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From the "It Matters" sermon series. Preached by Dewayne Pinkney.

Jason Sterling August 2, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL 

August 2, 2026 Pastor Nathan Lee Luke 14: 25-35

The Indictment Grace Presbyterian Church Download Title: The IndictmentSpeaker: Ransom KentScripture: Romans 1:18-32Date: July 2, 2026

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 9:13-10:20Speaker: Bob SchwartzbeckSeries: Ecclesiastes

Preaching the church vacant; Ephesians 4:1-16; Rev. Sam Parkinson, Sunday 2nd August 2026

Genesis 1:26–28 (NKJV) 26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God… The post 02/08/2026 – Evening Service: Humanity in the Image of God (Gen. 6:1-8) appeared first on Maroubra Presbyterian Church.

August 2, 2026 Pastor Nathan Lee Luke 14: 25-35

Bible Readings: Luke 15:11 – 32Luke 7:36 – 50 Sermon Outlines: The post 02/08/2026 – Morning Service: At the Table, Outside the Feast appeared first on Maroubra Presbyterian Church.

In this episode of The Reformed Brotherhood, Tony Arsenal delivers a rich expository sermon on James 5:1–6, one of the most striking prophetic passages in the New Testament epistles. Drawing on the Jewish literary and cultural context of James's original audience — Jewish Christians scattered from Jerusalem by persecution — Tony unpacks why this text is not a blanket condemnation of wealth, but a devastating judgment oracle against those who hoard riches and oppress the vulnerable. Along the way, he explores the eschatological weight of accumulated wealth, the theology of God's omniscient justice, and the stunning comfort available to the suffering believer. The episode closes by returning to James's thesis: that trials of every kind, including economic oppression, can be counted as joy because of who God is and what He has done in Christ. Key Takeaways James is a deeply Jewish book written to a specific audience — Jewish Christians dispersed from Jerusalem by Saul's persecution, not a general audience of wealthy or Gentile believers. The prophetic "Come now" signals a judgment oracle, not a direct address — James is not rebuking wealthy members of his congregation, but pronouncing eschatological judgment on oppressive landowners using a technique common in Amos, Malachi, and Micah. Hoarding wealth is not morally neutral — it is self-condemning — The corroded gold and moth-eaten garments are not just symbols of decay; they serve as legal evidence against those who refused to use their wealth for God's glory and the good of others. Withholding wages from laborers constitutes a form of murder — In the ancient world, depriving workers of their wages could literally cost them their lives. James draws on Old Testament law to frame predatory economic exploitation as a capital sin. God sees and hears the cries of the oppressed — The wages of defrauded workers "cry out" to the Lord of Hosts, echoing the blood of Abel in Genesis 4. God's justice is not passive or delayed out of ignorance — it is certain and coming. Matthew 25 reframes Christian mercy as care for the body of Christ — The sheep-and-goats judgment is not a general humanitarian mandate, but a specific call to care for persecuted brothers and sisters — and to recognize that mistreating them is mistreating Christ Himself. Trials are counted as joy through the doctrine of imputation — Suffering is not stripped of its pain, but it can be moved from the loss ledger to the profit column because God uses adversity as the instrument of sanctification and glorification. Key Concepts The Prophetic Address: Who Is James Actually Talking To? One of the most common misreadings of James 5:1–6 is assuming James is directly rebuking wealthy Christians in his own congregation. Tony Arsenal corrects this by grounding the passage in its literary and historical context. James employs a well-established prophetic technique — seen in Amos, Malachi, and Micah — of addressing an absent party in order to pronounce judgment on them, while simultaneously comforting those who overhear the oracle. His audience is the dispersed, impoverished Jewish Christians who fled Jerusalem under Saul's persecution. There were almost certainly no wealthy landowners in the room. The "Come now, you rich" is a judgment declaration directed outward, designed to assure the suffering poor that God has seen their oppressor and will act. Far from being a proof-text for radical poverty, the passage is a pastoral comfort wrapped in prophetic fire. Corroded Gold as Legal Evidence Against the Soul James's claim that gold and silver have "corroded" is deliberately shocking — and theologically precise. Gold, uniquely among metals in the ancient world, does not corrode. By saying it has already corroded, James is not making a metallurgical claim but a moral and eschatological one. The accumulated, hoarded wealth of the oppressor has lost its purpose. It sits idle while workers starve, and in doing so it becomes evidence — a legal witness — against its owner in the court of divine justice. Tony draws a direct line between this image and Jesus's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about treasures stored on earth being subject to moth and rust. Both brothers — Jesus and James — appear to be drawing on the same shared wisdom, likely rooted in the same household and the same mother's instruction. Unused wealth does not just fail to help others; it actively indicts its holder. Counting It All Joy: The Accounting Logic of Sanctification Tony closes the sermon by returning to James 1:2 — the thesis statement of the entire letter — and unpacking the word "count" as an accounting term, directly related to the doctrine of imputation. Just as righteousness is reckoned to the believer in justification, so suffering can be reckoned as joy in sanctification. This is not a call to pretend pain isn't real, or to perform contentment. It is a theological reframing: what belongs in the loss column of the ledger can, by faith, be moved to the profit side — not because the trial was pleasant, but because God is sovereign, good, and working all things toward the believer's conformity to the image of Christ. The oppressor means their wickedness for evil. God means it for glory. The supreme example is the cross itself — the only truly innocent man, suffering the worst evil ever committed, for the redemption of His people. Memorable Quotes The corrosion of that gold serves as evidence for the condemnation of those who are harming you — and the corrosion of this wealth is an indication of the corrosion of their very souls. He sees your pain. He sees your suffering. He sees your victories even when no one else is celebrating them. He sees you — and that should be a great source of comfort. Imputation is an accounting term. And when we count it all joy, we're taking what should be a red line in the loss ledger — what should be an expense — and we're able to move it to the profit. Not because it didn't hurt, and not because we wanted it to happen, but because our God is good enough to not rob us of the chance to be sanctified. Full Transcript Tony Arsenal: Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you." It's always a little, uh, strange to sort of jump into the middle of a series, and, um, you know, Wes is one of the most competent preachers that I know personally, so I trust that he has given you a good and satisfying overview. Uh, but I don't feel like I would be doing my responsibility if I didn't at least touch on a few things, uh, related to the, the intro to James that I think is relevant for this particular passage in a way that maybe is not relevant for the rest of the book. So some of this I hope is review, I, I anticipate is review, but I think it's worth, uh, touching on. James, as you know, is the, the half brother of Jesus. He was the leader of the Jerusalem church, and specifically he was sort of the figurehead of the Jewish church as a whole. Um, the Jewish church was the only church for the very early part of the church's growth. There were always, uh, Gentile believers. Even in the Old Testament, there were Gentiles who trusted in the Lord of Israel and the God of Israel. They were often called God-fearers. They rarely converted all the way to Judaism, but they were sort of seen as an attachment to the Jewish people. They didn't participate in all of the blessings of the Jewish people, but they did participate in most. They often had the same kind of protection. They were in a form of covenant with God. Um, they were able to worship and offer sacrifices. The temple itself had a whole portion of the temple dedicated called the Court of Gentiles, specifically for these Jewish worshipers. And as the church spread, primarily through persecution, which we'll touch base on here in a minute, as the church spread out from Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria, and ultimately to the ends of the earth, it took on a, an increasingly Gentile Greek flavor. As more and more primarily initially Greek converts came into the church, and then of course, as it spread to other sort of non-Hellenistic lands, other, other types of people, other nations, other people groups joined the church, the scriptures which-- the New Testament we receive primarily from Paul, at least in terms of the epistles, um, also began to take on a more Gentile flavor. Not because Paul was a Gentile, but because Paul was ministering primarily to Gentiles What we'll see here is that James is a very Jewish book. I'm sure that along the way there's been several kinds of things pointed out to you to show that, but I wanna show a couple things that not only establish James as the author, James the brother of, of Jesus, but also root the, not only the author, but the audience in a distinctly Jewish Christian, uh, context. So you don't have to turn there, I'll read this, but in Acts, uh, 15, which is the, the great Jerusalem Council, uh, we read this. It says, "With the following letter..." So the, the council meets, they make a decision about what k- what parts of the Jewish law were going to be commended to and recommended, uh, and required for the Christian believers, the Gentile Christian believers, and when they're done, they send this letter to all of, all of the churches. And it says, "With the following letter, the brothers, both apostles and the elders, to the brothers who are at, of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greetings." Now, I don't know about you, but I always sign my emails the same way, right? I've got, like, my work signature that I have to use, that the, the hospital makes me use with all the proper formatting and colors and fonts, but I always have the same signature. Mine is very simple. I just say, "Thanks," right? I just sign it as, "Thanks," above my signature, and I'm sure you all have that sort of characteristic way you sign a s- sign an email, or maybe it's the way you say goodbye at the end of a phone call. My father-in-law always says, "So long," which is a phrase you don't hear very often, so it's very distinct to him. We all have these little tells in our communication that sort of tip off who they're from. If you turn quickly back over to James 1, so just flip the page, uh, to the left here, he starts his letter by saying, "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the 12 tribes in the dispersion, greetings." It's the only two letters in the New Testament that we have where the author identifies himself, sends to a sort of generalized audience, and then signs it, "Greetings." Now, James, the brother of Jesus, was the leader of the Jerusalem Church. He was the leader of the Jewish ch- the Jewish Church in general, and he signed the letter coming from the Acts Council as sort of the presiding minister. If, if we were, y- you might call them, like, the moderator of your business meeting, or we would call them the moderator of our presbytery or our session in the Presbyterian context I come from. He was the one who sort of, like, presided over there, and so the letter that went out to the churches was signed in his name and written, drafted by him. So we see this characteristic way that the letter is addressed with this final word, "Greetings," which is not used frequently in the New Testament We also see when we look at the language carefully that the audience of this, uh, of this letter, it's debated and there are good arguments, but i- in my opinion, it's very clear that the audience of this letter is not Jewish Christians in general or, uh, Jews who have not yet converted. There are some people who would say that 'cause they're called the 12 tribes. But instead it is the Jewish Christians who originally dwelled in Jerusalem and were sent out into the countryside after the persecution that was started primarily by Saul. If you look at Acts, Acts 1 which is, uh, the passage where Saul begins to persecute the church or where Saul kinda comes on the scene as the persecutor of the church, there's a couple distinct, um, distinct linguistic markers we should touch base on. Starting in verse one it says, "And p- Saul approved of his execution. And there arose a day-- that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. They were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Devout men buried Stephen and made a great lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church and entered the house after house. He dragged off men and women and committed them to prison." When we look at this and we compare it to that, uh, again, that first verse of James where he says to the ones who are scattered, we see that there's a pretty strong linguistic parallel that tells us that the people he has in mind for this letter, the people he's addressing, are the same people who were dispersed or scattered out of Jerusalem in the persecution. When he says to the 12 tribes in the dispersion, that word dispersion is not really a translation. It's what we call a transliteration. So it's not like we've taken a word and sort of given it an English word. We've just changed the word, the letters over to English letters. In Greek, the word is diaspora, dispersion, and in, uh, Acts 1, the verb used to, to sort of describe this scattering of them is diaspero. And it is a picture of scattering seed. This is what a farmer would do. So it's not even the normal word we would use when someone is fleeing persecution. It's this idea that God has scattered Christians out into the world, in this case by persecution. He scattered them out into the world to be planted. A lot of this