Josh Benner

Category: Church

  • D-Day teaches us about faithful service

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    What do baseball hall of famer Yogi Berra, legendary actor Henry Fonda, “Catcher in the Rye” author J.D. Salinger, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness), and Scottie from the original Star Trek (James Doohan) have in common? All were part of the Normandy invasion.
    74 years ago today, Allied forces invaded Normandy, France which had been occupied by the Germans.
    156,115 men from the United States, Britain, and 11 other countries landed in Normandy during D-Day. More than 4,000 lost their lives. It was, and is – and hopefully always will be – the largest amphibious assault ever undertaken.
    The D-Day victory was crucial for the Allied Powers and helped set the stage for eventual victory in Europe. The invasion was so crucial because it it gave the Allied Forces a good access point into continental Europe.
    It’s interesting to think about the famous men who had roles in the Normandy invasion. None of them are famous because of Normandy. And unless you’re a huge World War II buff or have a relative who served in that battle, you probably struggle to name anyone who fought at Normandy.
    We live in such a “look at me” culture.
    But doing great things is not always about the recognition.
    Today there are too many people who want glory for its own sake. Not because they necessarily want to do something great but because they want to be thought of as great. There are people who want to be famous for its own sake.
    But there are also many who are doing great things. There are doctors who are making new discoveries which impact our health. They’ll never be household names. There are teachers whose names we’ll never hear but who are making differences in the lives of students and impacting students who will impact others and the ripples of that service will be felt in the next generation and in the generation after that. There are innovators who are working to change the world.
    Some of these people we obviously will hear about.
    But many we won’t.
    When kids play backyard football, no one ever pretends to be an offensive linemen. It’s all about being the quarterback, running back, or wide receiver. But to win, you need the whole team. And everyone matters to the team.
    I think about this in the church as well. We all have ways to serve. We all have ways how God has gifted us for the sake of building up his church. But everyone has a unique way to fit in. As the Apostle Paul draws an analogy to the human body, everyone in the Church is a part of the body. And the stakes are eternal as we work to spread the gospel, to make disciples, and to challenge, love, and encourage one another.
    How are you using the ways how God has gifted you today?
    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

  • Grumbling: when we forget God’s goodness

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    In the Book of Exodus, God had worked in mighty ways for the Israelites. He had brought a series of plagues against the Egyptians. He dramatically parted the waters of the Red Sea. Once the Israelites were in the desert, God continued to lead. But through a series of uncertain events, the Israelites continued to respond by grumbling.

    They ran low on water. Israel grumbled. God provided water. They didn’t have food. Israel grumbled. God provided food. After all that the Lord had done, the people should have trusted that God would provide.

    But their struggle is one that we too can have. In spite of all of the ways how God has provided for us, blessed us, sustained us, in a time of adversity, it can be easy to fall into grumbling and doubt.

    But this isn’t God’s desire for us. He wants us to live in faith.

    We can be so quick to forget what God has done, how he’s blessed us.
    Forgetting can lead to unbelief and faithlessness.
    Let us actively remember the blessings of the Lord in our lives.
    We forget about his past blessings and forget about his future promises.
    And so we grumble.
    God is the Lord of our past, present, and future.
    God has promise all of his children a wonderful and glorious future.
    And between now and then, he has not abandoned us in the desert.
    God is God of your life today.
    If you’ve placed faith in Jesus, you know that you’re a sinner, saved by grace, and know that Jesus saved you, you have that to thank God for.
    Ad that’s the most important thing of all.
    He redeemed you. He saved you from the penalty of sin. To remember that the Lord is good. The Israelites lose sight of that.
    To remember that God made everything and that everything belongs to him.
    You’re here today. Which means that God has provided for you up to this point in your life. For some of us, it might not have always been easy.
    There might have been times of real hardship.
    But we’ve made it to this moment.
    It’s easy to forget.
    For some of us, when a blessing gets answered, we might celebrate for a moment, but it can be easy to just move on to the next thing to stress about.
    And we can go through so much of our lives grumbling, complaining to God, feeling like he hasn’t given us enough.
    For the Israelites, they’ve seen God act in mighty ways, but then they go right back to worrying.
    The Israelites face difficult situations. And they choose to grumble instead of trust.
    Part of the root of a grumbling heart is one that loses sight of the sovereignty of God.
    I mentioned earlier that it was God who had led Israel to their circumstance between the Egyptians and the sea. It was no accident.
    It was God who was leading the Israelites in the desert. It’s so easy to lose sight of the divine hand of God at work in our lives. Israel did. In our passages, they actually don’t even grumble directly to God. They actually grumble to Moses and his brother Aaron.
    As if it was their fault.
    Nothing happens outside of the sovereign will of God.
    And while they might have directed their complaints to Moses and Aaron, the real displeasure of the people was with God.
    God is God of all circumstances.
    Job 12:10 refers to God and says:
    In his hand is the life of every living thing
    and the breath of all mankind.
    Grumbling is a lack of trust in God. Grumbling is feeling like God hasn’t give us enough. It’s a sense that perhaps God isn’t good.
    Grumbling is turning away from God. It’s complaining to others, it’s ignoring the goodness of God, and is not rooted in the truth of the character of the Lord.
    We don’t like the unknown.
    Israel didn’t know how they’d get water, they didn’t know how they’d get food. And even with the promises and presence of God, they didn’t know how it was all going to work out.
    At a certain point, you need to walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).
    I think we sometimes look at the Old Testament. We see the things God did there and think “well yeah, it’d be easy to believe back then.” But people still often struggled, even when seeing incredible signs and miracles that the Lord was doing.
    Because it’s not constant wonderment and awe. We live in the real world and it’s really imperfect.
    But when we don’t know what’s going to happen, when we don’t see the clearest path of how we’re going to get to a destination, let me challenge you today.
    Instead of doubting or being a catastrophist, instead look to God and see how he’s going to work.
    Do you have a situation in your life right now? That’s causing you stress? That’s robbing you of joy? That’s distracting you from God and where you’re tempted to grumble?
    Let me challenge you in that situation to consider that the same God who’s blessed your life, the same Lord who came into the world and died so that you be reconciled to him, the same God who has made you eternal and glorious promises is also your God for today.

