Word of Life Church Podcast

<p>​The day you came<br>Naked, afraid<br>Young mother screams and pushes you<br>The day you came<br> <br>Oh joy begin<br>Weak little thing<br>More precious there’ll be nothing, no<br>Oh joy begin<br> <br>Let’s not forget these early days<br>Remember we begin the same<br>We lose our way in fear and pain<br>Oh joy begin<br> <br>First just one step<br>One word and then<br>With laughter sing, oh life begin<br>First just one step<br> <br>Innocent kiss<br>Black magic bliss<br>First broken bone<br>Sudden and swift<br>Oh innocence<br> <br>Let’s not forget these early days<br>Remember we begin the same<br>We lose our way in fear and hate<br>Oh joy begin<br><br>Oh joy begin</p>

<p>Love Never<br>Jimmy Eat World<br><br>Love ain’t never been your friend<br>Love never going hear what you’re demanding<br>Love ain’t some magical thing<br>Love never gonna to be the way you’re dreaming<br>It’s going to seem so far<br>It’s going to feel so hard<br>Until you want the work more than the reward<br>Until you stop asking, “Oh, what is it all for?”<br>Do you want the work more than the reward?</p>

<p>The story line of the Book of Acts is very straightforward: It retraces the Gospel from Jerusalem to Samaria to the Gentiles and finally to Rome. The dominant person in the first twelve chapters is the Apostle Peter: His preaching in Jerusalem, his proclamation of the Gospel to the Gentiles at Caesarea, and the Council in Jerusalem that determined that Gentiles do not have to become Jewish in order to belong to the body of Messiah.<br><br>The central figure in the remaining sixteen chapters of Acts is the Apostle Paul: His conversion on the Damascus Road, his preaching of the Gospel to Jews and Gentiles throughout the Roman Empire, the persecution he suffered from both Jews and Gentiles, and finally his arrival in the capital city of Rome about thirty years after the resurrection of Jesus. Rome is where the Jesus revolution had to go.</p>

<p>Why were the first Christians frequently persecuted? Not because they embraced a new religion, but because with their faith, their baptism and their Christian lifestyle they announced and enacted a new social order. The first Christians pledged their allegiance to Christ as the world's new and true King and they dared to live according to that allegiance.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>Join us next year for our next Water To Wine Gathering, June 13-15, 2019. Register now at <a href="http://www.watertowinegathering.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">www.watertowinegathering.com</a>.</p>

<p>In Acts 9 we meet a man who was always zealous for God, who always wanted a revolution, who always wanted to change the world; but after he met Jesus he had to rethink how the world is to be changed and how the revolution is to come. This man is Saul of Tarsus—we know him as the Apostle Paul.</p>

<p>Hierarchies and strategies of exclusion belong to the old order that died with Christ. In the new order of the risen Christ, revolutionary inclusion and equality reign. Ethnic hierarchies, economic hierarchies, gender hierarchies are all done away with!</p>

<p>From Stephen and James, Peter and Paul, Polycarp and Perpetua in the early church, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jim Eliot, Oscar Romero, and the Coptic martyrs in modern times, the church has always had those who overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, and loved not their lives even unto death. These are the martyrs—the great saints whose loyal witness we honor.</p>

<p>On the day of Pentecost Peter preached the gospel to people who belonged to a religion that had become corrupted by its compromised allegiance to a materialistic and militaristic empire. So Peter’s invitation was, “be saved from this crooked generation.” It's the same today.</p>

<p>The Bible becomes an obstacle for some people when they are in a serious season of doubt or a process of spiritual deconstruction. Some choose to throw the Bible out and others simply walk away from the faith. Jesus offers us a better way: Read the Bible with Jesus at the center. In this way, the Bible leads us to Jesus. The written word leads us to the living Word. The word made text leads us to the Word made flesh. The Spirit-inspired word leads us to the Spirit-conceived Word. The Bible is the word of God insofar as it leads us to Jesus who leads us into the life of God, the Triune life of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.</p>

<p>In the Bible the new day doesn’t begin at sunrise or at midnight, but at sunset. Thus, for example, the Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday. In the Jewish way of thinking each new day begins with new darkness. This is counterintuitive. The new day does not begin by being able to see, the new day begins with being unable to see. Dark nights come before new dawns. Spiritual progress does not begin with the bright day of knowing; spiritual progress begins with the dark night of unknowing.</p>

<p>"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<br><br>"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</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.<br><br>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>"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</p>

<p>The truth can change a man<br>In the wisdom of his days<br>It whispers soft but constantly<br>You cannot live this way<br>–The Call, “When”<br><br>In the madness of modernity how do we cultivate the practices of prayer and contemplation that give us a life that we can live?</p>

<p>"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</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>On Jesus’ last Tuesday, he speaks to us with unfiltered clarity. The temple and it’s systems which perpetuate injustice has walked the way which leads to destruction. As the end of Jesus’ life draws near, he speaks to us about the things of utmost importance. How might we avoid the same fate as this temple and the city which surrounds it? We must let Jesus lead us in the way of neighborly love.</p>

