Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're examining the Gospel of John to learn about the words and work of Jesus.

In John 4, we have a case study in what it looks like for someone to pass from spiritual darkness into light, from death to life. This passage isn’t intended by John to be a comprehensive theology of conversion. Instead its the story of one particular person's conversion. And we see that being won over by Jesus is less like discovering the answer to a math problem, or a philosophy question, and its more like falling in love or, having a deep thirst finally satisfied.  

*Correction: in the sermon, Sam states that Samaritans were descendants of Babylonian invaders. It was actually the Assyrian invaders who in 722 BC defeated the northern Kingdom, led Israelite leadership into captivity and settled colonists in Samaria (see 2 Kings 17).

QUOTES:

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”― C.S. Lewis  


“Just as we learned from [the Old Testament] that the greatest obligation we owe to God is to love him with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, all of our strength, John is thrusting Jesus forward as the one to whom all that love is owed. "I am he," Jesus tells the Samaritan woman: the one the prophets have foretold and the one your hearts have longed for. Look no further. I've come to satisfy the yearning of every human heart. … To be human is to be thirsty, and Jesus calls his followers to come and drink.”- Jen Pollock Michel 

“How do you get someone to love and accept you? You make yourself more attractive, right? You make yourself more lovable and appealing. That's what all the adverts tell us; it's the relentless drone of social media. Yet with God, it is the other way round. With God, failing, broken people “are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive" (as Martin Luther put it). In other words, God does not love people because they have sorted themselves out: he loves failures, and that love makes them flourish.” - Michael Reeves 

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're examining the Gospel of John to learn about the words and work of Jesus.

Celebration is wonderful! It's a core need of the human soul. But if we're honest, we're all a little disappointed when seasons of celebration end, summer vacation wraps up, the concert ends, and we have to get back to "normal" life.

In Jesus's first miraculous sign in the Gospel of John, he challenges our assumption that all good things must come to an end. By extending a wedding celebration way beyond it's normal, reasonable end point, he shows us the joy at the heart of God and the glorious future that he brings through his Kingdom.

The sign isn’t just about the miraculous power of Jesus— although the fact that he is able to bend the normal rules of nature is important! What John wants us to see is something more than Jesus' power. John wants us to look at his personality, at his character. And how this sign reveals the heart of God toward needy people who are longing for glory. People who, like us, are hungry for wholeness, beauty, and joy.

QUOTES:

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”― C.S. Lewis  


"The two events in chapter 2, the changing of the water into wine at Cana, and the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem, establish the terms of Jesus' ministry. They also anticipate Christ's future work. To attend a marriage feast and to cleanse the temple were among the first acts of our Lord's ministry at his first coming. To purify the whole visible Church and hold a marriage supper will be among his first acts, when he comes again.'" --Bruce Milne

“The condition ... throughout the Gospel for all of Jesus' divine interventions is exquisitely simple — trust by doing something simple — and the promised results throughout, as we know, are extraordinary. We have no required absolutes in our story, like, "Please completely surrender to me and do these exceptional obediences." Rather, "Fill... draw... take" ordinary water from ordinary jars and then bring what you have across the room … We do simple things like trustingly obey; he does saving things like rescuing a wedding party from shame or like multiplying loaves for hungry pilgrims.”— F. Dale Bruner

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're examining the Gospel of John to learn about the words and work of Jesus.

In our world today, we're constantly bombarded by advice on what to do to become more healthy people. Seek after physical health or emotional health. Set better goals. Be more disciplined. Eat better. Sleep more. Take up this perfect self-care routine. Keeping up with all of it can be exhausting.

But what if the health and wholeness we're looking for comes not by not by pulling ourselves up by our own effort, but by following the lead of a loving teacher who is calling us to deeper enjoyment of him and fruitfulness in the world?

And what if we're not meant to grow ourselves, by ourselves? What if there is a loving teacher who is gathering a community around him that will grow us into the people he intends for us to be? What if it's not all up to you?

That’s what this passage is about– how God gathers his people to learn and grow in community with others. And John wants us to see – when we find Jesus, we find rest from our striving, because in the end, he has been seeking and finding us all along.

QUOTES:

"It is significant that [in Genesis 3] human beings separated themselves from God by hiding in the trees. But God did not separate himself from sinful human beings; he came searching for them. And the God of creation did not attack the hiding sinners, he asked them that gracious "first question" of all questions. This is the kind of God we meet in the New Testament Messiah as well. Are not the first question of Genesis and the first question of John rather alike: Genesis: "Where are you?"; John: "What are you looking for?" Is not a question itself, almost by nature, a kind of grace? Especially when it comes from the Lord or his Lamb? I believe the most thoughtful "evangelism" (which is a scary word for many of us who have been wounded by its misuse) is simply and sincerely to ask people who are seeking us out, as Jesus now thoughtfully does with his first seekers, "What are you looking for?" (Notice: Jesus did not come up to them, uninvited, and ask this as an evangelistic question. Jesus' evangelism is much more human and humane, as we will learn over and over again throughout the Gospel.) "-F. Dale Bruner

“(I)n Friendship…we think we have chosen our peers … But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say ‘You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.’ The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.”- C.S Lewis

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're examining the Gospel of John to learn about the words and work of Jesus.