is where we get phrases from Tertullian about the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Now, why does this matter? As I mentioned, we often think in Gentile categories when we're reading the New Testament, and for good reason. One, we're all, all Gentiles, I'm presuming. I, I don't, I don't think-- I think I mentioned this last time, and no one came up and corrected me. I don't think anyone here is ethnically Jewish with ancestry that they're directly aware of, you know, where they trace their lineage directly back. Europe is a, a big amalgamation of just about everything, so most of us probably have a smattering of different ethnicities. But none of us are ethnically Jewish to the idea that we would, uh, identify as such in the same way. And even if we were, we've been raised and grown up in a Gentile context. We live in the West. We have-- We think in different categories. And what's more is most of the New Testament is written primarily to Gentiles by someone who is ministering to Gentiles. So Paul uses a fair amount of, of Hebraisms or things that are related to the Old Testament. Of course, he's explaining the Old Testament, and he makes ample reference to the Old Testament because that is the word of God, and it is profitable for our teaching, our correction, our reproof, and ultimately for our, our sanctification. But he uses metaphors and language in a way that is not common to the Israel context that Jesus and James and Peter and the other apostles were raised in. We don't have time to go there, but there's even some metaphors that Paul uses that are actually used the opposite way in, uh, in the more Hebraic Jewish, uh, epistles we have. One example that comes to mind is, um, Paul looks at the concept of milk, and that's not necessarily a good thing, right? It's not a bad thing, but it's what immature believers use, right? They can't handle the meat of the Bible. They have to be given the milk of the gospel before they can progress to the meat. In the Book of Hebrews, which I don't think was written by Paul, and in other places, Peter uses milk as a way to talk about nourishment, right? We think of the land flowing with milk and honey. Milk was not seen as some sort of substandard food that was only for babies. It was seen as, like, the richest, best thing that you could eat. We all have a linguistic environment that we grow up in. We all have a shared vernacular. You know, if I say something like, "You can't get there from here," everyone knows what that means. Obviously, you can get there from here, but you have to take this circuitous route. We know what that means. I think if we went around the room, we probably would find that there is this shared language. And then if we took individual families, we'd find that even within those families, there's further narrowing down of sort of like inside jokes and words that are used in ways that are not necessarily the same as others So when we read James, or when we read the letters of Peter or the letters of John, we should default to thinking more along the lines of comparing them to the words of Christ in the Gospel, first and foremost, and then to the Old Testament before we start to think about them necessarily comparing them to Ja-- or to Paul or to other kind of first century Hellenistic literature. That's not, of course, to say that Paul and James contradict. I'm sure that we went through a long explanation with much detail when you got to James chapter two, which is, of course, the most famous example. Paul uses the word justification or justify in a legal sense to make or to declare someone to be righteous. It's the verdict that the judge delivers, and it communicates the status. It actually performs what it says. When the judge says, "I find you not guilty," it changes your status from being potentially guilty to being cleared of all charges. Paul uses it slightly differently. He's not using it in the sense of to make someone righteous or to declare them righteous. He's using it to say they've been shown to be righteous. They've been validated. They've been vindicated. And if we get that mixed up, that's the source of all sorts of confusion. So when we come to this passage, and we'll get there, I promise, when we come to this passage, we have to understand some of the metaphors and the language that's being used draws from an existing body of shared cultural language that is foreign to us and is in some ways foreign to the rest of the New Testament, apart from what we see in the Gospels And it's important to remember, and this is why it's so key to land, that the audience of this letter is the persecuted, poor Jewish Christians who probably had a fairly comfortable life, relatively speaking, living in Jerusalem. These are city folks. These are people that live in Jerusalem or farm into the fields immediately around Jerusalem. They were established. They owned land. They probably had family that they had to leave, and now they're scattered out into the country with nothing. They're sent out into the world with no jobs, no family connections, no social welfare. Because they've left the Jewish faith, at least from the perspective of the Jews, they can't even go to their Jewish brothers and sisters and rely on the hospitality that's required in the law of Moses This is so important when we think about how James opens the letter and delivers what I think is his thesis statement. "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you face trials of every kind." Trials like not knowing where the next meal is gonna come from, not knowing where the next roof over your head is, not being sure you can feed your children. We all face real trials and tribulations in our life. Some of them are related to our faith, and some is just the fallen human condition in the fallen world we live in. But we're talking here about a totally different category of, uh, trial and persecution than most of us hopefully will ever experience That brings us to our actual passage now. James opens up this section with a linguistic marker that signifies this is a change in topic. He says, "Come now," or another way to translate it might be, "Now listen. Listen up." When my son is doing something that, uh, I need him to stop or I need to give him instructions, I hold him by his shoulders and I say, "Look at my eyes. I want your eyes right here. Look at my eyes." That's what Paul is doing. He's stopping and he's interrupting the flow of language. This shows us this is a new topic and a new audience. James is not speaking to rich Christians in his audience. First, 'cause there likely weren't any rich Christians directly in his audience. Remember, these are the, the poor Christians scattered out into the Judean countryside, into Samaria He's using a technique that's really common in the prophets. It's common in Jesus, where he's addressing the people who are not really listening as a way to establish that they will be judged, to hold them accountable, but also to comfort those who are hearing the message. This is a form of prophetic address. We see this in Amos, where he's chastising the Jewish leaders. Uh, in Malachi and Micah, this happens. Malachi is primarily, at least initially, is primarily, uh, a book that is railing against the rich leaders in Jerusalem who had oppressed their own brothers and sisters. The chances that those Jewish cr- uh, Jewish leaders were reading his prophecy or hearing his prophecy is pretty slim. So he was addressing a different group to establish the judgment that he was proclaiming on another party. Jesus does this when he says like, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees." There were probably scribes and Pharisees in the audience there, but he wasn't just talking to the people in front of them. He was pronouncing a judgment oracle, a judgment prophecy on all people who fit that category, and James is doing the same thing here James is not opposing wealth generally. Sometimes James is used as kind of a New Testament example to justify the idea that we should all be poor and wear shabby clothing and walk around barefoot and dirty all the time. Right? This is a key passage that's used, uh, in parts of the church that really emphasize sort of a poverty-based lifestyle. Think of like the wandering monks of the Middle Ages or the, the, um, sort of more radical exclusionists that exist even in our day. I remember when I was in college, I was really enamored with this figure named Shane Claiborne. Some of you have probably heard of him, and I remember I was so impressed because he, he didn't buy new shoes. He just cut new shoes out of duct tape and put them back together. Now, there's some, you know, there's some rugged, uh, rugged get-it-done-ness that, uh, I think us, uh, New Englanders can appreciate, but God does not call us to wear duct tape shoes, at least not universally. I'm not gonna comment on whether he calls Shane Claiborne to do that. I also don't think Shane Claiborne does that anymore. Um, some of us he may call to a lifestyle of poverty in association with a mission field or in association with a specific calling. He does not call us generally to be poor or to not gain wealth What he is opposing here is the refusal to use wealth appropriately for God's glory and the accumulation of wealth just for wealth's sake We'll see that as we unpack the language here a little bit. He establishes that he's not just talking about the earthly hoarding of wealth, as though somehow the very act of accumulating wealth was itself the problem. What he's doing is he's pronouncing an eschatological judgment on those who hoard wealth and use it to oppress others. We see here he says, "Come now, you rich, and weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you." Th- that word weep and howl, those are li-- those are words that are most commonly used in prophetic literature to describe the final cry of anguish. Think about the weeping and gnashing of teeth that Jesus talks about. This is the language he's using. He's talking about the final estate of those who refuse to submit their wealth to God He says, "Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be the evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasures in the last days." Now, remember what we said. We, we should read this not in light of some general wisdom, although it is general wisdom that if we accumulate wealth, it tends to not actually go well for us if we're not utilizing it in God-honoring ways. But we should read this in light of the most obvious connection, his big brother, Jesus, who taught his people, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be." To maybe land this linguistic, uh, this linguistic connection a little more, I don't know, vibrantly, I'm gonna speculate a little bit. So if you don't like it, then you can disregard it. This is not God's Word. This is a speculation. I can just imagine little Jesus, little nine-year-old Jesus, and probably little six or seven-year-old James and the rest of their siblings, and there's quite a few of them. And we have Joseph, uh, who maybe at this time was still living, although probably not. We know he was living until Jesus was later, you know, 12, he was still around, but we don't know exactly when he left the picture. But he was a carpenter, and he was not, probably not overly wealthy. Uh, they had had to pick up and move, you know, cross-country anyways. They-- We don't know exactly where they were from initially, but they went to Bethlehem, and then they returned to Nazareth. They probably didn't have a lot. There were a lot of mouths to feed and only one business. They didn't have a farm. They didn't own livestock that we know of. I can just imagine a time when little J- little James or one of his sisters was frustrated about the fact that they didn't have anything. And I could picture Mary getting down and going, "Do not store up treasures in, in, uh, in heaven or on Earth. It's all gonna waste away." The same way we might tell our children kind of a, a moral kind of story. Sometimes we have this picture, last time I was here I, I spoke on Philippians 2, we have this idea that Jesus was somehow like Superman, that he, he was just pretending to be a normal human most of the time. As it touches his humanity, as, as we think about Jesus as a human, he had a, his own human set of thinking faculties, his own human knowledge. He grew in wisdom and stature is what Luke teaches us. Well, where did he get some of this wisdom? There's a good reasonable argument to be made that some of the pr- more proverbial type sayings that we see in Christ, that they actually come from the wisdom of his mother and father. And a really good reason to believe that is James relies on the same exact, uh, sort of proverbial wisdom to l- land his point. He doesn't create his own metaphor, he goes back to, at the very least we can say he goes back to the words of Christ. That's a very safe position to take. But this is the shared linguistic context that they both grew up in And he says, "You've done this in the last days." Now, the, the phrase last days in the Bible, uh, in the New Testament generally refers to the time period from Christ's resurrection to his return. We, for a lot of reasons, think about it as kind of like that climactic end period in time. Depending on your, your persuasion, maybe this is when the Antichrist comes, or maybe this is before or after, or maybe during the time when the church is raptured. But in either case, we think of that sort of last period in time before Christ finally comes back. But the New Testament writers are really talking about the entire duration, from Christ's resurrection to his return is what they're referring to. But it does have in view this idea that we are in the last times. The, the final judgment is not necessarily strictly something that's out there in the future. We are living in the last days now, and so what we do and what we say and, and how we worship and if we worship is eschatology. It is the theology of the last times He also positions this as though this is a universal thing going on with those who hoard wealth. This is a very shocking image. Um, we have very good ways to preserve things in our modern world, right? We have ways to m- to make, uh, stainless steel that won't rust, or at least won't rust quickly. But most things in the ancient world, even most precious metals, corroded. Um, I remember when I was growing up, there was this project in my hometown. I lived in a, a little town called White Bear Lake in, in, um, Minnesota, although