Word Of Life Church Podcast

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.

Christianity is a sacramental faith. It is not a faith of mere theological ideas, but of sacraments. Sacrament is an interface between the spiritual and the material, between heaven and earth. Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of the Word of God is the ultimate Sacrament. Because of the Incarnation and Resurrection Christianity is a sacramental faith. To be properly practiced, Christianity requires not just prayer and scripture, but water, bread, and wine. These are the necessary elements for the sacraments of baptism and communion. These sacraments are portals for interaction with Christ, who is the ultimate Sacrament.

Mankind was created for more than what we're living for. Created in God's likeness to bear his image, we strayed far from the life of God. It is Jesus who calls us, as he did Nicodemus, out of the "Circus of Systems" and into the life of the age to come, the life we are created for. Will we have the faith of Nicodemus and enter this new life?

Secularism is a philosophy that says nothing is truly sacred. At best there are only ideas we call sacred. But there are no real sacred objects or places or times or things. The secular West has generally accepted this premise; but we feel it as a great loss. The modern premise that there are no sacred things is simply untrue. Christians insist that the sacred is more than a mere idea; there are sacred realities. Christian insistence upon the reality of the sacred is based upon one confession: The Word became flesh. Words are symbols signifying something beyond themselves. Words are not the thing themselves, but they are how we describe and communicate the idea of a thing. The Word of God, however, is God. The Word of God is Life and Light, and that Word became flesh! The Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, perfectly reveals God because he is God made flesh. The Incarnation settles the question of whether or not there are sacred things: Jesus is sacred flesh and blood!

The role of art is to remind us of this beauty, to help us see what we've overlooked. Those who labor in the visual arts help us see what we have lost sight of. The poets and writers remind us of what we too easily forget: Life is beautiful. Even when life is tragic and painful, there is still beauty in it. We can say similar things about the artists working in music, theater, film, dance. They don’t just create beauty, they call attention to the beauty that already belongs to life. Life is beautiful. And ultimately life is beautiful because God is an artist. God doesn't mass produce anything. Not mountains, not snowflakes. He doesn't manufacture cheap clones. We share a common faith; the faith that confesses Jesus Christ is Lord. But each of us also has a unique story. We need to allow more latitude for diverse stories of saving grace. And not just diversity in how people encounter Christ, but diversity for how the life in Christ is lived out. Don't compare your story with others. We don't need an enforced c

21st century Western culture no longer has the sense of a God-saturated world. Modern people are not very religious at all. Today most people, though not atheists, feel God is somehow absent or far away. Instead we feel that we live in a secular world with God a long way off. Collectively we feel this as a kind of loss. The Western world in modernity is like a person haunted by a nagging feeling that something has been lost. That something is the Sacred. The sacred has been lost; but it can be recovered. However, this is NOT done by taking up arms in the culture wars. The culture wars are mostly a debate about the nature of civil religion in America. We cannot try to enforce the sacred on a secular culture. Instead, we need to help the church recover the beauty of the sacred. It is sacred beauty, not angry protest, that can make Christianity alluring again.

To have a sense of the kind of time in which you are living is part of being prophetic. Malachi was a prophet. He had a sense of the time in which he lived. Malachi knew he lived in a dark time. But as a prophet, Malachi believed the day would come, that there would be a dawn. This dawn (as all the prophets said) would be the coming of Messiah. God's anointed king would bring the day of God's glorious reign upon earth. The canon of the Hebrew scripture closes with a final prophetic picture of Messiah: The picture of a glorious sunrise where sun rays are seen as wings. With prophetic imagination Malachi sees healing conveyed in those radiant beams. This is Malachi's poetic prophesy of The Healing Sunrise.

