Exploring My Strange Bible

This teaching explores how Paul challenges the Christians to explore God’s spirit. The whole debate about God’s spirit and how he expresses God’s powers is very controversial conversations. However, the Apostle Paul actually intended the exact opposite - he wanted the spirit to be something that united Christians.

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This teaching comes from chapter 4. It is where Paul shifts, specifically from focusing on practical out-workings in day to day life of the grand vision of the good news about Jesus that he explored in the first half of his letter. In the first half of the letter, he shares this grand vision of Jesus as the redeemer and resurrected king of a new humanity that’s made up of every kind of person ethnically/socioeconomically/culturally. The second half of the letter, he explores what it is actually going to require. The character traits, life habits, moral commitment, and the relational commitment that is going to be required to live as this new and different kind of community together.

Paul wanted these new followers of Jesus to live and become what they really are, adopting new identities.

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It was important to Paul that Jesus' followers were a diverse group of people across many ethnicities. In this teaching, we explore Paul’s vision for diversity and bridging relationships among people who are different but unified under Christianity.

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This first teaching is actually from the middle of chapter 1. It’s a prayer that Paul prays for the followers of Jesus in Ephesus. It’s an amazing prayer where he prays for power. The kind of power that Paul thinks that followers of Jesus have access to is a very different conception of power. It’s a power that was expressed when Jesus gave up his life and was resurrected by the power of love and self-sacrifice. This is exactly the kind of power that Paul wants followers of Jesus to recognize.

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In this teaching we are going to explore Psalm 73, which is a prayer where the poet is expressing a crisis of faith. When he looks at the world, he doesn’t see a world that his faith can always make sense of. In fact, it is the opposite. It seems like many of the things that this poet believes about God are contradicted by what he sees going on around him.

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This teaching was exploring what it means to talk to God when we have seriously screwed up: hurt others, hurt ourselves, dishonored others and God, etc. How can we even talk to God in moments where we’re feeling so ashamed?

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Pslams teach us that protesting to God about horrors that take place in our world is a crucially important habit that we need to adopt. In this episode, We explore Pslam 22. We’re reflecting on the poets experience of extreme suffering and pain. We address what it means to hold on to the conviction that ‘God is good’ and has redemptive purposes when the world seems like it is falling apart. This poem teaches us the meaning of ‘lament’ and ‘protest’. It is very powerful, there is so much going on here.

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As a new follower of Jesus, I loved the Book of Psalms. I remember realizing for the first time that multiple points in Jesus’s life teaching, he used the language of the psalm to express his own thoughts. Jesus models for us what it means to use the psalms as language for our own prayers.

This first teaching is based on Psalm 3, it is about learning how to pray in the midst of great fear and anxiety in our lives.

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In this teaching we are exploring the word “covenant” and how it is crucially important for understanding the storyline architecture of the whole story of the bible. It really only gets used in a small number of ways in modern English.

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In this episode we’re exploring a biblical word that is commonly used, but mostly not understood: glory. This is actually a crucially important concept for understanding the Old Testament and the New Testament.

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