The Bible Speaks to You: Think, Pray, Love like Jesus

177 – Are you searching for the pathway to healing? Have you ever felt like you were a long way off from getting an answer to your prayers?  Maybe you’ve been praying for a long time about a resolution to challenge of some sort, guidance in making an important choice, or maybe you’ve been praying for healing, either physical or emotional, in your own life or for a friend.  Sometimes it’s tempting...

176 – Have you ever wondered if how much you love will have an impact on the future? A couple of weeks ago during my prayer time, God dropped this question into my heart: How much do you love the people who will be born 100 years from now? It really blew me out of the water. In this week's episode, I share some possible answers to this question. And I encourage you to think how you would answ...

175 – How is it possible to live in the kingdom of heaven today? Recently I was talking with a new listener to The Bible Speaks to You Podcast about what it means to embrace the mind of Christ on the subject of the kingdom of heaven. Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. If that's really true, how can we be more conscious of its presence? Can we actually live in the kingdom here o...

174 – Getting from hurt to hope Are there things hurting you from the past you're still carrying around? Or do you know someone who is? This week's podcast episode is full of healing. I'm talking with Steve Wormer about his work as a minister, and the Hurt to Hope program he works with to help churches and individuals find healing in their lives.  It's a Bible-based program tha...

173 – Is there anything you need to surrender to God? This week's episode is a parable about  six year-old Charlotte, who tries to take all 12 of her stuffed animals on a hike, crammed into her backpack. But it's not so easy to keep them all tucked away. One after the other they either fall in the water, get left behind, get covered in mud, or fall in a thorn bush. But Charlotte is deter...

172 – What is it like to live in the Holy Spirit? Is it still possible today? Yes, it is! To understand why, we need to go back to when Jesus promises his disciples he will send the Holy Spirit to guide them, teach them everything they need to know, and remind them of everything he taught them. In this week's episode I talk about Why Jesus had to leave before the Holy Spirit would come How to...

171 – Have you ever wondered why Jesus spoke in parables so often? Recently I got an email from a listener, Brian, wondering why Jesus spoke so often in parables but didn't ever explain things to the crowds of people who were listening. He only explained them to his disciples. So I decided to do a whole episode about this. There's actually a lot to it and Brian actually had a lot of rela...

170 – If you're stuck in a legalistic church, it may be time to leave. Being in a legalistic church is like being stuck in a small, tight box with little freedom. In today's podcast, I have a conversation with my friend Emily Louis, a worthiness coach and the host of the Abundant Grace Podcast, who left legalism for God's abundant grace. Here are some of the things we talked about:...

169 – Have you thought about what your spiritual vision for 2023 will be? It's not just setting a goal and making it happen but seeing what God is doing in your life. The book of Proverbs shares a powerful truth: "Where there is no vision, the people perish:" (Proverbs 29:18) But this vision doesn't just mean what you see with your eyeballs. It means spiritual or prophetic visi...

2022 Highlights of The Bible Speaks to You Podcast Sometimes at the end of the year and before the new year begins, you need a little reminder of all the good things that happened in the last 12 months. In this episode I share clips from 10 of the most listened to episodes of The Bible Speaks to You Podcast during 2022. Here are links to the full episodes of all those mentioned: # 120  Jason Elam:...

167 – Have you ever thought about what you'll give Jesus for Christmas this year? Christmas is in just a few days (if you're listening to this episode when it comes out). And you probably have most of your holiday preparations already taken care of except for the things that have to wait for the last minute. In all you've done to get ready for Christmas, have you ever stopped to con...

166 – How do you get ready for Christmas spiritually? Christmas will be here in less than two weeks. Are you ready? I'm not talking about the shopping and the cooking, the decorations and the  Christmas cards. I'm talking about being ready spiritually to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Usually at this time of year, I read the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. And I look at the propheci...

