Exploring My Strange Bible

This episode explores Jesus’ teaching about prayer. It is the famous “ask and you shall receive” teaching.

Personally, prayer has always been one of the aspects of following Jesus that I’ve found most difficult to make a big part of my life. So in this episode, I explore both what Jesus says, but also some of the objections or questions that come up in our minds when we try to take Jesus at his word and pray.

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Today we are going to explore one of the most memorable teachings of Jesus that many people, even non-Christians, know. It is the teaching that centers around judgment or the idea “Don’t judge so that you will not be judged”.

What did Jesus mean when he said not to judge other people? This is one of the teachings of Jesus that has truly taken on a life of its own. How has its meaning morphed over time, and what did Jesus intend for this teaching to mean?

We address these questions and more in this episode.

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Specifically, we talk about the meaning and significance of one of the most important things that Jesus ever said to his followers. Jesus passed along his prayer and taught us how to pray, which he addressed in his Sermon on the Mount.

Even after I became a follower of Jesus, I still never adopted the Lord's prayer as my own prayer that I prayed regularly. It took me years until I came across other people who really advocated that we should adopt the Lord’s prayer into our daily habits.

Listen in to hear more about this on today’s show.

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Today we explore the meaning and significance of Jesus’s command “Love your neighbor”, which even includes the people who hate you (or your enemies). We’re going to look into why this is such a shocking and controversial teaching, especially in Jesus’s day and age. It can sometimes feel very counter-intuitive.

This is a difficult teaching to hear and process and think of what it means, but let’s go into this with open minds.

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Today we are going to focus on Jesus’ teaching about swearing… as in “swearing oaths”. You’re probably not too hung up on “swearing too many oaths”, but it was actually a really important part of Jesus’ culture in his day and age.

More importantly, we’re going to explore some of the basic heart-level issues that Jesus is getting at here. The way we talk to each other with spins, half-truths, etc. is actually the very same thing that Jesus is trying to address in this piece.

This became a surprisingly relevant and important teaching for me, and I hope it is helpful for you.

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Today’s particular teaching is about one of the few times that Jesus addresses the topic of sex and sexual desire. He uses a lot of intense language that has really stuck with Jesus’ followers for many thousands of years.

The goal is to get inside Jesus’ heart and mind about his vision of what sexuality is and what it is for.

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Probably Jesus's relationship to the Torah isn't something that you woke up thinking about this morning, but it was actually a major major issue. The Torah represents not just the Bible, but the whole story and terms of the covenant that Israel used to relate to God.

Jesus came saying that the Kingdom of God had arrived through him and the work he was doing, but it was confusing to a lot of people so he addressed how he related to the story and the covenant that God made leading up to him. This is super important to learn about how Jesus talked about himself and what he was here to do.

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In this section, we’re exploring Jesus’s most famous collection of teachings in Matthew chapters 5-7. Jesus is announcing to the Kingdom of God that way of life that he’s inviting his followers to join only makes sense WITHIN the announcement that God’s Kingdom has arrived through Jesus.

This teaching focuses on those famous little poetic sayings at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount called “The Beatitudes”. It makes reference to the types of people who are blessed, but what does that even mean? What would it mean for a Jewish prophet or rabbi to go around and announce that certain people are blessed? These are familiar words that can lose their power and sharpness from over-use, but we’ll explore more about these questions in this episode.

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This teaching is about the second half of Matthew Chapter 4. Jesus is an adult in this segment, and he says his first words to the public (the people of Israel). He talks about the Kingdom or the reign of God.

To me, this was a foundational idea and a big part of my own rediscovery of Jesus’ own life, mission, and values. This is ground zero for understanding Jesus and why you should follow him.

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This is specifically a teaching that I did about Matthew Chapter 4 and the well-known story of Jesus being tested by the evil one in the wilderness. One of my biggest goals was to debunk a bunch ideas about Satan and the devil that aren’t actually in the Bible. I think debunking these ideas is a really important part of following Jesus because we should recognize the reality of “evil” and what that means.

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