T. David Beck: The Simple Way of Jesus

What is the one central idea of 1 Corinthians? What is the one sentence Paul would most like his readers to know by heart? Here it is: "Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose" (1:10). New Testament scholar Ben Witherington is one among many scholars who observe that Paul uses familiar Greco-Roman rhetorical devices to reach the people of the church in Corinth. The Corinthian house churches were predominantly Gentile in demographic, and the Corinthians highly valued a rhetorically skilled presentation. Witherington argues that ancient listeners from a prominent Roman city would have recognized v. 1:10 as the exordium , or the theme sentence of the letter. (Incidentally, Paul's letters were public documents, intended to be read out loud in church gatherings.) All the issues Paul...

I have long had this burning desire to be utterly transformed by God. I don't want to be a better person. I tried that. At a certain point, I realized that God was not going to be impressed by my attempts to be well behaved. What will impress him? Based on what Jesus had to say, I can think of only one thing: love. Now left to my own devices, I am not the most loving person. I am self-centered and rather insensitive to other people. I like to think conceptually. I can tune out people and relationships, and then I wake up wondering why I feel disconnected. Thankfully, this kind of ugliness defines me less than it used to. Slowly I am being transformed into the likeness of Christ. But a taste of transformation only makes me hunger for it all the more. I am realizing more and more that key to being transformed into a person who feels, thinks, and acts like Jesus is to place myself over and over again on the receiving end of God's love. There is nothing I can do to earn divine love...

I found out some interesting things about the apostle Paul over the last couple of days' reading in a book by Ben Witherington on 1 & 2 Corinthians. I never appreciated that in order to receive the education he did, Paul had to have been raised in a well-to-do family. Paul was trained in Greco-Roman rhetoric, and he was also educated under Gamaliel, one of the most famous rabbis of his day. Witherington states that Paul's education was in the top 1-2% of his day. Paul came from a wealthy family, and he was well educated. He was also a Roman citizen. Not many Jews enjoyed that status. So, all in all, Paul had a lot of social muscle he could flex. He usually didn't. In fact, in Corinth he chose to take the socially low road of being a tentmaker. This move disappointed some of the more aristocratic Corinthians, who came to see Paul as a disappointment and, ultimately, not really apostolic material. So... when Paul wrote in Philippians 2 about Jesus denying himself all the ...

Jesus preached that love is the core of the human response to God (see Matt 22:34-40). What made Haiti so impactful for me is that I saw this theological truth in the faces of children. The boys and girls in the orphanage have known various degrees of mistreatment, abuse, and abandonment. They are now in an environment where, for the first time, they are saturated with God's love. You can see in their faces the transformation that is taking place as they go from closed to open, hard to soft, begging to giving. They are like flowers that open their petals to receive sunlight. They soak up love like sponges soak up water. They are irresistable for that very reason. David Benner writes this in his book Surrender to Love... "Christianity is the world's great love religion. The Christian God comes to us as love, in love, for love. The Christian God woos us with love and works our transformation through love. "In spite of the trivializing influence of romantic and sentiment...

[Photo by LucastheExperience] Three days a week the Manasseros run a feeding program for kids who live in the area and are regularly undernourished. These kids might or might not eat when they are at home. A bowl of rice and beans at the feeding program is the only substantial meal they will get for a couple of days when the next feeding program happens. It is interesting to watch these kids eat. They clearly do not eat for taste. That is, how the food tastes is not important. For them, eating is a job. It gets oddly quiet when the kids are eating. There is no horseplay like you might see at an American elementary school cafeteria. These kids from the ravine are focused. There is a marked intensity to their eating. Nor are there mounds of food to throw away. If a child leaves leftovers, another child eats them. And you should see how much these kids eat! When you might not eat for a day or two, you shovel as much in as you can. Many kids eat until their stomachs are bulging and tight a...

We went to church on Sunday while we were there. I sat in the front row with the Manasseros and some other members of our team. When Pastor John McCool, a man who is as eccentric as Hait itself, started preaching from the second row, I had to turn around to see him. That gave me a chance to look at the people in the congregation. I watched them as they listened to him. I wondered what they were thinking. "How do they live out their faith here in Haiti? What are they hearing right now?" The message was about God's goodness. Pastor John was arguing that although life is messy, God is good in the midst of all the messiness. The poignant moment for me came when John said, "I have had to inform parents that their children have committed suicide..." As he said this, two people caught my attention. The eyes of a young man in his twenties drifted off from Pastor John to another part of the room. He had gone somewhere else in his thoughts. I said to myself, "This yo...

This moment from Haiti is about thankfulness. Every morning we would go at 6:00 AM to worship with either the girls or the boys of the orphanage. Six days a week they gather at that time to sing and pray together. On Saturdays they sleep in until 7:00. :-) The first morning we worshiped with the girls, I was both participant and observer. Much of what the girls did was in Creole, so I participated as best I could. In large part, I was just taking it in. One observation I had was that the girls were singing out. When they sing, they do not play it safe. They let their worship go. It's very inspiring! The thing that really grabbed my attention was the prayer of Navi, the house mother. She prayed for about five minutes, all in rapidly spoken Creole. I have an extremely limited Creole vocabulary, so I understood almost nothing she was saying. However, one word popped out to me. It was one of the few words I understood, and it was repeated over and over. "Mesi... Mesi... Mesi......