little is relative. It's pretty big compared to most of what we have out here. And I remember when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, they had this big building project to build this brand-new, beautiful lakeside pavilion in the center of town, and it w- just gleamed in the sun. It was so gorgeous, and it was made of copper, and everybody loved it, and two years later, it was bright green. I think it's still bright green. I think they figured out it wasn't worth repairing, so they, they just, they just make sure it doesn't keep getting worse, and at some point, I'm sure they either have or will tear it down. But the one metal in the ancient world that didn't do this was gold. It's part of why gold is such a durable measurement of wealth is because it doesn't wear out. It doesn't corrode. It's very soft. It's very easy to damage it, which is why we don't build statues out of it, or we don't build, uh, buildings out of it usually, but it didn't corrode. So when James says here, "Not only your silver, which tarnishes and corrodes, but your silver and gold have corroded." Not are corroding, but have corroded. The rich hearer of this is probably, you know, sitting around like Scrooge McDuck with a pile of gold coins thinking, "Ah, it looks pretty good to me." And what James is saying is, "No, no, no. No, it's corroded. It's eating away at your heart. It's lost its value because you refuse to use it, and so it sits in a pile doing nothing for no one, except serving to further your own condemnation." This is such a crazy, shocking situation that the insanity of not using your wealth, period, the insanity of sitting on your wealth in the ancient world is going to serve as a form of evidence justifying the condemnation of these wicked fools And further, the corrosion of this wealth is an indication of the corrosion of their very souls. There's something about money. I was-- When I was here a couple times before, I preached one of the wealth passages out of Ecclesiastes, and there's something about money that has a unique way of really, really wrecking us. Either we don't have it and we want it, or we have it and we don't wanna lose it, or we have it and we don't spend it wisely. It seems like there's an infinite number of ways to screw it up. And we landed last time that the gospel is good news because with the nearly infinite ways of screwing it up, we're going to screw it up. But the one way that he talks about screwing it up here is hoarding it and sitting on it and not using it Moving on into verses four and five, James moves us now to a more sort of temporal register. He starts out by talking about what wealth is and what it's doing and how it will ultimately affect the entire life and eternity of those in his targeted audience, those he's proclaiming this prophetic, uh, judgment against. But in verse four, he moves back to the behaviors that are being, uh, being engaged in to show the state of these people's souls. He says, "Behold, the wages of the laborers you, who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter." James here points at the, at the behaviors that show this hoarding behavior, and he does it for a number of reasons. One, he needs to call out sin. That's part of the role of a Christian, and especially a leader or a minister in the church, is, um, to not only call out sin in the body of, of Christ, but in a, I think a very particular way, and there's all sorts of, uh, all sorts of theological controversies flying on around about Christian nationalism and other associated things. Some of it is just the spirit of the age. Um, post-COVID, there's a, a real strong sense that our government has failed us and we need to replace it with something else. But there is a, a true way, and I, I think some of those things are a little misguided, but there's a true way that the church, particularly her leaders, should be speaking to the culture around us, and yes, even to the government, to proclaim the truth of God into a wicked and godless culture. This might take the form o- of a m- minister who goes to a town hall meeting to speak out against a gambling association that's going to be forming, or a, an elder in the church or a deacon in the church who goes to speak to, uh, to the city hall or to the state legislature about the wickedness of abortion and about what we see it does to women's lives when they are fooled into thinking that this is the right thing for them. Again, the church is not the state, and the state is not the church, and we should be very careful not to cross those lines for all sorts of reasons. But we as a culture, as a Christian culture, in the United States particularly, have lost sight of our responsibility to speak truth in all circumstances to those in power So James is doing that, of course. But even more so, this is a way that he establishes for his direct audience, for the Jewish poor Christians who have been scattered in this diaspora, in this dispersion. He looks at them in a sense and says, "I see you. I see what's happening to you." And as God's representative, as his chosen voice for this message, as his inspired author, God sees you too This goes back again, the first two chapters of James serve as kind of a thesis statement and table of contents for the whole book. We get an idea of what may have been happening, the actual, uh, acts that were being engaged in, in, in chapter two verse six, he says, "You have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong?" James has in mind here a form of predatory land purchasing, where the rich were sort of sweeping up property. They were sweeping it up, and then they were charging probably exorbitant prices to those who would lease the land to try to eke out a living. Does that sound at all like any of our current context, right? When's the last time any of us have tried to buy a house and found anything reasonable? Well, a large part of that is that there are big companies that are scooping up all the land and buying all the, the developments. Now, I'm not commenting on those particular situations. I don't know those people. I don't know their hearts, and some of those things actually are doing good things for the community. But we're familiar with this idea of someone who will purchase a resource, who will then jack the price up in order to turn a profit on it. I'm not opposed to turning a profit. Y- y- yeah, it takes money to run a business, and you have to, you have to recuperate those funds if your business is going to survive. But there's a, there's a way that that can be done that is a predatory act These rich landowners were getting fat on those that they were victimizing In our, in our modern world, we tend to think of someone who is overweight as unhealthy, for good reason, right? Too much weight, and I say that with someone with a little too much padding around the middle, so no, no judgment on this, but too much weight is not healthy, right? We hear that from our doctors, that there's a healthy weight range and there's an unhealthy weight range. In the ancient world, obesity was not the concern, right? Malnutrition was the concern. And so when you see, uh, a king in the Old Testament who's, who's noted to be fat, that's not always negative. Sometimes it is, but he's noted to be fat or he's noted to be large. Even the word for glory, I'm sure you've heard this before, the word for glory in the Old Testament has to do with being heavy. So this idea of weightiness or, um, being able to eat enough to actually gain weight instead of being thin was seen as a good thing, but not when you use it as a way to victimize other people. A person who gathers wealth honestly and enjoys it, that's, that's Proverbs right there. That's the Book of Ecclesiastes in its sort of positive sense, is that we, when we accumulate wealth and we use it for God's glory, it's perfectly okay for us to also use it for our enjoyment. God wants us to enjoy the fruit of our labor. But when we accumulate wealth and use it as a way to gain power over someone and to abuse them, that is what James is railing against here And ultimately, with the audience that James is writing to, this is a form of murder. This is why he says, "You have fattened your hearts in the day of slaughter." Because a person who can't feed their family in the Old Testament or in the New Testament era was likely to see them die. There are not a ton of people in modern America that are starving to death on the streets. It's not to say it doesn't happen. It's not to say that there's not things like food insecurity or malnutrition, but there are, there are plenty of places people can go to get their basic food needs met. It was not like that-- It's not like that in most of the world now, and it certainly was not like that in the ancient world. And so a, a landowner who again refuses, we're talking about the Jewish landowners, refuses to obey the Jewish law to leave some leftovers for the poor, and instead gleans all the way to the corner so that they can turn a little bit of extra pro-profit, is not only sinning against the Old Testament law, but is committing murder in the strictest sense by refusing to preserve the life of these poor, uh, Christians who are destitute And again, James is encouraging his readers here that the Lord has not ignored their plight. We can think back to the Book of Habakkuk, where Habakkuk basically lodges a lawsuit against God, saying, "You are not paying attention. You're not doing your thing. You're not being faithful to your covenant." And God says, "Let me show you how faithful to my covenant I am. The Chaldeans are on the way." And Habakkuk is like, "Whoa, wait a second here. That's not what I had in mind." God sees the oppression of the poor. He knows when His people are targeted. He knows when children are abused or when widows are ignored. He knows when the government does something to shut down a church, or when the medical institution refuses to acknowledge your personal rights. He sees those things, and He's not ignorant, and He's not static. He's not sleeping on those things. The purpose here is to comfort the oppressed by showing that God is not ignorant of what has happened to them. Just two quick Old Testament examples that use similar language. In Genesis 4, we read of Cain and his murder of Abel, and in verse eight it says, "Cain spoke to Abel his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, 'Where is Abel your brother?' He said, 'I don't know. Am I my brother's keeper?' And the Lord said, 'What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground.'" Numbers, uh, 35 verses 30 says, "If anyone kills a person, the murderer shall be put to death on the evidence of witnesses, but no person shall be put to death on the testimony of one witness. Moreover, you shall accept no ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of death, but he shall be put to death. And you shall accept no ransom from him who has fled to the city of refuge, that he may return to dwell in the land before the death of the high priest. You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land except for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it." There's a rich history in the Old Testament of language of inanimate things, land, blood, wealth, other kinds of things that give testimony to God in some way, and specifically of these inanimate, uh, impersonal things testifying to the sin of the people that dwell around them. Even Christ says, "If these people do not worship me, the rocks will cry out." Now, the rocks are not literally crying out, although it certainly would be within God's power to make the rocks sing. But Christ is not saying in that passage that the rocks are going to form mouths and begin singing Hosanna or whatever song they might have been doing. What he's saying is that the very rocks themselves give testimony to the glory and goodness of God. So even if the people around here fail to do so, the entire rest of creation is doing so, and that is what James is saying here. My dear brothers and sisters scattered in the dispersion who have nothing, and in society's eyes are nothing, some of you are facing persecution. Some of you will be killed for your faith, but God sees because the wealth that is being accumulated on the breaking of your own backs is crying out. The corrosion of that gold serves as evidence for the condemnation of those who are harming you We often want justice in the moment. I think we always want justice in the moment, don't we? I think it's a really hard discipline to say, "That person wronged me, but I'm okay letting God sort it out." That is a hard pill to swallow, but it is often the pill that we have to take. It's the medicine that God uses to further our justification, our j- our, uh, excuse me, our sanctification Paul says, you know, "Do not take vengeance. Let the Lord do that." We can trust, and this is where the comfort of this passage comes for us, brothers and sisters, we can trust that when we are wronged, that when someone has done something to us that is a violation of God's law, that that sin will be punished. Now, when we're dealing with other Christians, that sin has already been punished, and so it is not, it is not appropriate for us to hold onto that and to take vengeance. That's what the parable of the unmerciful servant is all about If I as a Christian refuse to forgive my brother and sister when they've wronged me, it's me saying that I'm a better judge of their sin and I'm a better executioner than the Lord is when he punished that sin on the cross. But that sin was not atoned for when we're talking about unbelievers. When we're talking about those who will ultimately end their earthly life and find themselves waking up in flames, that sin has not been atoned for, and so God will have his justice, and we will have our justice. We won't turn there, but in Revelation, we're familiar with the passage, I think it's chapter six, where the martyred saints are under the throne and they say, "How long, O Lord?" Well, God doesn't answer their question, but he gives them new clothes. When Job cries out and he's, he's saying, "I don't understand why this is happening. Why are you targeting me, God? Why, why are you a hunter with your arrows in my liver?" God doesn't tell him why, but he says, essentially, "I'm God and you're just going to have to trust me that this is right." We see a very similar, uh, kind of situation here when we think about when, uh, when Abraham, uh, when God tells Abraham what he's about to do to Sodom and Gomorrah, and then Abraham