,

Sends them in the right direction (Psalm 25:8, Msg).

To his followers, Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32, ESV).

Pass It On

Spread the word. People need it.

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Upon leaving this earth, Jesus gave us our work: “Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life” (Matthew 28:19, Msg).

In the end, we’re all dealing with different versions of the same problem.

For alcoholics, the key is focusing on the truth, building up a support structure, and then reaching out to help others.

And, for the rest of us, it’s exactly the same.

The post What I Learned from Alcoholics Anonymous appeared first on Joe Fontenot.

8 Ways to Study that will Help You Grow Closer to God

Have you ever felt closer to God at some times and not other times? A good bit of this is what life throws at us. Hard things tend to drive us to our knees.

But hard times are not the only way we grow closer to God. We can be intentional about it. For most of us, studying is something we did along time ago and don’t want to rehash. But when it’s on a topic your interested in–a topic that makes a difference in your life–then studying becomes more like exploration. It becomes fun.

(And, bonus, sometimes a little studying is what keeps us out of the hard times!)

Here are eight kinds of studying you can do that will help deepen your spiritual life.

1. Systematic Theology

This sounds worse than it is. Theology, in its plainest sense, is the study (-ology) of God (Theos).

Systematic Theology is how all the different branches (or “doctrines”) of theology work together. It’s what gives us a fuller and more accurate picture of what God told us in His Word.

For instance, studying eschatology (the end times) apart from creation and the Son–two other areas of systematic theology–can lead to some pretty weird stuff (or if you’re particularly unlucky, a new cult!).

In the end, the job of systematic theology is to give you a more complete picture of how all the pieces work together.

So, where do you start?

Wayne Grudem has a time-tested systematic theology called…Systematic Theology. Millard Ericsson also wrote a great tome called Christian Theology.

Both of these are pretty gigantic. So if books that cross into the 1,000+ page territory are thanks-but-no-thanks for you, then start with Gerry Breshear and Mark Driscoll’s Doctrine. It’s a normal-sized book and does a great job of laying out the land. It’s not shallow. But it’s also not a year-long commitment.

2. Ethics

Ethics is the practical application of theology. That is, taking what you’ve learned and applying it in everyday life.

Not everyone who is ethical (or even who studies ethics) bases it on Christian theology. But everyone who applies ethics is basing it on a worldview–a system that tells them what is right and what is wrong. Studying ethics brings this worldview into focus.

My favorite book on ethics (another beast, at over 800 pages) is John and Paul Feinberg’s Ethics for a Brave New World. 

A classic (and shorter but denser read) on the ethics-front is Ethics by the pastor and WWII martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

3. Philosophy

It’s more useful than its reputation. Stick with me.

There’s a joke. A girl at college calls home and tells her dad she’s thinking about changing her major to philosophy. “Oh good,” he replies. “Pittsburgh just opened up a new philosophy factory.” Sarcasm.

Philosophy isn’t that kind of job. It’s not a trade. Rather, it’s a skill that helps us to do better at what we’re already doing.

In short philosophy helps you get behind your own thinking. Why did you take that position? Or, why do you lean this way? Most of what we do is based on assumptions. And that’s not bad. (I’m assuming the roof over me right now is not about to cave in. That’s how I focus and get work done.) But not all of our assumptions are correct. And it’s the incorrect ones that can send us down the paths that get us in trouble. Philosophy (from which the discipline of logic flows) answers this.

Philosophy books tend to get a bit too heady a bit too fast (hence its reputation), but these two scholars (J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig) have created a wonderfully accessible book called Philosophical Foundations for the Christian Worldview. It’s a good one for skipping around by topic, too.

4. Apologetics

You believe it. You understand it. But in our hostile world, can you present a case for it? Are you prepared to explain why you’ve chosen this path?

Apologetics comes from greek apologia, or “defense,” like Plato’s classic work The Apology of Socrates. (It is, alas, not a reference to saying sorry. Sorry.)

Apologetics is, in a lot of ways, about winning arguments. It shouldn’t be just about that. But it can often deteriorate to this. Perhaps then a better way to think about apologetics is that it’s more about winning people who have intellectual objections to the Christian faith, than crushing their arguments. That means successful apologetics is people-first.

