Word of Life Church Podcast

The fifth song in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Us for Them" by Gungor. It’s easy to see we live in a world arranged around ‘Us vs. Them’—it's our organizing principle. But this arrangement produces hostility, hatred, and untold injustice and suffering. We may think that as long as “our side” wins it’s okay…but it’s not okay! It’s the way of death. If the world is to be saved and healed, it must be rescued from ‘Us vs. Them’—because the way of Cain always ends with Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and all manner of mass suffering.So Jesus comes as the Savior of the world. Not to save us from God, but to save us from…us! Because the deep truth is this: There is no them, there is only us. In Christ the chosen people is the human race and the holy land is the whole earth.

The fourth song in Finding God on your iPod 2015 is "The Waterfall" by My Morning Jacket. Sometimes it feels like life is just piling one painful thing after another on top of us.The power of the waterfall as a metaphor is in its unending relentlessness. Long before My Morning Jacket used the waterfall as a metaphor for how life can beat us down, the Sons of Korah used the waterfall as a metaphor in exactly the same way. So how do we stop the waterfall? How do we stop the endless cascades of pain? We can’t do it by stopping all the painful experiences. But here’s a secret:Most of our pain is either retrieved from the past or borrowed from the future.That’s the first part of the secret—that our pain is mostly not present, but retrieved or borrowed. The second part of the secret is this:We stop the waterfall of pain by learning to live in the present moment present to God's eternal love.

Song three in Finding God on your iPod 2015 is "Mercy" by Muse. The cry, show me mercy from the powers that be, is actually this cry: Show me the church! Show me the body of Christ that is characterized by compassion and looks like Jesus! Without knowing it, Muse is actually being very prophetic; they’re saying, Please, church, won’t you act like Jesus so we can see mercy!Which is why the church in America can be neither Democrat nor Republican. If we import their politics of power into the church, we import the spirits of the principalities and powers into the church and we become deeply compromised.As Christians we don’t follow a donkey or an elephant…we follow the Lamb!

The second song for Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Don't Wanna Fight" by Alabama Shakes. We live in a combative age. It’s constantly modeled for us and if we're not careful we'll pick it up like a bad habit. If the church takes on a combative spirit, it has capitulated to the spirit of the age. To be Christian is not to be combative in the name of Jesus, but to be something else entirely. If the church is to be a city set on a hill, a light shining in a dark place, then we must turn away from the combative and turn toward the contemplative.Jesus was a fighter, but his weapon was not a whip or a sword or a gun or a nuke. His weapon was a cross. On the cross Jesus laid down his life forgiving his enemies. His weapon was love, his weapon was forgiveness, his weapon was faith. And having seen Jesus on the cross forgiving his enemies…I don’t wanna fight no more.

First song in Finding God On Your iPod 2015 is "There Is No End To Love" by U2.Finding God On Your iPod is not an attempt to be cute or clever; I take this sermon series very seriously. I think some of my best sermons in the past seven years have come from Finding God On Your iPod. "Don’t Drink The Water" (2012) and "Ain’t No Reason" (2014) come to mind. Preaching is an intrinsically artistic endeavor. Sermons without artistry are either just lectures or bad sermons. What the Bible calls prophets, we usually think of as poets. Isaiah and Jeremiah, Hosea and Amos, Zechariah and Malachi, and even John the Revelator were what we call poets. The poetic and the prophetic are closely related. And the most visible poets today are music artists. So Finding God On Your iPod is an exploration of prophetic and spiritual themes found in contemporary music; some of it is explicitly Christian, some of it is not. But you can be sure of this: Every song will lead to a sermon that is saturated with gospel message of Jesus.

We have all felt the restless weight of our culture's demands to want more, need more, and thus do more. Just as God heard the restless cry of his people in Egypt, God hears our cry. He is calling us out of The Madness of More and toward the promised land of plenty. Will we trust God to deliver, sustain, and provide?

Without seeing the kingdom all we are left with is a docile, sentimental, personal "Jesus" who has little to do with the world God loves and wants to save. Jesus without a kingdom is like an eagle without the open sky or a whale without the expansive ocean or a bear without the thick woods. You cannot lock up Jesus in the captivity of your own personal spirituality and expect to see Jesus as he is. To see Jesus as king requires you see the kingdom of God and catching a glimpse of the kingdom of God changes how you see everything else.

All of Creation—from the mightiest mountain to the tiniest grain of sand—is a gift from God. People and animals, plants and every grain of sand, all belong. To be rightly connected to God’s good Creation can bring dimensions of revelation and restoration that may come in no other way.

Is the blessing and mercy of Christ just for those in the center of God's will or is it also for those on the fringe? If we carefully observe Jesus in the Gospels the answer should be obvious. But the little Pharisee that lives in all of us objects to this. We need to ask ourselves if we are trying to reconcile scandalous grace with a moral economy of merit? If so, the kingdom of God will remain either invisible or offensive.

Life can have a way of becoming a grey tedium of dull routine for many people. Every day can seem very 'everyday.' In the midst of our seemingly humdrum lives, is there a way to redeem a sense of the holy? Is God closer than we might think? If so, how might we find him? And once we do, how might our lives change?