negotiates, apparently negotiates with God, uh, trying to secure the salvation of the city for the sake of the righteous. And we read starting in verse 20 of chapter 18, he says, "The Lord said to, to Abraham," he says, " 'Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. If not, I will know.' " God is always seeing and investigating the sin of people We're, we're teaching my son, August, the children's catechism, which is a, a great resource. Um, and one of the questions is, "Can you see God?" And the answer is, "No, but he always sees me." Now that may feel at first to some people like a little bit of a heavy-handed answer, but knowing that God sees us is not just there to correct our sin. It should do that, right? Even the secret sins we commit in the dark when, when we're not being watched by anyone else, even, even those God sees. But do you know what else He sees? He sees your pain. He sees your suffering. He sees your victories even when no one else is celebrating them. He sees your progress. He sees you, and that should be a great source of comfort Now this passage, especially verse six, can be a little bit hard to apply because although we're the targeted audience, we're not the target of the judgment oracle. So I think what we have to do, we have to, we have to think about this in light of the way that God talks about the judgment of unbelievers in other places in the scripture, and how that helps us to understand kind of what our, what our status is. If you'll take your Bibles and open to Matthew chapter 25, I think the, um, the account here of the goat and sheep judgment, uh, is instructive for us Starting in verse 31, it says, "When the Son of Man comes in his glory and the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' Then the righteous will answer him saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you a drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?' And the King answered them, 'Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.' Then he will say to those on the left, 'Depart from me for you for, uh, depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, I was naked and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' Then they also, uh, they also will say, answer saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not minister to you?' Then he will answer them saying, 'Truly I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." Now, this passage is sometimes understood as a general command to feed the poor or the sick, or to visit those in prisons, or any of the f- the sort of mercy ministry things that, that, um, are mentioned here. And those are all things that Christians should do, right? We should be engaged in, um, in mercy ministry to the poor, to those who are destitute. We should be mindful and thoughtful of those who have needs around us. What this passage is teaching, though, is not a general command to feed all people, but a specific command to care for your brothers and sisters in Christ when they have a need He doesn't say to the righteous, "You did these to everyone." He says, "Whatever you did to the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me." All of the things that are listed here, the, the six mercy ministries that are listed by Christ here, are things that persecuted Christians were suffering at the time, persecuted Jew- Jewish Christians, and that would be common experiences for, for Jewish Christians and for all persecuted Christians. Right? They're hungry. They don't have food. Our diaspora Jewish Christians don't have land to farm, and even if they're able to scrape together enough funding to lease out a farm, they're being, uh, they're being totally overwhelmed by the cost of that. The sort of homeowners association dues of these pyramid schemes that were going on in the first century, they were so exorbitant that it wasn't even subs- subsistence farming. Christians were being thrown in, uh, in prison. They didn't have enough money to replace their clothes when it wore out. They couldn't have access to clean water. We take clean water as such a, such a basic thing, and it's so easy. You just turn on the tap, or you just go to the store and you buy a bottle of $7 water. It wasn't like this in the first century. If you didn't have a well, you didn't have water, unless you had someone who cared enough to share this precious resource with you. And so what Christ is saying to, to his people, both in the immediate audience on the Sermon on the Mount, uh, and in this, the Olivet Discourse here, what he's saying to his people is when someone in the body of Christ does not have what they need, the body of Christ should step up and make sure that that is the case, that they take care of that person. And likewise, he's saying to those who are not a part of the body of Christ, "Depart from me, I never knew you." Now, the intro to this, why it sometimes is called a parable, is the sheep and the goats. We sometimes go way too far into the arena of comparing the behavior of sheeps with the behavior of the people here, right? Sheep are nice, they're affable, they listen to you. In reality, from what I understand, sheep are pretty dumb and can be very stubborn, right? And then we, we read and we go, "Goats are stubborn, they're rebellious, they're not really good for anything." Well, there's a reason people have goats on farms. They, they can be stubborn, right? They can be destructive, but they also serve a purpose. So the point here is not that sheep are good and goats are bad. The point is that sheep are not goats and goats are not sheep. And, uh, another point that comes with this is sheep don't become goats by behaving like goats, and goats don't become sheep by acting like sheep. I have some friends that will tell you they have very affectionate, friendly, lovable goats, right? I'd, I would... If I could get my kids one of those little pygmy goats that everybody loves, I would do that, 'cause they can be very kind, very sweet, and they're very smart. But they're not sheep. And if you read this passage carefully, this fact that those who are taken to the right are, are in fact taken to the right is not because they fed the poor. It's not because they ministered to Christ by feeding the least of these. They did those things because they were part of the kingdom The King says to those on His right, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." The sheep on the right were always going to be the sheep on the right. They were predestined according to the counsel of God's will before all time to live and walk in good works. That's just Ephesians 2 there. That's also just James 2 there. You have faith, I will show you my faith by my works. This is evidence language, loved ones Likewise, the ones who are told to depart into eternal darkness were also predestined not to inherit this kingdom. No kingdom was prepared for them before the foundation of the world. They have no inheritance. They have nothing. They will end up in the state that they are trying to impose on these poor Jewish Christians. They will end up in the state that they may be trying to impose on some of us in this room And for the final verse here in, in chapter five, in verse six here, there's a lot of discussion and debate in the commentaries about who the identity of this righteous one is. It says, "You've condemned and murdered the righteous person, he does not resist you." Now, some commentators will take the fact that this is the singular righteous person, that he has been murdered and h- was condemned, and will take this as a reference to Christ. And that would, would make good sense, right? The Jewish, the wealthy Jewish landowners, the wealthy Jews in Jerusalem who per- who persecuted and cast out, um, the Christians, they were in the same group of people who condemned and murdered Jesus And at least at the time of writing this, and in many ways in our own day, God is not necessarily resisting them. He's allowing them to store up judgment for the coming day of wrath There are others who will take this as sort of the hypothetical singular, right? The righteous one or the righteous person is this, uh, representative hypothetical person that represents all of the persecuted Christians. And so it's more like saying, um, to the, the wealthy landowners who are persecuting Christians, "You have condemned and murdered the Christians, the righteous people, and we do not resist you." Now, at the end of the day, it's, it's always good to have good, sober, well-intentioned, text-based debates about what the Bible means. We can and we should try to convince others, uh, when we think they're wrong about what the scripture means. So that's not what I'm saying here. But in many ways, which of those two perspectives it actually is doesn't change the interpretation of this passage. Like we read in Matthew 25, like we read in Acts 9 when Christ comes and confronts Saul, what you do to God's people, you are doing to Christ himself. What you do to the body, you have done to the head. It's a little bit weird to say that when I stub my toe, I injure my head, but that's true, right? I don't injure my toe as though it's some separate piece. It's not like I'm a Lego man where I can just swap out a hand that gets cracked and put it back on. When I injure my toe, I injure myself. My whole body is injured even though it's specific to a part of my body. When you-- when someone persecutes you, when they, uh, try to extort your wealth, your funds, when they try to harm your body, when they try to take away your children, all things that are happening not just out there in the world, but in our country, even in our own region. When they try to tell you that because you don't wanna play a basketball game, that you can't play sports at all. When a city taxes a portion of a church's property because they don't think it's being used for religious purposes, they are doing that to Jesus Christ himself, and God will not be mocked This should call us both to faithfulness and to encouragement How people treat Christ or how people treat Christ's people, including how we trust, tr- uh, treat Christ's people, shows us what we think about Christ. The people who take care of the church do so because they love God, and they do it out of a regenerated heart that already loves God. And the people who hate the church do it because they hate Christ, and they do it out of their wickedness and out of their wicked heart This brings us back again to the thesis statement of James. "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." And then he says later in that, uh, first chapter in verse nine, "Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like the flower of the grass, he will pass away. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower fails, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits. Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him." Now, you're all coming up to the end of James here. Um, we probably have two, two more sermons, I would guess, and the rest of this chapter is reinforcing this. It's unpacking for the immediate audience and therefore for us, it's unpacking that although the rich have their punishment coming to them, that likewise our consolation, our comfort from Christ is also coming to us. He closes the whole letter out, he returns to his thesis statement to say, "I'm not going to pretend that the trials you're going through are joyful, but you can count it all joy." You can reckon it, you can impute it as joy, my brothers and sisters. You can put it in the joy column instead of the t- the pain column, right? We had discussion about the beautiful word imputation in the announcements and scripture reading in the beginning here Imputation is a, is an accounting term. And when we count it all joy, we're taking what should be a red line in the, in the loss ledger, right? We're taking what should be an expense, and we're able to move it to the profit. We're able to move it to the positive side, not because it didn't hurt and not because we wanted it to happen, but because our God is good enough to not rob us of the chance to be sanctified When we are oppressed and opposed, those who are oppressing and oppose us mean it for evil, just like Joseph's brothers, uh, and Pharaoh, and all sorts of wicked men in, in the Old Testament and in our own world. Pilate, Herod, you mean, you name it in the Bible, this applies. They meant their wicked acts for wicked things, but God, rich in mercy, works all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. And what is that purpose? That we might be transformed into the image of Christ so that Christ may be glorified and He may be the firstborn among many brothers. When we face trials and suffering of every kind, it leads us to our sanctification and to our ultimate glorification. We do not earn those things. We don't sanctify ourselves any more than we justify ourselves, or that any more than we will glorify ourselves or will raise ourselves from the dead. That is all God's work from start to finish. But God does use these things that He brings us through as a way to bring about that work It's like he bends us over the hammer, over the anvil of trials, and he hammers us until we become a sharp sword in the hand of, in his hand. Or he polishes us with a rough cloth until we become a smooth, beautiful gem, right? Think of any number of refining things that need to be done. It always involves, if the thing was, uh, was a person, it always involves something that would hurt a little bit. It always involves a little bit of damage to wear away the impurities. Our sanctification and our glorification is no different than that. He uses adversity. He uses the wicked actions and intentions of, of evil men and women. He uses those things to glorify us. So although we should never, uh, we should never seek those things, right? You don't have to go and make yourself the soft target to the wicked people. It's okay to keep your head down. There's nothing wrong with that. The Jewish Christians were probably doing their best to keep their heads down most of the time, and that's fine. There's not any words in scripture about being a coward if you don't, if you don't put a target on your back. But your target is gonna get there eventually, and that's not a bad thing. We can welcome that. We can count it as joy because of who God is and what he's done. The supreme act of suffering, the supreme act of, of evil happened to the only innocent person there ever was, and it happened to him for us.  this episode is available below.

