Word of Life Church Podcast

The story of Jeremiah is a tragedy -- a tragedy that foreshadows the tragedy and suffering of Christ. Jeremiah, like Jesus, lived and preached in a tragic time as Jerusalem hurdled toward destruction. Like Jesus, Jeremiah protested the Temple, was arrested, and publicly scourged. Jeremiah described himself as a lamb led to the slaughter. But Jeremiah also prophesied of a better day built upon a Ne...

Tucked away in the middle of the often bleak and sometimes scathing Minor Prophets we find a comedy: The book of Jonah. This reluctant prophet turns out to be the most successful evangelist in the Old Testament. But how it happened is funny. When God calls Jonah to travel five hundred miles East and preach to Israel’s despised enemies the Ninevites, Jonah buys a ticket on a ship sailing two thousa...

Isaiah of Jerusalem gave us three of the most important Messianic songs of salvation -- The Immanuel Song, The Prince of Peace Song, The Lion and Lamb Song. These songs all find their fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth as he brings God's presence, God's peace, and God's kingdom.

The parables of Jesus are not nice and conventional stories with a moral lesson. Neither are they stories designed to simply get us to pray a “sinner’s prayer.” Anyone who thinks this is what Jesus’ parables are about has clearly not read them! There is nothing nice or easy, clear or conventional about Jesus’ parables. If anything, Jesus’ parables are crazy, confusing, and most of all disorienting...

The Prophets are not predictors or political activists; they are poets. These poet/prophets assume the role of pulling back the curtain in society to reveal how things really are and what God is really like. Hosea does just that with a bold prophetic performance. He reveals the truth about Israel's unfaithfulness while also revealing the truth about God's faithfulness. Are we willing to face our o...

The fear of global terrorism creates anxiety, no doubt, the question is what do we do with our anxiety? There is the response of anger, hate, and the compulsion to stand up and fight on one hand and the response to suppress how we feel, disengage, and live comfortably numb on the other. Jesus shows us a better way. Jesus does not call us to stand up and fight for what is right. He does not call us...

What are the Hebrew prophets up to? What’s their agenda? The prophets call us to integrity—to wholeness of being. Religious people tend to build walls to separate the sacred and secular, but the prophets will not tolerate this bifurcation of being. The prophets use their poems like battering rams to break down the walls we build to separate the sacred from the secular. The poet-prophets thunder, "...

The bonus track in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Song for Someone" by U2. And I’m a long, long way from your Hill of Calvary And I’m a long way from where I was and where I need to be If there is a light you can’t always see And there is a world we can’t always be If there is a dark that we shouldn’t doubt And there is a light, don’t let it go out And this is a song, a song for someone -U2 Che...

Song nine in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "War in the Mind" by Lauryn Hill. "The prophet knew that religion could distort what the Lord demanded of man, that priests themselves had committed perjury by bearing false witness, condoning violence, tolerating hatred, calling for ceremonies instead of bursting forth with wrath and indignation at cruelty, deceit, idolatry, and violence." –Abraham Jo...

Song eight in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Sing All Our Cares Away" by Damien Dempsey. The power of song must never be underestimated. Don’t ever say, "but it’s just a song." Half the Bible is “just a song!” We’ve diminished the power of song because we’ve succumbed to empiricism. Song is not reason. Song is resistance—resistance to the totalizing of the facts. We sing to push back the “facts...

Song seven in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "The Thief and The Friend" by Jason Upton. "Many men are brave And many men are strong But few men have I ever seen Who’ll fight for who’s right And then fight for who’s wrong Fight for the friend and the thief But I’ve heard of you You’ve got so many names But you call yourself Son of Man I’ve heard your song on the streets where I live Heard it over...

The sixth song in Finding God on your iPod 2015 is "Brother" by The Brilliance. The supreme Christian confession—Jesus is Lord—is a political statement. Those who confess Jesus is Lord are to seek to embody the politics of Jesus. What are the politics of Jesus? Not the politics of competition and conquest, but the politics of love. Love for God…love for neighbor…even love for enemy. Because when w...

