Josh Benner

Category: Culture

  • Erika Kirk offers amazing grace

    Erika Kirk offers amazing grace

    Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk spoke at his memorial service yesterday in Arizona. Erika Kirk said “On the cross, our savior said “Father forgive them, for they not know what they do. That man, that young man, I forgive him.” She also said “I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and is what Charlie would do.”

    It was an incredible moment and an incredible offer of forgiveness.

    One illustration of grace that’s always struck me comes from the late Tim Keller. It’s the idea that all forgiveness is costly.

    If I go to your house, and I break your TV, someone has to pay for it.

    You might say “You have to pay for that.” Then I’m bearing the cost.

    You might say “It’s ok, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.” Then you’re bearing the cost.

    Maybe you say, “I bought insurance. That’ll replace it.” Then insurance is bearing the cost. And the homeowner paid for the insurance.

    Maybe we come to an agreement where we both pay for part of it. Then we’re sharing the cost.

    Maybe you say “I was actually going to stop watching TV.” It’s still bearing the cost of not having the thing that was yours.

    In any circumstance, someone must pay. Because all forgiveness is costly. It’s easy to picture with tangible things that have a monetary cost. But it’s also true with forgiveness.

    Forgiving a wrong is costly. And the greater the wrong, the higher the cost. If someone is 20 minutes late for a meeting, that’s annoying, but a pretty small cost. If someone hurts you or someone you love, that forgiveness comes at a much greater cost.

    There’s nothing the man who killed Charlie Kirk can ever do to undo what he has done. There’s nothing he can do to earn her forgiveness, there’s no way he can pay her back or make it right.

    The only way he could be forgiven by Erika Kirk was for her to freely give it. Because of hate, she senselessly lost her husband less than two weeks ago. Her children lost their father.

    It’s easy to understand why she would hate that man. To many, that feeling would be totally justified. But she responds with forgiveness.

    Forgiveness is striking.

    The Bible says that all sin and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). We all sin against God in the things that we do that we shouldn’t do. We sin in the things that we should do but don’t do. It’s not just occasional. We sin as a habit, as a way of life, as a matter of course. We could never earn forgiveness from a holy God.

    The gospel is that Jesus paid the price for our sin on the cross. That there was no way for us to earn our forgiveness, or to pay for it. And so he bore the cost himself by absorbing the penalty that we deserved.

    To some, the cross is foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:18). To others, it is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16-17).

    Hatred for that man might have been understandable. Forgiveness for him is glorious.

    In the Gospel of Luke, as Jesus is being crucified, he asks God to forgive his killers when he says “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

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  • Ariel and Jesus: The Gospel in the Little Mermaid

    Ariel and Jesus: The Gospel in the Little Mermaid

    My favorite Disney movie is the Little Mermaid, and part of why I love the movie so much is because of tall of the gospel themes. 

    THE LONGING OF THE HUMAN SOUL 

    Ariel has it all. She’s a princess, she lives in a palace. she’s beautiful, she has an amazing singing voice, great friends, she’s adored. Yet what she really wants is a world that’s above (literally).

    While her hope and aspiration is to be part of our world, her understanding of it is imperfect. She finds various items and turns to her seagull friend Scuttle to explain the things of the world to her. He’s well-intentioned but often ill informed as he tells her a fork is used for hair and a tobacco pipe is a musical instrument. We also see her imperfect knowledge of the world in the song “Part of Your World” where she keeps repeating “what do you call ’em?” “what’s that word?”

    None of that changes Ariel’s desire to know our world. A world where they walk, where they run, where they stay all day in the sun. Sun is noteworthy in her association with the world as light is a nearly universal religious symbol of truth and righteousness. She desires the illumination of the world above over the dark world of the seas.

    A SINFUL HEART

    Ariel has a loving father, the king, but she is also disobedient to him. She goes up to shore in spite of being forbidden. She complains about her father’s rules in “Part of Your World” when she sings: “Bet’cha on land they understand, bet they don’t reprimand their daughters.”

