Word of Life Church Podcast

In Acts 9 we meet a man who was always zealous for God, who always wanted a revolution, who always wanted to change the world; but after he met Jesus he had to rethink how the world is to be changed and how the revolution is to come. This man is Saul of Tarsus—we know him as the Apostle Paul.

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 the Word made flesh. The Spirit-inspired word leads us to the Spirit-conceived Word. The Bible is the word of God insofar as it leads us to Jesus who leads us into the life of God, the Triune life of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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 begin with the bright day of knowing; spiritual progress begins with the dark night of unknowing.

"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." –George MacDonald

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 when our theological house has to undergo a renovation, and perhaps some deconstruction and reconstruction.

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 Lies We Believe About God. Through his own journey of coming to discover the God revealed in Jesus, Paul has experienced overwhelming healing and the grace of God's transforming love.

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 became living souls. We are humans from the humus, soil with a soul; we are a mysterious synthesis of the dust of the earth and the breath of God. There is a sense in which humans are very complicated, self-aware rocks — rocks so magnificently complex that we are capable of bearing the Creator’s image and sharing the Creator’s spirit.