More Than Bread

Send me a Text Message! What are you filled with?  What fills your life, right now?  We can be filled with a lot of stuff, good and bad. What are you filled with today? In John 14-17, Jesus begins to talk about the Spirit of God. If you remember back in John 7, he talked about the Spirit of God so filling us up that rivers of living water flow out of our souls! It's an uncommon call to be fil...

Send me a Text Message! John 14-16 is an amazing piece of scripture. Jesus is sharing his last thoughts before he dies on a cross, and changes the story of the world. It's his locker-room talk before his team goes out to play the most important game of their lives. And he is talking to them about life, about what they need to thrive in the hard times to come. In the space of a few minutes, he...

Send me a Text Message! As you know I’m kind of stuck in John 14-17. Which isn’t a bad thing at all, if you took my advice and have been reading those four chapters every day, maybe even multiple times a day. So in the last episode, I ended with this thought. I didn’t develop it much, but I threw it out there at the end, the thought was simply this, "If hope is contagious, love is how it spre...

Send me a Text Message! Remember in a recent episode, talking about prayer, I said that while helplessness is a great initiator of prayer, helplessness is not enough. We need hopefulness to sustain prayer. But when our helplessness meets His hopefulness, something pretty amazing can happen. So I want to talk a bit again about that hopefulness. And here is the statement that I'm going to make....

Send me a Text Message! What is peace? In our culture today, we typically define peace in terms of absence. It's the absence of noise, the absence of storms, the absence of conflict and anxiety. But when Jesus spoke of peace, he used the Hebrew word, shalom. Shalom is fullness and wholeness, not absence. Shalom is well-being in the widest sense of the word. It's the blessing of God which...

Send me a Text Message! Expectancy is a tenacious hope that never stops believing that the best is yet to come. In this episode we will hear Jesus tie together expectancy, child-birth, and travailing prayer. Travailing prayer is the painful work of giving birth to something new. The Bible seems to speak little of casual prayer. It's pages are filled with examples of people who wrestled with G...

Send me a Text Message! It would probably be a good thing for you to read on your own all of John 14-17 multiple times as you listen to the next 5-6 episodes. These four chapters are Jesus last words before he gives his life for a world in trouble. So imagine this, you're with Jesus, sitting by a fire in a cabin, or talking a walk in the afternoon. You're walking through a vineyard and y...

Send me a Text Message! In our culture today, Christians are known by and known for a handful of things, to be honest to many of those things are not good things. We are known for our politics. We are known for our moral stands on issues that matter to us. But are we known for the way we love each other?  What are we known for?

Send me a Text Message! It was just before the Passover Feast.  Jesus knew that the time had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father.  He knew that all power had been given to Him, so he decided to show his disciples the full extent of his love, show them that he loved them to the very end.  Just stop for a moment and think about that. He is about to show his followers, the full exte...

Send me a Text Message! We've been settling for the false finish lines of comfort and control. We've been settling for false finish lines of politics and the economy. I have no faith in politics to bring us glory. That's not our finish line. In fact, filling up church buildings on a Sunday morning is a false finish line.  But I have found over and over again, that it’s difficult, if...

Send me a Text Message! John 12 is all about love-bursts. Mary had a love-burst, heart full for Jesus. We introduced that in the last episode. She left the table,...and got a small bottle out of her basket. It was full of a very valuable fragrant oil, worth a year's wages. What would that be for you? Put your number on it. Imagine pouring that out. She walks over to Jesus and uncorks the bott...

Send me a Text Message! John 12 starts on the Saturday before Palm Sunday. Jesus is at Lazarus' house. Yep same Lazarus that was recently dead, now living life large. Jesus is there and I'm telling you everyone wants to see Jesus, everyone wants to be on team Jesus. The crowds are going hard after Jesus. The next day is Palm Sunday, the processional of King Jesus into Jerusalem. The crow...

