Podcast: Gospel in Life

To become a mature society in which we’re able to talk about faith, we also have to be able to talk about doubt. We don’t get much help here from either religious people or secular people. Religious people tend to see doubt as a bad thing. And secular people tend to think perennial doubt is…

We live in a pluralistic society, so we must ask this question: how can people be true to themselves and still get along? No matter who you are, if you care about the social fabric, that’s a huge question to answer.  My goal is to show Christians how they can be part of the solution….

It’s very common for people, even those who want to live the Christian life, to feel they have to check their brains at the door if they’re going to believe. Often, we hear this basic approach to the Bible: the gospels were written down after years of legends, so we don’t really know how much…

We live in a culture of choice. In our individualistic culture, our place and our parents and our social location don’t determine everything that we can do. We have some choices. Choices! What does that mean?  That means we’ve never needed wisdom more than we do now, because wisdom is the ability to make wise…

We live in a culture in which there are more choices than there ever have been. But you can be incredibly good, moral, and knowledgeable and still make pretty stupid choices.  Wisdom is knowing the right thing to do in the 80 percent of choices that the moral rules don’t directly apply to. What you…

There are choices everywhere, just zillions and zillions of choices. And if you don’t make good choices, it can be very destructive. Bad choices blow up on you. Every choice is like a fork in the road, and once you make it, you really can’t go back to where you were.  What does it take…

The trouble with the Sermon on the Mount is it’s so familiar that almost nobody listens to it, almost nobody knows what it’s saying. How do we know that? At the very end of the sermon, it says the crowds were amazed at Jesus’s teaching. And that word, “amazed,” in Greek meant thunderstruck, shocked, astounded….

There’s no one section where Jesus lays out how a relationship with him radically changes our human relationships and forms a new, deep, radical human community in Christ. It’s not in one place — it’s all throughout the Sermon on the Mount.  The Sermon on the Mount is really a description of a new kind…

When people say, “I’ve tried prayer, and it didn’t work,” what Jesus is saying is, “You used prayer, not the way I designed it, but with a false model of spirituality.” For Jesus, the importance of prayer is revealed in a little unobtrusive word at the beginning of this passage in the Sermon on the…

If we actually take the gospel, the essential message of Jesus Christ, and we live it out, what will it look like? That’s what the Sermon on the Mount is about.  And in this part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we get to the area of money and possessions.  Jesus tells us three things…