Word of Life Church Podcast

Finding God On Your iPodJesus, the one who is the Word of God, sums up the Law and Prophets in two commands: Love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Everything depends on love. So when calculating the meaning of life, if it doesn’t add up to love, go back and recalculate. God is love, and to live life right, you have to go with the flow of love; any other conclusion about life a sad mistake.

But...

What happens if we start pulling on the strings of our affluence?

What happens if we look just beneath the surface of things?

What happens if we open our eyes to what we mostly overlook?

What happens if the other side of the world comes to our own town?

What happens if we discover the real price we pay for what we call security?

"So when I'm walking this prison camp world
I long for a glimpse of the new world unfurled
The chrysalis cracking and moistened wings uncurl
Like in the vision John saw"
-Bruce Cockburn

Those who confess Jesus is Lord are looking for glimpses of the new world. But we don't just sit back and wait for it -- we work with Jesus to move in the direction of New Jerusalem right now. Christians should have a compassionate eschatology, not a catastrophic eschatology. We should have an eschatology that leads us to be healers, not warmongers.

On a train ride from Rome to Assisi, researching the ancient Christian creeds and listening to Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace by the Foo Fighters, Brian says he realized that's what he needed: Echoes. Silence. Patience. Grace. Echoes from the past, silence in the present, patience with the future, and grace to tie it all together.

Ten years ago Brian Zahnd and Word of Life Church embarked upon a daring transition; a radical departure from American pop Christianity into the substantive faith of authentic Christianity. With story, sermon, scripture, and some help from a Tom Petty song, Brian tells this fascinating story.

I believe that one find day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem
-Steve Earle

Jesus is the fulfillment of all that the prophets foretold and the reign of his peaceable kingdom has begun. This is what we mean we confess Jesus is Lord. This is what the Apostles believed and preached. But as long as we fall for the eschatological trick that peace isn't for now, but only for when Jesus comes again, we will remain part of the problem instead of belonging to the solution. Which is equivalent to saying, "I'm going to follow Jesus... when he comes back."

Exodus! Movement of Jah people!
We're leaving Babylon
We're going to our Father's land
-Bob Marley

The people of God are called to a perpetual Exodus. We are always on the move -- always moving away from idolatry and injustice. This calls for an ongoing Exodus. Jah people, Jesus people, Christian citizens, are called to subordinate the interests of the Empire (the Economy) to the demands of justice. At times this will make us unpopular, but this unpopularity belongs to our baptismal identity.

The poetic and the prophetic are related. The poets and prophets are first cousins. Poets use artistic speech to say what cannot be said in conventional speech. The poet-prophets give us an alternative imagination -- a way of rethinking the world. Walter Brueggeman says, "Sunday morning is the practice of a counter life through counter speech." Finding God on Your iPod uses songs from contemporary recording artists to talk about Jesus and the gospel in a fresh, artistic way. This sermon is based on "Invisible" by U2.

A sermon delivered by Word of Life Church Youth Director Jacob Taylor.

The book of Philemon is a little window into the mind of an Apostle who saw the goodness of the Gospel for the whole world. In the Gospel we see God's desire for reconciliation. Human pride, greed, lust, and violence has had a way of tearing things apart. Jesus, in his reign, is bringing things back together. The reconciliation of Philemon the master and Onesimus the slave demonstrates not only God's work of reconciling the world to himself in Christ, it also demonstrates our call to the ministry of reconciliation.

The Gospel is not only for leading us to the doorway into the Kingdom of God. The Gospel is a foundation upon which we stand and it saves and shapes us as we continue to keep it central in our lives. The question is do we understand the gospel? If we misunderstand the Gospel we hear, we will misunderstand the faith we live. The Gospel found in the New Testament confronts the politics of power, the religion of relativism, and the sexuality of self and shapes us into a people of love.