The fifth song in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Us for Them" by Gungor. It’s easy to see we live in a world arranged around ‘Us vs. Them’—it's our organizing principle. But this arrangement produces hostility, hatred, and untold injustice and suffering. We may think that as long as “our side” wins it’s okay…but it’s not okay! It’s the way of death. If the world is to be saved and healed, it mu...

The fourth song in Finding God on your iPod 2015 is "The Waterfall" by My Morning Jacket. Sometimes it feels like life is just piling one painful thing after another on top of us. The power of the waterfall as a metaphor is in its unending relentlessness. Long before My Morning Jacket used the waterfall as a metaphor for how life can beat us down, the Sons of Korah used the waterfall as a metaphor...

Song three in Finding God on your iPod 2015 is "Mercy" by Muse. The cry, show me mercy from the powers that be, is actually this cry: Show me the church! Show me the body of Christ that is characterized by compassion and looks like Jesus! Without knowing it, Muse is actually being very prophetic; they’re saying, Please, church, won’t you act like Jesus so we can see mercy! Which is why the church...

The second song for Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Don't Wanna Fight" by Alabama Shakes. We live in a combative age. It’s constantly modeled for us and if we're not careful we'll pick it up like a bad habit. If the church takes on a combative spirit, it has capitulated to the spirit of the age. To be Christian is not to be combative in the name of Jesus, but to be something else entirely. If th...

First song in Finding God On Your iPod 2015 is "There Is No End To Love" by U2. Finding God On Your iPod is not an attempt to be cute or clever; I take this sermon series very seriously. I think some of my best sermons in the past seven years have come from Finding God On Your iPod. "Don’t Drink The Water" (2012) and "Ain’t No Reason" (2014) come to mind. Preaching is an intrinsically artistic end...

We have all felt the restless weight of our culture's demands to want more, need more, and thus do more. Just as God heard the restless cry of his people in Egypt, God hears our cry. He is calling us out of The Madness of More and toward the promised land of plenty. Will we trust God to deliver, sustain, and provide?

Without seeing the kingdom all we are left with is a docile, sentimental, personal "Jesus" who has little to do with the world God loves and wants to save. Jesus without a kingdom is like an eagle without the open sky or a whale without the expansive ocean or a bear without the thick woods. You cannot lock up Jesus in the captivity of your own personal spirituality and expect to see Jesus as he is...

All of Creation—from the mightiest mountain to the tiniest grain of sand—is a gift from God. People and animals, plants and every grain of sand, all belong. To be rightly connected to God’s good Creation can bring dimensions of revelation and restoration that may come in no other way.

Is the blessing and mercy of Christ just for those in the center of God's will or is it also for those on the fringe? If we carefully observe Jesus in the Gospels the answer should be obvious. But the little Pharisee that lives in all of us objects to this. We need to ask ourselves if we are trying to reconcile scandalous grace with a moral economy of merit? If so, the kingdom of God will remain e...

Life can have a way of becoming a grey tedium of dull routine for many people. Every day can seem very 'everyday.' In the midst of our seemingly humdrum lives, is there a way to redeem a sense of the holy? Is God closer than we might think? If so, how might we find him? And once we do, how might our lives change?

We know God by approximation and encounter. Within the approximation we have been given by the church we see that God is righteous. Righteousness is a Bible word that many fail to understand. God’s righteousness is his covenant faithfulness. This reimagining of the word righteousness fits within the big story the Bible tells: a story of creation, corruption, covenant, and new creation. God has rem...

Once we understand that Jesus is image of God, the exact imprint of God’s nature, and the only perfect theology, we can answer some important questions about God that in the past we humans have often gotten wrong. Does God send the storm? No. He calms the storm. Does God cause famines? No. He feeds the hungry. Does God inflict sickness? No. He heals the sick. Does God shun sinners? No. He welcomes...

Martha was distracted and worried about many things. But Mary had learned the secret of Real Presence. If we don't learn how to be really present to the Real Presence, we will be constantly harassed by pain from the past, distraction in the present, and anxiety about the future. In our age of distraction learning to practice Real Presence will bring much needed peace and healing to our souls.