Mother continues to read from The Catholic Mother and The Catholic Father, and answers questions from: Amy, who is struggling with disabilities and discerning a late vocation;  Ernesto, who found a 1956 Hong Kong Chinese Daily Missal;  Mikayla, who loves hearing Mother's evangelization stories;  And caller Rachel, a recent Catholic revert who asks for advice on raising her three sons with a staunchly Presbyterian husband.

We discuss Sarah's algorithm and why it's feeding her lavender marriages, and we debate their merits. We discuss the Presbyterian church debating whether to let their clergy be in polyamorous relationships. Sarah names some of the rules and courtesies the Washington Post says apply to people going on group vacations. Susie seems to be mad about power banks for some reason, so we have to hear about that. We discuss the documentary If You're Happy And You Know It, on musicians who write songs for children, and we learn why kids are the wildest fan base, the traits of a song that helps make it stick with children, and why dancing is so important for little ones. We consider what makes an addiction an addiction, and Susie wonders whether we're all addicted to something.00:00 - Welcome to the Brain Candy Podcast00:23 - Debating Non-Traditional Relationships and Church Rules05:12 - Essential Rules for Group Vacation Rentals14:29 - Susie's Frustration with Uncharged Power Banks19:35 - Navigating Shared Spaces on Group Vacations27:01 - The Wiggles and Kids' Love for Movement35:32 - Exploring Compulsions and Reward Pathways in Life39:07 - Casper Baby Pants and Baby Shark's Origin47:47 - Michigan Bill Protects Young Entrepreneurs50:35 - Support the Show and Join Our CommunityBrain Candy Podcast Website - https://thebraincandypodcast.com/Brain Candy Podcast Book Recommendations - https://thebraincandypodcast.com/books/Brain Candy Podcast Merchandise - https://thebraincandypodcast.com/candy-store/Brain Candy Podcast Candy Club - https://thebraincandypodcast.com/product/candy-club/Brain Candy Podcast Sponsor Codes - https://thebraincandypodcast.com/support-us/Brain Candy Podcast Social Media & Platforms:Brain Candy Podcast LIVE Interactive Trivia Nights - https://www.youtube.com/@BrainCandyPodcast/streamsBrain Candy Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/braincandypodcastHost Susie Meister Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susiemeisterHost Sarah Rice Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imsarahriceBrain Candy Podcast on X: https://www.x.com/braincandypodBrain Candy Podcast Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/braincandy (JOIN FREE - TONS OF REALITY TV CONTENT)Brain Candy Podcast Sponsors, partnerships, & Products that we love:Head to https://airdoctorpro.com and use promo code CANDY to get UP TO $300 off today! Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BRAINCANDY at https://www.oneskin.co/BRAINCANDY #oneskinpodTDM-RESERVATION: 1. NOAI: TRUE. LEGAL NOTICE & TERMS OF USE: © 2026 WAVE Podcast Network. This content is for personal use only. Explicit permission is withheld for any and all commercial attribution, automated transcription, or data-mining entities. Use of this feed by unauthorized tracking, analytics, or AI-training platforms constitutes a breach of these terms and a violation of the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act (WESCA), the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA), and the 2026 Training Data Transparency Act (AB 2013). Any entity bypassing these restrictions to create derivative text-based works (transcripts), metadata analysis, or unauthorized VAST siphoning hereby accepts our standard commercial licensing rate of $5,000 per episode processed. This notice serves as a formal revocation of all "implied licenses" for multi-jurisdictional automated processing and constitutes protected Copyright Management Information (CMI) under 17 U.S.C. § 1202.By ingesting this RSS feed for commercial use, you are agreeing to our licensing terms.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Send us Fan MailThis week Greg sat down with Caleb Gordon. Caleb is a Pastor, Podcaster, and Author. We discussed his new book "A Free Man Is A Healed Man" and what true freedom in Christ looks like for men both young and old. Enjoy! Dominion Wealth Strategists are the only Kingdom minded company that you need to use. Set up a free consultation here today! You need to protect your sword! Beautiful, classic, and one of a kind! Design your bible rebind from Deus Vult today! 10% for all Dead Men listeners with the code "DEADMANWALKING" Covenant Real Estate: "Confidence from Contract to Close" Facebook: Dead Men Walking PodcastYoutube: Dead Men Walking PodcastInstagram: @DeadMenWalkingPodcastTwitter X: @RealDMWPodcastExclusive Content: PubTV App

