Podcast: Gospel in Life

A good test shows you what you really are, what’s really in you. If you’re in denial, the tests are devastating. If you’re dropping the ball, the tests are traps. Jesus says the only way you’re going to come through the tests of life is if you seek God. How are you doing right now?…

In this passage, we finally get to a particular kind of prayer in which people are very interested: to the place where Jesus says prayer is a way to change our circumstances.  Prayer makes a difference. You can come to God and say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” But notice this happens in…

I’ll say it consciously: this is our worst nightmare. More than anyone else in history, modern people believe we ought to have a good life and we ought to have some control over our lives. But Jesus says when you connect with God, you must pray, “Thy will be done.”  This means the purpose of…

What does it mean to hallow? It’s a word virtually never used anymore in everyday English, but we don’t quite have an equivalent.  To hallow something means to treat it as sacred and ultimate. It means to make something your ultimate concern, to make it the most important thing, to make it the most crucial…

Jesus doesn’t just point the way to God—rather, he is the way to God because he’s risen. And that means that for Christians, prayer is a unique, radically different process than it is for other religions and philosophies.  Prayer is a rather universal thing, and there are many ways to pray. But Jesus says there…

The Psalms is the divinely inspired prayer book, but when you open this prayer book, the first page is not a prayer. It’s a meditation on meditation. Meditation is not the same as studying the Bible. In studying the Bible you’re just learning information. Meditation takes what you’ve learned and does something with it. And…

The Lord’s Prayer is quite a workout. You’re asking for a lot of things: daily bread, deliver us from evil. But at the end, you rest in God.  The last phrase in the Lord’s Prayer is, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever, amen.” Is that just a…

We don’t see that envy is as terrible as it really is. Envy is wanting somebody else’s life. Do you know what that does? It sucks the joy out of the life you actually have.  In Psalm 73, the psalmist is living as good a life as he can, and everything is going wrong. And…

What if I told you there was a process and no matter how much you blew up your life, if you used this process, there would be a way to come out the other side whole? Well, here it is. It’s what the Bible calls repentance. You say, “You mean just saying I’m sorry?” But…

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…