Word of Life Church Podcast

In Numbers chapter 15 a guy is caught picking up sticks on the Sabbath and is stoned to death. In John chapter 5 Jesus works on the Sabbath by healing and instructs the healed man to carry his bed. Those most committed to the Bible (Torah) want to kill Jesus. There is a way of reading the Bible that will instruct you to stone Jesus. Don't read the Bible that way! That wrong reading of the Bible is what happens if we confuse Biblicism with Christianity. The good news is this: Jesus is better than Biblicism!

With the coming of the Son of Man the world changed. There’s a new charter. A new divine edict. Ever since Jesus re-founded the world at the cross and called humanity to organize itself around an axis of love expressed in mercy and forgiveness, a new moral law has been established in the cosmos that will not allow nations to forever oppose God’s will. As the Hebrew prophets first revealed long ago, God possesses a deep bias for the underclass and will judge nations accordingly. The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus has given the world a new ultimate reality—love for God expressed as love for neighbor and even enemy. Any other agenda is idolatry. Babylon is still with us, but Babylon is always falling. The new gravity of grace will not allow the modern Babylons to stand for long. The kind of entitlement the Pharaohs and Caesars were able to claim for their empires has now been shamed by Christ and cannot endure for long. Greatness, and even security, is not found in wealth and might, but in compassion and mercy. Jesus now calls the nations to be great in serving the least. Nations who resist this call are headed toward their own destruction.

Ancient wisdom speaks of three prime virtues: the true, the good, and the beautiful. These virtues are not a means to some other end (which would be a lesser end) -- rather these virtues are self justifying; they are an end in themselves; they are the telos of our lives.

Contemporary Christianity has placed an emphasis on two of these three virtues. From the truth of Christ we have developed Christian apologetics. From the goodness of Christ we have developed Christian ethics. What we are missing is a Christian aesthetics developed from the beauty of Christ. And what we are lacking is what we need the most right now. In a secular age that is dismissive of the Christian claim to absolute truth and a superior morality, beauty retains it's enduring appeal. For Christianity to win hearts in a secular world it has to be beautiful. We need to discover Christian aesthetics. We need to be beautiful. But how?

Brad Jersak is an author and teacher based in Abbotsford, BC, where he attends Fresh Wind Christian Fellowship and serves as Reader at All Saints of North America Monastery. His heart is to share the good news that God is Love and that God’s love was shown to us perfectly in Jesus of Nazareth. Through his books and seminers, Brad teaches that anyone can learn to hear God’s voice through the simple practice of ”listening prayer.” Those who practice listening prayer find that God’s love heals wounded hearts and empowers them to heal this broken world.

Brad Jersak’s foundational book, “Can You Hear Me? Tuning in to the God who speaks” trains readers in the ways of “Listening Prayer.” This book provides biblical teaching and 33 practical exercises for tuning in to God’s voice.

Brad self-identifies as a follower of Christ. His spiritual journey includes his confession of faith and trinitarian baptism in the Baptist General Conference; followed by membership and ordination in the the Conference of Mennonites in BC. Then after planting and serving in a “small-c” charismatic church plant, he was chrismated and ordained as a Reader in the Orthodox Church (OCA). He is comfortable ministering with Orthodox, evangelicals and charismatics across the spectrum.

Brad Jersak is an author and teacher based in Abbotsford, BC, where he attends Fresh Wind Christian Fellowship and serves as Reader at All Saints of North America Monastery. His heart is to share the good news that God is Love and that God’s love was shown to us perfectly in Jesus of Nazareth. Through his books and seminers, Brad teaches that anyone can learn to hear God’s voice through the simple practice of ”listening prayer.” Those who practice listening prayer find that God’s love heals wounded hearts and empowers them to heal this broken world.

Brad Jersak’s foundational book, “Can You Hear Me? Tuning in to the God who speaks” trains readers in the ways of “Listening Prayer.” This book provides biblical teaching and 33 practical exercises for tuning in to God’s voice.

Brad self-identifies as a follower of Christ. His spiritual journey includes his confession of faith and trinitarian baptism in the Baptist General Conference; followed by membership and ordination in the the Conference of Mennonites in BC. Then after planting and serving in a “small-c” charismatic church plant, he was chrismated and ordained as a Reader in the Orthodox Church (OCA). He is comfortable ministering with Orthodox, evangelicals and charismatics across the spectrum.

Jesus was put to death by the Roman Empire (skillfully manipulated by the Sanhedrin). What the Roman Empire did (and every empire does) is shape the world according to its will. Empires makes disciples of all nations. They do this by using the power and fear of death. But on Easter a new empire arrived -- an empire from God appointed for the toppling of all the old empires of death. On Easter Jesus turned death inside out and gave the world a new alternative -- the empire of love, the empire of peace, the empire of eternal life!

"God is dead." Friedrich Nietzsche made the saying famous. But Nietzsche borrowed it from Hegel. And Hegel took it from a line in an old Lutheran hymn for Holy Saturday. O Great Desolation, God, yes God, is dead! The hymn doesn't mean that the God who is Father in the Trinity suffered death. But it does saying something very bold: Whatever it means for a human being to suffer and die, God in Christ has fully experienced. On Good Friday the crucified God becomes the God who dies, the God who is dead.

When Jesus and Pilate meet, it is one of the most epic moments in history. As it turns out, it’s not the trial of Jesus in the court of the Roman governor; it’s the trial of the Roman Empire itself (and all systems of violent power) in the court of God. But the enduring scandal of the cross is this: Though we believe in Jesus, we also have sympathy for Pilate’s ideas about how to run the world. As Miroslav Volf has said, “Pilate deserves our sympathies, not because he was a good, though tragically mistaken man, but because we are not much better. We may believe in Jesus, but we do not believe in his ideas, at least not his ideas about violence, truth, and justice.”

Success is an idol—the great American idol. Which emphasizes the scandal that Jesus died as a failure. Jesus died as an apparent failure in the eyes of everyone. Yes, we know that Easter changed that perspective, but slow down. We can't rush from Christmas to Easter. We have to take Good Friday on its own terms. If we use Easter to obliterate Good Friday, rather than illuminate Good Friday, we end up a "theology of success," instead of the true theology that comes from the Crucified God.

The Cross isn't just one thing with a single meaning. Rather the Cross is where all that is wrong with humankind and the world we've built is dragged into the light, and God's redemptive alternative is offered. Christ crucified is the Lamb of God (the last scapegoat) who takes away the foundational sin of scapegoating.