    A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL 

    In order to make it to land, Ariel makes a deal with Ursula, the Sea Witch, who’s a demonic figure. Many had come before Ariel and made various deals with Ursula, only to lose and be turned into polyps.

    Ariel is betting on herself. But it’s a bet she will lose. She cannot ultimately prevail in becoming part of the world.

    A SAVIOR 

    Ariel was always a pawn in Ursula’s game. Ursula wants to rule the world of the seas. When Ariel loses her deal, her father Triton intervenes. There’s only one thing that can save Ariel. Triton exchanges himself for her and is turned into a polyp. He sets aside his crown so that Ariel can live.

    VICTORY

    Ursula is powerful. But she’s not all-powerful. In the end, she is defeated. There’s a resurrection of the people who’s lives she had taken. Triton gives Ariel what she could not give herself. He gives her entrance into the human world. The movie ends like the Bible ends, with a wedding celebration and a choir (only time in this movie) singing: Now we can walk, now we can run, now we can stay all day in the sun. Just you and me and I can be part of your world.

    THE GOSPEL 

    There are great themes in this movie. But it also is just a shadow of the real story. That we are sinful and need grace. Jesus is the one who took the penalty of our sin for us so that we could be forgiven and have our true home in another world.

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    Originally published November 22, 2019

  • The hardest commandment: love your neighbor

    The hardest commandment: love your neighbor

    Throughout the Bible, there are lots of commands to love people. Why? 

    Obviously because it’s important. But it’s also interesting that the command keeps coming up. 

    The fact that it has to be told to us over and over again points to the fact that it’s actually hard for us to do. The Bible doesn’t call us to do things are super simple and which come naturally to us. 

    There’s no command to love chocolate in the Bible. 

    Loving people is hard. And part of why it’s hard is because we don’t think it’s hard. 

    It goes back to how we use the language of the things we love. If we will throw around the word “love” for things we don’t actually even love, then we believe in an idea of love that’s pretty easy. 

    The Greek language actually had four words for four different types of love. I’m not going to get into all of those this morning, but even to know that fact is interesting. That there are different ideas of love, different types of love. 

    And we probably all understand that but we only have one word for love. We don’t think it’s hard to love people because we think love is easy. 

    Real love is hard. 

    Sometimes when we say “love,” what we really mean is tolerance. Let and let live is not love. That’s easy. Anyone can do that. 

    We do love our families. That’s usually pretty easy, at least for most of them. They’re our family. But we’re called to love everyone. 

    Now, that’s easy to do in that aggregate. It’s easy to love humanity as a human race and want what’s best for it. And that’s fine. But that’s also pretty easy because that’s so big and broad that we can also still get away without having that really needing to impact how we live. 

    But what about loving the people who are hard to love. 

    Jesus and love

    We see that from Jesus throughout his ministry. 

    We see him associating with those his society most despised. We see him visit lepers, people who were viewed as inherently unclean and who were outcasts in their society. We see him show grace to a woman who was a prostitute. 

    One of his disciples was a tax collector. Tax collectors were hated in their society. For the Jewish people, they were looked at as being traitors to their people. Taking money from Israelites to give to Rome. We see Jesus show grace to those who hated him, personally. Pharisees who plotted against him, guards who beat him, officials who crucified him. 

    Jesus loved the groups who were hard to love. 

    Every society has its groups it looks down upon. We see how Jesus showed love. Who are the groups with whom our society struggles? 

    Criminals. People who struggle with addiction. 

    People who have hurt us. And that can be hard. There’s incredible damage people can inflict. Forgiveness can be hard. Let alone saying that we love that person. 

    People who have different political views than us. The division right now in this country is incredible. Some of us can really struggle with not being judgemental on those who have some different political views. 

    You still have to love them. 

    How do we love people? It begins not with the people, but with the God we serve. Loving others is, and especially loving those who are hard to love is a reflection of our love for God. 

    We are to love others because we have a savior who loves us when we were unlovable. 

