Word of Life Church Podcast

While there are those who have attempted to strip all of the hardship out of the Christian life, the reality is life is hard and following Jesus is hard. The Apostle Paul said he chose to boast in his hardships, calling some of his hardships a “thorn in the flesh.” Jesus said the way he was blazing for us with narrow and hard, so we should accept hardship and expect it. The hard is what makes life great. Indeed everything we call great was bought by the hardship of someone.

When Jesus’ disciples saw a man who had been born blind they asked the a question framed around blame. Who sinned? Who can we blame? Whose bad karma is this? The disciples belief was essentially that because something bad has happened, someone must have sinned, and somehow they deserved it. People who blame suffering on bad karma (and Christians do this all the time) still have mud in their eyes; they are still blind. Jesus is the light of the world. And his light brings a whole new perspective to the works of God. The works of God are not to assign blame and condemn the victim. If we will wash in the water of Jesus, we will get the mud out of our eyes and begin to see. It doesn’t matter who sinned; the way of God is grace and the work of God is mercy!

Often, we confuse God for a malevolent monster that intends us harm. Because of deep-seated shame the thought of God produces anxiety and avoidance and generates a “monster god” neurosis. This becomes the foundation for appeasement-based religion. The monster god narrative feeds into a wrong theology about Jesus— that Jesus came in order to save us from God. We are terrified of the One who is actually trying to help us. We mistakenly think the One coming to help us is coming to harm us. But the revelation of God based in Christ tells us something else: God is love! Jesus comes as the rising sun giving full revelation and dispelling the monster god. Jesus does not save us from God! Jesus reveals God to us! Jesus calls us into a world free from the monster god— A world created by the true and living God, the Father God who is love.

In Jewish culture, the sea is a representation of chaos and the origin of evil. The biblical Israelites were not a seafaring people. This is made evident by the way the bible uses the sea in metaphor. The book of Revelation the new earth has no more sea. Job, in praise of God, says, “God tramples the waves of the sea.” And in the book of Daniel, the author describes a vision of beasts that come up out of the sea. So when Jesus came walking on the sea to the disciples who were in great distress in the storm, it is a sign. It is a sign that leads us to life and informs our faith in Jesus. When we see Jesus walking on water on the rough sea in a dark and stormy night, it tells us that Jesus is Lord! When our life feels like a sinking ship and we are in a dark and stormy situation, we are not alone. Jesus will come to us and calm our fears. When Jesus comes to you everything will be alright!

At your worst, most sinful, backslidden, far from God state, God’s heart towards you is still one which burst with longing for reconciliation. God is not full of vengeance or angry with you. His attitude toward you is one of unwavering love, like a mother or father has towards his children. God knows you and loves you, and knows you have a complicated story. Unlike most people, God does not put all of the blame on you. God as your Father is responsible for you.

The human condition suffers from a kind of emptiness. We are born with a pervasive mentality of scarcity and insufficiency. We don't perceive ourselves as blessed with abundance, but cursed with scarcity. We fear there won't be enough oil, land, water, food, money, labor to go around, so we use force to guarantee us what we believe is ours. This way of viewing the world is absolutely dominant, And into this sad world dominated by the paradigm of scarcity the Son of God appears. Jesus came to save us from the cycle of conquest, war, famine, death. Jesus constantly tell us not to worry about scarcity, but to trust in God. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is the sign pointing us to Jesus and a new way. Christ is the single point at which the Infinity of God is poured into the finite Creation. We don't have to fight down here. To connect with Christ is to connect with the Infinite! This connecting point is called Jesus Christ. To connect with this point is called faith. To believe in Jesus in the right way is to connect our lives to The Beauty of the Infinite.

We read in Hebrews 11:1 that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. We accept this statement about faith, but how exactly is faith substance and evidence? Some have tried to make faith too spiritual by imagining faith to be a spiritual substance, a force under our control. However this is not how we see faith at work in Scripture. Others have attempted to define faith as empirical evidence, trying to conjure up rational arguments to answer every question raised against the faith. Yet faith is not empirically verifiable because the God who is the object of our faith cannot be found using the rules of empiricism. When viewed in the context of Hebrews 11 and 12, we discover that faith is substance and evidence as it is confessed and lived out in the life of the Church. We become the substance and evidence of faith as we rightly confess and rightly live out the things we believe.

This is the third message in a series of the seven signs John recounts in order to form our faith in Jesus. It's the story of a man paralyzed for 38 years whom Jesus healed at the Pool of Bethesda. In this story we see that what the healing that the Pool of Bethesda promised is what Jesus does! And Jesus is not only the hope of the Jews; he is also the hope of pagan Gentiles. We are all in need of some kind of healing, and Jesus is the healer.

In order to experience natural, open conversation with Jesus, an openness is required. 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 "salvation" event ruins us for future spiritual growth. Often, people have their one moment of spiritual openness, and then slam the door forever! But nothing is more essential to spiritual development than spiritual openness. Christianity is an ongoing conversation with Jesus, the Living Word with whom we must constantly engage.

If we treat the Bible as a complete catalog of "do's" and "don'ts", then we can almost always find a way to justify whatever we want to justify. From slavery to genocide, you can find a scripture to "prove" just about anything you want in the Bible. But if we recognize that Jesus is the Living Word with whom we must engage, then we are engaging with the Logos of Life - God's Wisdom of how to live. To believe in Jesus is to believe that he is what God has to say. If you'll believe in the Logos of Life (Christ), your soul will be healed and you will find life.