<p>On Monday of the final week before his death Jesus interrupted the operations of the Temple by driving out the sacrificial animals with a whip and flipping over the tables of the money changers. We are accustomed to calling this the "cleansing of the Temple." But is that what it really was? Or is there a better to way to interpret Jesus' provocative action in the Temple?</p>

<p>There's always some dude on a horse. The most famous dude on a horse is Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). Even his horse is famous—the warhorse Bucephalus (355–326 BC). At the same time when Alexander and Bucephalus were conquering the world, the Hebrew prophet Zechariah gave a different vision of a different kind of king. Zechariah prophesied that Israel’s king would not be like Alexander the Great, riding a warhorse and conquering by killing. Instead, Zechariah prophesied that Messiah would come with gentleness and humility, riding a lowly donkey and teaching peace to the nations.</p>

<p>Jesus came as a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy where the wolf and lamb come to eat together. The mission of Jesus is revolutionary because Jesus wants to save both the oppressed and the oppressor, both the abused and the abuser, both the offended and the offender, both the lambs and the wolves. All people are invited into his saving embrace. We can experience a kind of forgiveness that leads to reconciliation if lambs tell the wolves how their actions make them feel and if wolves ask, "Will you forgive me?"</p>

<p>Cristine Eckhardt's Story of Forgiveness</p>

<p>What Jesus calls us to in the Kingdom of God is not a religiously modified version of the self-preservation and self-promotion value systems that govern the empires of men. What Jesus calls us to is far more radical than that. Jesus calls us to the demanding ethic of the turned cheek and the second mile; he challenges us with the absurd idea of loving our enemies, overcoming evil with good, and triumphing over tragedy through forgiveness. The only reason we even entertain the possibility of living such a life is that we believe Jesus is the Son of God.</p>

<p>Todd Norris's story of forgiveness</p>

<p>We must dare to believe in Jesus’ radical ideas of enemy-love and endless-forgiveness, because without this kind of love and this kind of forgiveness, there is no future. The future you look for, the future you long for, the future that would free you from the unending repetition of the painful past, lies in your capacity to move beyond the past through the liberating practice of faith-based forgiveness. It is forgiveness that creates the future you want to live in.</p>

<p>Candy Draper's Story of Forgiveness</p>

<p>When we choose to forgive those who harm us, instead of perpetuating the cycle of revenge, we become a living imitation of Jesus Christ. As we do this we help flood a world hell-bent on paybacks with a forgiveness that washes away sin. The world is full of a lust for vengeance that fuels our conflicts—from petty quarrels to deadly wars. Christians are called to opt out of the game of getting even.</p>

<p>Glen & Heather Taylor's Story of Forgiveness</p>

<p>If Christianity is to be a compelling and relevant voice in the 21st Century, we need a fresh message—not a new innovation or novel interpretation, but a return to our roots. And if Christianity is about anything, it's about forgiveness.</p>

<p>The Epiphany text begins with these words: “In the time of King Herod.” Most of history has been “in the time of King Herod.” And if not the time of Herod, then the time of Pharaoh, the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the time of Caesar, the time of Nero, all the way into modern times—the time of Hitler and Mussolini, of Franco and Salazar, of Pinochet and Putin. It’s true that most of history has been lived in the time of tyrant kings. But the gospel also tells us that since the birth of Jesus, heaven has been invading the time of tyrant kings.</p>

<p>In singing his prophetic song over the infant Jesus, Simeon drew upon a verse from one of Isaiah’s Servant Songs. The Servant Songs (Isaiah 49–52) were prophetic poems written in the sixth century BC that envision Israel as Yahweh’s Servant. But these poems also seem to envision Yahweh’s Servant as a person who will be the embodiment Israel. In other words, this Servant will be Israel in person, as a person. And it is this person who will fulfill Israel’s mission to the world—it is this person will be Messiah!</p>

<p>This is what Christians confess about Christmas: Emmanuel (God with us) joined humanity, not by swooping down from the celestial heavens in a golden chariot, but by being born—born in a stable, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. Like all of us, God was pushed from the womb through contractions, labor, agony, and blood, to enter headfirst into the beautiful and horrible mess that is our world. This is not Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus, this is Jesus born of Mary.</p>

<p>It was through a young, poor Jewish maiden named Miriam (Mary) living in the backwater Galilean village of Nazareth during the Roman occupation of the first century, that the Eternal Logos, the Word of God, the Logic of Divine Love, took on flesh, becoming incarnate and fully human. In Christian theology this is known as the Incarnation and Mary is known as the Theotokos—the God-bearer. The Incarnation of Christ through the Theotokos is one of the most sublime confessions of the Christian faith—it’s the sacred mystery of how through a cooperation of the Spirit and humankind the holy becomes enfleshed.</p>

<p>John the Baptist was a burning and shining lamp—but he wasn’t the dawn of the new day. John doesn’t belong to the new day—John belongs to the end of the long night. John is not the sun of righteousness that will give the world a new order and orbit. John is a supernova—the brief, brilliant explosion of a dying star. But it's John who prepares us for the coming of Jesus and the birth of a galaxy of grace.</p>