Word Of Life Church Podcast

John describes Jesus as "the light that has come into the darkness." All of us have been impacted by the darkness of the world's system and we have seen the effects of this darkness in the lives of the next generation. It is up to us to bring this next generation, our children, into the light of Christ and each of us have a part to play.

The "kingdom of God" is Jesus-language. Jesus began his public ministry by saying, "Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand." He continued to proclaim the kingdom and demonstrated the kingdom throughout his ministry. After his resurrection he spent time with his disciples, talking to them about the kingdom, but did they see it? Do we? For all of our worship and devotion to Jesus, do we see the kingdom he proclaimed? A glimpse of the kingdom of God changes everything. It changes how we live, how we love, and how we pray. Seeing the kingdom is possible, but it requires new eyes. We must be born again if we are to see this kingdom which has come.

At the core of being an authentic expression of the Kingdom of Jesus in the 21st century is following King Jesus. As we follow him, we hear him calling us to go and make disciples. We are followers of Jesus who are called to make followers of Jesus. We invite people to follow Jesus and welcome them into the family through baptism. From baptism we continue the disciple-making process by teaching them the ways of Jesus. He enables us to make disciples by being present with us. He has promised to be with us by his Spirit, transforming us into the kind of people who want to follow him.

To be a Christian is to confess faith in God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We believe the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and is himself God. Part of the ongoing ministry of Jesus is to baptize us or immerse us in God's life-giving Spirit. The picture of this baptism is not so much of individuals getting the Holy Spirit within themselves. Rather the picture of full immersion in the Holy Spirit is Jesus gathering his church together and plunging us into the depths of the Spirit. We need the Spirit like our body needs each breath and as we live immersed in the Spirit we find a life of righteousness, peace, and joy.

Christianity is inherently full of mystery. Christianity is not an explanation, it is the confession of a sacred mystery. At the heart of the Christian faith is the great mystery of the Incarnation. Most Christian heresies come from trying to relieve the tension of the Incarnation. In trying to lessen the tension we either diminish the deity of Christ or the humanity of Christ. We must learn to enter the mystery and live within that tension, that Jesus is fully human AND fully God. The flesh and blood of Jesus is both human flesh and blood and divine flesh and blood. When Jesus offers us his human flesh and blood, he offers us divine, life-giving flesh and blood. Don't try to explain this mystery, don't resist this mystery, don't balk at this mystery... Enter The Mystery!

One of the primary goals of spiritual formation is to become your true self. The real you is calm, content, wise, and unafraid. It is only the false self, the shadow self, that is agitated, grasping, foolish, afraid. You may have had very little contact with your true self. The self who is calm, content, wise, and unafraid is who you really are deep inside. Why are we more often agitated, grasping, foolish, and afraid? We have been distorted by sin. The fallen world has marred the image of God in our life. And so, 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. The psalms are meditations that bend the soul toward calm, content, wisdom, courage. This is one of the primary purposes of daily praying the Psalms: to lift up our soul to God and discover and recover our true self.

Jesus is a king, the king; and he has a kingdom. To be a Christian is to confess that Jesus is the world’s rightful king and to enter that kingdom by faith and baptism. Our calling is to live as citizens of the kingdom of Jesus here and now, in the 21st century. We don’t live in 2nd century persecution or 12th century Christendom or 20th century modernity. We live in the 21st century postmodern world with its own challenges to the gospel and its unique opportunities to embody the Christian faith. If we can learn to live as a people faithful to Jesus we will be a city on a hill.

God doesn't cause all things to happen, nor does he always prevent bad things from happening. But God does cause all things that happen to work together for good. But God is able to take all the events of your life, the good and bad, the beautiful and ugly, and weave them together in such a way that in the end the whole story is beautiful! Sometimes in the present moment our lives seem to be a confusing, painful mess. But the One at the loom working on the story of your life has a hand of grace. When dark, ugly, and painful events come into our life, we suffer. But never let go of the promise that, in the end, the tapestry of our lives will be beautiful."He will wipe away every tear from their eyes… and there will be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. And he who sits upon the throne says this: 'Behold! I am making all things new!'" –Revelation 21

When imperfect people aspire to perfection, the results are disastrous. And when people find themselves in a culture where perfection is expected, (in their family, or church, or job), they are forced to fake it. Perfectionism requires hypocrisy, and requires people to live outside of reality. But Jesus saves us from all of that! Jesus saves us from the pressure to be perfect. This is really good news! When you don’t have to be perfect, you can begin to be good. The glory of God is seen in mercy, not perfection. Jesus has established a temple for the imperfect. Being perfect is not what Christianity is all about. The church is a place where broken people can find acceptance, forgiveness, and healing in Jesus Christ. The house that Jesus builds is a temple for the imperfect. The church is to be a temple for the imperfect, a place where the glory of God is seen in mercy.

We don't like to admit it, but it's not always our weaknesses that get us in trouble. Sometimes it's what we are good at— our strengths, our successes, our victories— that cause trouble to find us. We pray for success, and some of those prayers are answered. But too much success can become a stumbling block. If the Apostle Paul had nothing but success and smooth sailing in his ministry, it would have been his undoing. But Paul suffered, he felt weak, and knew he had to depend on the grace of Jesus. In this way, Paul’s life reflected the contours of the cruciform. Paul would have never achieved the same authority if he had not been subjected to great suffering. Paul gains both grace and credibility because he suffered deeply.