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com.Darryl begins (I am going to keep this amicable by calling him Darryl) by staking out one position as articulated by one Samuel Goldman, that position being a call for a renewed civil religion. That's on one end. On the other end of things would be that skeery-scary Christian nationalism. And Darryl wants a Presbyterian middle way to wend its path in between these two options.For more from Doug, subscribe to Canon+: https://canonplus.com/  

What is it that actually forms our inner reality? Our values, our perspective, our judgment, our understanding of wisdom about the issues that really matter? What difference does that make in Christian character formation? The American church consistently produces fruit that many of its own leaders either don't recognize, don't want, or disapprove of. Under- and malformed Christian people reflect a grounding in the surrounding culture rather than the character and love and gospel of Jesus Christ. In this episode, author, professor, and consultant Tod Bolsinger argues that culture is the thing that forms you before you ever realize it, let alone consent to it. He suggests that the soil of community and belonging—rooted in attachment, vulnerability, trust, and joy—is what makes sense of exemplary models of Christian formation. "If you wanna grow good fruit—abundant harvests of good fruit—you don't focus on the fruit, you focus on the soil." With Mark Labberton, Tod reflects on the agricultural model of spiritual formation; regenerative farming and the impact of soil health on the quality of the fruit; the example of Andre Trocme and the French Huguenots of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, village whose radical hospitality saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust; trust, pain, and care The intentionally formative community: joyful belonging, shared values, vulnerable self-reflection, care that isn't comfort. Episode Highlights "There are no dysfunctional systems. They all produce." "These people just lived out their faith." "The precognitive and the unconscious realities of our life are stronger than our words." "Nothing is as formative as the organizational culture you're in." About Tod Bolsinger Tod Bolsinger is co-founder and principal of AE Sloan Leadership, a coaching and consulting firm working with churches, nonprofits, universities, and businesses in seasons of change. He is associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he earned an MDiv and PhD and served six years as a vice president. His books include "Canoeing the Mountains," "Tempered Resilience," "It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian," and the four-volume Practicing Change Series. He was a Presbyterian pastor for 27 years, most recently in San Clemente, California. Helpful Links and Resources Tod's current project, Good Soil, Holy Ground: Preparing Your People for Facing Change https://www.aesloanleadership.com/good-soil-holy-ground  AE Sloan Leadership, Tod Bolsinger's coaching and consulting firm: https://www.aesloanleadership.com/ Canoeing the Mountains, Bolsinger's best-known book: https://www.ivpress.com/canoeing-the-mountains Tempered Resilience: How Leaders Are Formed in the Crucible of Change: https://www.ivpress.com/tempered-resilience The Practicing Change Series, Bolsinger's four most recent books: https://www.ivpress.com/practicing-change-serie The Biggest Little Farm: https://www.apricotlanefarms.com/biggest-little-farm/ Weapons of the Spirit, Pierre Sauvage's documentary on Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (from the Chambon Foundation): https://www.chambon.org/weapons_en.htm The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Kreider: https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/the-patient-ferment-of-the-early-church/339350 An Everyone Culture by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, on deliberately developmental organizations: https://store.hbr.org/product/an-everyone-culture-becoming-a-deliberately-developmental-organization/14259 Show Notes Dallas Willard's worry: that spiritual formation would become commoditized—"a cottage industry instead of rooted deeply in the life of the church" "We take on the terroir of the soil, like the way a grape does for wine." "The Biggest Little Farm" documentary: how regenerative agriculture transformed a soil-depleted farm north of Los Angeles "If you wanna grow good fruit—abundant harvests of good fruit—you don't focus on the fruit, you focus on the soil" Rereading the parable of the sower "Jesus literally says that more powerful than his preaching is the soil that the word falls into." Systems perfectly designed for the results they get: "There are no dysfunctional systems. they all produce." No church ever started a program in Christian nationalism, no associate pastor, no strategic plan. "It just came up out of the soil." "Weapons of the Spirit" documentary: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon: How French pastor Andre Trocme led a small village of Huguenots to save thousands of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The pastors daughter, at age 93, on being told her parents were heroes: "You're very romantic about this. These people just lived out their faith." Counter-cultural cultivation Examples of radical communal formation: Amish forgiveness, Mother Emanuel AME Cultural competency vs. cultural humility Hospitality as the village economy Mother Teresa and entering East Beirut to save children because of (not in spite of) the bombing Brain scientists reaching for a word: "It is to be in a room with people who are happy to see you." "God, please make me the kind of person my dog thinks I am" The intentionally formative community, which "begins in joy, it ends in death" "Trust, pain, and care": Kegan and Lahey's deliberately developmental organizations, and the three words in the word cloud Are university theology faculty equipped to provide pastoral care to hurting, traumatized students? #SpiritualFormation #Discipleship #ChristianLeadership #LeChambon #AdaptiveLeadership #ChurchLeadership #ChristianNationalism #Fuller Production Credits Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

