Word of Life Church Podcast

Understanding that God is like Jesus is essential to our understanding of salvation. We must not think that salvation comes about because Jesus appeases a vengeful God, angry at the actions of sinful man. Salvation comes about because Jesus reveals the Father and does the Father's work. If we believe God killed Jesus for the sake of justice, we have dramatically distorted our understanding of salv...

The universe has a flow and a telos, a purpose and an aim, a goal and a grain. And the grain of the universe is love. From the heart of God there is an endless flow of love. What wisdom knows is that to flow— and not fight— your way through life, you need to go with the grain. To flourish as a human being you must go with the grain of love. Our capacity to love comes from knowing that we are loved...

When we look at the death of Jesus on the cross in the light of the resurrection, we are looking at our salvation. But, what do we really see when we look at the cross? Are we looking at the appeasement of a monster god through barbaric child sacrifice? Or are we seeing something else? Is the cross vengeance or love? When Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," he is no...

Jesus was faithful. Jesus remains faithful. Jesus will be faithful. This theme of faithfulness is the foundation of Paul's view of how God intends to save the world through sending his Son. To see the the faithfulness of Jesus in the New Testament requires a proper understanding of the big story the Bible is telling, a four-act story of Creation, Corruption, Covenant, and New Creation. With that s...

Why did Jesus die? Why was he tortured? Why was he crucified? Why was he murdered? To answer these questions, you must first answer this question: Who Killed Jesus? This much must be made clear: God did not kill Jesus! To suggest God tortured and murdered his Son is to malign the character of God. God sent his Son into a world founded on a sinful and satanic system of blame and violence to bear wi...

We don’t preach the Bible, we preach Jesus. We use the Bible to preach Jesus. The difference between preaching the Bible and preaching Jesus is the difference between Christianity and Biblicism. The difference between Christianity and Biblicism is the difference between following a book and following our risen Lord. Philip didn’t preach the Bible, he preached Jesus. He used the Bible to preach Jes...

We Christians are a most peculiar people. Why? Because we worship a crucified God. Other religions worship a an omnipotent God, a glorious God, a victorious God— but we worship a crucified God! The death of Jesus upon the cross was murder. It was a lynching. It was a mob killing that God knew would happen because of our sin, but he did not will it. What God willed was that through his death Jesus...

The Transfiguration is the high point of the narrative arc in the synoptic gospels. Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus on the mountain where he was praying. This is the moment It is when the divinity of Jesus was revealed to Peter, James, John. The Transfiguration moment is where the Old Testament hands the project over to Jesus, where Moses and Elijah find their great successor, and where the o...

Special Guest Terry Wildman is a Native American and the head of Rain Song Ministries, a Christian organization ministering to the indigenous people of North America. In this special sermon, Terry Wildman describes the current plight of Native Americans and offers a perspective of an appropriate Christian response.

Pastor Brian Zahnd recently made a blog post that received considerable attention, entitled, "My Problem With The Bible". It has been shared over 17,000 times on Facebook, 700+ tweets on Twitter, and been reposted on numerous blogs across the internet. Obviously, he has hit on something that a lot of people resonate with. In this sermon, Pastor Brian shares that he is serious about the Bible, and...

When we look to Scripture we discover God is the God of time who created time along with everything else in his creation. God existed before time. He is not bound by time, but rules over time. He entered into time through Jesus Christ. Time, as a part of God’s good creation, is sacred. One of the ways we can recover the sacredness of time is to organize it around Jesus himself. We mark the years b...

Jesus is presently building his church. We are called to walk in such a way as to build up the church, because we are one body, one church, one body of Christ. We work with Jesus to build up the church by consciously doing life together. God has made us in his image, in the image of the one God revealed in the distinct persons. We were created as distinct, unique individuals who are interconnected...

