theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin 1.9.22 Who can really set us free? Judge, jury, priest, pastor, lover, forgiver? We say Jesus is our savior. And we wait. But Jesus said if we followed him, we’d know truth, and that would make us free. Jesus, truth, law, circumstance? Who can really set us free? In a movie, an old convict is released from prison. Gets a job bagging groceries and drives his boss crazy raising his hand...

Dave Brisbin 1.2.22 The universe is a clock. A clock made of circles. Circles within circles. Stars, planets, orbits, rotations, all scribing out time in days, months, years, longer years. Ironic that we think of time as line segments when the universe thinks in circles. And in the language of Jesus, each time a circle is completed as on New Year’s Day, it is perfected. 2021 is now a perfect year....

Dave Brisbin 12.5.21 What are you trained to see that others miss? If you’re trained in art and art history, when you look at a painting you can see color, palette, composition, technique down to the brushstrokes. You can place a painting in its genre and era, maybe assess its importance and value as others pass by without a second glance. If you’re trained in architecture, you see a building very...

Dave Brisbin 11.21.21 Some ideas are just too big to fit into our minds all at once. We can understand the meaning of the words, but not the significance. The number trillion is thrown about these days the way a billion was a few years ago, the way a million was a generation ago. You can count a million seconds in twelve days, but counting to a billion would take thirty-two years. Breathtaking, un...

Dave Brisbin 11.14.21 There was something different about the way Jesus prayed. His friends watched him, watched other religious leaders. They saw their Jewish teachers praying in the marketplace or temple court in full view of the people, saw gentiles praying loud and long, entreating their gods over and over with petitions. Then they saw Jesus, after a grueling day teaching and healing, disappea...

Dave Brisbin 11.7.21 How do you measure your own righteousness? Kind of loaded word. Maybe “rightness” is better. Do you even think about your rightness spiritually? How you measure up, how you’re progressing, what God thinks of you? The religious authorities of Jesus’ day had it all worked out. They measured their righteousness in three ways: how much money they gave to the temple treasury, how m...

Dave Brisbin 10.31.21 Most of us realize we’re imperfect. Some of us are even willing to admit it. When Jesus tells us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, some of us are immediately off trying to follow every rule…perfectly. Some give up after a while, and others don’t even try. But if we’re going to take Jesus seriously, how can we be imperfect and perfect at the same time? Right bef...

Dave Brisbin 10.24.21 Jesus is not here to make us safe. Jesus is here to make us free. We can’t have both at the same time because freedom and security are inversely proportional—as one goes up, the other goes down. We give up freedom to feel safe, and the freer we are, the more exposed and vulnerable. Without Jesus’ priorities deeply set, we willfully miss his message in our obsessive desire for...

Dave Brisbin 10.17.21 Is texting OMG—shorthand for oh my God—taking the Lord’s name in vain? Blasphemous, unlawful? Many Christians will answer yes and yes. But a group of Jewish high school students said they just use it instead of an exclamation point and don’t feel God is involved at all, that OMG stands for oh my gosh anyway. Now gosh and golly have been polite euphemisms for God since the 170...

Dave Brisbin 10.10.21 Nearly thirty years ago, my fiancé and I asked our Pastor if he would marry us. I can only imagine how our faces looked when he said no because we’d both been married before, and he didn’t know that we had the biblical justification for our divorces. The church’s reading of Jesus’ sayings on divorce and remarriage was that the only legitimate reason for divorce was adultery,...

Dave Brisbin 10.03.21 Stepping off stage after speaking, a woman leads another young woman by the hand who sees only the floor in front of her feet as they approach. The first asks if I would speak to her friend. Without meeting my eyes, she slowly tells of a friend since childhood who married a Jewish man and converted to Judaism, then after a long depression had just committed suicide. She loved...

Dave Brisbin 9.26.21 Desperate for a different outcome, a mother asks me to visit her son in county jail on a drug charge. Visiting an inmate is much like the movies: huge sterile waiting space, walls an unnamable yellowish beige green, bolted down metal benches, stenciled black numbers over an endless wall of doors. Waiting. Lots of waiting. A flat male voice calling my name and two numbers. One...

