Eden Teachings Podcast

In Chapter 2, Paul spends the majority of his time communicating how their understanding of what it means to be human is insufficient, and it can only come through understanding the story of Jesus and the work of the Spirit. It's a bold claim, because Paul is saying they (and we) do not understand why we are here and where all of history is heading apart from the Scriptures and the Spirit. Because...

In Chapter 1, Paul's main concern is Corinth's understanding of wisdom. What is it? Where does it come from? How does one get it? Does everyone get it? The dominating understanding in their day was wisdom comes from within. That we can be our ultimate authority, and there is no higher calling than to pursue wisdom, be a good person, and die. Sound familiar? This is the ethos of our culture...

Yesterday we started our journey into 1 Corinthians, situating the text into its moment in time. To understand letters, like 1 Corinthians, we first have to understand something right off the bat.  Each letter in the NT is written to a specific group of people, with a specific set of circumstances, questions, problems, pain points, etc.  A moment none of us are familiar with.  In a language none o...

We would have to ignore large portions of Scripture to avoid God’s concern for the poor and his desire for his people to care for them. In the first century, the poor or “the needy” would have included widows, orphans, or those in prison. Today, this could be children in the foster care system, a single parent, the sick, the elderly on a fixed income, or refugees. While our societal order often ov...

Jesus lived a remarkably interruptible life. More than 30 stories in the Gospel of Mark alone hinge on Jesus’ ability to see an interruption as an invitation. And these are just the stories that were recorded from his life. We can never know just how many people received Jesus’ loving attention and service in these unplanned moments. This way of being in the world is about more than our personalit...

Where does your imagination go when you consider where you can serve? Perhaps it leads you to your local church, the care home nearby, or the low- income neighborhood in your city. For some of us, these very well could be the places Jesus is leading us to give more of ourselves — more on that in the sessions to come. But if we consider Jesus’ life, and specifically the environments where he chose...

Service has always been a defining characteristic of those who apprentice under Jesus. In the first century, this obscure group, who called themselves “followers of the Way,” took their Rabbi Jesus’ teachings and example seriously. They called the marginalized “brother” and “sister,” cared for the sick at the cost of their own health and reputation, and willingly lived with less so that the needs...

Among the words the New Testament writers used to describe followers of Jesus, perhaps none hit quite so close to home as the Apostle Peter’s description: “foreigners and exiles.”Walk the streets of most cities in the post-Christian West as a follower of Jesus, and you’re likely to feel the force of those words — this sense that you don’t quite “belong” in the surrounding culture; you’re a kind of...

To be effective witnesses in the world, we have to be pained by the things that pains God. In fact, we cannot offer the gospel of hope to people whose grief we cannot acknowledge. But in our culture, we tend to treat grief like a disease that might infect us if we let it get too close. But this is not the way of Jesus. Jesus was a man well acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53). He was not indifferent...

The invitation to witness to the good news of Jesus can give rise to many different emotions — excitement and expectation, but also anxiety and, at times, overwhelm. Often, that particular feeling of overwhelm can come from feeling like: “It is my job to bring God to people.”Now, if that were true, we would have good reason to feel overwhelmed. But what if the practice of witness isn’t about bring...

Yesterday, we took a look at three things that keep us from loving our neighbor and expanding our circles:  01   Embracing Discomfort 02   Inattentional Blindness 03   Implicit Bias  To love others well requires looking inward and becoming aware of prejudices present in our hearts— becoming aware of the things keeping us from love. Teacher: Caleb Sprinkle Text: James 2.1-9

While our witness should take many shapes and forms, in a post-Christian culture that is often apathetic to the Gospel, confused about the gospel, or at worst hostile to it, our method for joining Jesus in his mission to “seek and save the lost” must become more about compassionate presence. How can we bear witness to Jesus in a time like this? In a very ordinary setting — one shared meal at a tim...

Who is your neighbor?   We have to start here if witness + service, or justice and evangelism, is going to make sense.  We’ve got to define and redefine neighbor.  For Jesus, it appears it’s any image bearer.  Any other human.  And to be a good neighbor means making other people's problems and concerns  your own .  It's to do right by others through embodying the love, understanding, curio...

