Word of Life Church Podcast

When Jesus quoted from Isaiah 61 at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, he says the Spirit of the Lord is upon him to proclaim good news, liberation, restoration, and the year of God's favor. But Jesus omits Isaiah's line about "the vengeance of our God." Was it was a mistake? No. From what Jesus says next we know it was clearly intentional. Jesus came to bring the mercy of God and close the book...

Whether it’s a flood, a famine or a Pharaoh…God will deliver you! When you’re facing a Goliath or in a lion’s den…God will deliver you! Even if the wine runs out, the boat is begins to sink or Lazarus begins to stink…God will deliver you! The point of salvation history is that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. But faith doesn’t mean that everything will always turn out just...

When we follow the example of Stephen we discover a life filled with the Holy Spirit as we remain open to God in prayer, acknowledging his presence with us and his love for us.

In the final hours before his crucifixion Jesus is blamed, accused, condemned. The Sanhedrin accused Jesus of blasphemy; Pilate convicted him of insurrection. But Jesus is neither a blasphemer nor a violent revolutionary—he is blameless. Indeed, he is the only truly blameless one—he is the innocent Lamb of God. But Jesus takes the blame anyway. All of it. He doesn’t try to defend himself. Jesus do...

O LORD, the hope of Israel! All who forsake you shall be put to shame. Those who turn away from you shall be written in the dust, for they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living water. –Jeremiah 17:13 If we use the Bible to condemn other people… If we use the Bible as a weapon to trap our enemies… If we use the Bible as a barrier to dam the river of God’s mercy… We are written in the dust.

The journey from Sinai to Tabor… The journey from Exodus to Matthew… The journey from the Old Testament to the New Testament… The journey from God hidden in darkness to God revealed in light… The journey from seeing the back of God to seeing the face of God… Is the journey of the progressive revelation of God found in Scripture. It's the journey from Back of God Theology to Face of God theology.

In Acts 2 we find the believers devoting themselves to “the prayers.” In Acts 4 we find the believers lifting their voices in spontaneous prayer. We need both: The formation of liturgical prayer and the spontaneity of improvisational prayer.

"Sitting with Jesus" is a form of contemplative prayer. There are breakthroughs in spiritual development that can occur through contemplative prayer that can occur no other way. Either we gain new perspectives through contemplative prayer or we forever look at the world through the same old lens of frightened self-interest. It is in contemplative prayer (or "sitting with Jesus") that universal lov...

We all know we live in a broken world. From Fallujah to Ferguson, Beirut to Baltimore, there’s too much hate, too much war, too much poverty, too much sorrow. Some religious folk just want to post a “condemned” sign and abandon the world. Their escapist fantasy is to fly off to some other world. But this is not the blessed hope. God still loves our beautiful and broken world, and the Carpenter of...

The Apostle Paul says that he received his revelation directly from Christ. Paul never knew the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but he did know the risen and ascended Christ of the Cosmos. Paul also says that it is this "Christ of the Cosmos" who has been given all authority in heaven and on earth.

If we don’t perceive the importance of Pentecost, it’s because we don’t perceive how the gospel culminates with the creation of the Church. The catholicity of the Church is not about speaking one language. (That's Babylon.) It's about one gospel spoken in many tongues. We must not shrink Pentecost to an individual spiritual experience. Pentecost isn't about individualism; it's about our unity in t...

Armageddon. It's word that only appears once in the Bible, but few words have captured popular imagination more than Armageddon. As such it's much used and and abused by the popular misinterpreters of Revelation. To hear them tell it, the world is being drawn inevitably toward an unpreventable war. But this is a horrible misinterpretation. Our looming Armageddons are always a possibility, but neve...

The only thing Jesus ever talked about was the Kingdom of God. Think of it as the Government of God; God's politics of grace; God's alternative to anti-human empire. Jesus announced the Government of God in disorienting parables about a curious grace and a new kind of justice that upends the established order. Jesus said that with the coming of God's Government, "many who are first will be last an...

We certainly need fresh encounters with the Holy Spirit, but we also need the wisdom of the historic church. We need the Holy Spirit and we need the creeds. We need the power of the Spirit and we need the writings of the church fathers. We need the gifts of the Spirit and we need the traditions of the church. We need an openness to the surprising work of the Holy Spirit and we need serious, theolo...

Most of our problems in church life are rooted in worship problems driven by theology problems. This phenomenon is why the Apostle Paul addressed problems in the ancient church with answers in what we think and what we say about God. The god we believe in is the god we will worship. Worship the wrong god and experience the road to destruction and heartache. Christians worship the one God, the crea...

The branches of our life that are incapable of transmitting the life of Jesus will eventually be burned. The branches of our life that are capable of transmitting the life of Jesus will eventually be cut back. But if we keep abiding in the mystery of Jesus, the pruned places of pain and loss will become the source of great grace to help heal others.

We're told that the Ethiopian Eunuch went to Jerusalem to worship. But this treasurer in the royal court of Queen Candace would not have been allowed to worship in the Temple. The Torah prohibited eunuchs from the entering the Temple. But Isaiah held forth a vision of a new kind of Temple where eunuchs would be welcome. When Philip preached the good news of Jesus, the eunuch discovered that he was...

Jesus said he was was the good shepherd who came to bring abundant life. He also said that those who came before him were thieves and robbers who came only to steal, kill, and destroy. Who were these bad shepherds? Jesus then said the sheep hear his voice, but they did not listen to the bad shepherds. Who are these sheep?

The kingdom of God is not heaven. It is not the church. The kingdom of God is the present rule of God in Christ on the earth through the church. It is where God is in charge and running the show. For those who enter into this kingdom and become kingdom-people God desires for them to live together in unity. In Romans 14, the Apostle Paul dealt with a growing division in the church between meat-eate...

The Emmaus Road disciples encountered Jesus on the road and he was made known to them in the breaking of bread. It's the same with us. We encounter Jesus on the road of our own surprising story. And we encounter Jesus in the bread of our shared sacrament. Story and Sacrament. We need both.

It’s high time that a morbid fascination with a supposed unalterable script of God–sanctioned–end-time–hyperviolence be once and for all left behind. A secret (or not-so-secret) longing for the world’s violent destruction is grossly unbecoming to the followers of the Lamb. We are not hoping for Armageddon; we are helping build New Jerusalem. We will not complete it without the return of the King,...

Thomas, one of the disciples of Jesus, wanted to see the wounds of Christ. What he discovered was the flesh of the wounded God. He was not so much "Thomas the Doubter" as "Thomas the Revelator." The very wounds of Christ, the wounds Thomas touched, were wounds opening up a window into the glory of God.

Perhaps the most misunderstood and misused teaching of Jesus is his Olivet Discourse -- the teaching Jesus gave to his to his disciples on the Mount of Olives regarding the signs of "the end." The end of which Jesus is speaking is not the end of the world, but the the end of the Temple age. While the Temple establishment was plotting the end of Jesus, Jesus was prophesying the end of the Temple, t...

The Gospel of Mark was the first of the four gospels to be written and its original ending was rather strange and quite abrupt. At a later date a longer and more satisfying ending was appended, but Mark’s original conclusion to his gospel narrative was simply this: “And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they w...