Barnabas Piper's Blog, page 77

New Happy Rant: Platform Building, Bill O’Reilly, and What Are People Even Doing

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted and Barnabas tackle a number of the most pressing topics in the news and on their minds. Ronnie was called away (seriously) moments before the show to attend to a pastoral matter, so he was unable to join them in their lively ranting.

Should Christians try to build a platform? If so how can we do this well?
Bill O’Reilly’s firing and how some evangelicals defend him
Objectification of women in media
What are people even doing? A new segment  in which we ask “what are people even doing?” about various things that drive us nuts. This episode features children’s birthday parties, bad NFL decisions, and Chick Fil A fear.

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Episode #138

New Happy Rant: Gospel Coalition Conference Recap

In this episode of The Happy Rant Podcast Ted quizzes Barnabas and Ronnie about The Gospel Coalition’s 2017 National conference which both of them attended. Subjects discussed include:

How TGC is like summer camp for grown ups
Everyone is weird
Amazing fan interactions
Barnabas and Ronnie’s first ever in-person meeting
The best and worst speakers

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Episode #136

New Happy Rant: Visiting Israel, The Billy Graham Rule, and NBA MVP

In this episode of The Happy Rant Podcast Ted Kluck and Barnabas Piper discuss a range of topics from the news to their travels to the world of professional sports. Ronnie sat this one out due to a particularly pastoral week. Here’s what he missed:

Coffee talk
Ted asks Barnabas about his recent trip to Israel – the good, the bad, and the NFL opera singer
The recent hubbub about “The Billy Graham Rule” and whether it is actually the best way to handle things.
Who is the NBA MVP?
Which NBA player are you?

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Episode #135

NEW HAPPY RANT: Awkward Pastors in Restaurants

In this episode of The Happy Rant Podcast Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas discuss one of the most pressing issues facing the church: the awkwardness of pastors in restaurants.

Calling servers by name
Asking how to pray for servers
Praying endlessly
Which famous pastor would be the most likely to be this way?

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Episode #134

NEW HAPPY RANT: Bracketology with Ronnie

Yes, we know the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament are over, but don’t you wish you knew how Ronnie picked games? This is how, this entire episode. Just as importantly we have an important announcement about our partnership with laggers Roasters.

Ronnie hates sports
Ronnie picks games
Ted and Barnabas give commentary and some guidance
Bison burgers are delicious
Ronnie trolls Ohio
WE HAVE COFFEE FOR SALE

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Episode #133

That Time Russ Ramsey Made Me Cry

I am not a crier. It’s not that I am afraid to cry or to admit to crying. I certainly don’t think crying is weak. It’s just that tears don’t come easily for me.

But Russ Ramsey made me cry. Russ is a friend and Russ is writer, or should I say a writer. He can write the sober out of a Southern Baptist church the irony out of an East Nashville hipster. And he can write me to tears.

Russ sent me his latest book, Struck: One Christian’s Reflections Encountering Death, several months ago, before it was released. He asked me to endorse it, and since he’s a good friend I was happy to do so. It was an ambush. The manuscript I waded into thinking I would enjoy and recommend happily was surgery and medicine and therapy. Of course, since it’s his reflections on mortality and mourning and recovery after near heart failure and open heart surgery, that makes sense. But it was all those things for me.

I read it one week after I moved out of the home I shared with my now ex-wife. My marriage had just ended (I reflected on that here). I was grieving but wasn’t fully aware of it. I was hurting but didn’t entirely feel it. I was moving forward but mainly because life just sort of does that without permission. I had hope but couldn’t have articulated it.

Struck was precisely the book I needed but didn’t know it.

The best memoirs tell one person’s story and the reader’s story all at once. They connect experientially and truthfully beyond the details of time and place or even the specifics of the event. To ask what they are “about” is to miss the point altogether – because they are about all the ways they speak to the reader. This what Struck did for me.

Russ’s account of sickness and health, of marriage and parenting, of friendship, of pain and misery, of recovery and its long road, of faith and dependence was his story. But it was my story. Or at least it was where my story could go. It was true and beautiful and hopeful, and I needed nothing more than truth and beauty and hope. Through the pages of this book he taught me to lament, and in lament there is healing. Without lament there is arrested development and soul stagnation. He offered hope and a little humor too. Come to think of it, the latter makes the former even brighter.

