Word of Life Church Podcast

Why is there light and water and trees and whales and life and Valentine's Day? Because God is love. Creation is God’s infinite love expressed as matter and energy. God is love that seeks expression in the beauty of self-giving creativity. This is the basic revelation needed to understand the phenomenal gift of life. At the bottom of the universe, and at the end of all things, there is love. The meaning of life adds up to love. And unless you love, you will live life wrong.

One of the primary goals of spiritual formation is to become your true self. This is why the primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want, but to become properly formed. If you spend all your time praying out of your agitated, grasping, foolish, fearful self, it does very little good. We have been distorted by sin, both our sin and the sins of the fallen world. We must lift up our soul to God. We lift up our soul to God that we might recover the proper image and that we might escape our false self and find our true self. Your true self is one that is calm, content, wise, and unafraid. Deep inside, this is who you really are.

When we feel hurt, threatened, angered by a person, an incident, or some situation, we instinctively view it through a perspective of self-defense. If you are a non-contemplative person you will think your perspective is the total truth. We must have a change in perspective, or we will forever look at the world the same way. There are breakthroughs in perspective that occur through the practice of contemplative prayer that can happen no other way. Contemplative prayer is prayer without agenda and largely without words. In contemplative prayer, you sit with your problems and issues in the presence of Jesus. Jesus can give us an entirely new perspective outside of ourselves.

In order to experience natural, open conversation with Jesus, an openness is required. The initiation is on Jesus' part, but our response requires an opening. There is a gentle knock, which leads to either an opening, or nothing. All conversion results from a moment of spiritual openness. But too often we restrict spiritual openness to a single moment of conversion. An over-emphasis on a single "got saved" moment ruins us for future spiritual growth. People often have their one moment of spiritual openness, then slam the door forever! Christianity is an ongoing conversation with Jesus. This is true both for the individual believer and for the corporate body. Jesus Christ is the Living Word with whom we must constantly engage. We need to cultivate spiritual openness. This is the path to more conversions and deeper salvation.

Part of maintaining a healthy soul is learning who you really are, knowing yourself. In this message, Peri Zahnd presents a description of the Enneagram personality system, including the basics that you will need to understand how the Enneagram works. As you will see, only a few simple concepts are needed to begin your journey of self-discovery.

The Living God is both the father and home of the human soul. When a soul tries to live on its own apart from God is in a wrong state, it has "lost" its way. This is why "lost" is so often the metaphor used to describe what is wrong with us. The lost soul tries to live apart from its true father and away from its real home. The opposite of the lost soul is the soul that lives by faith. Living by faith is the proper way to go about the task of being human. Your soul is a precious gift from God. But the fallen world with its system of power politics, greedy economics, and scapegoating religion, is an enemy to your soul. The world will leave your soul in tatters, distorted by pride, fear, and greed. This is why we need to discover the way in Christ to restore our soul.

Every person is sacred. If we are going to talk about recovering the sacred in a secular world, we have to talk about the unique sacredness of the human being. There is a sacredness that belongs to all of God’s creation, the oceans and forests, the mountains and plains, the planets and stars, the plants and animals. But there is a unique human sacredness. It’s called the Imago Dei, the Image of God.

For most of the last half of Christian history we've made the gospel mostly juridical. We have made our salvation a study of how to be acquitted for our crimes and be declared innocent before the court of divine justice. But our problem is not just that we’ve run afoul of the law and stand guilty before God. Our deeper problem is that we are ill. We need a gospel that is therapeutic and healing. We need a physician to heal us from our harms. We are ill because of our addiction to mimesis and violence. We’re sick because we look at each other through the distorted lens of competitive fear. We harm ourselves because of our irrational obsession with wealth and power. The kingdom of God is enacted when the sick, both bodily sick and spiritually sick, are being healed!

The Bible is the word of God that bears witness to the Word of God: Jesus Christ. The Bible did not create the Heavens and Earth. The Bible did not become flesh. The divine Word of God did these things. Jesus is God. The Bible is not. We worship Jesus; we do not worship the Bible. We worship the God revealed in Scripture. The Bible is not perfect. Christ is the perfection of God as a human being. What the Bible does infallibly is point us to Jesus Christ. The Bible is the inspired witness to the true Word of God who is Jesus Christ. The Church must always be in conversation with our sacred text, but to the end that we might submit to the rule of the living Christ.

When it comes to being chosen in a favorable sense, we all want to be picked. Whether it's chosen for the baseball team, as a cheerleader, for the prom, or for the job, we all want to be special. To find yourself not among the chosen can be a very painful experience. We want to be among the chosen people, we want to be a chosen person. Within our own stories that we tell we are the chosen. Every nation and ethnicity have stories that affirm they are special and chosen: the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Native Americans, modern Americans, and of course, the Hebrew people. Within our own stories, we relate ourselves as the ones that are great and blessed, bringing wisdom and bringing liberty. We need the sense of chosenness to produce the necessary sense of community. But as we engage with other people, other tribes, other nations, and other ethnicities, we need a more contemplative view. This is exactly what the prophets do! They help us see life from a contemplative perspective.