Eden Teachings Podcast

In the final week of his life, Jesus enters Jerusalem to pronounce judgement on the Jewish leaders who were supposed to shepherd God's people.  Instead, they were extorting the poor, making a mockery of the temple, and making it impossible for Jews (and Gentiles) to know the One true God.    Jesus came as the true Shepherd; one who does not exclude the marginalized or outsiders from the presen...

At Eden, we believe that how we live together matters as much as our beliefs and convictions . And so, we are shaped by an ancient practice, used by communities of Jesus followers for nearly 2000 years, called a Rule of Life . The meaning of Rule comes from the Greek word for trellis; a tool designed to enable a grapevine to get off the ground and grow upward, to become more fruitful and productiv...

There’s an ancient proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.”You can’t follow Jesus alone. Not you shouldn’t; you can’t. The way God does this work of healing is through healthy relationships, through familial love. Why? We are both hurt at the deepest level by relationships, and we are healed at the deepest level by relationships. Teacher: Caleb...

Jesus of Nazareth once said, “In this world, you will face trouble.” (John 16v33). Suffering comes to find all of us — the loss of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, the breakdown of a relationship …   And over time, emotional pain accumulates in our soul. We carry our history in our body and live our past in our present; and all too often, our unhealed emotional pain sabotages our spiritual formati...

We take a look at what Jesus said is wrong with the world: sin. Now, “sin” is an emotionally loaded word for a lot of people.  You may hear it and instantly feel a kind of inner allergic reaction.  But sin is just the word Jesus used to name a reality that all the brightest minds agree on – ancient, modern, spiritual, scientific, Western, Eastern – pretty much everyone agrees that something is off...

For those of us who desire to be formed to be like Jesus, we don’t start with a blank slate! We’ve already been deformed. Not into the beauty of Jesus but into the ugliness of sin and shame. Therefore, to some degree, all formation in the Way of Jesus is  counter-formation .    To be formed to be like Jesus will require an intentional, thoughtful, conscious way of life to counteract the many force...

Who are you following? Everybody is following somebody. Or something. Put another way, everyone is a disciple. The question isn’t, “Are you a disciple?” It’s, “Who or what are you a disciple of?” We explore in this session what Jesus had in mind for discipleship (or apprenticeship), along with looking at the forces that work on the human soul that "conform [us] to the pattern of this world&qu...

This passage is not about wealth, though Jesus had a lot to say about money; this is a story about your  heart .   What is it that is keeping you from fully taking on the yoke of Jesus and experiencing life to the fullest as he put it?  For this man, it was his money.  For us, it could be all sorts of things.   What is the  thing ?  From Ben Witherington:  Mark is making clear that the demands of...

Typically, the "Triumphal Entry" (i .e. Palm Sunday) is depicted as a happy scene.  The gospel writers would say otherwise.  As Jesus approaches Jerusalem, he weeps.  He weeps because he knows that while the people hail him as king, they want a violent overthrower, not what Jesus was offering.  They wanted a god of their own making, not God himself. They wanted the benefits of the Kingdo...

In this passage, we see a debate between Jesus and the Pharisees on the topic of  divorce .  Typically, this passage becomes an air-tight theology on divorce, but this is not the aim of this passage.  Instead, He uses the conversation about legal divorce in the 1st century to expose and rebuke the Pharisees for exploiting and demeaning women.    Jesus is  not  giving a full discourse on divorce. ...

Mark 9.42-50 is arguably one of Jesus' tougher teachings. Where generally this passage has become a doctrine about hell,  Jesus is after something more pressing for the present.   The way we live now matters .  We have real power in the words we say and actions we do to push people away from Jesus, or to bring them to him.  Hell is  not just  a future reality, but a  present  one too.  With ou...

