Podcast: Gospel in Life

We need every bit of help we can get to learn to pray, “Thy will be done,” because we’re going right into the teeth of our culture.  The essence of American culture is the belief that the more free we are to decide for ourselves, the happier we’ll be. But Jesus Christ says every time…

What does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come”?  Jesus gave us his instruction on how to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s filled with concepts you need to know from the rest of the Bible. There are two places—Matthew 5 and Luke 6—where Jesus tells us a lot about the kingdom of God…

Hallowed is an old English word that means to treat something as sacred. It means to be captivated, astonished, melted with grateful joy for who God is and what he has done.  For many years, I felt I didn’t know how to praise God, because nobody ever gave me specifics. As we look now at…

What does it mean to pray, “Our Father”? It’s much more complicated than you think.  Everything Jesus Christ came to do—the reason he came, the purpose of his salvation—was that we might receive adoption. We can pray “Our Father” because we’ve been adopted into the family of God.  Let’s look briefly at 1) the gift…

If you’re going to deal with the brutal realities of life, the writer of Hebrews says you have to have shepherds in your life. Hebrews is written to people whose lives are filled with problems. And here, in the last passage of Hebrews, the writer tells us if we’re gonna make it, we have to…

When you embrace God by faith two things come into your life: a transforming power and a deep tension. It’s a duality. If you try to resolve the deep tension, you lose the transforming power.  The writer of Hebrews says the great believers in history were resident aliens on earth. In Greco-Roman society, a resident…

This passage in Hebrews seems like an anti-climax. Throughout the book, the writer gives us something to help us face the brutal realities of life. But then, Hebrews 13 seems different. At first it looks like a to-do list, like miscellaneous ethical prescriptions, but that’s wrong.  This is not an anti-climax. What we’re being told…

Hebrews was written to people who have been shaken by life. Difficulties and sufferings have shaken them to the core.  The writer is trying to help them find ways to face the brutal realities of life, to stand solid when everything around them is falling apart. In Hebrews 12, we have the climax. The writer…

There’s never been a culture with a lower pain threshold than ours. There’s never been a culture that gave us fewer resources for dealing with the brutal realities of life and death than ours.  The writer of Hebrews wants his readers to understand how to become the kind of people who can cope with the…

Hebrews is written to help us have what it takes to face the difficulties of life. And in chapter 11, we’re told one of the keys is to be people of faith. But what is faith? In our cultural moment, conservatives see faith as a moral virtue, while liberals see skepticism as a mark of…