The TMP Podcast

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ ministry begins not with the roar of the crowds, but with the invitation of the Holy Spirit into the Wilderness. Out of the wilderness, Jesus will launch his public ministry, call his first disciples, and announce and enact the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet, before all this takes place Jesus is first called into the wilderness. The wilderness is a place of lacking, and lo...

Jesus tells us to love our enemies. He doesn’t mean a hypothetical imagined enemy either. When Jesus said ‘love your enemies’, everyone listening in could identify an enemy in the Roman occupation of Israel. So on the surface, this teaching goes against all reason. It is a love that goes beyond common sense. This teaching reflects the love revealed at the Cross, and this goes against our instincts...

Israelites took oaths that made their statements legally obligating because they implored the presence of God in the commitment—but this only happened because half-truths, deceptions, and lies were all too common. To take oaths was to assume that honest speech was not always present. Jesus speaks to a culture of legal oath-taking and calls his disciples to go further into truthful and honest speec...

Jesus continues his antitheses statements by addressing adultery and divorce. The Law prohibited adultery, which is having sex with anyone other than your spouse. Jesus goes further than the law by speaking against the root cause of adultery: lust. Lust is when we look to desire and intentionally foster sexual temptation and arousal through the imagination. Jesus is against lust because it causes...

Murder was a serious offence in the Torah. (Numb.35:16-28) To deliberately kill another human was punishable by death. Even if the killing was unintentional, the guilty person would need to flee to a city of refuge to escape retaliation. Simply put, the Law tried to limit murder from getting out of hand by addressing the act of murder. Jesus enters into this discussion about murder with the first...

Jesus insists he’s come to fulfill the Old Testament, and fulfill it completely. He hyperbolically says “not one letter or stroke of the pen will pass away until I fulfill it.” He’s going to fulfill the law in a way that goes beyond the righteousness of the Pharisees, not by literally adhering to every letter or stroke of the pen—something Jesus obviously didn’t do. Jesus fulfilled the law by embo...

The Sermon on the Mount begins with a list of counterintuitive blessings on an unlikely group of personalities. This list of blessings is a Kingdom manifesto called the Beatitudes, and it describes the sort of people through whom God is starting to bring wise and healing order to this world. After giving us the Beatitudes, Jesus then immediately begins talking about being salt and light. Salt &amp...

We are kicking off our teaching series on the Sermon on the Mount by taking the time to hear the best sermon ever preached: The Sermon on the Mount. Our TMP Scripture Reading Team will read through the entire text of Jesus’ sermon as a way to prime us for this next series.  We will then take some time to ask what it means for our community of The Meeting Place to engage in this call to follow the...

In Matthew 3 we meet Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist. John the Baptist’s role was to prepare the way for Jesus. He was the embodiment of Isaiah’s vision of a “voice calling in the desert to prepare the way of the Lord”. (Is 40:3) John called the people of Israel to repentance and enacted this through baptism. The Church has a role that is similar to John’s. Just as he prepared the way for Christ 2...

The Magi do not return to Herod. The response from Herod is to eliminate any possible challenge to his power-hold over Israel. Herod commands that all male baby boys under two years old be put to death. It is a tragedy. Perhaps no event in the gospels challenges our sentimental depiction of Christmas than the slaughter of these innocents. Most North American Christians don’t like to sully their se...

We often picture the Magi as three Kings or three wise men who arrive alongside the shepherds in an epic Nativity evening of worship on an O Holy Night. The story that Scripture tells us is far more complicated. For starters, the Magi arrive on the scene after the birth of Jesus— likely years after the shepherds. (Mt 2:1) Secondly, the Magi were not kings, they were Persian astronomers, astrologer...

Joseph was pledged to be married to Mary. As was the Jewish custom during the betrothal period, Joseph was probably away building a home and preparing for his marriage to Mary. Joseph surely had plans and dreams about what his future would look like. However, God had other plans for Joseph. Joseph’s life turned upside-down. Mary became pregnant. The child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, but Jose...