For this reasons I recommend Andy Bannister’s smart (and often hilarious) The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist. His heart is to keep the dialog open–to win over the enemies of Christianity–without sacrificing the truth in the process.

John Stott’s Why I am a Christian is a small but powerful book. Or, if you’re into the free variety of things, I’ve written a series of short apologetics ebooks which you can get in the Resources section of my site.

5. Socio-economic Background of Jesus’ Day

Nothing makes reading the Gospel conversations or Acts geography come alive like being there. Okay, that may be a little out of the question. But there has been some fascinating historical research into what it was like during those times.

Exploring the socio-economic world (think: What were normal customs? And how did people look and live?) opens up layers of context and meaning. It’s about as close to time-travel as you’ll get.

Donald Brake wrote a book with more color pictures than words (I think) called Jesus: A Visual History. I’ve read it several times and recommend it often.

For a more in-depth, but still fascinating look at how things used to be, you can also check out Backgrounds of Early Christianity by Everett Ferguson.

(Oh, and anything by Kenneth Bailey. He’s more commentary-style, and he goes pretty deep, but he’s one of the best.)

6. Internalize the Biblical Timeline

How long was it from the exodus to King David? And then what about from King David to when Jerusalem fell?

Maybe you’re thinking: what difference does it make? Quite a lot. For instance, the Exodus happened (roughly) between 1200 and 1400 B.C. That means King David reigned only a few hundred years, at the most, after the Israelites walked across the Red Sea floor on dry ground.

But it was over 1,000 years until Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem (even though it was only a few miles away). It’s easy to compress what we read in the Bible to an unspecified, close-together time line. But, like today, the world then changed rapidly between what’s recorded.

Here’s a way to think about it. We as a country have only been independent for just over two hundred years. And if we were to go backwards in time (from present day) by the same distance that separated Jesus and David we’d find an uncivilized Europe of barbarians and warlords heavily influenced by Vikings.

No one would confuse that world–even the world of George Washington–with today. Understanding that sheds a great deal of light on what happened then versus what happens now. The same is true for our Bible. Its writers alone span 1,400 (or more) years. Understanding the timeline can illuminate what we’re reading.

K.A. Kitchen, the noted historian, offers a helpful look into this in his book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Another book, largely out of style for his views on creation, is Archbishop Ussher’s Annals of the World. It is incredibly detailed. Sandra Richter also weighs in from the cultural angle in Epic of Eden.

7. Find an Opinion on Creation

Seems kind of an odd one to include. But the issue’s not so straight forward. It’s nuanced. And it’s one that will cause you to think through and process more than just the issue of creation (which is a doctrine in systematic theology). For most I’ve talked to, diving into its implications stretch how you think about it.

For instance, why do the vast majority of scientists reject a straightforward reading of early Genesis? It is because they reject the Bible and want an alternative? Or do they have something to add, and should we consider how their data might be merged with the biblical record?

David Snoke wrote an argument for this in A Biblical Case for an Old Earth and Hugh Ross has provided a scientific model (against evolution) in More than a Theory. Contra these “old-earth” views, Jonathan Sarfatti has written a rebuttal from the young-earth side called Refuting Compromise. And John Ashton has compiled a book of fifty scientists who weigh in on different possibilities of the young-earth view, In Six Days.

8. Read Church History

Most people (and for a long time, myself included) recite church history like this: there was Jesus, then the apostles, then two millennia of nothing with an occasional spark by somebody called Augustine or Luther or something, and then…us today. Sound familiar?

Do you know the number one thing I learned from reading church history? A lot happened in the last two-thousand years. And more than that, looking at what happened has shed a lot of light on why we are the way we are today.

Understanding church history not only allows us to keep from repeating the same mistakes again, but it illuminates things like, why do we have Catholics and Protestants? And where do the Orthodox guys fit in? Studying church history has helped me to have a more restorative view toward people who are not like me. Because, in the end, we’re actually quite a lot alike.

Bruce Shelley has written a fantastic book on church history called Church History in Plain Language. Between us, I recommend you go the audiobook route. Audiobooks work well for this narrative kind of reading. It also happens to be cheaper right now on audio than it is in print.