Word Of Life Church Podcast

Success is an idol—the great American idol. Which emphasizes the scandal that Jesus died as a failure. Jesus died as an apparent failure in the eyes of everyone. Yes, we know that Easter changed that perspective, but slow down. We can't rush from Christmas to Easter. We have to take Good Friday on its own terms. If we use Easter to obliterate Good Friday, rather than illuminate Good Friday, we end up a "theology of success," instead of the true theology that comes from the Crucified God.

The Cross isn't just one thing with a single meaning. Rather the Cross is where all that is wrong with humankind and the world we've built is dragged into the light, and God's redemptive alternative is offered. Christ crucified is the Lamb of God (the last scapegoat) who takes away the foundational sin of scapegoating.

How did Jesus understand his own death? What purpose did he see in it? Did Jesus have a "theology of cross"? In fact, he did. A few days before Good Friday Jesus said his crucifixion and death would accomplish three things: 1. Judge the world. 2. Drive out Satan. 3. Reorganize the world.

Understanding that God is like Jesus is essential to our understanding of salvation. We must not think that salvation comes about because Jesus appeases a vengeful God, angry at the actions of sinful man. Salvation comes about because Jesus reveals the Father and does the Father's work. If we believe God killed Jesus for the sake of justice, we have dramatically distorted our understanding of salvation.God is like Jesus.God has always been like Jesus.There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.We have not always known what God is like—But now we do.

The universe has a flow and a telos, a purpose and an aim, a goal and a grain. And the grain of the universe is love. From the heart of God there is an endless flow of love. What wisdom knows is that to flow— and not fight— your way through life, you need to go with the grain. To flourish as a human being you must go with the grain of love. Our capacity to love comes from knowing that we are loved by God. Love of God demands love for the other— be they lover, neighbor, or enemy. The only way to love the other, especially an enemy is to practice the art of contemplation. Contemplation makes the Golden Rule possible.

When we look at the death of Jesus on the cross in the light of the resurrection, we are looking at our salvation. But, what do we really see when we look at the cross? Are we looking at the appeasement of a monster god through barbaric child sacrifice? Or are we seeing something else? Is the cross vengeance or love? When Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," he is not asking God to act contrary to his nature. He is, in fact, revealing the very heart of God! The cross is not about the satisfaction of a vengeful monster god, the cross is the full revelation of a supremely merciful God! In Christ we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. Once we know that God is revealed in Christ, we know what we are seeing when we look at the cross: The cross is where God in Christ absorbs sin and recycles it into forgiveness. The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Christ in order to forgive, but what God endures in Christ as he forgives.

Jesus was faithful. Jesus remains faithful. Jesus will be faithful. This theme of faithfulness is the foundation of Paul's view of how God intends to save the world through sending his Son. To see the the faithfulness of Jesus in the New Testament requires a proper understanding of the big story the Bible is telling, a four-act story of Creation, Corruption, Covenant, and New Creation. With that story in mind, we can see the faithfulness of Jesus in Paul's description of the death of Jesus in Romans 3:21-24. Through his faithfulness, God declares us justified, and thus incorporated into the covenant people of God.

Why did Jesus die? Why was he tortured? Why was he crucified? Why was he murdered? To answer these questions, you must first answer this question: Who Killed Jesus? This much must be made clear: God did not kill Jesus! To suggest God tortured and murdered his Son is to malign the character of God. God sent his Son into a world founded on a sinful and satanic system of blame and violence to bear witness to divine love and to save us from death and the ways of death. Jesus sacrificially laid down his life, but it was not a suicide. At the cross, human religion and politics committed homicide. The sacrificial killing of Jesus is not what God required; it's what we required.

We don’t preach the Bible, we preach Jesus. We use the Bible to preach Jesus. The difference between preaching the Bible and preaching Jesus is the difference between Christianity and Biblicism. The difference between Christianity and Biblicism is the difference between following a book and following our risen Lord. Philip didn’t preach the Bible, he preached Jesus. He used the Bible to preach Jesus. The Bible has never saved anyone. It’s Jesus who saves. The Bible is the means, but Jesus is the end!

We Christians are a most peculiar people. Why? Because we worship a crucified God. Other religions worship a an omnipotent God, a glorious God, a victorious God—but we worship a crucified God! The death of Jesus upon the cross was murder. It was a lynching. It was a mob killing that God knew would happen because of our sin, but he did not will it. What God willed was that through his death Jesus would save us from sin and death. God crucified. The giver of life put to death. The Creator crucified by his creation. This is the greatest scandal of all time.

The Transfiguration is the high point of the narrative arc in the synoptic gospels. Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus on the mountain where he was praying. This is the moment It is when the divinity of Jesus was revealed to Peter, James, John. The Transfiguration moment is where the Old Testament hands the project over to Jesus, where Moses and Elijah find their great successor, and where the old witness of the Hebrew scriptures truly becomes the new witness of the New Testament.

Special Guest Terry Wildman is a Native American and the head of Rain Song Ministries, a Christian organization ministering to the indigenous people of North America. In this special sermon, Terry Wildman describes the current plight of Native Americans and offers a perspective of an appropriate Christian response.

Pastor Brian Zahnd recently made a blog post that received considerable attention, entitled, "My Problem With The Bible". It has been shared over 17,000 times on Facebook, 700+ tweets on Twitter, and been reposted on numerous blogs across the internet. Obviously, he has hit on something that a lot of people resonate with. In this sermon, Pastor Brian shares that he is serious about the Bible, and wants to read it for all it's worth, but he has a problem with it. Discover what his problem is (and perhaps your problem too) in this sermon.

When we look to Scripture we discover God is the God of time who created time along with everything else in his creation. God existed before time. He is not bound by time, but rules over time. He entered into time through Jesus Christ. Time, as a part of God’s good creation, is sacred. One of the ways we can recover the sacredness of time is to organize it around Jesus himself. We mark the years by Jesus. This year is 2014 AD, with “AD” meaning the year of our Lord. We follow the church calendar in order to mark the months of the years around Jesus. We honor the sacredness of Sabbath because of the resurrection of Jesus and if we open ourselves, we find every moment to be sacred. Every moment opens up before us as an opportunity to acknowledge Jesus and make the moment-by-moment choice to obey him and not waste the time we have been given.

Jesus is presently building his church. We are called to walk in such a way as to build up the church, because we are one body, one church, one body of Christ. We work with Jesus to build up the church by consciously doing life together. God has made us in his image, in the image of the one God revealed in the distinct persons. We were created as distinct, unique individuals who are interconnected with other people. In the New Testament we find the recurring phrase "one another". This phrase tips us off to our responsibilities, the things we can do for one another as we live together, working to build a healthy, unified church.

The Bible opens with the story of God's work of creation. At the end of the first account of creation in Genesis the point is made emphatically: "...and behold, it was very good." Genesis 2 gives a second account of creation—this time the emphasis is on the human vocation. Creation was good, but it was incomplete. Adam was to work with God as a gardener, tending God’s good earth, cultivating it, caring for it, protecting it, and expanding it. The original human vocation was to work with God in the cultivation and care of God’s good earth. God gave Adam and Eve dominion over the earth in order to deputize them for the care and cultivation of the earth. But then sin happened, with catastrophic effects upon human identity and vocation. Not only did human beings begin to suffer, creation itself began to suffer. God's children commissioned with the care of God's good earth had turned bad.

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.