Word of Life Church Podcast

We are called to fight the good fight of faith and the enemies of our faith include secularism, individualism, and nationalism. In this message, Pastor Derek Vreeland spends time defining and illustrating what these enemies are like. Secularism is any attempt to do life without God. Individualism is the preoccupation with putting ourselves first. Nationalism is the love, devotion, and allegiance t...

Jesus told a Samaritan woman, "Salvation is from the Jews, but it is for the whole world." Although the Gospel began in Jerusalem, it must journey to Rome because in the world after Easter the nations are now called to surrender their sovereignty and confess their allegiance to Jesus Christ. Rome was the Capital of the Empire, and the Roman Empire stretched across the whole world. When the Gospel...

If you want to read the Bible right, you read from the perspective of the cross. If you want to get God right, you understand him as revealed in Christ. On Good Friday, where do we found Christ? He is stretched out upon a cross, dying, imploring his Father to forgive. God is not the one who demanded crucifixion. nor is he the one doing the crucifying. God is the one who was crucified! All of human...

Pastor Brian Zahnd has been teaching from the Gospel of Luke for nearly four months, as we examine the stories of Jesus. We have arrived at Palm Sunday, celebrating Jesus' triumphal entry into the city of Jerusalem. Palm Sunday is confusing. It is a combination of both joy and sorrow, of celebration and of suffering. It contains Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, but shadows the impending doom...

Throughout the Gospel of Luke, we see Jesus moves from table to table, meal to meal, announcing and enacting the Kingdom of God as radical hospitality. In the 19th chapter of Luke, Jesus is on his journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. Jesus and his disciples have arrived in Jericho, just a day before they will arrive in Jerusalem and ride through the gates in what will become known as the Triumphal E...

In our modern age, "Hell" has become a catch-all word. It includes everything from the grave to an afterlife-destination to Dante's Inferno to a minor swear word, and much inbetween. Many modern English translations of the Bible don't even use the word "hell." It is important to actually listen and hear what Jesus says about hell, rather than try to force him to fit your particular theological sys...

The greatest and most famous Jesus' parables is the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It is the gospel found inside the gospel. The parable of the Prodigal Son is a story of the Kingdom of God being announced and enacted. Jesus gave it to those who were angry about how he was ushering in the Kingdom of God. The actions of the father in the parable are the actions of Jesus in his ministry. In his table...

We have all heard the famous parable of "The Good Samaritan". It has become so famous in our culture that it has unfortunately lost its meaning. Despite popular belief, the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan is not to be "a good Samaritan." Jesus crafted this parable to answer a question about eternal life and love of neighbor. Jesus was speaking to Jews, and Jews and Samaritans hated one...

The Samaritans were a separate ethnic group from the Jews, with different theological views. These differences often translated into violence between the two groups. Most Jews would thus travel around Samaria instead of traveling through it. But on his journey to Jerusalem, Jesus journeyed right through the middle of it. During their travel, a Samaritan town refused him and his disciples hospitali...

To follow Jesus is revolutionary. That's not hyperbole; it's the absolute truth. To live the Jesus way is the most revolutionary thing a person can do. To follow Jesus' practice radical love, forgiveness, hospitality, and humility, and to join God's alternative society that is formed around Jesus Christ is life-changing. It's revolutionary! in the 1970′s, the Jesus Revolution was a genuine move of...

We would prefer to think there is never any conflict between our family and our faith. But this is not always the case. Sometimes we find the family we're born into is in conflict with the kingdom we have been reborn into. Jesus himself experience this conflict. His family didn't really get what he was doing. They did believe that he could be the Messiah, they simply didn't think he could be the M...

By far the most common way we're formed in faith is we receive it from our parents. There are Christian conversions from other religions and non-religious backgrounds, but these are more rare. Many of us are Christians because are parents were also Christians. We are all formed by tradition with choices made by parents, in our language, in our culture, etc. But we don't just give our kids a Bible...

As followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to speak the truth lovingly, to speak words that build up, to put away anger, wrath, and slander, and to forgive one another. How do we live this out in our homes particularly in the context of marriage? In this message, Pastor Derek Vreeland offers a helpful tool to empower couples to communicate in such a way that brings resolution to conflicts and for...

The greatest challenge that we face in passing on our Christian faith to our children and our grandchildren is the growing tide of secularism in America. Secularism is the idea that stemmed from the Enlightenment that God must be restricted to the private realm. But the private spirituality of the solitary, self-styled Christian will not withstand secularism. To live as a Christian in the 21st cen...

In life, it's easy for us to assign labels to people. It's how we identify ourselves inside a group. But often, even without realizing it, we put label on other people in order to negate them. We reduce them to a category. We put labels on ourselves that we have to live up to (or down to). Once you adopt a "pressure group label" you have to live up to the expectations of the group. Self-adopting a...

The degree to which the Sermon on the Mount has been ignored by Christians is scandalous. We want Jesus to die for us, but leave our world alone, especially if we are on top of the world. But Jesus has no intention of leaving our world alone- he fully intends to change it! What Jesus preached in his sermons and what Jesus did on his cross are one in the same! In the Sermon on the Mount and on the...

Jesus is forming a movement of people who will join him in announcing and enacting the Kingdom of God. An important understanding about Jesus is the way in which he selects his followers. Jesus does not seem to be very concerned about our categories of "good people" and "bad people". Instead, he divides people into the proud and the humble. The shocking thing is who joins Jesus' new movement. It's...

After Jesus completed his 40 days of prayer and fasting in the wilderness, he soon returned to his hometown of Nazareth. Initially, Jesus was well received by his own people. They were brimming with excitement and great anticipation that their hometown kid might really be the long foretold messiah. But Jesus quickly realizes that the people in his hometown really just want to see him do miracles....

John the Baptist called on Israel to repent in preparation for the Messiah. When people began asking what it was they should do, everything John said had to do with money. When you are willing to rethink what you do with your money... you've repented! John doesn't mention any other sins, but he continually stresses economic repentance. Why? Because he is trying to prepare a people who will follow...

God did not suddenly appear on the earth in human form one day. He came just as every other human did: He was born to a mother as an infant, and grew through childhood and into an adult. But the Bible tells us very little about Jesus' childhood life. The only account of his life between infancy and age thirty is found in the book of Luke, in which a 12-year-old Jesus is "lost" at the Temple in Jer...

When God became Man and came to the earth, he experienced the fullness of humanity. He didn't merely just appear as a man. He was born as a helpless baby, lived a life as a man in the Roman occupied territory of Israel, and died. Jesus became Immanual, God with us, so that he might give us a new way of being human. He came that he might lead us beyond the ways of death into life and resurrection....

What kind of news would make you literally leap for joy, jump up and down, and throw your hat in the air? The end of a long war? The fall of the Berlin Wall? Winning the lottery jackpot? Being cured of cancer? When war ends and tyranny topples, when prosperity comes and sickness goes, that is good news! And this is the kind of good news that Mary and Elizabeth celebrate together. These two poor an...

What a mystery the mother of Jesus is. Mary is the human, the woman, through whom God enters and takes on humanity. Mary is a mystery because she's intimately connected with the greatest mystery of all: The Incarnation. In Christ God became fully human and Jesus is fully human as you! The story of Jesus begins in earnest with the Annunciation, the angelic announcement to a young virgin that she wo...

We shouldn't ever think that Jesus just popped into history 2,000 years ago out of nowhere. Jesus is the continuation of a story that began a very long time ago with Abraham & Israel. With the birth of Jesus God is not starting over. God is keeping his promise to bless the world with the seed of Abraham and to rule the world with the Son of David. And in Luke's Gospel, he is telling the story of h...

Pastor Brian Zahnd concludes his two-month series on climbing the Mountains of God with the "Mount Everest of the Gospels", the Mount of Beatitudes. The Beatitudes are not commands, but portals to a new way of thinking. They are not platitudes, but paradoxes. The Beatitudes are the Preamble to the Constitution of the Government of God. The government of God is nothing like the governments of this...