Dave Brisbin 9.19.21 Have you ever considered the power of your unconscious thoughts? Unconscious thoughts are like your bones. You cover your bones with muscle, skin, hair, and makeup, but though you never see them, it’s all about the bones. Your bones create your true form. Unconscious thoughts, core beliefs we have accepted since childhood, assumptions about life that family, education, and cul...

Dave Brisbin 9.12.21 With two great metaphors, Jesus shows us the effect a person has on everyone near, once they have come to see life through God’s eyes. Salt and light. As modern Westerners, salt makes no sense until we look back to see what it meant to ancient life before refrigeration and antibiotics. But light seems to make perfect sense right away. We think we know what Jesus means, which i...

Dave Brisbin 9.5.21 In the poetic manner of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus starts by painting a portrait of the person who has become the Kingdom of Heaven…not entered or possessed it, but has actually come to embody God’s “reign,” God’s will being done on earth. His deepest purpose and pleasure: humility, connection, faithfulness—lived out in human form. Jesus then transitions to show us the effe...

Dave Brisbin 8.29.21 Ever watch a movie where you were missing every third word, maybe because of accents, fast dialog, or low volume? At first you listen harder. Then your mind tries to make meaning by contextually stitching the edges of what you did hear together. Eventually you just give up and watch something else. This is essentially what happens when we read ancient scripture and especially...

Dave Brisbin 8.22.21 Remember those Russian nesting dolls? Matryoshka dolls, one inside the other, smaller and smaller, but each containing the whole doll. In terms of Jesus’ teaching, the Bible is like this: open the Bible and find the New Testament, and inside that, the gospel of Matthew. Inside Matthew is the Sermon on the Mount, and inside the Sermon, the Lord’s Prayer. Each one smaller, but c...

Dave Brisbin 8.15.21 Some six hundred years ago, in what has become a classic of Western spirituality, the anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing is trying to show us the only way we can approach God: “No one can fully comprehend the uncreated God with knowledge, but each one, in a different way, can grasp him fully through love.” This love, understood as pure presence and connection,...

Dave Brisbin 8.8.21 Have you ever thought of Jesus of Nazareth as a poet? I just asked a roomful of attendees on Sunday morning and got no takers. Truth is, we were not taught and don’t think of Jesus as poet. Jesus remains more or less an extension of ourselves: sharing enough of our values, attributes, and worldview to be comfortable. Truth is, Jesus was outrageously uncomfortable to his own peo...

Dave Brisbin 7.25.21 What’s the most important verse in scripture? That could be endlessly debated and ultimately impossible to answer unless asked this way: what is the most important verse in scripture to you? And once it becomes personal, it most likely becomes a moving target as well. Different verses have been signatures for me, changing over time, and recently, Luke 23:34 has been persistent...

Frank Billman 7.18.21 We all have those times in our lives when we get hit hard with tragedy or difficult life events. Sometimes they come in waves and leave us breathless and wondering how to even begin to process them or move forward. In those difficult times we can find ourselves getting overwhelmed by sadness, despair, grief and depression. So how do we deal with this? How do we find our hope...

Dave Brisbin 7.11.21 We are fast on track to becoming a post-Christian country. Recent stats show that only 36% of the youngest among us, Millennials and Gen Z, have any church membership as opposed to Boomers at 58% and those born before 1946 at 66%. There is a generational changing of the guard, and for the first time, less than half the population are members of a church. Only one in three self...

Dave Brisbin 7.4.21 Fourth of July, 2021. 245th anniversary of what? Start of the revolution? Birth of the US? Signing the Declaration of Independence? The revolution started a year before, the Constitution wouldn’t be adopted for another twenty, and the Declaration wasn’t fully signed until the following year. But on July 4th, 1776, the rough draft of the Declaration was approved by congress...we...

Dave Brisbin 6.27.21 A priest says that some of the most egotistical people he knows are clergy. A friend asks why people who believe in a loving, abundant God are not living happy, healthy, abundant lives. Digging down, the reasons are related. True transformation is the merging of enlightenment and maturity, our state of consciousness and our stage of consciousness. The two are connected, but no...

Dave Brisbin 6.20.21 What does everything we experience in life teach us about life? What does everything that our fathers, our culture, and institutions demand from us show us about the way life works? That any approval we receive is always based on performance? That the basis of life is legal and transactional? That not only is there no free lunch, there are only so many lunches to go around, an...