Calvary Pentecostal's podcast

The Lord’s Prayer is quite a workout. You’re asking for a lot of things: daily bread, deliver us from evil. But at the end, you rest in God.  The last phrase in the Lord’s Prayer is, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever, amen.” Is that just a rhetorical flourish? After all, it doesn’t seem to be a prayer. But ancient commentators have said this is a prayer of repo...

We don’t see that envy is as terrible as it really is. Envy is wanting somebody else’s life. Do you know what that does? It sucks the joy out of the life you actually have.  In Psalm 73, the psalmist is living as good a life as he can, and everything is going wrong. And on top of that, he sees a lot of other people who are corrupt and they’re having a great life. What is the solution? A particular...

What if I told you there was a process and no matter how much you blew up your life, if you used this process, there would be a way to come out the other side whole? Well, here it is. It’s what the Bible calls repentance. You say, “You mean just saying I’m sorry?” But that reveals you don’t understand the power of this kind of prayer. This kind of prayer, if you do it in an ongoing way, will final...

We need every bit of help we can get to learn to pray, “Thy will be done,” because we’re going right into the teeth of our culture.  The essence of American culture is the belief that the more free we are to decide for ourselves, the happier we’ll be. But Jesus Christ says every time you pray to God, you need to say to him, “Thy will be done.” That goes right against probably everything you’ve bee...

What does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come”?  Jesus gave us his instruction on how to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s filled with concepts you need to know from the rest of the Bible. There are two places—Matthew 5 and Luke 6—where Jesus tells us a lot about the kingdom of God and the blessedness of the kingdom. I want to show you 1) what the kingdom of God is, 2) what it’s not, 3) what it’s...

Hallowed is an old English word that means to treat something as sacred. It means to be captivated, astonished, melted with grateful joy for who God is and what he has done.  For many years, I felt I didn’t know how to praise God, because nobody ever gave me specifics. As we look now at one phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, “Hallowed be thy name,” we’ll look at five aspects that are all needed if we’re...

What does it mean to pray, “Our Father”? It’s much more complicated than you think.  Everything Jesus Christ came to do—the reason he came, the purpose of his salvation—was that we might receive adoption. We can pray “Our Father” because we’ve been adopted into the family of God.  Let’s look briefly at 1) the gift of adoption, 2) what it means to be adopted, 3) the reason we can be adopted, and 4)...

If you’re going to deal with the brutal realities of life, the writer of Hebrews says you have to have shepherds in your life. Hebrews is written to people whose lives are filled with problems. And here, in the last passage of Hebrews, the writer tells us if we’re gonna make it, we have to have shepherding in our lives.  The text tells us 1) our insulting need for shepherds, 2) the surprising iden...

When you embrace God by faith two things come into your life: a transforming power and a deep tension. It’s a duality. If you try to resolve the deep tension, you lose the transforming power.  The writer of Hebrews says the great believers in history were resident aliens on earth. In Greco-Roman society, a resident alien was a permanent resident but not a citizen. That is the tension that anyone w...

This passage in Hebrews seems like an anti-climax. Throughout the book, the writer gives us something to help us face the brutal realities of life. But then, Hebrews 13 seems different. At first it looks like a to-do list, like miscellaneous ethical prescriptions, but that’s wrong.  This is not an anti-climax. What we’re being told is that we’ll never make it in life without being deeply embedded...

Hebrews was written to people who have been shaken by life. Difficulties and sufferings have shaken them to the core.  The writer is trying to help them find ways to face the brutal realities of life, to stand solid when everything around them is falling apart. In Hebrews 12, we have the climax. The writer pulls together all of the threads and says, “In an unstable world, here is how you can live...

There’s never been a culture with a lower pain threshold than ours. There’s never been a culture that gave us fewer resources for dealing with the brutal realities of life and death than ours.  The writer of Hebrews wants his readers to understand how to become the kind of people who can cope with the brutal realities of life. To a great degree, the climax of his argument is here in Hebrews 12. We...

Hebrews is written to help us have what it takes to face the difficulties of life. And in chapter 11, we’re told one of the keys is to be people of faith. But what is faith? In our cultural moment, conservatives see faith as a moral virtue, while liberals see skepticism as a mark of intellectual maturity. As usual, the Bible’s understanding of faith is much more nuanced, much more sophisticated an...

