Podcast: Gospel in Life

To many people, the whole point of prayer is this: how do you get God to give you what you need? Now, that’s not the point of prayer, and if you think it is, you will get very little. That’s the irony. Prayer is very effective for those people who don’t come into it hoping…

A life of absolute peace, a life of tremendous clarity, a life of total power and freedom, a life of high beauty—that’s the vision of the Lord’s Prayer. A whole new life that revolves around God. We’re going to look now at the part of the prayer that’s about admitting. Let me reiterate that since…

What’s ironic is the Lord’s Prayer has probably the most familiar words in the English language, and yet it is the secret to what you seek. We’re so tired of technology, of quantifying everything, of being a number. At the core of our being, we need and we desperately want real soul experience. And how…

It’s artificial to avoid the subject of money when so many of your problems, your worries, and your difficulties revolve around money. And it’s also artificial to avoid the subject because so much of the Bible is about money. The Bible says there can be no significant spiritual growth unless you put your money and…

In the middle of John 1, the religious leaders send people to interrogate John the Baptist. It doesn’t look like it’s got much to do with Christmas, and yet it does. Some major inner change has happened to John the Baptist. And if John the Baptist has had that change with what little knowledge he…

When the original hearers of John’s gospel—the Jews and the Greeks—heard the term, “the Word became flesh,” it was revolutionary. Many scholars have said it marked a complete revolution in the history of human thought.  But I’d like us to think about the fact that Christmas doesn’t change our lives like it ought to. John…

John 1 is about Jesus first coming into the world. It’s John’s way of helping us understand the meaning of Christmas.  And at the very beginning, John sort of hits us between the eyes and says the reason why Jesus Christ came into the world is so that you might be born again.  It’s all…

Light in the darkness is one of the ways that throughout history, Christmas has been celebrated. Lighting candles, and lights on trees, and lights at night. What is that all about? In John 1, John talks about Jesus coming into the world. It’s his way of talking about the meaning of Christmas. And in this…

Paul gives us an assurance at the end of Romans 8. It is magnificent and yet very simple. In these verses, he’s saying, “Here’s the thing that will absolutely change your life through Christ.”  Paul tells us this assurance, and he says this is the thing that you can use every day that will change…

Rightly so, at Christmas, people who are suffering want to know, “Why should I be merry? What basis do I really have for joy?” The answer is that if Christmas really happened, if God really did open a cleft in the pitiless walls of this world, if he broke into our broken reality with his…