The Gospel of John tells us that "no one has ever seen God until they see Jesus." The revelation of God is given to us in Jesus Christ. And so we must ask ourselves: Does the view of an angry sadistic monster God look like Jesus? Do we see examples of Jesus pouring out vengeful wrath upon people? Of course we don't! And so, we must reject the view of a monster God. Yet people still struggle with the vision of an angry, vindictive God. God's attitude towards you is one of unwavering fatherly love. God knows you and God loves you. God as your father is responsible for you. He is not a neglectful parent. Our Father is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. God doesn't view you as an enemy, but even if he did, he would love you. God is kind!

Christ is the new day. If we think only in terms of Christ bringing a new day then we sit by passively and wait for Jesus to forcibly bring the new day. This is the way most of us have been misled to think about the kingdom of Christ. But if we think a bit more creatively, deeply, and scripturally, we discover Christ is the new day and that to be in Christ is to enter the day now! This was in the Bible all along, but somehow we managed to miss it. To believe in Christ is to be baptized into Christ and his kingdom, which is to enter into the new day that is Christ!

The good news of great joy is that the world's true king has been born! This Savior-King is going to free us from our chains and lead us out of the dark. Christmas is the time of year when Christians are called to repeat the sounding joy. The world’s true King didn't come to reign over the old politics of fear. Christ the King came to lead us out of fear and into the politics of love. Jesus invites us into a new kind of politics. It is the way of peace. There is no way to peace, peace is the way. Jesus is peace. Instead of predatory, our stance is benevolent. We don't have to hate. We don't have to fight. We don't have to fear. We can have goodwill toward our sisters and brothers, and toward all of our fellow humans!

A long time ago, the church made the cross mostly about private and individual sin. From there the cross eventually became largely sentimental. What was left out was its prophetic critique and divine condemnation of the religion and politics of the world. Religion has been largely about using blame to make ourselves feel better. Politics has been mostly about using power to get what we want. The crucifixion is where God exposes and shames our religion of blame and our politics of power. The cross is where love triumphs over blame through forgiveness. The cross is where love triumphs over violent power through suffering. The cross is the triumph of God's LOVE over the world!

In the early first century, declaring a new religion wouldn't cause much trouble. The world was awash in varied religion, but it had one political scheme: the Roman Empire. For the early Christians to declare a new political king was a very dangerous proclamation. The early Christians dramatically and radically re-imagined the world with a new king, a new Caesar. This is precisely what the gospel is a declaration that the world now has a new emperor: Jesus Christ of Nazareth! The early Christians were accused of being "people who are turning the world upside down" because they were part of a strange movement that worshiped a crucified Galilean Jew whom they claimed had been raised from the dead and was now the world's true emperor. This new king would reorganize humanity, based on a system of reconciling love, not avenging power. This new world is the Kingdom of God.

The book of Daniel sets forth a vision of a king who is not like warrior-conqueror kings of world history. The dominating rulers throughout history were warriors, known for their rage and mercilessness in conquering the kingdoms of the world. But Daniel reveals a king who will rule humanely and not beastly, who's reign is known for its peace and everlasting shalom. We worship a different kind of king: King Jesus!

When Jesus left his quiet life as a carpenter to launch his career as a prophet and preacher, he first had to walk from Nazareth to Capernaum. We to tend to look at the life of Jesus as being filled with wonder and miracles. But in the Incarnation of God, Christ entered into the tedium of human life. But Jesus made it holy. All of the unremarkable bits necessary to living are made holy in Christ. Ordinary living is elevated to a sacrament. When we see the Incarnation for what it really is, life itself becomes a kind of Jesus Trail. In the ordinary activities of human life we are walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

The theme of Jesus Christ as king is the predominant theme of the Christmas Carols. We sing "Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her king" and "Hark! The herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king". But what do we mean when we sing about Jesus being king? Is Jesus just a “spiritual” king? A king in heaven? Actually the answer is NO! When the apostles first called Jesus King, they meant it in the most literal and political way! The gospel is the story of how Jesus of Nazareth became King of the world. The gospel is not primarily about going to heaven, self-improvement, or even personal forgiveness. Though these things are related to the gospel, the gospel is primarily the royal announcement that Jesus Christ is now King of the world!