All Episodes
Displaying 21 - 40 of 83 in total
Episode 21: Thou shalt not covet (part 2)
We live in a world dominated by electronic devices. Through them, marketers and advertisers continually manipulate our desires. And while we may consider ourselves inn...
Episode 22: Radical sacrifice
What does it mean to be a faithful Christian? How high does Jesus set the bar for true righteousness? Jesus has already taught the commandment against adultery in a wa...
Episode 23: What about divorce?
In our world, divorce is commonplace, even among Christians. Not surprisingly, then, Jesus’ teaching about divorce is controversial. In this episode and the next, we’l...
Episode 24: Hardness of heart
The rabbis of Jesus’ day had different views about divorce, and some of the teaching gave men a tremendous amount of power and freedom in ridding themselves of their w...
Episode 25: I mean it, I swear!
Have you ever heard someone swear “on a stack of Bibles” that what they were saying was true? Or have you heard someone say, “I swear to God”? Verbal formulas like the...
Episode 26: Say what you mean, mean what you say
Many of us have suffered from broken promises—or from the violation of what we took to be a promise. The Law of Moses required people to fulfill their oaths, but the l...
Episode 27: Justice or mercy?
The idea of an “eye for an eye” kind of justice is an ancient one, found even in the Law of Moses. And the principle may make intuitive sense: if you hurt me, I get to...
Episode 28: Don’t retaliate
An eye-for-eye kind of retaliation may seem fair, but in his teaching about righteousness, Jesus calls his hearers to something higher. He asks them to forgo retaliati...
Episode 29: Move the needle
Have you ever been attacked in a way you felt was undeserved? Everyone should have the right to be treated with fairness and justice, and one day God’s justice will re...
Episode 30: Us and them
Research has demonstrated again and again how easily humans form in-groups and out-groups, and the Pharisees seem to have reinforced that tendency with their teaching,...
Episode 31: Cutting corners
The command to love our neighbor can be found in the Old Testament—but there is no command to hate our enemies, contrary to what the Pharisees may have taught. It’s un...
Episode 32: There shall be showers of blessing
It’s natural to love our friends and hate our enemies. But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls his hearers to live with the kind of righteousness that lets others ...
Episode 33: A hard prayer
It’s not easy to love one’s enemies. We remember the things people have done to hurt or wrong us. But Jesus is not asking us to be best friends with those who have abu...
Episode 34: The highest standard
Some of us struggle with some degree of perfectionism. And if so, what Jesus says at the end of Matthew 5 may be particularly disturbing: he suggests that we are to be...
Episode 35: Reimagining righteousness
Before we move on to Matthew 6, let’s take an episode to review. What Jesus is giving his hearers in Matthew 5 is a vision for a kind of righteousness that is differen...
Episode 36: Right religion
It’s common these days to make a distinction between “religion” and “spirituality,” as if the former was bad and the latter was good. But that’s too much of a simplifi...
Episode 37: Piety, public and private
What kinds of things do Christians do that people might consider “religious”? Pray, go to church, read the Bible? Yes, all these, and more. But in the first part of Ma...
Episode 38: Tooting your own horn
Jesus gives three examples of public piety to distinguish between hypocritical and true righteousness: charitable giving, prayer, and fasting. All three were common re...
Episode 39: Praying in public
Some of us are reluctant to pray out loud in front of others, worried that we may not “get it right.” That fear already suggests how our concern over what others think...
Episode 40: Praying in private
Some prayers are public, which is as it should be. But there will always be the temptation to turn it into a performance of piety, using more sophisticated words than ...