P.S. Post Sermon Podcast

Jesus calls a desperate mother’s people dogs. Read that again slowly. A woman begs him to heal her demon-possessed daughter, and he answers with silence, then a refusal, then a line about bread and the dogs. Some readers have called it racist. Others skip the passage altogether. So what is Jesus actually doing? And why does the Canaanite woman keep coming back?

Matt Mead preached "The Master’s Table" on Sunday, and he and Wes wrestle with the hard parts of Matthew 15:21-28. They take a listener’s question about demon possession and illness, ask why this story gets skipped so often, and wonder about how persistent we should be in prayer.

Jesus only praises two people for "great faith," and both are Gentiles. What does that say about who we assume has it?

This conversation follows up on Matt's sermon “The Master’s Table (Matthew 15:21-28).” Listen to the full message here.

Why does church culture often prize efficiency and productivity over devotion that costs something? Is lifting holy hands too much, or is folding them just a habit we mistook for Scripture? A woman broke a jar of nard worth a year’s wages over Jesus’ head in Mark 14, and the dinner guests called it waste. Wes and Barrett talk about perfume, Simon the leper’s house, a bottle of Brut cologne in a middle school bedroom, and the difference between judging others and assuming we’re being judged. The question they leave open: what are we still holding back?

This conversation follows up on Wes’s sermon “Unafraid to Pour Everything Out For Jesus (Mark 14:3-9).” Listen to the full message here.

What do you do when the law has a gap and your family’s name is about to vanish? Five sisters in Numbers 27 stood before Moses and asked for the land their father had no son to inherit. Matt and Wes start there, fresh off Wes’s trip to Romania, then land on harder questions. How do you speak up without burning things down? Is boldness the same as rebellion? And what happens when God hears your case and doesn’t agree? Along the way they wade into the rabbis’ wild guesses about these women’s ages, and wonder why most of us can’t name them. The daughters of Zelophehad never made it into most children’s Bible storybooks, and that might say something about whose stories we’ve been telling.

This conversation follows up on Wes’s sermon “The Fearless Daughters of Zelophehad (Numbers 27:2-7).” Listen to the full message here.

Lazarus is dead, and Jesus is furious. Not at Mary. Not at Martha. At death itself. Barrett and Wes dig into the anger Jesus felt at that tomb, the grief that doesn't need an apology, and why no one should hate death as much, or fear it as little, as Christians. They also talk about the moving response of a sister who has been praying about her cancer diagnosis. Plus listener questions on being honest with God without being disrespectful, and why Jesus telling Martha "believe and you will see" might be harder to live than it sounds.

This conversation follows up on Wes's sermon "Come and See the Pain and Disappointment." Listen to the full message here.

Married five times. Alone at the well at noon. We've built an entire sermon tradition on assuming those two facts mean she was a social outcast, a moral failure hiding from her town. But is that exegesis, drawing the meaning out of the text, or eisegesis, reading our own assumptions into it? Barrett sits down with Wes to work through a batch of listener questions from Sunday's message on John 4: how far it's fair to lean on extra-biblical history when Scripture stays silent, why the Jews and Samaritans wouldn't speak to each other despite sharing Jacob as an ancestor, and what actually changed Wes's mind about this woman years ago. They also unpack the story of Nicodemus, coming to Jesus at night while this woman comes in broad daylight, and why that contrast might matter more than we often realize.

This conversation follows up on Wes's sermon, "Come and See the One Who Knows You" from September 13 — listen to the full message here: https://www.ccmcdermott.org/episode/the-one-who-knows-you

"A student of evangelism, but not a practitioner." Is that how you would describe yourself? Matt Mead sits down with Wes the Monday after he kicked off a new series in John called "Come and See," McDermott Road's guest friendly launch to Friends and Family Month. They talk about why the best evangelists Wes has ever known never had a strategy, a curriculum, or an answer for every objection. They just loved people and loved Jesus, and wanted to connect the two. Wes traces that all the way back to Andrew, one of the least famous apostles. Along the way, a listener question about angels in John 1:51, and why having all the answers was never the point.

This conversation follows up on Wes's sermon "Come and See the Son of God (John 1:35-51)" — listen to the full message here: https://www.ccmcdermott.org/episode/come--see-the-son-of-god

Does letting God do the work mean sitting still while bad things happen? Barrett and Wes work through the mailbag from two weeks of James: why joy and mourning aren't opposites, who's actually safe to confess your sins to (James 5:16), and what to do when someone you love is dying without Christ and every door to talk about it seems closed. They also sit with the hardest question of all, what unanswered prayer does to your faith, and why the resurrection changes what "unanswered" even means.

This conversation follows up on Wes's sermon "Words that Hurt, Words that Heal" — listen to the full message here.

Driving home from worship Sunday, Wes caught himself calling someone a name. Minutes after preaching that no one can tame the tongue. That's the whole point of James 3. Wes and Matt Mead dig into the bit in a horse's mouth, the rudder on a ship, the spark that burns down a forest, and the uncomfortable test James gives for whether the Spirit is actually shaping us: not what we say about God, but what we say about the people we don't like. They also work through a listener's question that cuts close for anyone who wants to speak truth without becoming the kind of person who enjoys landing the blow. Where's the line between conviction and cursing?

This conversation follows up on Wes's sermon "Out of Both Sides of Your Mouth." Listen to full sermon here: https://www.ccmcdermott.org/sermons/out-of-both-sides-of-your-mouth/

Does James 2 actually contradict Paul on faith and works? It's one of the most common objections raised against the book, and Barrett brings it straight to Wes: how do you square "faith without works is dead" with Paul's "saved by grace, not by works" in Ephesians 2:8-10? They also dig into James 1:6, what our translations render as "doubt" but the New Living Translation calls "divided loyalty," and what James means when he warns against being a "friend of the world." Then a harder, practical question a listener sent in: what do you actually owe someone on the street who might use your money for drugs? If you've ever wondered how James and Paul fit together, or what loyalty to Jesus costs in your actual, everyday life, this one's for you.

This conversation follows up on Wes's sermon "Don't Tell Me, Show Me" (James 2:14-26). Listen to the full message here: https://www.ccmcdermott.org/sermons/dont-tell-me-show-me/

This week's sermon started with complete silence and it was met with two very different reactions. It was a sermon that launched, "Talk is Cheap," a new series through the book of James, a book that reveals how convincingly we can lie to our own hearts without noticing. Wes and Matt dig into a neuroscientist's claim that up to 80% of what we tell ourselves daily isn't even true, why James calls the tongue something that has to be bridled, and why anger might be less about righteousness and more about protecting our own mess from being seen. The harder question, the one they don't fully resolve: which of your own stories have you never let anyone examine?