We live in a world that values self-expression— it seems natural to us that someone would want to share, display, and communicate about ourselves to others.

When humans share about ourselves, we usually do it for validation, or community, or for a sense of security. In other words, we mostly self-express out of a sense of neediness. 

In this passage from John's prologue, Jesus is described as “God’s self-expression”— that’s what "the Word” (logos in Greek) is getting at. Jesus is God’s message of revelation, expressing himself to his creation. And what we find is that when the eternal God, who made everything, expresses and communicates himself to his creatures, he’s not motivated by neediness, but by fullness. He's driven by an overflowing wealth of creativity, power, goodness and love. 

And when the Eternal God reveals himself most fully, he doesn’t express himself in a poem or a post, or a painting. Instead, his self-expression comes in a person, Jesus Christ. A creature like us— a “self-portrait in a person.”

That's who Jesus is.

And John (the writer) is going to show us why we should listen to Jesus' message.

QUOTES:

"The way we understand human life depends on this question: What is the real story of which my life story is part?”— Lesslie Newbigin

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic ... or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” ― C.S. Lewis

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW.

At our final on-campus meeting of the semester, we had some graduating seniors (and our departing intern, Bailey) share about how God met them during their time in RUF. Then Sam closed us out with a reflection on the Aaronic blessing from Numbers 6.

The story of the Bible is God showing his people both how desperately needy they are, and how ready God is to love, rescue, forgive and keep them. The blessing (or benediction) in Numbers 6 is God’s reminder to his covenant people that they stand under his fatherly care all the days of their life.

*Note: due to the variety of people speaking, the sound quality is less than optimal in some places. We also weren't able to capture everyone's testimony who shared that night--but we hope you still enjoy hearing from a few of them!

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. In our final series of the Spring semester we are looking at how to relate to God through prayer, using the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 as our guide.

This week in our series on prayer we look at “supplication,” which is a fancy word for petition, which is another fancy word for asking.  A prayer of petition or supplication is asking God to supply something lacking. In some ways, the entire Lord’s Prayer is a prayer of asking, with praise and confession and thanksgiving thrown in.  Asking (along with lamenting, intercession, and other kinds of asking) is the most common mode of prayer in the Bible. And it’s the mode of living that is most congruent with the reality of God’s fatherly grace. The Lord’s Prayer shows us that because God is our loving Father, we should continuously bring all our needs to him. 

"As far as I can see, prayer has been ordained only for the helpless... Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray”- Ole Hallesby

“To come to the Father in Jesus' name, not our own, is to come fully cognizant that we are being heard because of the costly grace in which we stand. This is the one principle of prayer that makes it possible to be heard by God even though no one can follow all the other guidelines and "rules" as we should.” - Tim Keller

“We can do only what we can do and acknowledge our humble place in the grand scheme of things. This disposition is what sets prayer apart from manifestation. The practice of prayer presupposes that while we can express and pursue our preferences, we ultimately hand them over to someone with a perspective much broader and a love more generous than any of us can fathom.”-Lydia Sohn

Heidelberg Catechism Q & A 117. 

Q. What is the kind of prayer that pleases God and that he listens to?

A. First, we must pray from the heart to no other than the one true God, revealed to us in his Word, asking for everything God has commanded us to ask for.

Second, we must fully recognize our need and misery, so that we humble ourselves in God’s majestic presence.

Third, we must rest on this unshakable foundation: even though we do not deserve it, God will surely listen to our prayer because of Christ our Lord. That is what God promised us in his Word.

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. In our final series of the Spring semester we are looking at how to relate to God through prayer, using the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 as our guide.

We tend to want to put our best food forward, sweep our failures under the rug, and downplay our shortcomings. If we ignore our failures before God and others, we’re refusing to acknowledge reality. And we cut ourselves off from the possibility of repair and forgiveness. So then, open confession actually leads to healing and trust. 

When he speaks about confession in the Lord's Prayer, Jesus is pointing us to one of our deepest human needs. We need to confess our weakness, and our wickedness— so that we can actually enjoy intimacy with God and others. We must learn confession, because God uses our confession of sin to form us into a forgiven, forgiving people.

