In this episode, we dive into Hebrews Chapter 4. In the chapter, the pastor urges these followers of Jesus to remember a whole bunch of themes and stories from all over the Old Testament. He is going to recall the stories of Israel’s wilderness wanderings. They were on the way to the promised land, and he links the life that God wanted to give his people with the theme of Sabbath rest.

The pastor then links this story to faith. Faith, by his definition, doesn’t mean you do nothing, but rather it means a sort of active or loyal trust.

This teaching comes from Hebrews chapter 2 and it is exploring the portrait of Jesus as God becomes human that the anonymous pastor goes into. What is it that human story of Jesus reveals about the glory and power of God? We explore this on today’s episode.

This is a letter that doesn’t actually behave like a letter. There is no proper introduction. So what this first letter does is orient us towards the question “what is the letter to the Hebrews?”. It is kind of like an early Christian sermon, but kind of like a letter too. We talk about what we know (and don’t know) about this letter in this lecture.

We also talk about what it means to be the divine identity of Jesus and what that means to be disciples of Jesus.

In this last episode, we are going to look at a phrase that appears in one of the four gospel accounts about Jesus. It’s a phrase that Jesus uses called “being born again” or “born of the spirit”. The phrase comes from Jesus and a conversation that he had with Nicodemus (John Chapter 3), and what Jesus means and what Nicodemus means by this phrase are two different things. We’ll learn more about what they each mean in this episode.

In this episode we are going to look at the way that the spirit’s presence in the Bible story is often connected to a physical building… the temple or the sacred space of God. It’s a major theme uniting the hebrew scriptures and a theme that New Testament authors use to talk about who Jesus is. Then, the theme continues on into the Book of Axe and the letters to the apostles in the New Testament.

In this episode we explore the story of the baptism of Jesus. This story is very powerful and there are many many biblical themes colliding here. This story communicates the love of the father as a gift to the son before the son has done anything at all. This wasn’t just something that Jesus experienced, it was something that he invited his followers to experience as well.

In this message we are going to look at something very personal, very serious... it is the motif of how God’s spirit is particularly present in moments of human pain and suffering. There is something about suffering and pain that brings the whole human experience to this really acute pinpoint type of moment where we are participating in something very deep and very spiritual. We are going to look at a chapter in Roman chapter 8. It is one of the most beautiful depictions of the trinity at work participating in suffering in this work.

The longest part of the series is about God’s spirit… what does that even mean? In this teaching called the spirit and the fruit, we are looking at God’s personal creative presence as the one who creates and generates growth and life. What does it mean for the spirit to be at work? We’ll address this in this episode.

If someone didn’t really grow up in a tradition that emphasized the spirit of God, then these are kind of abstract and difficult things for people to incorporate into their thinking and life experience. This is going to explore different facets of the biblical portrayal of the person in work of the spirit.

This first teaching is mostly hanging out on page one of the bible and then following the thread of the spirit as creator and giver of life throughout the Old and New Testaments.

In this episode we’re exploring the story of Jesus. We’re going to explore the version from the Gospel of Mark. Jesus fundamentally redefines his understanding of God by his acts of forgiveness and healing. How does forgiveness reveal something fundamental about God’s heartbeat? We address this question and more in this episode.