bread church

By breadReligion & Spirituality Christianity

bread church episodes

May 27, 2025 Jesus and the ten commandments: Honor your father and mother.
Contrary to what we may have been told, this was never a one-dimensional
command to obey our parents. Jesus himself did not always do what His
earthly parents expected of Him; and of course, it originally given to
adults, not children. Far from being about control or blind loyalty, it
must be rooted in the ancient wisdom in the Genesis story, that tells us
all it’s necessary to ‘leave’ our parents in order to love others well. In
fact, only when we are rightly defined by God’s perfect love can we truly
honor our parents. Of course, this isn’t a call to abandon or dishonor them
either (which is clearly instructed by Jesus’ teaching!).
His way for us includes giving weight to those who came before us - even
when they no longer seem useful to us - so that we may see ourselves in
them and be free to learn from our pasts from a place of freedom and grace.
By Hannah Flint
36 min
May 19, 2025 Jesus and the ten commandments: remembering the sabbath.
As a culture, we tend to be very good at recreation, but less so
re-creation. Sabbath is about the latter. It is the place where God
re-orders us in line with his purposes and will.
Firstly, this means stopping all our work to reflect and delight. We
remember that God is in control, that his plans for the world are good, and
that our destination is heaven on earth, where ultimately all pain and
suffering will cease. We catch glimpses of heaven all around us, even
amidst the trouble of this world.
Secondly, this means preparation. During Sabbath we allow God to re-create
His image in us where it has been marred. We allow Him to place His hand
back into the imprint of our lives, and reorder our lives. We listen to His
call, rather than pushing ahead with our own agenda.
Thirdly, and most importantly, we choose to surrender to Jesus and allow
Him to do whatever it is he wants to do in us. It takes vulnerability to
respond to Jesus’ surrender with our own. But as we come to him, as a
helpless child might approach a parent, He does not lord his authority over
us. Rather, He is gentle and humble with us, and places His yoke on us,
giving true rest for our souls. What we receive is not something from
Jesus, but Jesus himself.
By Ed Flint
43 min
May 12, 2025 Jesus and the ten commandments: you shall not take the Lord’s name in vain.
To take God’s name in vain is much more than simply using it as a curse
word. Blaspheme is a symptom of something bigger. ‘In vain’ means 'to
empty.' So, we’re called, not to empty God’s name of its fullness, but
rather to fill it with the fullness of God's nature and His work.
By His name, God has made Himself known: He revealed Himself to the
Israelites as ‘The great I am', the one and only true God, the 'Beginning
and the End'. And, in the person of Jesus, he has fully revealed himself to
the whole world. His name is Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Prince of
Peace, Everlasting Lord.
When we fill God’s name with the fullness of His nature, we see Him more
clearly, giving Him His rightful status and place in our lives and the
world. To fill God’s name with its fullness is also to acknowledge the
unique work Jesus has done in making us right with God, beckoning us into
God’s presence.
When we don’t empty God’s name of its nature and work, our prayer and
worship lives are transformed. We approach God with confidence, not in our
own name but in Jesus’ name, knowing He is the great God, whose name is
above all other names, who can do anything for us his children.
By Ed Flint
35 min
May 05, 2025 Jesus and the ten commandments: God’s image must not be made.
The Second Commandment isn’t just about all the idols we worship - the
ones we make ourselves, and the ones we bow down when we make ANYTHING more
important than loving God - but about rediscovering who we truly are. God
did not command his people not to make images of Him (which was was radical
to a worldview that viewed idols and god-presence as interchangeable)
because He’s against beauty or art, or because he doesn’t want us to know
Him. Quite the opposite in fact— because He’s already made His image: US!
Long before golden calves or carved statues, God’s intention was to reflect
His presence through human beings—created in love, for love. We look at how
this ancient command speaks directly to us today: how we see ourselves, how
we treat others, and how we understand God’s presence in the world.
Jesus—the perfect image of God—restores what’s been fractured, and invites
us to live fully as His image-bearers. Maybe in ways we’ve never even
dreamt of. It was always about love, and it will always be revealed and
restored by His love. Today is always the day to receive more of it.
By Hannah Flint
40 min
April 28, 2025 Jesus and the ten commandments: no other gods.
This new series, Jesus and the ten commandments, is a conversation on how
Jesus embodies – and helps us to embody – the kind of life we are built
for, and the kind of life framed by the Ten Words.
Bill starts with a re-framing of the Ten Words – which we mistakenly call
Commandments – as more about relationship and reality than about rules and
restrictions. When the Ten Words are reduced to rules restricting what we
think of as our freedom, we will try and find ways to do end-runs around