165 – Have you ever noticed all the ways Jesus loved his disciples? If you were going to tell someone you loved them, what would you say? How would you say it? There are so many possibilities. Just saying the words, “I love you,” doesn’t always convey love does it?  It’s about the tone of voice, the circumstances, your facial expressions and body language, the sincerity in your heart. A lot more t...

164 – Wouldn't it be great to be sitting with Christ in heavenly places? Have you ever just wanted to get away from all the struggle, the challenges, and the busyness of daily life? Sometimes it seems the cycle of events never stops and we don’t have time to just be still and feel God’s presence as much as we’d like to. I have certainly felt this way many times. But a phrase from Ephesians ha...

163 – What are you most grateful for? What’s the first thing you think of? Is it something big or small? Something recent, something in the distant past, or is it for something in the future that hasn’t even happened yet? Recently, when I asked someone in a class I was teaching what he was grateful for, he said it was his toothbrush. There's more to the story when you listen to the full episo...

162 – How do you define success? Too many people today define success by how much money they have, their career, the things they have, their education, and lots of other externals. But we need to redefine what success really is according to Tim Winders, my guest this week. Tim made some very insightful observations about success: Redefining  success is about busting up the Babylonian or worldly sy...

161 – Did you know that as the image and likeness of God, in a sense, you are already complete and whole. When I was a kid, I usually felt there was something missing in my life. I didn't have everything I needed. I felt incomplete. I often thought I needed some thing or situation to make me complete, but it was actually a mindset issue. Way down inside, I felt incomplete as a person. As I gr...

160 – Why is the Sabbath still important? In the world today, lots of people don't really think too much about honoring the Sabbath. They may be glad to have a day off from work, but they’re not aware of its deep spiritual significance.  Other folks who consider themselves spiritual but not religious, may think it’s just some old-fashioned religious tradition. They may be thinking, “Why can’t...

159 – The Bible is full of women who speak with wisdom and have positions of authority. Several years ago in my Bible class at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, CT, I put together a class on all the women in the Bible. It was fascinating to look at the Bible from the perspective of what women were doing and what was being done to them.  One of the first things I realized in preparin...

158 – Have you ever thought of yourself as a prophet? Have you ever thought it was even possible for you to be a prophet? We usually think if someone is going to be a prophet, it’s going to be someone else. Not us! And we have this stereotype of prophets in the Bible predicting the future, issuing a warning to an evil king, or performing miracles of some sort. But to be a prophet, doesn’t necessar...

157 – Have you ever had one of those days... You know, when you just feel down in the dumps, uninspired, and nothing seems to get you out of the doldrums?  You sit there praying and it just seems like words? You try to read and study your Bible but even your favorite stories and verses seem empty and flat? It happens to most of us at one point or another.  So how do we get out of it? Well, it may...

156 – Do you remember the story about the Syrophoenician woman who asked Jesus to heal her daughter? Have you ever wondered why Jesus was so incredibly inclusive of all types of people is in his ministry?  I mean, think about it. Jesus talked to every sort of person there was to talk to: the rich, the poor, the holy, the humble, the sinner, the self-righteous. It didn’t matter to him if someone wa...

155 – Jesus spoke Aramaic in the New Testament Is there any advantage to learning Aramaic to understand his teachings better? Of course! In this week's podcast episode, I talk with Roy Gessford about the insights we can get from reading the New Testament translated from Aramaic. Roy got interested in the original languages of the Bible when a speaker at a Bible conference told him he could le...

154 – Have you noticed lately how so many people are predicting the end of the world? There is so much talk about "end times" these days. But actually it's been going on for years, even centuries. Think of all the people who came up with exact dates for when the world was going to end. But it never happened the way they predicted. Jesus said no one knows that day and time, not the a...

153 – How can we find true self-worth? A friend of mine lost his job. All his confidence and self-assurance vanished. He never was able to reclaim a sense of his own worth. He saw his value based on the job he had and the money he made. But true self worth doesn’t come from anything you do, say, or achieve. It’s not based on how much money you make, how successful you are in business, with your fa...