Rebuilding Faith

After 77 weeks, we've reached the final section of the Gospel of John, and it ends with Jesus telling Peter to mind his own business. In this episode, we watch Jesus restore Peter three times over breakfast (one for each denial), we bust a favorite seminary sermon trick about the Greek words for love, and we catch John doing damage control on a rumor that he was immortal. Then there's the question...

Three years following Jesus, and Peter's first move after the resurrection is to go fishing again. Not as rebellion, just because he doesn't know what else to do with himself. In this episode of Rebuilding Faith, we look at John 21 and the strange detail of the resurrected Jesus standing on a beach making breakfast for disciples who reverted to their old lives instead of moving forward. If you've...

Thomas finally gets his moment. He has carried the weight of centuries of bad theology that turned his honest request into a character flaw, and this episode is an attempt at rehabilitation. When the disciples tell Thomas that Jesus is alive, he says what any reasonable person would say: I need to see it too. Not more than the rest of them got. Not less. Exactly what they got. And rather than scol...

Mary Magdalene shows up to a tomb expecting a body and finds nothing. No body, no explanation, just absence. This week on Rebuilding Faith, we're in John 20, and the resurrection story is stranger and more human than you probably remember: a foot race, a priest who won't touch a corpse, and a woman who becomes the first witness in a world that wouldn't let her testify. But the moment that reframes...

Most people show up for Jesus when it's safe. Nicodemus had been quietly watching for the entire Gospel of John, showing up at night, speaking carefully, covering his tracks. But something about the cross changed that. In this episode, we look at John 19 and the strange, costly responses of the people who stayed when everyone else had gone, and we ask what it means to follow Jesus at the moment it...

Pilate says "I find him not guilty" three times, then hands Jesus over to be crucified anyway. In this episode of Rebuilding Faith, we look at the slow-motion moral collapse of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Pilate isn't a monster. He's something more familiar: someone who disagrees with what's happening but goes along with it because the cost of refusing feels too high. The crowd, the...

Peter said he was ready to die for Jesus. Twenty-four hours later, he was warming himself by a charcoal fire, telling strangers he'd never met the man. Most of us know what it's like to mean something and then discover, under pressure, that we didn't quite mean it the way we thought. The gap between who we intend to be and who we actually are in the moment of cost is one of the most honest places...

What would you do if you knew exactly what was coming and walked straight into it anyway? In John 18, Jesus doesn't hide, doesn't run, and doesn't let Peter fight his way out of it. He steps forward to meet the soldiers and then he willingly goes with them. This episode explores what it means to face suffering not as something to escape, but as something to leverage, and how Jesus models the most...

Most of us assume we know what prayer is supposed to look like, and most of us quietly feel like we're doing it wrong. In John 17, we get something rare: an unfiltered look at how Jesus actually prayed. Not a model prayer with blank lines to fill in, but a real conversation that reveals what Jesus cared about most in his final hours. What he says about eternal life alone might rearrange everything...

Jesus knows his disciples are confused. He's just told them that in a little while they won't see him, and then a little while after that they will see him again, and they've basically said, "Yes, we understand none of this." So he does what any reasonable teacher would do: he compares the whole situation to a woman in labor. He's telling people who are about to watch him die that the suffering is...

Jesus tells his disciples there's more he wants to say, but they can't handle it yet. It's an admission that the text has edges, that revelation isn't finished, that the Spirit was sent precisely to take us further than the disciples could go. This episode looks at John 16:5-15 and asks the question Jesus leaves hanging: what does the Spirit want to show us today that those first followers weren't...

Christians love talking about being persecuted. This episode asks whether they've ever considered that they might be confusing persecution with accountability. Jesus was pretty clear about what it means to be hated for your faith, and it looks a lot different from what most of us see celebrated in Christian culture right now. Using John 15 and 16 as the lens, this episode explores what it actually...

Most of us have been taught that the Christian life is about doing more, trying harder, and producing results. But in John 15, Jesus reaches for an image that flips all of that: a grapevine. He doesn't tell His disciples to work harder. He tells them to remain. Eight times in one passage, that's the word He keeps coming back to. What does it actually look like to live connected to something rather...

