Discovering Jesus

For the ancient Israelites, Yahweh was just one of many gods, and it was difficult for them to understand why they should worship him and no other gods. And even for us today, it  may even seem a little narcissistic on Yahweh's part to jealously demand such loyalty and to punish infidelity so brutally as he threatens to do in the prophets.

However, as we begin the book of Hosea, we will see that Yahweh actually has very good reason for acting this way, and if we just dig a little below the surface, we'll see that he is far more than just a jealous, narcissistic god. It turns out that worshiping other gods leads to far more and far worse than just "not worshiping Yahweh."

In only two weeks we're finishing the prophet Amos! 

This week Amos will continue to call Israel to repentance, as well as brutally trash-talk another wayward prophet. But our main focus will be on what Amos feels the Israelites' key sin was: a failure to worship properly.

According to Amos, behind Israel's sin of social injustice is a failure to worship the way God wants. What does it mean to worship God, then? And why does God require basically say, "Worship me, or else!" Isn't that a little bit manipulative or abusive?

The answer to all these questions has something to do with understanding idol worship and how we, as Christians, in a strange way, are supposed to learn to worship from the example of idol worship in the ancient near east.

We begin this year with a new series: The Minor Prophets.

We will be starting with Amos, arguably the first of all the written prophets to preach, and his journey to Bethel, Israel, to condemn Jeroboam II and the elites for their abuse of the poor and oppressed.

Amos has much to say about social justice, but for our purposes today, he also has much to say about how and why God uses punishment and discipline, how God can claim to love his people yet exact terrible curses on them, and how we as Christians ought to pray for God to discipline us if we want to remain useful to him.

We have reached the final week of our series on the Parables! While we have not covered every single parable, we have covered enough to give us a general feel for what messages Jesus intended  his parables to convey and how to read them in their very Jewish context.

This week we are going to look at the final three parables Jesus taught before he was betrayed and crucified. These particular parables were given specifically to his disciples as a warning against apostasy in the coming persecution they were going to experience. 

So if you've ever wondered what an evil servant, ten virgins, and a resentful man burying money  have in common, join us to learn the answer!

This week we take a look at another set of three parables. As Jesus nears the end of his life, his parables are becoming ever more explicit, and full of indictments on the current ruling class of priests and scribes, particularly on how they have oppressed and ignored the outcasts and rejects of society.

However, as we'll see, simply being an outcast or reject does not give one automatic entry into the Kingdom. God still requires that we wear the right clothes to get in.

The Gospel writers always have a reason for why they arrange their parables the way they do, and Luke is no different.

Join us as we discover the common thread Luke detects between Jesus' Parable of the Persistent Widow and the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and why he places them right after Jesus' "mini-apocalypse."

*We apologize for the drop in audio quality.

Most Christians know Jesus had a thing or two to say about rich people, and we can sometimes think that Jesus thought all wealth was bad. This leads to an uneasy state of mind where we feel guilty for having wealth but also are told that God blesses his children. 

What did Jesus actually say about money? Was he entirely against it? Is money always a sign of God's favour?

In our parable today Jesus is going to tell us about a rich man and a poor man whose fortunes are reversed after they die.  Many Christians are very familiar with this story. What a lot of those same Christians might not be familiar with, though, is that Jesus was not the first to tell a story like this.

Jesus is retelling a very popular, well-known Egyptian folktale, that most of his hearers would have heard before. However, Jesus tells it with a twist at the end that, if they are listening, the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders would perceive as a direct and piercing criticism of their neglect of the poor and vulnerable.

Far from a parable on what hell is like or a simple message of "wealth is  bad," Jesus' message is a challenge to the Western church to pay attention to a responsibility we may have neglected: justice for the poor and vulnerable.

Social justice can be seen as a "dirty word" in evangelicalism because some Christians understandably do not agree with all the ideologies of certain social justice movements. But, as Jesus, the Old Testament prophets, and God himself make abundantly clear throughout Scripture, we might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as well as throwing ourselves out of the Kingdom of God.

This week we take a look at one of Jesus' most confusing parables, commonly known as The Parable of the Dishonest Manager. While this parable is often used to speak on wealth, the way Jesus uses it is quite a bit different than maybe our western, middle class, capitalistic sensibilities often understand it. 

In today's sermon, we will learn that the proper backdrop for this parable is the wrath of the Roman empire, and that one of the reasons Jesus believed Rome was going to descend on and destroy Jerusalem was because of how Israel's elites mismanaged their wealth.

Have you ever wondered why Jesus told Peter he needed to forgive 490 times, or why Peter even asked how many times he needed to forgive in the first place? It turns out Jesus is saying much more than that we just need to forgive a lot of times, or even an unlimited amount of times. And Peter might not be as unforgiving as we sometimes think.

Jesus seems to believe that forgiveness isn't just a good thing to do, but is critical to our own salvation. 

When Jesus said that we must become like little children, he wasn't talking about having a "child-like faith" unencumbered by "adult rationalism" or something like that. Jesus was talking about something entirely different, and way more radical.

Matthew puts Jesus' parable of the Lost Sheep in a different context than Luke, and thus changes the meaning drastically, however it is by no means any less political or intense. Jesus is a brilliant, radical, almost crazy leader with completely upside-down ideas on how the world ought function.

So this week we are going to learn about the type of Christian Jesus wants, and how the ways in which we treat the people at the bottom of our socioeconomic ladders says a lot about whether or not we agree with Jesus' concept of Christianity.