A veteran nonprofit CEO and minister walks away from the top job to take a year‑long “power pause” for her health, her daughters, and her sanity. In this first conversation, Emilee Whitehurst traces her path from human biology and divinity school into community organizing, parish ministry, and leadership at Interfaith Action of Central Texas, the Rothko Chapel, Planned Parenthood, and the Houston Area Women’s Center. She describes guiding shelters through COVID, running three facilities at once, and realizing that every minute of her life was organized around work. Emilee explains how a single thought — “I do not have to keep doing this” — triggered a powerful physical release, pushed her to live off retirement savings, and forced her to relearn what rest feels like, rethink her worth, and imagine a different way to lead and live. Support The Rose HERE. Subscribe to Let’s Talk About Your Breasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever you get your podcasts. Key Questions Answered 1. How did Emilee Whitehurst move from studying human biology into faith, ministry, and social justice work? 2. Why did Emilee decide to go to Harvard Divinity School and pursue ordination as a Presbyterian minister? 3. How did community organizing around youth incarceration and police violence shape Emilee's sense of calling? 4. What did Emilee learn directing Interfaith Action of Central Texas and then leading the Rothko Chapel? 5. Why did Emilee shift into reproductive health advocacy and later into the CEO role at the Houston Area Women’s Center? 6. How did the COVID pandemic, and the spike in domestic and sexual violence, change Emilee’s work and her staff’s role? 7. What did it look like for Emilee’s team to operate three shelters at once and be treated as first responders? 8. What finally made Emilee consider an “intentional pause” or “power pause,” even though she was at the peak of her career? 9. How did Emilee’s responsibilities as a single mother of two teenage daughters influence her decision to step away? 10. What did Emilee feel in her body when she realized she did not have to keep doing this work in the same way? Timestamped Overview 00:00 Dorothy welcomes Emilee Whitehurst, introduces their long friendship, and invites her to share her background in human biology, divinity school, and early community organizing.02:22 Emilee explains how working around youth incarceration and police violence led her to Harvard Divinity School, parish ministry in Kansas, and leadership roles at Interfaith Action of Central Texas, the Rothko Chapel, Planned Parenthood, and the Houston Area Women’s Center.04:55 Emilee describes leading the Women’s Center through COVID, operating three shelters during a spike in violence, and having her staff recognized as first responders.05:50 Dorothy asks about Emilee’s “power pause”; Emilee explains that as a single mom of two teenage daughters, she feared regretting lost time and began to question her nonstop pace.08:08 Emilee recalls the turning point thought, “I do not have to keep doing this,” and how it brought immediate physical relief, even as she recognized the privilege of living off retirement savings.09:40 Emilee admits she had to relearn how to rest, choosing naps over laundry and confronting fears that she would become lazy if she stopped producing.11:10 She shares how this rest raised profound questions about worth, revealing the “spell” of believing every minute must be productive and acknowledging how nonprofit culture can justify self‑sacrifice.13:20 Emilee says she does not regret her work but is grateful to have woken up in time to enjoy priceless car‑ride conversations with her daughters and to start reconnecting with herself.15:29 She describes becoming present to long‑dormant feelings like rage, sorrow, and grief, and how practices like yoga, Tai Chi, and Qigong helped her trust her body’s wisdom.18:18 Emilee notes that while she once lived passionately “from the heart,” the grind of being both full‑time CEO and full‑time mom was no longer sustainable for her health.20:02 She characterizes her current season as a liminal state where headaches and chronic stress have eased, and her daughters see her treating “laundry as just laundry” instead of a crisis.22:21 Emilee explains her search for a new baseline of well‑being, saying she now better recognizes when she slips below it and will use that awareness to judge future roles.24:06 She shares a vision for a retreat center focused on love, healing, and liberation and says she cannot return to her old way of functioning now that she has proved herself.25:31 Emilee acknowledges that her “break” quickly became another full‑time, unpaid job at home, and that most working women never feel they truly rest.27:19 She recognizes women’s fear of stepping out of the workforce in midlife but hopes there is a way to live that does not require working against our own best interests.28:59 Emilee offers simple practices—stop, breathe, line up your body, relax your muscles, tune your mind into your body—as accessible starting points for rest and mindset change.30:16 She roots her perspective in spirituality, affirming that we are inherently worthy without needing to prove it and emphasizing the importance of communities that reflect that worth back.31:21 Dorothy closes by thanking Emilee for sharing a story many women need to hear; Emilee responds with gratitude and humor about how different she looks and feels now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joe Clifford's sermon for Sunday, July 26, 2026, at Myers Park Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, NC. Subtitles/closed captions for this video are available by clicking the “CC” button on the video player. Full sermon manuscripts can be found at myersparkpres.org/manuscripts.

