Save My Darlings

It's sometimes difficult to understand what "trust," "believe," and "faith" mean in the Bible--especially the New Testament--because the Greek word behind all three is usually the same one: "pistis." And this matters a bunch because we need to know what is asked of us when we're told to "believe" or "have faith" or "trust." Here's a 10 minute primer on how to do it!

The Bible contains a lot of pretty scary stuff from the spiritual world. We saw the Seraphim on Sunday and in the last podcast and, let's be honest, from our perspective these "Burning Ones" seem like monsters. So are we supposed to be scared of all that? The answer is a little bit Yes and a little bit No. Check it out!

Read the Bible enough and you will encounter some weird stuff. On Sunday, we ran into the "Seraphim," or "Burning Ones," who had six wings and set things on fire! What do we make of stuff like that? In this episode I give some explanation of what the Seraphim are and how we might interpret weird stuff like that when we come across it in the Bible.

In this episode we show what the Bible does and doesn't mean when it talks about a special movement of the Holy Spirit on individuals or groups. You may have heard Christians talking or singing about the Holy Spirit coming or filling a place. Well here I explain how to know what that means and how to tell is it's actually true!

Some Christians feel like they don't have much of a testimony. Maybe it's "boring" or "too simple" or they've just "always believed." Well I'm here to tell you that these kinds of stories aren't boring at all--in some ways, they might be the most important stories we've got. Listen here to find out why and then take the challenge to begin asking God for boldness to share your testimony in church and in the world!

The Bible just sort of assumes that bad things happen to good people and doesn't seem terribly bothered by that fact--it certainly doesn't hamper anyone's faith in God! But in in today's world atheists and agnostics use the fact of "unnecessary evil" or suffering as a major reason to disbelieve in God or at least be unsure about God's good character. In this week's episode we tackle that problem head-on. Unintended consequences, deep complexity, chaos theory and more in this week's podcast episode!

In this episode, I explain why we used the translation we did of Psalm 139 and explain the logic of the Psalm. In doing so, we see how important it is to take note of the weird stuff in the Bible. It's easy to gloss over things that don't fit our idea of who God is or what God is like, and doing so has led to missing out on the real depth, power, and tension in Psalm 139, and many other texts as well!

This week's podcast ties up our Exiled series with a reflection on the role of remembering as people in Exile and how we can rekindle the joy of our greatest spiritual experiences in the here and now. Plus, a little bit of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation to help make sense of it all.

There are a lot of good interpretations of the Bible, but not every interpretation is good. A lot are out of bounds. But how? In this episode we go through three critical rules for interpretation: (1) Words can mean a lot but not anything, (2) The Bible tells a coherent story about God, the Universe, and us, and (3) The pieces of Scripture fit together to show us an all-loving, self-giving King. I try to avoid getting too philosophical, but this episode is definitely a bit more abstract. It'll be good to give your brain a bit of a stretch!

Here's a question I get asked about different biblical passages: "What does this mean, this or that?" The assumption is that each text from the Bible has a correct interpretation and a whole bunch of incorrect ones. In this episode I demonstrate how the Bible might have multiple--even endless good interpretations. That doesn't mean anything goes, but that's for next week! See how experience, context, and word meanings can lead to multiple good readings of biblical texts.