Word of Life Church Podcast

"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.

"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how a human being becomes good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that… The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties—but right through every human heart and through all human hearts." -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

The truth can change a manIn the wisdom of his daysIt whispers soft but constantlyYou cannot live this way–The Call, “When”In the madness of modernity how do we cultivate the practices of prayer and contemplation that give us a life that we can live?

"On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but in the dawn." –G.K. Chesterton

In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft, and for forty years it has continued its long journey into interstellar space. Today Voyager is more than thirteen billion miles from home. Aboard Voyager is a golden record; one of the songs on the golden record is Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground. It's a blues moan. It has no lyrics. It's a song about death, the most bitter of all human experiences. It's a song that belongs to Holy Saturday.

At the cross the sin of the world coalesced into a singularity where it was both borne and forgiven by God in Christ. The structures of sin (“the sin of the world”) that entangles and implicates all of us reached its hideous apex in the crucifixion of the Son of God. At Golgotha the sin of the world gathered in a Good Friday singularity where it was absorbed and forgiven and thus dispelled.

When Jesus was in the home of Simon the leper on Wednesday during his last week, a woman poured a bottle of costly perfume on him while he sat at the table after dinner. The group around the table scolded her. But Jesus commended her. They thought what she did was shameful. Jesus saw it as beautiful, because she was preparing his body for burial. What she did was an act of worship and in it we discover that two components working together make Christian worship a beautiful thing—intentionality and expression. Both are needed. Expression without intentionality ends up in heartless worship and intentionality without expression ends up in lifeless worship. But together they bring out of us something very beautiful.