Jesus First

Our next passage in the Gospel of Matthew takes us to a passage on judgment. Actually, it's the message John the Baptist gave to warn people about the coming Messiah. For John, the coming Messiah was something to be scared of... John would baptize with water, but the coming Messiah would baptize in fire. This should teach us at least two important lessons about Jesus, our King.

What does it take for a leader to be rejected? What kind of leader will religious people follow and what kind will be despised? Jesus was the kind of leader religious conservatives hated.

What kind of king is Jesus? He's the kind of king who would do things we can't imagine to reach people we don't love!

Christians today often fantasize about what it might be like to have a king like David again. We know the stories of his victories, and we imagine what it would be like to have a king like that fighting our battles for us. However, the opening to the book of Matthew shows us that Jesus is so much better than David!

We now turn our attention in this podcast to the question about the kingdom of our king. What kind of king is he and what kind of kingdom does he have? To get us started, Jeff takes us through a passage that's on his heart to address the question What kind of God is God?

In his final words to his followers, Jesus told them to make disciples, but he also left out a bunch of things we think are important. Sadly, we often leave out some of the things he said.

Did you ever realize that the core message of the gospel is a political statement? At least it was in the first century. The idea that Jesus is king is what got him crucified, and it's the reason the first Christians were martyred, not because people found the beliefs or behaviors offensive but because they weren't loyal to the political power structures of the day. The government wanted them to say, Caesar is lord, but they kept putting the wrong name into that sentence. They kept saying Jesus is Lord, and that got them into a lot of trouble.

For some people, saying Jesus is King means that he is a King in opposition to the other powers and the other kings in this world. They see the Kingdom of Jesus as a kingdom under threat, a kingdom that needs warriors. The problem is that they have severely overestimated their own responsibility and they have severely underestimated our King's authority.

This is our last episode working through Colossians 1:15-20, and in it, we cover the fact that Jesus is already, right now, actually in charge of the universe, but also that Jesus is the solution for my deepest need.

The supremacy of Jesus starts with the recognition that he's more than merely a man. He is God in the flesh. Saying that Jesus is God isn't just a theological statement. It's a statement about what it means to be a person of faith and what it means to be a person who follows God.

This year, with a looming presidential election and the continuing concerns of global warfare, tragedy, and political divisions, I think it’s important once again to remember this essential truth.

Jesus is King.

And that means a lot.

Are you a person of faith or fear? It's really a question about who is on the throne in your heart. Let's put Jesus first again.

Sooo... this episode is a bit long. Remember how I was critical of a sermon I heard a couple weeks ago? Well, this is my conclusion to that episode, the conclusion to my thoughts on how that pastor misunderstood the passage, but more than that, why that pastor misunderstood the message. Ultimately, I don't blame him. I blame the American Evangelicalism that trained him to see the Bible through a specific lens that led to his own misunderstanding.

This is the first in a series of episodes where I'm going to talk about some problems commonly found among evangelical preachers while also talking about the problems I myself have when listening to other preachers!

This first message teaches us to point the fingers at ourselves first even if we sometimes need to address the errors we see in other people.

And it's not that passage about taking the log out of your eye!

I was taught that all Black people descended from Noah's son Ham.

I was also taught that Noah pronounced a curse on Ham's children.

That created in me a lingering racial bias that I never really confronted until a few years ago.

The story of Cain and Abel is commonly taught to children in American churches, but in white contexts, the implication is often that God punished Cain by turning him black. Not only is that a misunderstanding of the text, it actually perpetuates the opposite lesson we are supposed to learn from the passage.

No one ever taught me that Adam and Eve were white, but lots of tiny details in the way it was taught definitely led me to that presupposition. In fact, many aspects of the story led me to think that being white was "normal" and if being white is "normal," then any focus or attention given to the Black experience would be celebrating something that wasn't normal. In other words, the way we talk about Adam and Eve has led many including myself to disregard or discount the experience of non-white people. I used to consider Black History Month to be itself racist. In this episode, I share briefly how I came out of that misunderstanding.

For some reason, the term "Woke" has become a negative term among modern evangelical Christians. However, the Bible is filled with references to "wakefulness" and commands to "wake up."

In this introductory episode, I cover some of those passages to see what it means to be Biblically Woke.