The Cosmic Car Wash

This is the first of what we believe will be a few episodes reviewing and commenting on our new favorite book. If you haven't read The Paradise King by Blaine Eldgredge, do yourself a favor and go buy it immediately and then begin reading it the day you get your hands on it. You can find it on Amazon here . Combining years of research and a masterful ability to craft stories, Blaine has gifted...

Today we start with Psalm 23:6 and David's prayer that God's goodness and mercy would follow him all the days of his life and move further into an exploration of what is following each of us. Since every exploration into scripture leads to deeper and deeper levels of meaning and significance for our lives, it's no surprise that the word translated as "follow" has much more we...

Today we are, as the title hints, just "chewing the cabbage". We find it's good from time to time to just show up to an episode with a survey of what God's been saying to us and what we're hearing from others about the Kingdom of God. We've been sharing, writing, and responding in daily devotions for over five years now and it's been just over three years since we wer...

Dallas Willard taught that we should take Jesus seriously as someone who's life and words we should honestly seek to live out with sincerity and commitment. But being like Jesus feels like a target way out there that's unachievable. However, God isn't looking for people who are perfect but are simply committed to the chase. The apostle Paul wrote about this in Romans 8:38-39 and 2 Cori...

Dang! It's been a while since we sat in our respective chairs, 831 miles apart, to talk about the Kingdom of God. But the minute we hit record, it felt like it had been only minutes. The reason it's been a while is that we both went through some pretty heavy stuff through the month of November. Deaths in the family, church shakeups, grieving, questioning, and wondering. It leaves us asking...

Taking our cue from Jesus' parable in Matthew 25:1-14, often called the parable of the 10 virgins or 10 bridesmaids, we explore what it means to have enough oil to make it through the night. This is a disturbing parable that doesn't end with Jesus providing a soft landing or an easy way out. It's meant to be a disturbing warning to those who claim to follow Jesus and await His return....

We often find ourselves living parallel lives and feeling or meditating on the same things. This week is a perfect example of that. We were both experiencing this longing for Eden that seemed to be heightened more than it has been. Is it wrong for us to look forward to the return of heaven to earth? Are we simply exchanging an escape theology (i.e. the Rapture) for another mechanism by which to ge...

This episode turned out to be an honest conversation about the struggles we have with typical and topical presentations of something claiming to be the gospel. In reality, those topical presentations convince very few people to alter their lives for God and don’t produce much if any lasting fruit. Rather, the thing that produces real change in our lives and in the lives of anyone who hears it is t...

Picking up where we left off last week in discussing the things we left behind once we discovered the message of Eden and the Great Renewal in the Bible, this week we survey the work we have yet to do in becoming all that God desires us to be. In a way it's kind of a throwback to an earlier episode we recorded about living with open hands. You can check that episode out here . There's stil...

Today we're reflecting on the changes that have taken place in us in the nearly three years since we discovered the message of the Great Renewal. It came to us by way of John and Blaine Eldredge and a series of five episodes from the Wild At Heart podcast they recorded in 2000. You can find those episodes from September and October 200 on WildAtHeart.org/rhplay or wherever you listen to podcas...

After a few week hiatus, we're back today for a relatively impromptu discussion about some things we're learning from the late Dr. Michael S. Heiser (www.youtube.com/@drmsh). We'd heard of Dr. Heiser's work from Dr. Tim Mackie and John Collins, whose own work you can find at www.youtube.com/@bibleproject. Heiser makes the point that in order to really understand the Bible, we have...

All the things that happen in this world as we try to pursue the Eden we were made for! We run after this thing and that person and all the experiences in an attempt to fill the void that only God can fill. But we'll always run up short and wind up disappointed if we try to pursue life outside of the One who is Himself, Life. Any attempt to have "the kingdom without the King" ends up...