I read Struck in a single evening. My only difficulty in reading it was that it’s hard to see pages through tears, old stored up tears that needed permission to depart. Struck gave the permission because pain and fear were shared. In a sense it ushered me into hope and healing, or to a new place in them.

Struck is captivating and life-giving, but not light or trite. It is the best sort of heavy, the sort that anchors you and gives some ballast to your soul. It tugs at your soul. It shows what is good and real and invites you in rather than telling you what to think and what order to think it in. I devoured it because I was starving for what it had to say and because Russ delivered it with craft and precision and pleasantness.

For you who are grieving, this is for you. For you who are dried up, this is for you. For you who fear, this is for you. For you who are in the midst of trouble, this is for you. For you who anticipate trouble, this is for you. For you who are climbing out of trouble, this is for you. It is not a book about anything any more than a window is about what you see through it. And what you see through Struck will lift your soul, though it might be through tears.

New Happy Rant: The Shack, Gay Beauty and the Beast, and Another Christian Conference Update

In this episode of The Happy Rant Podcast Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas hit on their subjects – Evangelical controversies and conferences.

Barnabas gives a recap of two of the weirdest Christian conferences
Why do Christians insist on being the best marketing vehicle for things they hate . . . like The Shack?
Is it really a big deal that there is, apparently, a gay character in the new Beauty and the Beast movie?
And how is that any different than the cartoon?

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Episode #132

The 50 Best Quotes from The Ragamuffin Gospel

I recently read Brennan Manning’s classic work on God’s profound love and grace, The Ragamuffin Gospel. I’d known of the book for years, but it took dozens of recommendations before I bought and read it. Part of me wished I had done so earlier and part of me is grateful I encountered this beautiful book when I did. It is rare or me to read a book that makes me love Jesus and feel loved by Jesus more. This one did, page after page, relentlessly. It is magnificent in its simplicity and depth and honesty and gratefulness and worship. If you have not, please read it. Here are a election of the best quotes from it.

1) [This book] is for smart people who know they are stupid and honest disciples who admit they are scalawags.

2) The bending of the mind by the powers of this world has twisted the gospel of grace into religious bondage and distorted the image of God into an eternal, small-minded bookkeeper.

3) He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners.

4) The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there. No, it is for a far larger, homlier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinner because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle.

5) The men and women who are truly filled with the light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.

6) Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

7) My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn or deserve it.

8) Whatever our failings may be, we need not lower our eyes in the presence of Jesus.

9) Something is radically wrong when the local church rejects someone accepted by Jesus.

10) Creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech.

11) Grace is the active expression of His love.

12) The child of the Father rejects the pastel-colored patsy God who promises never to rain on our parade.

13) Jesus learned how to walk, stumbled and fell, cried for his milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit, was fixed to a cross, and died whispering forgiveness on us all.

14) The legalists can never live up to the expectations they project on God.

15) The Word we study has to be the Word we pray.

16) Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games, or pop psychology. It is an act of faith in the grace of God.

17) One of the mysteries of the gospel tradition is this strange attraction of Jesus for the unattractive, this strange desire for the undesirable, this strange love for the unlovely.

18) Just as a smart man knows he is stupid, so the awake Christian knows he/she is a ragamauffin.

19) Repentance is not what we do in order to be forgiven; it is what we do because have been forgiven.

20) The Father in not justice and the Son love. The Father is justice and love; the Son is love and justice.

21) The deeper we grow in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the poorer we become – the more we realize that everything in life is a gift.

22) To be alive is to be broken. And to be broken is to stand in need of grace.

23) We grow complacent and lead practical lives. We miss the experience of awe, reverence, and wonder. Our world is saturated with grace, and the lurking presence of God is revealed not only in spirit but in matter.

24) If God is not in the whirlwind he may be in a Woody Allen Film or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations.

25) It is only the reality of death that is able to quicken people out of the sluggishness of everyday life and into an active search for what life is really about.

