Eden Teachings Podcast

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...

Historically, there are four practices the church has done that we believe are essential to life with God in the Scriptures: 01 Reading through the entire Library of Scripture 02 Meditating on the Scriptures (Lectio Divina) 03 Studying the Scriptures 04 Putting the Scriptures to Memory We believe you should aim to find a healthy diet of all four practices over the course of your life and apprentic...

The Biblical authors actually believed that wisdom (or HOKMAH) and knowledge of what is actually true and going on in reality can be found in a person.  That God himself is the access point for all reality, and salvation is that awakening to reality.  By living under the authority of the Bible, we are living under the authority of God himself.  In not doing so, we therefore live in conflict with r...

Everything in our culture screams quick, fast, efficient. But the Bible is the opposite. It’s designed for the reader to go slow, with ongoing consideration for a lifetime. It's designed to be meditated on. We delight in what we meditate on, and vice versa, we meditate on what delights us. In the process, we become like the things on which we give our attention to. And so Bible's ideal rea...

Human beings are wired for story. We are narrative animals. We can’t help but ask the questions who are we? What does it mean to be human? We cannot function without some story to make sense of reality. So the question is not are we religious or have a story. The question is what story do we live by? And how do we know we are living by the right story? This is where the Bible comes in. The Bible t...

This past Sunday, we started a new teaching series on Scripture, exploring what it is, and what it is not. Scripture is NOT:- A systematic theology, or theological reference book- A moral handbook- A "devotional grab-bag"We see a lot of problems surface when we approach the Scriptures in these three ways. So for us, we believe the Bible (or Scripture) is a library of writings both divine...

In the West, many people have deconstructed from their "Christian upbringing" because they are seeing a wide gap in what Christians "believe" and how they actually act. The root cause for this gap is how the gospel is being preached today. The gospel has been ripped away from the story the Scriptures are telling, and reduced to a simple formula to get people out of hell. This i...

Many have chosen to focus on the gore of the crucifixion. But when we read this scene, this isn’t what the gospel writers choose to focus on. Certainly, it’s sobering what was done to Jesus. But the focus was not blood and guts, but his enthronement. The focus is how God became king. At the center of allegiance and apprenticeship for Jesus is a cross, a Roman torture device meant to cause excrucia...

In this passage, Jesus is arrested and put on trial. There's much that could be said in this narrative, but specifically what's striking is the way Mark contrasts how Jesus handles suffering verses how the disciples did.  For Jesus, suffering led to honest prayer and ultimately trust.  For the disciples, it led to betrayal and fleeing.   When suffering comes, where will you turn?  Will you...

This past Sunday, we looked at the Last Supper.  It was in the final meal with his disciples that Jesus gave us one of His greatest gifts to the church:  Communion .  It was here that Jesus modeled life around a table, with Him at the center.  And every time we participate in this meal, we share in His life, and recommit to Him and to each other.    And while this was done in the context of a meal...

This past Sunday, we looked at the entirety of Mark 13.  Many have taken this passage to be a proof text for the end times, as if Jesus was laying out a scene by scene movie of what will happen.  This interpretation, though relatively new in the scope of church history (i.e. the 19th century), has become the dominating view of modern Evangelicalism.   And unfortunately, it's created a lot of f...

In Mark 12, Jesus is being interrogated from the leaders of his day as they are trying to trap him in his words and either start a revolution against Rome, or side with the oppressor.  Jesus does neither, and instead challenges them on where their allegiance actually lies.  It's a scathing discourse, one that challenges us in our own allegiances.  Jesus says the leaders have misunderstood the...