With no particular topic bubbling up for us this week, this is a review of a few of our favorite verses (which admittedly feels a bit like deciding between fresh Maine lobster or a perfect medium rare Wagyu filet. You can't go wrong either way.) We start with surveying the context of Matthew 10:50 and how a blind beggar leaving his cloak is a huge statement of his love of Jesus. Next we talked...

Asaph is a monumental character from the Old Testament. As the worship leader in the tabernacle and later in Solomon's temple, he excelled at penning his deepest feelings and always rooting them in the confidence that God is good and in control. Psalm 73 is one example of this. Classified as a song of lament, Asaph reflects on the seeming injustice that wicked people don't seem bothered by...

It's been more than two and a half years since we first discovered the message of Eden, the Great Renewal, the Renewal of All Things, the Paligenesia. Whatever you want to call it, it has radically changed our lives. It's brought hope and excitement to our daily lives in a way that religion and "the rapture" never did. In this episode we dive in and discuss how the whole story of...

Because we don't take ourselves too seriously... What we DO take seriously is the fact that nothing else in life can ever or will ever give us the stability and recovery that Jesus does. But we're all prone to run after shiny objects, the things that distract us from our real source, our real life. When we find ourselves running to other things but running on empty, when we find ourselves...

This episode was born out of a desire to keep God as the only one who keeps us steady, holds us firm, sees us through every storm, and makes us unshakeable. Everyone of us fight the tendency to replace God with all sorts of other things. For some it's the toys they hold on to while for others it's the vacation they desperately want. Many turn to some form of addiction to try and find some...

The account from Matthew 15:21-28 of the gentile woman who approached Jesus asking for Him to deliver her daughter from demonic possession is an amazing story we can all learn from. At first rebuffed by Jesus as a "dog", she persisted saying, "Even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table." Jesus' response to her shameless audacity was to commend her faith...

We originally recorded this in August 2022 but decided to release it now. We explain the name of our podcast, the Cosmic Car Wash, where it came from and why the intentionally ironic name matters a great, great deal for all of us. It comes from the late Dallas Willard who explained that there is no cosmic car wash. We don't get our hard drives wiped when we step into the other side of eternity...

In Romans 8:6 the Apostle Paul said the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. We're not scholars or theologians but it makes sense that Jesus, who we know was always totally in sync with His Father and Holy Spirit, was in perfect peace even while He was being tortured and murdered on a Roman cross. We are created for union with Jesus and He promised us we can be one with Him so we shoul...

Not having had a chance to sync up with one another over the course of the week in order to coalesce around a particular topic, today we are kinda shootin' from the hip, on a wing and a prayer as they say. We start with talking about Bezalel, the man gifted by God to actually build the storied Ark of the Covenant. From there we launch into what it means to live with the sustaining expectation of t...

Eden. It isn’t just a garden from antiquity and legend. It’s a place that God creates in each of us when we commit to follow Jesus and those who pursue the God of Eden are absolutely unsinkable. Psalm 37 is among those passages in the Bible that contrast the life of those who follow Jesus with those who don’t. In fact, Jesus echoed many of the poem’s themes in the beatitudes. Those who commit to f...

The Shema is an ancient Israelite prayer prayed every morning and evening to recommit all of themselves to God: heart, soul, and strength. In Revelation 13 we encounter the dreaded mark of the beast, which Tim Mackie of the Bible Project describes as the anti-Shema. It's not a microchip implanted in our hands or foreheads. Rather, John was communicating to first century Christians in symbols they...

We've discussed at length about what heaven is currently like and what it will be like when they are fully reunited again, when Jesus returns and makes everything new. But Jesus spoke very clearly during His earthly ministry about those who don't want God to rule over them. If we find ourselves opposed to the highly filtered experience of His glory now, it stands to reason that heaven (or heaven o...

In Matthew 7, part of Jesus's seminal sermon, he instructs us to not judge others too quickly or harshly, or with a different standard than we want to be judged with. Continuing that thought, He instructs us to not give what is sacred to dogs or give our precious things to those who will trample them and us. There's a lot of immediate application for our lives in the ways we approach others. We al...