    Knowing the love God has for us. Knowing the need others have for grace and the gospel. Knowing that every person we meet is created in the image of God and is worthy of value and dignity. 

    How do we love people? 

    By praying for a person, by sharing the good news of Jesus with someone, by showing kindness to someone, by serving someone. By stepping into a person’s life. 

    Jesus stepped into our world to show love for our world. 

    Jesus went out and found the people who were hard to love. We actually can have pretty good control of our surroundings to avoid people we don’t want to be around. And I’m not saying that we all need to make a checklist of every difficult group. But let me ask you this: when is the last time you’ve had to regularly interact with someone who challenged you? When was the last time you’ve been around someone where you’ve had to turn to God and ask you for strength to love that person? 

    For some of us, maybe it’s been recent. 

    And I’m not even saying that you need to go out today and go out of your way to find the most difficult person you possibly can. But I think we do need to have some humility that love is actually hard. The love that God calls us to is hard. But Jesus didn’t shy away from us, he didn’t walk away from our world, he entered into it. He loved us when we were unlovable. 

    We can’t do it perfectly. But we have a savior who loves us perfectly. 

    And the more we understand God’s grace, and the more we grow in our love for God, the more that is meant to impact our love for those around us. 

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  • The gospel in Les Miserables

    Caught.

    Jean Valjean had stolen silver from the Bishop and the local authorities had caught him red handed. On his own merits, there was nothing Valjean could do to rectify the situation. He didn’t have the money to pay for it. He was guilty. But then something amazing happened. The Bishop tells the officers that the silver was a gift. He reminds Valjean that the ex-convict had even forgotten to take two silver candlesticks with him. The sacrifice for Valjean was not made by himself but by the Bishop .

    He let him go.

    Once the officers leave, it would be completely reasonable for the Bishop to say, “Ok, I got you off the hook. Now give me my stuff back.” But he doesn’t. He gives it to Valjean but with the expectation that he use those stolen items to restart his life as an honest man.

    This is a life changing event for Valjean. And it’s a great metaphor for grace. Merely canceling the debt of the condemned man would have been mercy. But the bishop rewards him. That is grace.

    In the book, over 70 pages are spent developing the Bishop’s character and describing his devotion and piety. In film and musical adaptations, he is always portrayed as a minor character but he profoundly impacts the life of the book’s protagonist. For Valjean, there is his life before encountgering the and everything changes after he experiences true love and grace. In the musical, with limited time, I feel that they do the best job they can to show the Bishop’s grace but it is tough to truly capture the full weight of the transformation that the encounter has on Valjean.

    There are so many great themes in Les Miserables which have led to the popularity of this story over the past 150 years. And the Bishop’s grace to Valjean is not the only example of sacrificial love we see in this story. It’s seen in how Fantine desperately tries to do everything she can to support Cosette. It’s seen in how Eponine helps Marius find Cosette despite the fact that Eponine is in love with Marius and she’s sacrificing her own joy (it’s not exactly the same in the book).

    But the most moving example of sacrifice is seen in the Bishop. I feel that part of the appeal to this story is the way in which it depicts the gospel. Because we are all condemned with a debt that we cannot possibly pay. While we deserve exile and punishment, a priest has personally sacrificed and taken are debt for us. And for people who know this truth, just as it is with the Bishop and Valjean, this grace is meant to transform our lives. It’s not the end in itself. There is a reason behind it.

    But remember this, my brother, see in this some higher plan. You must use this precious silver to become an honest man. By the witness of the martyrs, by the Passion and the Blood, God has raised you out of darkness; I have bought your soul for God!

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    Originally published December 24, 2014.

  • Evangelism Training Podcast #5 Dr. David Gustafson

    Evangelism Training Podcast #5 Dr. David Gustafson

    In this episode, we talk to Dr. David Gustafson on his newest book “Gospel witness through the ages” and discuss the history of evangelism. Each generation has its own challenges of making Jesus known to the world. But as we study the history of evangelism, we see that the challenges of one generation or culture have also been the same challenges which other believers have faced in other times and places.