Podcast: Gospel in Life

For centuries now, on the Sunday before Easter, the church has observed the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem just days before he was crucified. It’s called Palm Sunday.  What does Palm Sunday mean? It means Jesus is king, and it’s important to see that’s not just an abstract proposition. Palm Sunday is about…

Christianity gives us resources to help us live in a world that’s hard to live in. And in Luke 5, we see a resource we wouldn’t immediately think of as one — that is, that when Jesus calls us, he sends us out into the world to serve. Serving other people is draining, but it’s…

When you’re in the wilderness, how do you handle the trials, the difficulties, and the temptations? In Luke 4, we have a famous passage about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. Jesus is assaulted by the Devil, and he deals with it through the Word of God. We’re going to look at how Jesus…

The raising of Lazarus is the seventh and climactic of Jesus’ miraculous signs in the Gospel of John. John says Jesus did many miracles, but these seven particularly revealed who Jesus was and what he came to do. And this one is probably the most famous.  Jesus especially loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus—there was a…

The healing of the man born blind is one of Jesus’ miracles that’s called a sign, meaning it symbolizes something about who Jesus was and what he came to do. This is a story about a man who’s born blind, and it takes up an entire chapter. The man is healed in the very first…

In the miraculous sign of the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus takes a few loaves and fish and miraculously feeds a multitude of people. This is the only one of Jesus’ miracles that’s told in all four gospels. And the gospel of John gives us the final discourse in which Jesus explains the meaning of…

Can you imagine a perfect human being? You may say, “Sure.” But perfection would necessarily be surprising to us because we’re not perfect and we’ve actually never seen perfection.  The challenge of the New Testament is to read about Jesus, not just once, but page after page after page. If you do that, you’ll pretty…

I’ve heard people say, “Oh, I wish I had his faith, or her faith,” as if faith is a talent. And I do think there’s a kind of faith that’s a temperament—people who are more trusting or more skeptical—but that’s not saving faith.  There is no type of person who becomes a Christian. Saving faith,…

Jesus’ first sign was not feeding the poor. It wasn’t healing the sick or raising the dead. It was keeping a party going.  In the book of John, there’s a series of miracles that are called signs. That’s important because it means Jesus’ miracles weren’t naked displays of power. They signify. They’re symbolic. They point…

People come up to John the Baptist and say, “What is your identity? What is your self-understanding?” That has a very contemporary ring to it. And it has quite a bit to do with us.  We’re looking at the life of Jesus and who Jesus is. In the second half of John 1, in this…