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

  • Supreme Court rules in favor of Christian baker

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    Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex couple who was getting married.

    This decision only scratches the surface of the issue. It does not give every Christian who works in a creative field (baking, photography, etc) permission to refuse services for a same-sex wedding.

    I’m not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar but it appears to be on an inevitable crash course for another Supreme court decision. Is it a matter of individual liberty? Whereby a person reserves the right to refuse service? Or is it discrimination and the violation of law?

    People on both sides of this issue are very polarized. If private business owners do have the legal right to refuse service, some draw analogies to people refusing services to African Americans before passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s.

    Persecution takes a variety of forms. There are absolutely people who seek to persecute Christians for their beliefs under the tyranny of law. With Jack Phillips, a couple attempted to force this man to comply. There have been numerous legal victories for the gay rights movement over the last few years. But some seek to crush any dissenters. There have been other businesses who have faced threats, backlash, and thousands of dollars in legal fees for standing by convictions.

    Today’s decision does not further enshrine religious liberty. It has more to do with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and their hostility towards Phillips than if Christians have a general liberty to refuse services in situations which conflict with their faith.

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

  • Not taking the Lord’s name in vain – more to it than just bad words

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    The Third Commandment
    “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
    -Exodus 20:7
    The third commandment involves more than just not using God’s name in profanities. That’s part of it but it’s not the whole picture.
    In its historical context, it seems that part of the meaning of the third commandment involved swearing oaths in the Lord’s name. A person could make such an oath and yet fail to follow through, and God doesn’t want his name invoked with falsity.
    However this commandment is more broad than only applying to oaths.
    It also involves misusing the Lord’s title.
    Psalm 29:2: “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness.”
    In the beginning of the Lord’s prayer, Jesus addresses God the Father and says:
    “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. (Matthew 6:9).
    God’s name is to be hallowed. It is to be spoken in reverence.
    There are still Orthodox Jews who won’t say the word God out of concern that they’ll never say his name with due reverence.
    We must keep in mind the awesome holiness of the Lord when we invoke his name.
    The Westminister Confession of Faith puts it well:
    The third commandment requireth the holy and reverent use of God’s names, titles, attributes, ordinances, Word, and works.
    But another way how people speak the name of the Lord in vain is by misrepresenting God theologically.
    People often attempt to speak for God. People will say what God’s standards are for love but it can misrepresent God’s holiness and justice.
    People speak for God in comparison to other religions.
    People who don’t seek to honor God speak for what God does or doesn’t accept.
    This is a terrible blasphemy against the Lord.
    We misuse the name of the Lord when we speak for God in ways that are not true to how God has revealed himself in scripture.
    We see that at the heart of the original sin.
    God originally gave one commandment.
     “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17).
    But his words were twisted.
    Genesis 3:1: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”
    He never said such a thing.
    But then Eve responded by further misrepresenting the words of the Lord.
    Genesis 3:2-3
    2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”
    And the serpent undermines the consequences that God had spoken.
    Genesis 3:5: “You will not surely die.”
    Listen to the ways people talk about God. It’s a pattern that constantly happens.
    Twisting his words. Speaking on his behalf in false ways.
    Terrible sins.
    In undermining the consequences of God’s word, we make God out to be a lair and there is no deceit in the Lord. He is true to his word.
    This is part of the reason why it’s so important to have such reverence for the scripture.
    Because people are imperfect but God’s word is perfect.
    2 Timothy 3:16-17 says: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
    Unfortunately, our society has little Biblical literacy today.
    As we continue to study the Israelites, we will see that it had consequences for them and we suffer consequences in our world for a lack of reverence and training in God’s word.
    So in the first three commands, we get glimpses of the position where God is to be in our lives: first. We see glimpses of the reverence for how God wants us to approach him.

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

  • What Would Jesus Fly?

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    In a popular video, televangelist Jesse Duplantis appeals to potential supporters of his desire to purchase a $54 million jet for his ministry which would allow Duplantis to travel anywhere in the world non-stop.

    Duplantis’s ministry already has a private jet (though they’re slumming it in a jet that can’t fly anywhere non-stop). And they can certainly buy a new jet if they want to and have the money. Although I don’t understand why a person would donate money for that purpose.

    Duplantis says, “I really believe that if the Lord Jesus Christ was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn’t be riding a donkey, he’d be in an airplane flying all over the world.”

    Would he?

    Or would Jesus (if he decided to fly) be in coach, with the people?

    If Jesus was given $54 million, an incredible amount of money, would the first thought to be to buy something to help him get to people? Or would it be to turn back around and give that money back to the people?

    Duplantis wanting all of this money for a jet so they can travel non-stop rubs me the wrong way because it’s such an extravagant expense with the premise that the ministry and what they’re doing is so important that they don’t have time to stop for fuel.

    Take a pit stop!

    If you have that type of fund raising power, use the money for more noble causes.

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.