The book of Hebrews is written to people who are so beaten down with troubles that they’re ready to give up.  The writer is trying to give the readers what they need to handle the brutal realities of life in this world. In Hebrews 11, he gives us something that helps us handle anything.  If you have it, you can handle absolutely anything life throws at you: 1) what is it? and 2) how do we get it?...

When modern people hear that God requires blood to turn aside his wrath from sin, it sounds offensive. It sounds disgusting, primitive, obscene.  Christianity has sometimes been called the religion of the slaughterhouse. It doesn’t seem to be what we need in a world that’s filled with blood and violence. But Jesus saves through his blood. And the book of Hebrews says there’s power in the blood.  W...

Jesus Christ did not come to start a new religion. He didn’t come to start the best religion. He came to end religion. Every religion has its extremists. Religion causes an enormous amount of conflict and strife in this world. What are we going to do about it? To embrace Jesus Christ is to end religion, is to move away from all religion.  There are two things Hebrews 8 tells us: 1) Jesus came to e...

To be able to handle life, there’s nothing more practical than to know that Jesus is your advocate. This isn’t just an abstract doctrinal issue. Because this whole book of Hebrews is written not as a theological treatise, but as a piece of intense pastoral counseling.  So let’s ask three questions: 1) why do we need an advocate? 2) how is Jesus Christ the advocate we need? and 3) what difference w...

The book of Hebrews is telling us we’ll never make it through life without counseling—daily counseling. A main theme of Hebrews is that life in this world is a journey, spiritually speaking, through a wilderness. In verse 13, it says the only way we’re going to get through it is with this little word: the Greek word, parakaleō. It’s often translated as encouragement, but it comes closest to what w...

Hebrews is written to first-century, urban people who are so weary with troubles and difficulties that they’re in danger of giving up. What do they need?  It’s pretty obvious from this passage what the writer is trying to get across: because eight times in eleven verses we see the word “rest.” It’s not just a crucial message for them, but for us too. We live in a culture that’s probably more in ne...

The book of Hebrews is written to a group of urban, first-century Christians who were struggling with fear and discouragement because their lives were so filled with troubles.  The question this book asks is if God loves us so much, why are our lives so hard? In almost every passage, the answer it gives is that fear and discouragement can be dealt with by looking at Jesus.  Hebrews 2 says if you r...

If God is so committed to our joy and our glory, if he loves us so much, why is our life so hard?  That’s what the book of Hebrews is about and the answer, in a nutshell, is life is a journey. It’s a journey from weariness into rest. It’s a journey from alienation into the presence of God. It’s a journey from isolation into the city of God. And the only way you’re going to get home is by fixing yo...

Psalm 126 has always helped me. It has never filled my soul with glory. It has always made me quiet and reflective. Because it’s a perfect overview of the emotional life that the life of faith brings. You’re going to weep. In this world, you will weep. But how are you weeping? What are you doing with your sorrows? They need to be sown. They need to be invested. They need to be planted, in a sense,...

Jesus tells his disciples that no one will take away their joy. Now that’s pretty amazing. He knows to whom he is talking. He is speaking to men who are going to be persecuted. They’re going to be robbed of everything they own. They’re going to be tortured. They’re going to be put to death. The Bible says there is a joy that is not subject to circumstances, that the deepest troubles can’t put out,...

Jesus was about to come into Joseph’s life, and Joseph thought he was doing the right thing to arrange things so it wouldn’t happen. Joseph was going to dismiss Mary quietly. But the angel comes to Joseph and says, “Your problem is you’re a coward. Do not be afraid.” This passage shows us that you can’t be a Christian unless you have courage. Or put another way, to let Jesus into your life, to rec...

The meaning of Christmas is that God got flesh and blood. In Jesus Christ the holy and transcendent God became really and fully and truly human. He shared in our humanity. I submit to you that the traditional, moralistic religion has completely forgotten this whole idea. In fact, I submit to you that if you and I really undertstood the fact that Jesus Christ shares in our humanity, we’d live diffe...