Everywhere Paul went there were riots. But riots were never Paul's doing or desire or intent. Paul didn't advocate for angry, loud, public protest, but just the opposite. He wrote to the Thessalonians that they should “aspire to lead quiet lives." Paul advocates not for a riot Christianity, but a quiet Christianity. In a world that grows weary of the endless noise of ideological anger, the church is to be a haven of quietness and trust, a quiet refuge of peace. Isaiah dreams about what it will be like when righteousness returns to the earth. He write that the effect will be peace and the result will be quietness and trust. The result of righteousness among God's people is not riot and protest, but Quietness and Trust.

In the garden of Gethsemane, the disciple Peter was ready to go to prison and death with Jesus. But when he attempted to defend Jesus from the Roman soldiers who had come to arrest him, Jesus rebuked Peter, telling him to put away his sword and renounce violence. Peter was disillusioned and began to follow Jesus only at a distance. Before being redeemed, Peter would end up shedding some heavy tears. In in our own lives, often deep spiritual transformation happens only through the shedding of tears. Tears are necessary to soften the soul. But Jesus will not leave those tears unredeemed, they serve a holy purpose. Jesus remade Peter after his greatest failure, which caused those heavy tears. God, by his grace, uses our sins and failures to form Christ in us. Before you can be remade, you may have to be undone- and that will involve shedding some tears.

Pastor Derek Vreeland delivers a sermon entitled, "The Useful God".

Jacob swaggered through life with the confidence typical of a con man. He was a success in the shallowest sense of the word. Jacob had a kind of success; but what he didn't have was dignity, integrity, holiness. God was at work in Jacob's life and would bring about holiness in Jacob. The tool that God would use to produce this holiness in Jacob’s life was pain. When Jacob came face to face with real pain he would see the face of God. Transformed by pain, Jacob limped the rest of his life. He had been blessed and broken— and his blessed brokenness gave him a new name and a new life.

Jesus breaks bread and calls it his body. His broken body becomes the source of our salvation This is breaking that is good and that belongs to redemption and resurrection. This is the kind of breaking we're called to share with Jesus. But there is a kind of breaking—a kind of response to pressure—that is not good. After receiving the broken bread, Judas departed into the night to betray Jesus. Judas' journey into the darkness was a response to pressure that is Breaking Bad. Pain, pressure, disappointment are the sources of inevitable breakage in our lives. As humans, you will experience these things. It's part of the human condition. How you respond to these pains determines whether you break good or break bad. We are called to follow the Jesus way of trusting God, and not breaking bad. When we trust God, God is faithful and becomes a source of healing. But when we break bad and try to take control, we inflict our wounds on others. Let's learn to trust in God!

We are to be gospel-centric and gospel-saturated in the life of the church, because the gospel creates a certain kind of culture, shaping how we think and how we live. In order to be this kind of church, we preach the gospel first and morality second. God has saved us and called us to a holy life, but we emphasize the gospel of God's great love first. This life then creates the kind of culture whereby we can flourish in the holy life, where the Spirit continues his work of transformation within us.

The idea that God could and would truly suffer is foreign and scandalous to us. From the dawn of religious consciousness, humanity has shared similar images of God: The Glorious God, The Almighty God, The Holy God, The Merciful God. But the idea that God could suffer is something altogether unexpected. But God did suffer; torture, crucifixion, and finally death. On the cross Jesus suffers with us as God. God not only became human, he became the kind of human we don't want to be; A despised and rejected outcast, a failure. Jesus Christ God with us in life, in struggle, in sorrow, in pain, and in death. Jesus died the worst kind of death, that he might go down to the ugliest depths of death. But this suffering is not just an act of solidarity; it's also an act of salvation. God in Christ suffered death that he might enter into death and lead the way out. God saves us by suffering death with us! Only the suffering God can help.

In the Bible, the new day doesn't begin at sunrise or at midnight, but rather, at sunset. God wants us to see that each new day begins with darkness. The new day does not begin by being able to see— The new day begins with being unable to see. Likewise, spiritual growth does not begin with knowing. Holding onto certitude and insisting you have all the answers prevents spiritual progress. The process of spiritual growth is knowing, unknowing, and then new knowing. There are some things you have to unlearn before you can make spiritual progress. We want to think that to make spiritual progress all we need is positive addition. But a lot of making spiritual progress is about negative subtraction. Unknowing is harder than not knowing. It's not the learning that is hard, it's the unlearning.

Religion can be misused as a way of avoiding the reality of pain. Religion becomes delusional and destructive when misconstrued as a guaranteed way of avoiding pain. This phenomenon is dramatized in the cycles of debate found in the Hebrew scriptures of Job. The first lesson we should learn from the book of Job is to be wary of explaining to sufferers why they are suffering. If we accept that Job was a blameless man who suffered outrageous and undeserved misfortune, as the scriptures says, then our false certitudes, our easy answers, and our trite clichés need to be called into question. Perhaps the main lesson we are to learn is that blame is the satan and serves no good purpose—whether it's the friends blaming Job, or Job nearly blaming God.

The bread and wine in communion are more than a symbol, but not less than that. In the broken bread we see not only a symbol of the brokenness of Christ given for the sins of the world, we also see a picture of the church. Jesus blesses us; he breaks us; he gives us to the world. This three-step Eucharistic action provides for us our core identity. We are blessed. We are broken. We are given. In our brokenness we admit we are broken by sin and we also choose to break open ourselves to allow people to see us as we are. This kind of vulnerability is the pathway of love. We cannot love or be loved if we do not trust. We do not trust and do not become trustworthy if we do not know. We do not know and are not known if we are not vulnerable.