All Episodes
Displaying 31 - 60 of 83 in total
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 ...
Episode 41: Blah blah blah
Jesus has already condemned the practice of praying in public in order to be noticed by others. But it’s not just about where one prays, but how. In this episode, we e...
Episode 42: Praying to our Father
Many of you listening to this can probably recite the Lord's Prayer from memory. But do we ever think about what we’re saying when we pray those words? The prayer sits...
Episode 43: God isn’t “Daddy”
Jesus taught his hearers to pray to God as their heavenly Father, using the Aramaic word, “Abba.” Some have said that this means “Daddy,” but biblical scholars general...
Episode 44: Names matter
In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that God’s name would be “hallowed.” That’s a word that contemporary speakers of English almost never use. But the prayer is an important...
Episode 45: His name is holy
What does it mean to treat a name as holy? The idea may be a little odd to people who live in a day and culture in which names function like labels and have little rea...
Episode 46: Is God’s story the story we want?
As human beings, we are all naturally storytellers. We inherit stories from our families and from the cultures in which we live. And there is a sense in which the Bibl...
Episode 47: Your will be done
Often, we speak of “God’s will” as something we seek when we have an important decision to make; we want to know what the “right” decision is, the one that God wants u...
Episode 48: Heaven on earth
Part of the Lord’s Prayer sounds like were asking for “heaven on earth.” But that sounds like we’re asking for God to turn the world into a vacation paradise. Rather, ...
Episode 49: Big-picture prayer
The first part of the Lord’s Prayer is what I call a “big-picture” prayer, a prayer not just for the things we want or need, but for the world. The second half of the ...
Episode 50: The bread of life
In the previous episode, I suggested that we need to keep a big-picture perspective throughout the Lord’s Prayer. When we pray for our daily bread, for example, we can...
Episode 51: Not by bread alone
In Matthew 4, the chapter just before the Sermon on the Mount, we read the story of Jesus being tempted by Satan in the wilderness. Jesus had been fasting for forty da...
Episode 52: Ordinary mercy
Bread isn’t the only thing we need every day. We also need forgiveness, and Jesus teaches his hearers to pray for that too. But even as we pray for God’s mercy, we are...
Episode 53: Forgiven and forgiving
In an earlier episode, we reflected on Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant from Matthew 18. In this episode, we revisit that parable, because its ending is simila...
Episode 54: Forgive and forget?
We’ve all heard the saying that we should “forgive and forget.” But forgiveness can be difficult, precisely because it’s also difficult to forget how others have hurt ...
Episode 55: Trials and temptations
The Bible speaks of both “trials” and “temptations.” But both of these English words can be used to translate the same word in Greek—making translators have to choose ...
Episode 56: Security
Our world is one in which people often learn to derive their sense of security from material things. But again, Jesus wants his followers to have a big-picture perspec...
Episode 57: Eyeballs
We now live in what some have called an “attention economy”—a world in which marketers and advertisers compete for a few moments of our attention as we stay glued to o...
Episode 58: Divided loyalties
How often do we live with divided loyalties? Jesus has spoken about the treasure we pursue, and the way we direct our attention. We may want God, but we want more than...
Episode 59: This is my Father’s world
Matthew portrays the Sermon on the Mount as being preached outdoors; that’s how Jesus often spoke to large crowds. And as he turns to the universal subject of the worr...
Episode 60: Fragmented
Throughout the sermon, Jesus has been trying to teach his hearers to imagine the big picture and pray and act accordingly. We can be pulled in so many different direct...