Many of us may admittedly experience a certain allergic response to the idea of “evangelism.” It brings up images of uncompassionate preaching on street corners, unsolicited conversations, or perhaps more painfully, well-meaning invitations and interactions that are met with hostility. But what if our witness to the person of Jesus could be more ordinary and less forced than what we may initially...

The church bears witness through practicing justice and righteousness. We bear witness to the Kingdom in what we say and how we live. Meaning, not only is it unkind to preach the gospel without demonstrating the gospel (justice and righteousness), but biblically speaking, you actually are not witnessing if you neglect practicing justice and righteousness. What if we shared and lived the gospel in...

Robert Mullholland defines spiritual formation this way: "Spiritual formation is becoming like Jesus for the sake of others”. Spiritual maturity is not measured by how much we know, but how we love others. The invitation into a life of apprenticeship to Jesus is to come and die. An invitation to be with him, become like him, and do as He did. What did he do? He preached and demonstrated the gospel...

In Jonah 4, God’s call to Jonah was a kind of love towards people that don’t deserve it.  One that would cost Jonah something: releasing bitterness and contempt in his heart towards Nineveh. It was a call to love his enemies. The book ends with a question: should I not care for them? Jonah doesn't answer, so the question is for us. Can we love our enemies? Teacher: Caleb Sprinkle Text: Jonah 4

In Jonah 3, we see that Jonah does the bare minimum of what God asked him to do, doesn't even mention God in his gospel presentation, goes in reluctantly and angry, and the entire city repents. What is going on here? Remember, Jonah is satirical. This passage shows 1) How little the mission of God depends on us, but it does still seem to depend on us…? and 2) God is not static. He responds to...

In Jonah 2, we wrestled with the reality that Jonah may have been just paying lip service; not really repentant of his tribalism and racism and disobedience. And while the author is not clear, in the context of the entire book, it would seem Jonah is simply regurgitating (no pun intended) Scripture. Especially when you juxtapose his story with Jesus' similar storm stories in the gospels. It se...

Jonah 1 is a sobering passage because he is depicted as a human who is fully bought into the serpents lie — you don’t need God.  In fact, you’re better off without him.  You can have the life you want without God. Jonah has lost the plot.  He has heard the screams of Nineveh, and chooses to run the other way.  Instead of partnering with God to put the world to rights, he descends further and furth...

Jonah has long been misunderstood as the focus is put more on Jonah being swallowed by a great fish. Because of this, a fight has broken out within the church over 1) did this actually happen, 2) if you don’t believe it happened as it is laid out, then you don’t believe in the authority of the Bible. This is the wrong starting place. If we focus on the things the author chooses not to focus on, th...

In contemporary Western Christian culture, most people engage the Bible by themselves. Typically referred to as “quiet time,” there is richness and beauty to be gained from a time of personal reflection on the Scriptures. However, that method has not been the norm throughout most of Church history. For the majority of Church history, people heard the Scriptures read aloud in a group or saw Bibles...

The Bible is not a book; it’s a library. And it was written thousands of years ago, in three different languages, by dozens of different authors and in multiple genres of literature. As you would expect, it can be very hard to understand at times, and we can easily get lost or turned around as we work through it. But by reading the teachings of Jesus, it becomes clear that if we misunderstand Scri...

In the Bible, the word for " Remember ” is used 352 times in the scriptures. When its variants are counted, that number jumps to more than 550. In John 16, Jesus promised his apprentices that the Holy Spirit would remind them of his words. But to do that, we have to have Jesus’ words in our memories! God’s part is to bring the right Scripture to our minds at the right time, but our part is to...

In our current day and age, we read things quickly, scanning and scrolling, and mainly for information. But the Scriptures were not designed for fast reads and immediate understanding. They were meant to be meditated on. Scripture assumes you will come back to it over and over; it does not give up its secrets that easily. The goal is not information, but formation. To become the kind of person who...