Word of Life Church Podcast

From the beginning Jesus has been gathering together a flock, a community of people, who follow Jesus and believe his teaching, a community that would share his life, eternal life. The Journey at Word of Life is not a solo project. It is an adventure we share together with friends and also with people who we would not necessarily be friends without outside of our shared faith.

Following Jesus is something we do together, but it is a self-initiated journey. No one can walk this journey for you; it is something you determine to do. God does give his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, to be our helper and companion. However, you make the daily decision to either cooperate with or work against the Holy Spirit.

We are each responsible for our own exploration of The Journey. We have the help of the Holy Spirit, but we also have the help of the collective wisdom of those who have followed Jesus before us. We have summed up much of this wisdom in what we call The Four Practices: awareness, learning, reflecting, action.

In a culture of consumerism worship is an act of holy rebellion. Worship is gloriously impractical—a royal wast of time. Because contemporary models of worship involve a band, a stage, and popular music, we are tempted to confuse worship with entertainment. Worship is not entertainment! Entertainment is evaluated on the basis of did we personally find it enjoyable. Worship is evaluated on the basis of did we give God the glory due his name.

April 8, 1966—fifty years ago today—Time magazine published its most iconic cover, asking the question that haunts modern man: “Is God Dead?” After the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima should we concede that Nietzsche was right in his provocative prophesy about Western civilization? Is God dead? This sermon is on the "Doubting Thomas" story. In his commitment to empiricism and the doubt it engendered, Thomas was a prefiguring of the modern age and the crisis of faith. Thomas was called “The Twin” (Didymus). He had the twin experiences of crippling doubt (“I will never believe”) and soaring faith (“My Lord and my God!”).

On the evening of the resurrection Jesus appeared to his frightened disciples as they were hiding in the upper room. He spoke peace to them, breathed the holy spirit upon them, and sent them into the world. From that locked room on that first Easter the gospel message of Jesus has traveled around the world and down through the centuries launching billions of spiritual journeys.