“Give and forgive— these are humanity's two great personal needs before God. Please give us physically what we need in order to live like humans; then please forgive us spiritually those things that we do or don't do so that we can really live as humans - free of guilt (since human beings "do not live by bread alone”) Food is humanity's priority need, but forgiveness is humanity's profoundest need.” - Dale Bruner

“Confessing is not a payment. It is simply an agreement with God that this was an ugly and unworthy thing for me to do, and I’m ashamed of it. I’m sorry for it. I turn from it. I embrace the finished, complete, perfect, once-for-all work of Christ afresh. I rest in it. I enjoy the fellowship that he secured.”— John Piper

“All of the Christian life is repentance. Turning from sin and trusting in the good news that Jesus saves sinners aren’t merely a one-time inaugural experience but the daily substance of Christianity. The gospel is for every day and every moment. Repentance is to be the Christian’s continual posture”.- David Mathis 

“Its me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.” - Taylor Swift

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. In our final series of the Spring semester we are looking at how to relate to God through prayer, using the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 as our guide.

As we begin the prayer, Jesus focuses our attention on God himself, the audience and object of our adoration and worship. And we see that Jesus doesn’t just tell us to praise God, he shows us why he’s worthy of praise.  We should praise God, because He is both a better audience and a better object for our adoration. 

Heidelberg Catechism Q & A 117. 

Q. What is the kind of prayer that pleases God and that he listens to?

A. First, we must pray from the heart to no other than the one true God, revealed to us in his Word, asking for everything God has commanded us to ask for.

Second, we must fully recognize our need and misery, so that we humble ourselves in God’s majestic presence.

Third, we must rest on this unshakable foundation: even though we do not deserve it, God will surely listen to our prayer because of Christ our Lord. That is what God promised us in his Word.

“Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.” — Eugene Peterson

“The One whom we most need to behold has made himself known. He has traced with a fine hand the lines and contours of his face. He has done so in his Word …. By fixing our gaze on that face, we trade mere human glory for holiness:” ― Jen Wilkin

“God is a delicious good.”- Thomas Watson

“To change people most profoundly, we must change what we worship. Thinking, arguments, and beliefs are crucial as means of moving the heart, but ultimately we are what we adore. We are what captures our imagination … We must love God supremely, and that can be cultivated only through praise and adoration.”- Tim Keller

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This semester, we are looking at how the Spirit of God transforms our relationships.

Tonight we look at the final aspect of fruit, Self-Control, and we discuss how people in Christ are called to relate to their desires. Nothing builds vibrant relationships full of trust and mutual service more than the ability to control and deny our selfish desires. But, the Christian way of self-control looks totally different from all other methods of combatting selfishness, because it starts from a place of satisfaction and abundance. It begins with sinners being forgiven and reconciled to God through Christ, and made alive by the Holy Sprit. In the end, we see that true fulfillment in our deepest relationships comes not by following our desires, or emptying ourselves of desire, but by being filled with the supernatural love of the Holy Spirit.

“‘Just be true to yourself” sounds very intuitive. It sounds very right in our individualized culture. It’s a message we hear from all kinds of directions, but it’s actually a very catastrophic philosophy. … Jesus’ teaching about the self is that the most important thing we do with the self is not express it, but deny it. And the amazing thing is, as we deny self, we actually do become the real person God always intended us to be.’ —Sam Allberry

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure … You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” —G.K. Chesterton

“When Jesus calls for self-denial and cross-bearing, he’s claiming authority. Following Christ means disowning the self and giving allegiance to him instead. And it means giving him allegiance down to the very depths of our being.”— Christy Gambrell

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This semester, we are looking at how the Spirit of God transforms our relationships.

For this week's message we're examining the gentleness of Jesus. Gentleness (or meekness) is the aspect of Jesus’ heart that he gives to his people which allows us to make use of power without abusing people. If we want to wisely navigate the power differences in human society and in our family relationships, we need to cultivate the virtue of meekness.  

“Peter in no way diminishes the worth or capability of wives by comparing their physical strength to that of their husbands with a simple word picture. He is, in fact, guarding them from being treated contemptibly. [Our] emotions are not a sign of weakness – they are a gift from the Lord and can be a great strength. [Men and women] share equal potential for strength or weakness in all things moral, intellectual and emotional - question any teaching that states or implies otherwise.” -Jen Wilkin

“Jesus tells us who He is as a person: He is gentle and humble. Too many religious leaders, however, are not gentle nor are they humble. They are controlling and proud. They use people to satisfy their fat egos. But Jesus is refreshingly different. He truly loves people, selflessly serving and giving His life for them. He expects His followers—especially the elders who lead His people—to be humble and gentle like Himself.”- Alexander Strauch

“If you are selfish, and make yourself and your own private interests your idol, God will leave you to yourself, and let you promote your own interests as well as you can. But if you do not selfishly seek your own, but do seek the things that are Jesus Christ’s, and the things of your fellow human beings, then God will make your interest and happiness his own charge, and he is infinitely more able to provide for and promote it than you are. The resources of the universe move at his bidding, and he can easily command them all to subserve your welfare.” -Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits

https://faculty.wts.edu/posts/the-fifth-commandment-and-the-household/