Send me a Text Message! In John 11, we get a whole new picture of Jesus. We see Jesus, standing near the tomb of his friend, pain and grief cascading over him.  It's not simply the death of his friend that he rails against, it is the hand behind death. It is the power behind evil, this death symbolizes the accumulation of all that is wrong in the world.  Evil, pain, sorrow and suffering, hope...

Send me a Text Message! Isn’t there something in each of us that wants to believe that our stories matter? Sometimes we call that hope. We want to believe that we are living a good story, or perhaps even better yet, we want to believe that we are part of a good story. Yet, there are chapters where it seems like we are stuck in a bad news story. Right? In our culture today, we talk more than a bit...

Send me a Text Message! In this series, “The Jesus Way" we are Listening to, learning from and leaning into the gospel of John; to get a better picture of what it looks like to be a Jesus-apprentice. And in this episode, we are finishing John chapter 10. But like the last episode, I’m going to start in John 10 but then wander a bit, all the way back to the Psalm 23. Why Psalm 23? Because ther...

Send me a Text Message! The first problem we have in discovering our identity is that we simply don't know his voice. As my friend Terry says, "We need to develop voice recognition, because we don't recognize his voice." The problem is that we've let so many other voices into our souls.  We let the voices that shout lies into our hearts and miss the voice that whispers tru...

Send me a Text Message! John of Kronstadt was a 19th-century Russian Orthodox priest at a time when  alcohol abuse was rampant. None of the priests ventured out of their churches to help the people. But John, compelled by love, went out into the streets. People said he would lift the hungover, foul-smelling people from the gutter, cradle them in his arms, and say to them, "This is beneath you...

Send me a Text Message! At the end of the last episode, I said that our vision is shaped by the stories we hear and even more so, that stories we rehearse. Remember I asked, "What stories do you tell and what stories do you hear?" In this episode, I will share four stories that shape our sight. These four stories are not just run of the mill common narratives. These are four stories abou...

Send me a Text Message! If we want to live our one and only life in an uncommon way, we must gain uncommon sight. We need to be able to see what is truly real. We need spiritual sight. So ask yourself the question, "Where am I missing the uncommon sights that lead to an uncommon life because I'm living life blind? Nobody had, nobody has better vision than Jesus. When he looked at people,...

Send me a Text Message! In our teaching series at Calvary, we've been making our way through four  different portraits or roles of a Jesus-Apprentice. The first portrait was Beloved Masterpiece. You are what God does. You are deeply loved and shaped by God to be like Jesus, and He's preparing you to do good stuff, make a difference. Secondly we are called to be courageous leaders. Courag...

Send me a Text Message! For the last few days, about 70 participants and 30+ coaches, speakers, and leaders have been advancing their leadership, uncovering their calling, while discovering who God is shaping them to be. One of key verses has been Ephesians 2:10, "For we are God's masterpiece created in Christ to do the good works that he has prepared in advance for us to do." Now I...

Send me a Text Message! In this episode we will hear Jesus say, "If you abide in my word, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free."  If you dwell in, and get connected to my word; if you let your soul saturate in my word, you are truly my disciples. You can’t be an apprentice of Jesus if you don’t live in his Word; the words of the WORD. I don’t think I’ve noticed before...

Send me a Text Message! We live in a world filled with darkness. And into this world of darkness Jesus came. In John 8:12 Jesus spoke to the people once more and said, "I am the light of the world. If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life." Like the worship song sings, "There is a light, his name is Jesus. He's the...

Send me a Text Message! In this episode, I'm going to talk about the beauty of the sound of dropping stones. You will hear it, in your heart, as you listen to this episode, the sound of dropping stones. Did you know that you can recognize by a sound, whether or not you are following Jesus?  Do you know what sound you hear when you start living and  loving and becoming like Jesus?  It's t...

Send me a Text Message! Who are your untouchables? We spent a couple of weeks at Calvary talking about being bridge-builders. I think one of the most vital gaps we need to bridge today is the gap between you and whoever your untouchables are because we still have untouchables today, don't we? How long has it been since you went out of your way to be around the friend who betrayed you?  Has sh...