Jesus says the Father is greater than him. His words aren't his own. He's doing whatever the Father requires. This episode sits with those claims rather than explaining them away, and traces the posture Jesus models: receiving from God and passing it on. It turns out that posture is contagious in ways that talking about Jesus often isn't, and Easter is what happens when the Father confirms it actu...

Jesus tells his disciples that after he leaves, God will send another advocate. And then, within the same breath, pulls them into one of the most bewildering sentences in the farewell discourse. In this episode, we look at the Eastern Orthodox concept of theosis and ask what it would mean for spiritual formation to be less about moral discipline and more about proximity, that virtue comes from par...

Most people know "I am the way, the truth, and the life" as a claim about Jesus' identity. This episode looks at what Jesus said it was supposed to lead to, which turns out to be more demanding than a statement of belief. A Buddhist monk shows up with a clear explanation of what it actually means to follow Jesus. And somewhere between Thomas's honest confusion and Philip's frustrated request,...

Jesus gives his disciples a new command, and somehow it's both simpler and more demanding than anything he's asked before. Most of us know the golden rule, but Jesus isn't talking about that. He's raising the bar to something that, if we actually did it, would be unrecognizable to most of what gets called Christianity today. This episode sits in the space between Peter's boldness and his collapse,...

Most of us know the feeling when Jesus doesn't do what we hoped he would. Doesn't say what we needed. Doesn't show up the way we expected. And in John 13, two disciples face exactly that crisis, and they go two completely different directions. One of them is Judas — and before you mentally cast him as the villain, consider that his problem might be closer to yours than you're comfortable admi...

Last week, Jesus used all His authority to do the lowest job in the room... He washed feet. This week, He asks a haunting question: “Do you understand what I was doing?” You can watch Jesus, read about Jesus, even follow Jesus... and still completely misunderstand Him. In this episode of Rebuilding Faith , we wrestle with what it really means to call Jesus “Lord” and why you don’t get to worship H...

If you’ve ever felt burned by authority—or wished you had more of it—this episode is going to mess with your categories in the best possible way. In John 13, right after we’re told that Jesus has been given “authority over everything,” he doesn’t seize power… he grabs a towel. What would you do if you had unlimited authority? Fix the system? Crush your enemies? Finally, prove yourself right? Jesus...

In this episode of Rebuilding Faith , we wrestle with a bold claim: if you’ve seen Jesus, you’ve seen God. Not a cloudy, filtered, fear-based version of God—but God without distortion. What if Jesus isn’t explaining the Trinity here, but revealing the clearest picture of God we’ve ever had? And if Jesus says he didn’t come to judge but to save, what does that mean for how Christians talk abou...

What if the real opposite of belief isn’t disbelief, but self-protection? In this episode of Rebuilding Faith , we ask why people can witness truth, injustice, and even Jesus Himself—and still refuse to see. This episode connects an ancient Gospel text to our very modern moment, where clarity feels costly and courage feels rare. If you’ve ever wondered why faith can feel so tangled up with ha...

What do you do when faith feels heavy, and obedience doesn’t come with clarity or peace? In this episode of Rebuilding Faith , we explore the moment when Jesus finally names what’s coming and admits, “My soul is deeply troubled.” As confusion spreads, God’s voice thunders, expectations collapse, and the cost of following Jesus becomes unmistakably real. Drawing a powerful line from the a...

Jesus spends much of the Gospel of John saying, “My time has not yet come.” Again and again, he delays, deflects, and resists going public. Then, suddenly, everything changes—not because of a miracle, a confrontation, or a demand for proof, but because a group of outsiders shows up and says, “We want to see Jesus.” In this episode of Rebuilding Faith , we explore why that moment becomes the t...

What kind of king are we really hoping for? In this episode of Rebuilding Faith, we step into the tension of Palm Sunday — cheering crowds, shouts of Hosanna, and a Messiah who stubbornly refuses to ride a warhorse. As Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey, we uncover how deeply our ideas of power shape the faith we practice and the world we help create. From ancient expectations of military delivera...