The kingdom of Jesus is an "Upside-Down Kingdom". Meaning, His kingdom does not look like the kingdoms of the world. Power is not through taking, but giving. Not by wealth, status, or influence, but through becoming a servant. Jesus refuses to play into the structures of power and influence of His day... and He still won't. Real status in His Kingdom comes by being a servant of all....

The Great Commission is spiritual warfare." - Michael Heiser. In this famous, and regularly misapplied, story of the transfiguration, we see Jesus declaring turf war against the gods of darkness. And when we follow Jesus, we are called to bring that same light into dark places. But in order to do that, we must let the light break into the dark places in us .  Teaching Slides Teacher: Caleb Sp...

In Movement 02 of Mark's biography, we see the disciples wrestling with what it means for Jesus to be king. In this story, Jesus challenges their (and our) understanding of king, and gives his famous call to what it means to be his apprentice: "deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me". Teachings Slides Teacher: Caleb Sprinkle Text: Mark 8.22-38

Listen along for tips and suggestions on how to implement the prayer practice into your rule of life. Slides

In the middle of a prayer about heaven invading earth, and cosmic war against evil, Jesus tells us to ask God to give us our daily lunch. To pray to BIG prayers, but to make sure we pray the small ones too. Because both matter to God. Charles Spurgeon once said "asking is the rule of the Kingdom". So why do so many of us struggle to ask God for things? Does God really care about our actu...

As a general rule, you can gauge the intimacy in a relationship by how comfortable you are being alone together in the silence. Early on, relationships are full of words and activity. As you grow closer over time, there are still words and activity, but you also come to deeply enjoy just being with each other. While we never mature beyond any of the four stages of prayer we are exploring in this P...

Do our prayers really matter to God? Isn't He just going do whatever He wants regardless of whether I pray? Or do our prayers somehow bend the arc of human history towards the Kingdom of God? Teaching slides Teacher: Caleb Sprinkle Text(s): Matthew 6.9-10; John 16.23-24

There comes a point in our relationship to God where we desire not just to speak to him, but to listen. To hear his voice. As Jesus said in John 10v27, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” This is a Spirit- generated desire in the heart of a disciple of Jesus. Learning to sift through all the “voices” in our head and to discern how God is speaking to us is a key task of...

Eden Church and Uncommon City in St. Pete, Florida are partnering together for the Prayer Practice. Week by week. Question by question. Meiko and Simone Seymour from Uncommon City, and Caleb Sprinkle and Brittni Ratliff from Eden Church sit down to reflect the first four weeks of the Prayer Practice, how they sense it is integrating into the life of their communities, and talk about what didn'...

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”    James 5.16 If we are honest, confession is usually seen as a  drag .  It’s the slow song at the dance that usually people skip to go refresh their drinks until the good stuff starts back again.  But if it’s the abundant life in Jesus y...

In this teaching, we explore the second movement of prayer: talking with God . Praying pre-made prayers is a beautiful way to pray. It’s where we start our prayer journey, and it’s a place we revisit all through our lives. But at some point in our life of prayer, we desire to pray our own words to God — to share what’s on our mind, our heart. Our pain, our joy, our hopes and fears. We can’t help b...

Our earthly  humanness  is defined by yearning, longing, and desire .   You have been hard wired to adore.  Just look at what presently may have your mind, heart, affections.  But oftentimes, it may feel difficult to adore God this way. What would change if you realized that God first  adored you? And that his baseline disposition towards you is one of  compassion. Teaching Slides Taught by Brittn...

In this session, we explore the first stage of prayer: talking to God. When the disciples asked Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” in Luke 11, Jesus replied, “This, then, is how you should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name...’” He gave them a pre-made prayer, or what some call a liturgy, to pray to God. Teaching Slides Taught by Caleb Sprinkle Text: Luke 11.1-4

Mark writes about the feeding of the 5000... and the 4000? Was this a mistake, or is Mark purposely writing two similar but different feeding narratives to make a point about who Jesus really is? Taught by Caleb Sprinkle Text (s): Mark 6.30-44 & 8.1-21