26) Each moment of our existence we are either growing into more or retreating into less. We are either living a little more or dying a little bit, ad Norman Mailer put it.

27) We cannot apply human logic and justice to the living God. Human logic is based on human experience and human nature. Yahweh does not conform to this model. If Israel is unfaithful, God remains faithful against all logic and all limits of justice because He is.

28) Jesus has journeyed to the far reaches of loneliness.

29) We cannot will ourselves to accept grace. There are no magic words, preset formulas, or esoteric rites of passage. Only Jesus Christ sets us free from indecision. The Scriptures offer no other basis for conversion than the personal magnetism of the Master.

30) Just as the sunrise of faith requires the sunset of our former unbelief, so the dawn of trust requires letting go of our craving spiritual consolations and tangible reassurances. Trust at the mercy of the response it receives is a bogus trust.

31) When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God’s gift of grace.

32) Christianity happens when men and women accept with unwavering trust that their sins have not only been forgiven but forgotten, washed away in the blood of the Lamb.

33) The ministry of evangelization is an extraordinary opportunity of showing gratitude to Jesus by passing on His gospel of grace to others.

34) Impostors in the spirit always prefer appearances to reality.

35) The alternative to confronting the truth is always some form of self-destruction.

36) The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.

37) Many of us pretend to believe we are sinners. Consequently all we can do is pretend to believe we have been forgiven. As a result, our whole spiritual life is pseudo repentance and pseudo bliss.

38) We ought to attract people to the church quite literally by the fun there is in being a Christian. – Robert Hotchkins

39) As the chameleon changes colors with the seasons, so the Christian who wants to be well thought of by everyone attunes and adapts t each new personality and situation.

40) For most of us it takes a long time for the Spirit of freedom to cleanse us of the subtle urges to be admired for our studied goodness. It requires a strong sense of our redeemed selves to pass up the opportunity to appear graceful and good to other persons.

41) Living by grace inspires a growing consciousness that I am what I am in the sight of Jesus and nothing more.

42) A little child cannot do a bad coloring; nor can a child of God do a bad prayer.

43) Compassion for others is not a simple virtue because it avoids snap judgements of right or wrong, good or bad, hero or villain: It seeks truth in all its complexity. Genuine compassion means that in empathizing with the failed plans and uncertain loves of the other person, we send out the vibration, “Yes, ragamuffin, I understand. I’ve been there too.”

44) Usually we see other people not as they are, but as we are.

45) When God’s love is taken for granted, we paint Him into a corner and rob Him of the opportunity to love us in a NEW AND SURPRISING way, and faith begins to shrivel and shrink.

46) To be Christian, faith has to be new – that is, alive and growing. It cannot be static, finished, settled. When Scripture, prayer, worship, ministry become routine, they are dead. When I have decided that I can now cope with the awful love of God I have headed to the shallows to avoid the deeps. I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.

47) To really be a disciple of Jesus, one must be as committed to the message of the kingdom as He was, and to preach it whether or not the audience finds it relevant.

48) The sinner is accepted before he pleads for mercy. It is already granted. He need only to receive it. Total amnesty. Gratuitous pardon.

49) After falling flat on your face, are you still firmly convinced that the fundamental structure of reality is not works but grace?

50) The love of God is folly.

Interview with BraveDaily.com

I recorded am interview with Crosswalk.com on my new book, The Curious Christian. In it we talk about where the idea of curiosity came from for a book, whether curiosity is safe for Christians, where our boundaries should be on our curiosity, and dealing in the mysteries and complexities of life.

Learn more about the book at CuriousChristianBook.com.

NEW HAPPY RANT: Gungor, The Oscars, and Surviving without Tim Keller

In this episode of The Happy Rant podcast Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas are back to their usual rantiness. All is well again and the evangelical world has delivered subjects on a sterling silver platter.

Who is Michael Gungor and why is everyone so enraged at his tweets?
We will indeed be offering Happy Rant Coffee in the near future
The spectacle of The Oscars and why anyone should care
Can evangelicalism survive the departure of Tim Keller?
Who will the next Timmy K. be?
Why doesn’t the reformed world do the red carpet thing?

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Episode #131