Word of Life Church Podcast

Hierarchies and strategies of exclusion belong to the old order that died with Christ. In the new order of the risen Christ, revolutionary inclusion and equality reign. Ethnic hierarchies, economic hierarchies, gender hierarchies are all done away with!

From Stephen and James, Peter and Paul, Polycarp and Perpetua in the early church, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jim Eliot, Oscar Romero, and the Coptic martyrs in modern times, the church has always had those who overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, and loved not their lives even unto death. These are the martyrs—the great saints whose loyal witness we honor.

On the day of Pentecost Peter preached the gospel to people who belonged to a religion that had become corrupted by its compromised allegiance to a materialistic and militaristic empire. So Peter’s invitation was, “be saved from this crooked generation.” It's the same today.

The Bible becomes an obstacle for some people when they are in a serious season of doubt or a process of spiritual deconstruction. Some choose to throw the Bible out and others simply walk away from the faith. Jesus offers us a better way: Read the Bible with Jesus at the center. In this way, the Bible leads us to Jesus. The written word leads us to the living Word. The word made text leads us to...

In the Bible the new day doesn’t begin at sunrise or at midnight, but at sunset. Thus, for example, the Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday. In the Jewish way of thinking each new day begins with new darkness. This is counterintuitive. The new day does not begin by being able to see, the new day begins with being unable to see. Dark nights come before new dawns. Spiritual progress does not...

"Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me." –Frederick Buechner "Do you love your faith so little that you have never battled a single fear lest your faith should not be true? Where there are no doubts, no questions, no perplexities, there can be no growth."...

At the center of Christian faith is not a belief system or a book, but a person—Jesus Christ. We confess Christ as the incarnate Word of God who saves the world through his death, burial, and resurrection. Constructed around Jesus is our theological house. But we may discover that our theological house is an inadequate dwelling for Christ the King—too small, too sectarian, too impoverished. That's...

What we think and say about God affects us more than we know. If we believe lies about God, those lies begin to run rampant and do damage to our souls. Today, we will turn our attention to the one true living God and listen to a great conversation about separating out truth from lies regarding the God we worship. Paul Young is the New York Times bestselling author of The Shack and most recently Li...

Soil is miracle ground — it’s the matrix of all life on earth. As the second account of creation in Genesis tell us, all life comes “out of the ground” — plants, animals, and humans. We did not fall as pure spirits from the realm of the perfect forms and find ourselves imprisoned in contemptible matter (as Platonism claims); rather we were formed from the dust of the earth, breathed on by God, and...

"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how a human being becomes good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with s...

The truth can change a man In the wisdom of his days It whispers soft but constantly You cannot live this way –The Call, “When” In the madness of modernity how do we cultivate the practices of prayer and contemplation that give us a life that we can live?

"On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but...

In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft, and for forty years it has continued its long journey into interstellar space. Today Voyager is more than thirteen billion miles from home. Aboard Voyager is a golden record; one of the songs on the golden record is Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground. It's a blues moan. It has no lyrics. It's a song about death, the most bit...

At the cross the sin of the world coalesced into a singularity where it was both borne and forgiven by God in Christ. The structures of sin (“the sin of the world”) that entangles and implicates all of us reached its hideous apex in the crucifixion of the Son of God. At Golgotha the sin of the world gathered in a Good Friday singularity where it was absorbed and forgiven and thus dispelled.

When Jesus was in the home of Simon the leper on Wednesday during his last week, a woman poured a bottle of costly perfume on him while he sat at the table after dinner. The group around the table scolded her. But Jesus commended her. They thought what she did was shameful. Jesus saw it as beautiful, because she was preparing his body for burial. What she did was an act of worship and in it we dis...

On Jesus’ last Tuesday, he speaks to us with unfiltered clarity. The temple and it’s systems which perpetuate injustice has walked the way which leads to destruction. As the end of Jesus’ life draws near, he speaks to us about the things of utmost importance. How might we avoid the same fate as this temple and the city which surrounds it? We must let Jesus lead us in the way of neighborly love.

On Monday of the final week before his death Jesus interrupted the operations of the Temple by driving out the sacrificial animals with a whip and flipping over the tables of the money changers. We are accustomed to calling this the "cleansing of the Temple." But is that what it really was? Or is there a better to way to interpret Jesus' provocative action in the Temple?

There's always some dude on a horse. The most famous dude on a horse is Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). Even his horse is famous—the warhorse Bucephalus (355–326 BC). At the same time when Alexander and Bucephalus were conquering the world, the Hebrew prophet Zechariah gave a different vision of a different kind of king. Zechariah prophesied that Israel’s king would not be like Alexander the Gre...

Jesus came as a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy where the wolf and lamb come to eat together. The mission of Jesus is revolutionary because Jesus wants to save both the oppressed and the oppressor, both the abused and the abuser, both the offended and the offender, both the lambs and the wolves. All people are invited into his saving embrace. We can experience a kind of forgiveness that leads to...

Cristine Eckhardt's Story of Forgiveness

What Jesus calls us to in the Kingdom of God is not a religiously modified version of the self-preservation and self-promotion value systems that govern the empires of men. What Jesus calls us to is far more radical than that. Jesus calls us to the demanding ethic of the turned cheek and the second mile; he challenges us with the absurd idea of loving our enemies, overcoming evil with good, and tr...

Todd Norris's story of forgiveness

We must dare to believe in Jesus’ radical ideas of enemy-love and endless-forgiveness, because without this kind of love and this kind of forgiveness, there is no future. The future you look for, the future you long for, the future that would free you from the unending repetition of the painful past, lies in your capacity to move beyond the past through the liberating practice of faith-based forgi...

Candy Draper's Story of Forgiveness

When we choose to forgive those who harm us, instead of perpetuating the cycle of revenge, we become a living imitation of Jesus Christ. As we do this we help flood a world hell-bent on paybacks with a forgiveness that washes away sin. The world is full of a lust for vengeance that fuels our conflicts—from petty quarrels to deadly wars. Christians are called to opt out of the game of getting even.