The Gospel of Matthew opens with a genealogy— or a family tree— of Jesus the Messiah. In our modern day, we tend not to care too much about genealogies and long family trees. We might even view genealogies as incidental information, but this list of Jesus’ family tree tells a story about Israel, a story about us, and even a story about God. In mentioning Jesus as “the son David, the son Abraham”(1...

There are some folks that like to suggest that the Christian life is one of endless prosperity and victory. Peter challenges this thinking by pointing to Jesus’ suffering and asking the church to “arm herself also with the same attitude.”(4:1) Peter is writing to a church who was experiencing persecution from the dominant culture. By publicly shaming them, the Greco-Roman culture was trying to pre...

Jesus saves us and calls us to be holy— but Jesus does not expect us to do this by ourselves. We are called to be in a relationship with other followers of Jesus. This is not just a hoped for outcome, but is what is ultimately true of all who confess Jesus as Lord. Those who follow Jesus are “being built into a spiritual house”(2:5) so that they are “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nat...

Peter uses some curious terms in the opening words of his first letter. He calls the churches in the eastern provinces “exiles” who are “scattered” throughout the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. This is a curious word choice because there is no historical evidence of an exile among these people. This is not a mistake by the Apostle Peter. The reason Peter uses the terms exile (parepidēmos )...

Peter uses some curious terms in the opening words of his first letter. He calls the churches in the eastern provinces “exiles” who are “scattered” throughout the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. This is a curious word choice because there is no historical evidence of an exile among these people. This is not a mistake by the Apostle Peter. The reason Peter uses the terms exile (parepidēmos )...

Our culture is all about hustle. We want to get results and better our lives through hard work. This can be helpful to some extent, but unhelpful when we begin to believe that God cares more about what we do rather than the person we are becoming. It is totally possible to lead, teach, stack chairs, and do a lot of work for God, but have a deep disconnection to our inner lives. But the good news i...

Jesus was born under Roman rule that saw the Jews as colonized people. He lived far away from religious, economic, and political power in the backwards town of Nazareth. In his ministry in ancient Israel, Jesus saw power better than anyone who has ever lived. He did that because in order to love people well he had to discern how power was at work in their lives. Throughout his ministry, Jesus will...

One of the unhelpful things we can sometimes believe is that God’s holiness causes God to keep a distance from broken people. We may even unconsciously believe that God is only present to our lives when we have it all together. To shield ourselves from this lie, we develop self-coping strategies that numb, deflect, distract, and bypass what is true.  But the good news is that God always meets us w...

We all carry around ideas, images, and experiences of God. It is important to unearth these stories, these experiences, and pictures of God because the God we imagine is the God we become like. So what is God like? Some folks may have an image of God that resembles a deadbeat dad, a prosecuting attorney, or a master of puppets who secretly has some anger management issues. Ancient peoples imagined...

God’s design from the very beginning was that God would be with us and we would be with God. This design was resisted by the first humans when they chose to go their own way and welcome chaos and sin into God’s good creation. Did this stop God from being with us? Sometimes we may believe this to be the case. We can feel like God is somewhere else, out there in the universe. This is especially the...

When you ask some folks about what God is like, you might get a discussion about words like omnipresent (all-present) , omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing). These categories may be helpful to some extent, but they tend to be a poor description when you consider that we need to become like God. Knowledge and power may be impressive and can get things done, but according to the Apost...

We spend so much of our lives looking for wholeness. We search for the right career, relationship, friendship, or hobby to give us a sense that we’ve got it all together. We tell ourselves that things will be better on the other side of our search for enough. Many of us feel crushed that we can never find enough, and often resign ourselves to quiet desperation or nihilism. We can even do this with...

The journey to Rome is finally complete. Jesus has sent his witnesses to the very ends of the earth. At the end of this story, Paul the disciple of Jesus, is under house arrest. This should not be imagined as though Paul was living in the suburbs, enjoying the peace and quiet of sequestered living. He is in prison with a soldier guarding him. Yet the Spirit is with him, present to guide and instru...