Podcast: Gospel in Life

The Western romantic idea of human nature was that we’re inherently good. But the problem is over the last century, we’ve discovered that oppression and evil have not gone away but rather have erupted with ferocity over and over again regardless of social and political arrangements. This has created a crisis for the modern secular…

Earlier in the twentieth century, the intellectuals of the Western world said it was our society and our institutions that were making us bad. If we changed them, then we’d get rid of atrocities, evil, war, racism, and poverty. But it hasn’t worked. More and more, the Western world is looking back at Genesis, and…

We are created for relationship. One of the key differences I hope to show you between the biblical idea of God and other alternative views of God is in this whole idea of relationship. Genesis 1 shows us three things: 1) why we need relationships, 2) what kind of relationships we need, and 3) the…

The book of Acts is all about the earliest Christianity. It shows us something about the character of the earliest Christianity, especially about where the church got its power. The book of Acts, but also the Bible in general, is bound to surprise you. No matter what your culture or what your class, no matter…

Something is going on with work in our culture. We’ve lost our rhythms of work and rest. And work is becoming a crisis issue.  In Genesis 1 and 2, work and rest come up in the very beginning of creation. This tells us that understanding work and rest is at the very essence of living…

If you live in North America or Europe, the question almost everyone has in mind when they read Genesis 1 is “How?” They ask, “How did it happen? How long did it take?”  But how questions aren’t as important as why questions. What you really need to know about this world is why did God…

We’re in the second of a two-part series on the devil and the conflict between supernatural forces of good and supernatural forces of evil.  In Part 1, I made my case for why I think it’s immanently sensible to say there really is a devil. And we talked about Satan’s weapons and strategies. If you…

The devil. Spiritual warfare. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, most places in the world, the idea of spiritual warfare—of a conflict between spiritual good and spiritual evil—is not an unusual concept. Many people in many parts of the world think this helps make sense of reality. But here in the Western world, we find it…

Ephesians 5 is like a fair number of people in New York City. It’s both rich and famous. Because it’s so rich, you could work through it word by word and get quite a bit out of it. But it’s also advantageous to do what we’re going to do, which is to fly over the…

Christianity is not just a vitamin supplement. It doesn’t just come into your life and give you a little boost to live a better form of the life you’re living. It’s a sweeping revolution that affects every part of you. In Ephesians 5, we have a long passage on what it means to live the…