Walla Walla University Good Word Broadcasts

What does the future hold for you? the SS Quarterly asks. Seventh-day Adventists, rightly or wrongly, done well or poorly, often use the double-edged sword: the shortness of time and the uncertainty of life, to motivate people. The shortness of time is urged as an incentive for us to seek righteousness, and to make Christ our friend. This is not the great motive. It savors of selfishness. Is it ne...

Sharing Jesus with others has more to do with how we are built by God, instead of with how we must force ourselves to do what we are reluctant to do. What do I mean by this statement? Matt. 5:14-15 “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. 15 No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 2Cor...

Something we hate to admit is that we are the ones who often create our own setbacks! Yes, we live in a sin-damaged world and sin wreaks havoc on all, but: Luke 6:46-49 NLT “So why do you keep calling me ‘Lord, Lord!’ when you don’t do what I say? 47 I will show you what it’s like when someone comes to me, listens to my teaching, and then follows it. 48 It is like a person building a house who dig...

Sin is first and foremost a killer! If God had not intervened, anyone and everyone who sinned would die immediately. The only reason we sinners are not dead yet is because God stepped in and regifted us life; He did this in such a way that there was no gap between the time in which we humans sinned and the next smallest amount of time imaginable! From the outside, it simply looked like we had just...

I did not wish to combine these three topics into one lesson, so I’ve decided to focus on just the law this week, while offering some thoughts regarding sin and the gospel to next week’s lesson on repentance and forgiveness. God’s law is a transcript of God’s character. We see this when we compare their shared attributes: God’s Character in His Law! GodGod's LawRighteous (Ezra 9:15)Righteous (Psal...

Perhaps this lesson might be better titled Exercising Faith since we never generate faith ourselves. As the SS Quarterly itself says: It’s not something we can generate ourselves, for “God has dealt to each one a measure of faith” (Romans 12:3), and faith is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8-9). Thus, faith is a gift that God has given everyone, but that does not mean that everyone is exercising fait...

I’ve chosen to focus this lesson on the idea of Praying as Learners. From the cradle to the grave Jesus’ life was bathed in prayer. In fact, even before His birth we find both Zechariah and Jesus’ mother Mary offering praise to God, see Luke 1. The baby Jesus, brought into the Temple to be circumcised, was the object of thanksgiving to God as the deeply committed Simeon and Anna recognized Jesus a...

Though I am now using them for a different purpose than he did, I am indebted to Greg Boyd for some of the concepts I am sharing below regarding why we pray. Why do we pray? In a nutshell, the reason why we pray has to do with our God-given reality. Love requires freedom. Freedom creates risk. Risk creates moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is generally proportionate to influence. Influenc...

On my desktop computer I have a file titled Biblical Books. In that file is another file titled Amos, a biblical book I am currently studying. In my Amos file I have individual files for each chapter in the book of Amos, so Amos 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. I have additional files titled Background Stories of the Nations (that are mentioned in Amos 1 & 2). Another file is simply titled Exile, wherein I ha...

Romans 10:17 So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ. In 1978 I finally chose to attend college. I was then 22 years old. I was a bit anxious, knowing that I had not been in an academic program in four years! But I had spent the last two of those four years studying the Bible for myself. For 2-3 hours a day I had used an exhaustive concordance, my Bibl...

In 1988 Margaret Becker wrote a song titled Pico Boulevard. In it she expressed her failure to find the balance between need and desire, and thus fell right into line, this line: “Let me be somebody someone else wants to be;”lost my joy and humility down on Pico Boulevard. This is a problem most of us have—we fail to find the balance between need and desire. More pointedly, we want to be somebody...

Several books on my bookshelves wrestle with the idea of “a hidden God.” My Amazon wish list contains a few as well. So here we will put the big question earlier than normal: Question How can we understand the character of God, who is both the single most important character in the Hebrew Bible and yet absent from the majority of it? As we read Scripture, we note that God often uses stand-ins for...