The Vine Church Podcast

During this Advent season, the members and friends of The Vine church are pleased to provide thematic scripture readings, meant to help focus your mind on the coming Lord in the season. Every day will feature a different scripture read by a different individual. We encourage listeners to meditate on these scriptures and share them with friends and family throughout the season. The scriptures this...

During this Advent season, the members and friends of The Vine church are pleased to provide thematic scripture readings, meant to help focus your mind on the coming Lord in the season. Every day will feature a different scripture read by a different individual. We encourage listeners to meditate on these scriptures and share them with friends and family throughout the season. The scriptures this...

During this Advent season, the members and friends of The Vine church are pleased to provide thematic scripture readings, meant to help focus your mind on the coming Lord in the season. Every day will feature a different scripture read by a different individual. We encourage listeners to meditate on these scriptures and share them with friends and family throughout the season. The scriptures this...

During this Advent season, the members and friends of The Vine church are pleased to provide thematic scripture readings, meant to help focus your mind on the coming Lord in the season. Every day will feature a different scripture read by a different individual. We encourage listeners to meditate on these scriptures and share them with friends and family throughout the season. The scriptures this...

During this Advent season, the members and friends of The Vine church are pleased to provide thematic scripture readings, meant to help focus your mind on the coming Lord in the season. Every day will feature a different scripture read by a different individual. We encourage listeners to meditate on these scriptures and share them with friends and family throughout the season. The scriptures this...

During this Advent season, the members and friends of The Vine church are pleased to provide thematic scripture readings, meant to help focus your mind on the coming Lord in the season. Every day will feature a different scripture read by a different individual. We encourage listeners to meditate on these scriptures and share them with friends and family throughout the season. After a brief introd...

In today’s episode Warren and Rachel give some final thoughts on our recent series covering the Ten Commandments, or “Ten Words.” They discuss some specifics of the final two commands before giving reflections, takeaways and concluding thoughts on the commandments and series as a whole. In the process they discuss how this series has been a reminder of the partnership aspect of covenants, the wisd...

Taking a break from the 'Ten Words' series, Warren is joined this week with friend and son of The Vine, Dr. David Kneip. David is a former member of The Vine and the son of former elder Bill & Cathy Kneip. He is also currently a professor and Associate Director of the Siburt Institute at Abilene Christian University. Warren and David discuss the literature of the Bible. Our Christian Bible is...

As The Vine continues its deep dive into the Ten Words, we have consistently encountered novel and insightful understandings of commands that previously seemed so simple, and this week is no different. Warren, Rachel, and Jason address the 5th and 6th Commandments: "Honor your father and mother," and "Do not kill." While seemingly straightforward, these two present some challenging questions: How...

This week Warren and Rachel discuss Sabbath in another episode that coincides with our current “Ten Words” sermon series. There’s much to talk about as it relates to the history, purpose and importance of Sabbath. So in this episode Warren and Rachel discuss more of the context of this command, Jewish thoughts and teachings about Sabbath and its physiological effects on our bodies, Jesus and the S...

The entire Vine Church has been studying the "Ten Words" (aka Ten Commandments) for the last three weeks, and the past two weeks have been diving into the first two words, drawn from Exodus 20:3-4. While it may be easy to dismiss these words as mostly irrelevant to modern Christians, they may be the most relevant and most easily broken. We are consistently tempted to place other priorities (i.e. g...

The podcast is back! This week’s episode features some introductory topics connected to our new comprehensive Sunday morning series, “Ten Words.” This series began on Sunday, August 22, and you can listen to the introductory sermon as part of Sunday’s service on our YouTube channel. But there’s plenty of material to think about at the outset of this series, so in this episode Warren, Rachel, and T...

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Beginning next week (Sunday, August 22, 2021), The Vine Church will resume live-streaming worship services on YouTube, and future services will be viewable there. This podcast will continue to post the midweek discussion, now to be about 2-3 episodes per month, but the Sunday morning worship will be exclusively on The Vine Church YouTube channel . As we begin to embark on a new s...

The mid-week podcast will be taking a short break and then returning with less frequent episodes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At the beginning of Luke 18, Jesus tells his disciples a story about why "they should always pray and not give up.” The story he then tells is one about a widow who keeps “bothering” a judge until he finally gives in and sees that she gets justice. It’s a story about persistence, but also a story that leads us to some questions. What does this story tell us about God? Where do we find him in a sto...

Mental health is a topic that does not get much attention in churches. Spiritual health gets much attention, of course, and physical health is sometimes addressed, but churches and Christians have often been resistant to conversations about mental health, let alone advocating for mental health treatment. Some of this is attributed to the sometimes adversarial relationship that religion and science...

In Luke 16 Jesus tells a parable about a rich man and a poor man. This is a unique parable for many reasons. The point of the story seems to be about God comforting someone who led a difficult life and was overlooked and neglected in his earthly life — including by a rich man whose gate he lived by. But the end of the story also encourages us to think about what would need to happen in order for u...

Many of Jesus’ parables are framed at the beginning or end by a question that he himself asks, and when you look at the entirety of Jesus’ ministry you find that question-asking was not confined to his parables. By one count Jesus is recorded as asking 307 questions over the course of the Gospel accounts. Examining and thinking about Jesus’ penchant for asking questions not only gives us some insi...

In Matthew 21 Jesus tells a parable about “wicked” tenants. This parable is surrounded by an encounter Jesus has with a figless fig tree and his well-known Temple visit where he overturns tables and drives people out of the Temple courts. It’s a busy couple of days in Jerusalem! The parable — and the other stories that surround us, invite us to consider to what extent we have accepted Jesus’ visio...

Some parables are difficult to grasp, which leads to numerous potential interpretations. Others have a message so simplistic and easily understood that it can be comprehended by young and old alike. Those parables invite us to consider how our understanding of the parable grows over time, how we teach the parable to our kids and the value of continuing to sit with parables that seem to be the most...

In Matthew 13, Jesus tells a couple of stories in which he compares the kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed and yeast. These stories are part of a continuing theme of imagining the kingdom as small and sometimes insignificant items. These stories are reminders that kingdom work and movement is often not seen in the grand and overwhelming, but in the small, consistent and mundane. **SPECIAL ANNOUNC...

The parables are interesting, inspiring, and often confusing. This week, Warren and Rachel are joined by Terry Rascoe to talk about one of Jesus's most enigmatic parables, The Parable of the Shrewd Manager in Luke 16. While many parables have clear parallels to God and His will for our lives, this parable is not so straightforward. What does Jesus want us to learn? What is the role of God in the p...

In Luke 15, Jesus tells three stories that follow almost an identical pattern…until he gets to the very end of the third story. The parts of the three stories that match give us a picture of a loving, merciful and celebratory God. The ending of the third parable invites us to consider how we view God acting in such a way toward others. Themes of love, celebrations, forgiveness, what was lost being...

This week Rachel interviews two of her friends from school about their unique work for the kingdom of God. Although they are currently in the United States to visit family and eat tacos, Aaron & Grace serve very different yet connected ministries in Milan, Italy. They felt called to minister with people who are as far removed from main stream Christianity as you can possibly be in our world. W...

Today we begin a new series entitled "Stories As Told By Jesus." This series will be a look at the stories Jesus told, stories that we call "parables." Parables can sometimes be frustrating and inscrutable, but they are also clever ways to reveal God’s Kingdom in various layers that can speak to differently to people with different levels of spiritual growth. In this first installment in the serie...