Exploring My Strange Bible

In this teaching we explore the Gospel of Mark's introduction to Jesus and his basic message and mission. We discover that announcing the arrival of God's kingdom was Jesus' greatest priority. For the most part modern Western people have not truly heard what Jesus was trying to get across, and so the concept of God's kingdom is not familiar to most people. Instead of importing our ideas about what Christianity is, we need to recover the apostles' presentation of Jesus in the New Testament.

So this is all about Jesus’s announcement of the Kingdom of God. What did that mean? Why was that important to him? Take a listen…

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Should the fact that I am a follower of Jesus mean that I think differently about my work and career? If so, how? In this teaching, I explore how our hopes about the ultimate outcome of history have a significant impact on how we think about our day to day jobs and career goals. Many Christians adopt the view that the world will ultimate be destroyed when Jesus returns, and that our day to day lives don't matter very much. But this is the opposite of what we find in the teaching of the Apostle Paul. We'll look at 1 Corinthians 15 and Colossians 3 to see how Paul believed that the eternal, redeemed nature of the new creation made our day to day work more meaningful, not less.

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In this teaching, I compare what constitute work in the story line of the bible vs. how modern American culture defines work. We will look at Genesis chapters 1-3 and see how work is not a curse but actually one of the greatest gifts that God has given to humans.

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In this message, I explore the concept of work and labor in the book of Ecclesiastes. The teacher wants to show us that it's impossible to create meaning in your life from one's vocation or career. But, this doesn’t mean that we should quit working. Rather, we must learn how to see our life's work in a larger context, helping us navigate through both success and failure. The teacher offers practical wisdom and guidance about having a job, and how to enjoy both the mundane and the beautiful parts of having a job.

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In this episode, we explore how how acknowledging that all of life is "vapor" (Hebrew "hevel") can lead to the enjoyment of the small and simple delights we encounter in day to day life.

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In this first episode we unpack the introduction to the book of Ecclesiastes and touch upon the issues of authorship. Mostly we'll camp out on the core the metaphor the teachers uses to talk about all of life. It's the Hebrew word “hevel” which means vapor or smoke. You won't be able to see my hand-carved Danish tobacco pipe, but you'll hear all about it. It's a powerful image to talk about the fleeting nature and unpredictability of all of life.

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This last episode is about the manuscript history of the New Testament, as well as a short history of English translations. In the second half of this lecture, we talk about the process and the dynamics at work in collecting the books of the bible into the “canon," a technical term referring to the authoritative collection of the biblical books.

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In this episode we dive into the composition and writing of the book of the New Testament. Specifically, we'll look at how the books themselves give us clues about when and how they were written. As we learn more about where the Bible came from, we gain a deeper sense of what the Bible is and what we're supposed to do with it.

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In this series we explore how the Bible was written and the long process of its composition and manuscript history. The bible is a book with a very traceable history, it was not written in secret. The authors of these texts were of course humans, but they also claimed that through these human words God speaks to his people. It's important to keep the divine and human nature of the Bible in balance. Many people think that believing the Bible is God's word necessitates believing it came into existence with little or no human agency. This idea is foreign to the biblical authors and we should cherish the beautiful and complex ways the Bible was composed and collected over the centuries.

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In this episode, we focus on the purpose of the laws in the story line of the Torah and the whole Bible. The story about the covenant that God made with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai makes up 2/3 of the entire Torah. There are 613 laws that God gives to Israel at Mount Sinai.

In this lecture, we’ll talk about where the laws come in the story, and how the stories offer important commentary on the laws. In short, the Torah is showing how the Israelites were unable to truly love and obey God and to follow the laws. This unresolved tension creates a future hope that Moses himself announces. If God is ever going to have loving and faithful covenant partners, he will have to do some future work of transforming their hearts and minds. This is the future hope of the Torah that Jesus believed he was bringing to fulfillment.

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