Displaying 31 - 60 of 237 in total
Psalm 122 - Standing inside your gates
Many Psalms speak joyfully or longingly about specific places, so how do we read them in a culture not much concerned about location? The idea of pilgrimage has been c...
Psalm 78 - Stories we have heard
"Lessons from the past" are important, but not always easy to transmit. This Psalm is dominated by an overview of Israelite history, with a remarkable focus on where t...
Psalm 2 - You are my son
Messianic elements in the Psalms can be tricky to handle. Some psalms obviously (to our eyes) foreshadow aspects of the earthly life and ministry of Jesus. Psalm 22 an...
Psalm 141 - Drift toward evil
The Sabbath School topic this week is "wisdom for righteous living", and Psalm 141 serves us a good dose! It is clear that controlling what we say is a core step towar...
Psalm 57 - Have mercy!
Mercy seems to be one of God's most prominent characteristics. Psalm 57 is a beautiful celebration of God's mercy, but this concept keeps popping up all over the Bible...
Psalm 41 - Kind to the poor
The theme of being kind to the poor is well-trodden on this podcast, but we turn to Psalm 41 for new insight. The Sabbath School lesson falls into a fascinating trap b...
Psalm 77 - The good old days
Thinking about "singing the Lord's song in a strange land" makes us wonder what feels normal and what feels strange. Exile in a foreign land is a substantial theme for...
Psalm 121 - Keeps you from all harm
Any discussion of how the Lord hears and delivers has to consider the times when he doesn't. This well-loved Psalm strongly endorses God's protection, and we find the ...
Psalm 100 - the Lord is good
The Lord "reigning" is a somewhat antiquated metaphor in our contemporary social and political context. What does it tell us about God, and is there any helpful altern...
Psalm 44 - Lord, wake up!
The Psalms have plenty to teach us about how to pray. Perhaps the most striking thing about Psalm 44 is the rawness of complaint and accusation against God. Clearly a ...
Psalm 33 - Sing a new song
This season we return to the Psalms, and it is good to start by exploring how we can read them. Our initially general discussion of Inspiration leads to the reasonably...
1 Peter 2 - Living stones
We attempt to wrap up this season on "God's mission", but it seems there's more to learn and understand. The lesson poses a question about what the end of God's missio...
Esther 8 - They feared the Jews
Esther is a complicated story in any context, let alone the theme of God's mission. This complication arises from the implicit role of God in numerous surprising coinc...
Jeremiah 7 - The Lord’s Temple is here!
What might it mean to participate in God's mission to the "reached"? As anticipated, we follow on from last week's topic of "the unreached" by considering what it coul...
Acts 17 - Hearing something new
The "unreached" might need mission, but it is not such an easy category! We look at the well-known story of Paul in Athens using a statue to an unknown god to launch a...
Daniel 1 - Serve in the royal palace
It's fascinating to explore mission to the powerful. A number of biblical examples are illustrative, but perhaps the most iconic is the story of Daniel and his friends...
James 1 - Pure and genuine religion
To explore the topic of "Mission to the needy" we turned to the story of friends lowering a paralytic man through the roof. This topic is particularly timely for our w...
Luke 10 - Love your neighbour
The topic "Mission to my neighbour" sends us straight to the Good Samaritan. Although so well-known, this story has so much capacity to challenge us. It provides an ex...
Luke 24 - Hearts burn within us
How to catch the kind of motivation that makes you re-walk a day's journey without resting?Some of the motivations experienced by friends of Jesus in the New Testament...
Jonah 4 - Angry enough to die
We all have excuses to avoid God's mission, but the most obvious ones are nearly trivial. Looking at the story of Jonah exposes a much more challenging idea: what if w...
Genesis 18 - Will you sweep away?
Abraham challenges God's suggestion of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, which is a challenging picture of "participating in God's mission".
Isaiah 58 - This kind of fasting
How might we stop "mission" becoming a mirror?Talking about comfort zones in the context of God's mission reminds us just how powerful the pull of comfort can be. Do w...
Matthew 28 - Some of them doubted
What is the Great Commission again?It's a command to go, make disciples, baptise them, and teach them to obey. All of these aspects deserve to be unpacked a lot, but a...
John 3 - God sent His Son
An exploration of God's Mission must start with a focus on the God of mission.This new season will explore the theme of "God's Mission, My Mission", and we have to rec...
Ephesians - Union with Christ
After exploring the themes and some details of Ephesians, does it "feel different"?This episode is a bit of an experiment - does listening to the entire book of Ephesi...
Ephesians 6 - Grace and peace
Ephesians closes with almost the same sentence as it began: a blessing of grace and peace.Peace seems at first to be the flip side of the aggressive military imagery o...
Ephesians 6 - Stand your ground
How helpful is military armour as an analogy for the Christian life?This passage is perhaps the most well-known part of Ephesians, and yet it actually feels somewhat s...
Ephesians 6 - Do not provoke
The theme of unity and submission gets awkward when discussing slaves!It is hardly surprising that the New Testament mentions slavery (it was a cultural norm), but it ...
Ephesians 5 - United into one
We've reached the well-known passage about submission in marriage......except that after the emphasis on unity that has been observed consistently throughout Ephesians...
Ephesians 5 - Making music to the Lord
Ephesians 5 is a call to "be careful how you live".The chapter opens with a stark juxtaposition between "worthless deeds of evil and darkness" and choices "that please...