The Bible opens with the story of God's work of creation. At the end of the first account of creation in Genesis the point is made emphatically: " ...and behold, it was very good." Genesis 2 gives a second account of creation—this time the emphasis is on the human vocation. Creation was good, but it was incomplete. Adam was to work with God as a gardener, tending God’s good earth, cultivating it,...

Why is there light and water and trees and whales and life and Valentine's Day? Because God is love. Creation is God’s infinite love expressed as matter and energy. God is love that seeks expression in the beauty of self-giving creativity. This is the basic revelation needed to understand the phenomenal gift of life. At the bottom of the universe, and at the end of all things, there is love. The m...

One of the primary goals of spiritual formation is to become your true self. This is why the primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want, but to become properly formed. If you spend all your time praying out of your agitated, grasping, foolish, fearful self, it does very little good. We have been distorted by sin, both our sin and the sins of the fallen world. We must lift up o...

When we feel hurt, threatened, angered by a person, an incident, or some situation, we instinctively view it through a perspective of self-defense. If you are a non-contemplative person you will think your perspective is the total truth. We must have a change in perspective, or we will forever look at the world the same way. There are breakthroughs in perspective that occur through the practice of...

In order to experience natural, open conversation with Jesus, an openness is required. The initiation is on Jesus' part, but our response requires an opening. There is a gentle knock, which leads to either an opening, or nothing. All conversion results from a moment of spiritual openness. But too often we restrict spiritual openness to a single moment of conversion. An over-emphasis on a single "g...

Part of maintaining a healthy soul is learning who you really are, knowing yourself. In this message, Peri Zahnd presents a description of the Enneagram personality system, including the basics that you will need to understand how the Enneagram works. As you will see, only a few simple concepts are needed to begin your journey of self-discovery.

The Living God is both the father and home of the human soul. When a soul tries to live on its own apart from God is in a wrong state, it has "lost" its way. This is why "lost" is so often the metaphor used to describe what is wrong with us. The lost soul tries to live apart from its true father and away from its real home. The opposite of the lost soul is the soul that lives by faith. Living by f...

Every person is sacred. If we are going to talk about recovering the sacred in a secular world, we have to talk about the unique sacredness of the human being. There is a sacredness that belongs to all of God’s creation, the oceans and forests, the mountains and plains, the planets and stars, the plants and animals. But there is a unique human sacredness. It’s called the Imago Dei, the Image of Go...

For most of the last half of Christian history we've made the gospel mostly juridical. We have made our salvation a study of how to be acquitted for our crimes and be declared innocent before the court of divine justice. But our problem is not just that we’ve run afoul of the law and stand guilty before God. Our deeper problem is that we are ill. We need a gospel that is therapeutic and healing. W...

The Bible is the word of God that bears witness to the Word of God: Jesus Christ. The Bible did not create the Heavens and Earth. The Bible did not become flesh. The divine Word of God did these things. Jesus is God. The Bible is not. We worship Jesus; we do not worship the Bible. We worship the God revealed in Scripture. The Bible is not perfect. Christ is the perfection of God as a human being....

When it comes to being chosen in a favorable sense, we all want to be picked. Whether it's chosen for the baseball team, as a cheerleader, for the prom, or for the job, we all want to be special. To find yourself not among the chosen can be a very painful experience. We want to be among the chosen people, we want to be a chosen person. Within our own stories that we tell we are the chosen. Every n...

Christianity is a sacramental faith. It is not a faith of mere theological ideas, but of sacraments. Sacrament is an interface between the spiritual and the material, between heaven and earth. Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of the Word of God is the ultimate Sacrament. Because of the Incarnation and Resurrection Christianity is a sacramental faith. To be properly practiced, Christianity requires...

Mankind was created for more than what we're living for. Created in God's likeness to bear his image, we strayed far from the life of God. It is Jesus who calls us, as he did Nicodemus, out of the "Circus of Systems" and into the life of the age to come, the life we are created for. Will we have the faith of Nicodemus and enter this new life?