Word of Life Church Podcast

Lift up your heads, O gates;lift them high, O everlasting doors;and the King of glory shall come in.“Who is this King of glory?”“The LORD, strong and mighty,the LORD, mighty in battle.”Lift up your heads, O gates;lift them high, O everlasting doors;“Who is this King of glory?”“The LORD of hosts,he is the King of glory”(Psalm 24:7–10)

To read the Bible in such a way that's it’s not a sprawling mass of contradictions we have to center our reading at some stationary, unmoving point. That is, we have to find the place to stand in this thousand page epic of redemption where we say, “It's from this vantage point that I’ll read and interpret the rest of Scripture.It’s not Leviticus with its prohibition against eating shellfish and other obsolete laws.It’s not Joshua’s conquest of Canaan with its troubling genocidal violence.It’s not even Paul’s technical theology of justification that we’re so prone to misread and misunderstand.It’s certainly not the Book of Revelation with its wild (and often inscrutable!) metaphors.Center your reading of the sacred text in the Gospels…with Jesus…on the cross…as he forgives his murderers. Luke 23:34 ("Father, forgive them") is the Pole Star around which the rest of scriptural constellations rotate and are interpreted.

The story of Lazarus abides among us as a story of enduring hope despite all odds. When all seems lost, when all hope has faded, we remember the story of Lazarus. Because Jesus is the resurrection and the life, no one — no matter how mired in sin and death, in sorrow and despair — is a lost cause.

Economic self-interest is the single greatest obstacle to participating in the kingdom of God.Jesus doesn’t teach Marxist economics.Jesus doesn’t teach Capitalist economics.Jesus teaches Love economics.We’ve been scripted to believe that life is a competition of acquisition. But that is a lie. Life is not a game; life is a gift. The purpose of life is not to win; the purpose of life is to learn to love well.

Jesus has healed the blind man and it was a scandal. There should have been a party, but instead there was an investigation. The Pharisees were all upset about this and they launched a criminal investigation. Jesus shows them what true judgment looks like. To their surprise, it wasn’t fault-finding or pointing the finger of accusation. The judgment of Jesus is not a judgment of condemnation, but a judgment of light, exposing things for what they are in order to set things right.

The life of faith is a life of trust. When Jesus invites us on the journey of following him with these words, "Come follow me" he is saying to us "Come trust me." What does it look like to answer that call? What happens if we struggle to answer that call? This sermon explores these topics and more as we dive into the call to trust.

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." Nothing of this world can resist the inevitable entropy of life and death. Only that which is eternal can be the center that holds so that things don’t fall apart. Which just another way of saying only God can occupy the orbital center of our life.Christ is before all things,And in him all things hold together.–Colossians 1:17

Saint Patrick’s BreastplateChrist, be with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ where I lie,Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise,Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.Salvation is of the Lord.Salvation is of the Christ.May your salvation, O Lord, be ever with us.

The dark night when Nicodemus came to Jesus reflected the dark night of his own soul. For a long time Nicodemus had lived in the sunny land of a Pharisee’s certitude. Nicodemus had it all figured out. He had all the answers. He was the Bible Answer Man. But then along came Jesus and suddenly his equations no longer added up. Jesus was an untrained, self-made rabbi from Galilee who was not a Pharisee — and yet God was obviously with him. All of this created deep theological cognitive dissonance for Nicodemus.Jesus was the monkey wrench in Nicodemus’ theological system.Jesus was the pebble in the shoe of Nicodemus’ certitude.Jesus was the solar eclipse that suddenly cast a shadow of doubt into Nicodemus' soul.

We live in an unprecedented time of the exponential growth of human knowledge. Some have suggested that knowledge in some sectors is doubling every 12 months. This does not necessarily mean that we are getting smarter, because knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. For Christians, Jesus is for us the wisdom of God. In Christ we learn Wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord and it is curated in the halls of patient reflection. We will learn and grow in wisdom either by listening to wise people or by suffering through our own failure.