them – and discover that they were actually protections put in place to
enable human thriving the way God intended.
Because Jesus is fully aware of this, He invites us to learn our lives from
Him – to follow in His way. As we do so, allowing Him to shape us by
alignment with Him, we discover that we live in the center of the Ten Words
naturally and without thinking about it. They have become part of what it
means for us to be human.
By Bill Dogterom
39 min
April 22, 2025 Jesus, the resurrected one. (EASTER)
The resurrection is emphatic: Jesus is said to have bodily risen in time
and space at a moment in history. The resurrection is neither mythical, nor
metaphorical. It happened, and it changed the world forever.
To a world lost to wishy washy relativism, Jesus’ victory over death is the
most sure absolute anyone can build a life on. And the resurrection is
transformational. The victory of God means the end of fear and the end of
any lack of purpose. Those who live in the light of resurrection are able
not to be alarmed, and to go: go and live lives of meaning. And the
resurrection is grace. It’s the gift of God to a world in need. Grace
transforms everything.
Thank God for Easter.
By Ed Flint
34 min
April 14, 2025 Jesus the irenic, innocent, indestructible one.
At Jesus’ trial before Pilate, the crowd call for Jesus’ crucifixion and
Barabbas’ release.
Barabbas represents violent rebellion, in contrast to Jesus’ refusal to
defend himself. Whether we like to admit it, there is something in all of
us that can find brutal aggression more compelling than the way of Jesus.
When this happens it’s like we’re in the crowd crying for Barabbas to be
set free.
But Jesus is more than just an example of non-violence. He is also
Barabbas’ substitute. And He is ours too. He does what no human before or
since could do. His inncoent death is like a lightening rod for all our
human corruption and guilt. In His body He absorbs Barabbas’s sin, our sin,
and all the sin of the world. And, in death, he kills off all evil, setting
us, like Barabbas, free. His revolution is not a human one, it is eternal.
Unlike any other revolution, it cannot be held back. It is indestructible.
As such, it is the only revolution worthy of our lives. When we commit
ourselves to it, we commit to the only way the world will ever be
fundamentally redeemed.
By Ed Flint
38 min
April 07, 2025 Jesus, beloved son.
We’ve made it to Jesus’ point of no return in His journey to the cross; a
well-known scene in the garden of Gethsemane, where He will beseech his
followers to stay awake and pray with him as He pleads with His Father for
another way. The language used builds to a picture of abject horror, and is
another picture of human Jesus displaying the holiness of a raw emotional
response that we should come to when we face loss, death and pain in this
life.
Of course, Jesus’ horror is beyond anything we will ever face, and
embedded within this scene is some vital theology. Did the Father send
Jesus to do battle with death and darkness on the cross to satisfy His
wrath (our reformation forefathers would have us think so)? Or did the
triune God, together, devise this ancient plan to redeem their beloved
world from the very beginning?
A clear understanding on this can change the way we read all that tricky
stuff in the Old Testament, and revolutionize what it is to be included in
this divine relationship, for all of us.
By Hannah Flint
35 min
March 31, 2025 Jesus, the victim of betrayal and denial.
In Mark 14, Jesus doesn’t directly accuse Judas, but keeps his prediction
about the identity of his betrayer ambiguous. Part of the reason is to show
that any of his disciples were, and by extension, any of us are, capable.
We all have a bit of Judas in us. We can treat Jesus as a commodity, to be
discarded when we don’t get what we want from him.
And, we all have a bit of Peter, too. Peter is so sure of himself he
doubles down on his insistence he won’t deny Jesus. We can trust our own
righteousness in similar ways. In all this, Jesus knows exactly what we’re
all like. It means he goes to his death abandoned and betrayed. But he’s
not defeated. And, as with Judas, he leaves the door open to us to turn
around, be forgiven, and enjoy him and his presence, for its own sake, once
again.
By Ed Flint
46 min
March 25, 2025 Jesus, our divine rescue.
The combined feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread are the most important
of all the annual Jewish feasts. They commemorate God’s rescue of the
Hebrews from the “plague of the firstborn” during the time of Moses, where
God’s people were spared death by applying the blood of lambs upon the
doorframes of their homes. The feasts also remember the hasty release and
exodus of the Hebrews from their cruel treatment and enslavement by
Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
So that they would always remember his saving acts, God told the Jews to
commemorate this “divine rescue” from death and bondage through these two
feasts, which were to be celebrated every year—at the same time and in the
same way—without fail.
Jesus and his disciples had travelled to Jerusalem to commemorate Passover
before, but the one we read about in Mark 14:12-26 would be entirely
different. As Jesus told his disciples during this particular Seder meal,
it would become the occasion of his death by crucifixion, and the timing
was no mere coincidence.
By Keith Beebe
37 min