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 9:1-12Speaker: Brandon EggarSeries: Ecclesiastes

From the "It Matters" sermon series. Preached by Stephen Baker.

Jason Sterling July 26, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL 

Audio Recording Satisfying Speech Rev. Scott Strickman Download Sermon OutlineSpeaker: Rev. Scott StrickmanSermon Series: ProverbsProverbs 18:20-21 (ESV)20 From the fruit of a man's mouth his stomach is satisfied; he is satisfied by the yield of his lips.21 Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.Sermon OutlineThe wise understand that a person's satisfaction is linked with what they say.1. Your words have power.v21 Death and life are in the power of the tongue2. Your words reveal what you love.v21 and those who love it will eat its fruits. v21 Death and life are in the power of the tongue3. Your words bear fruit.v21 and those who love it will eat its fruits. v20 he is satisfied by the yield of his lipsPrayer of ConfessionMerciful God: We are slow to listen, and hasty to say what we ought not. Forgive us for every foolish and harmful thing we have said and done. Forgive us for when we have failed to steward our power to speak words that encourage, build up, form, clarify, or express thanksgiving. We confess we are more inclined to slander and complaint than praise and thanksgiving. Our words expose corruption deep within us, so along with a plea for forgiveness, we ask for help. Open our ears to hear your message of grace, and plant your word deep in us. Nourish us with Christ, the Word who became flesh, who tasted death so that we could have life. May we bear the fruits of life in the Spirit. Amen.Questions for ReflectionDo you enjoy speaking words of thanks, encouragement and praise? What is your experience of this kind of communication?What do you find hard about speaking positively?Why is it tempting to complain, slander, lie, insult, etc.? Why do you speak in such ways?How can wisdom help you change? What is important to understand about your words that can make it more compelling to speak what is good and resist problematic speech? What insights can help shift your patterns? What is God showing you?How do your words reveal what is going on within you? When you look at the things you want to say, what conclusions do you draw? Why is it crucial that we hear good news? What makes the message of the grace of God so essential?How is the gospel message a seed in the life of the person who receives it by faith? How does that new reality grow and form the believer? What prayer habits will help you be more consistent with thanks and praise? How can your words become a greater source of satisfaction to your own soul? What can you do to taste more of the grace of God through what you choose to say?Reflect on Psalm 50, and consider how it helps you gain understanding of our speech in relation to God.

9th Sunday after Pentecost; Sermon based on Ezekiel 17:22-23 and Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52. Preached at The First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn (https://linktr.ee/firstchurchbrooklyn). Podcast subscription is available at https://cutt.ly/fpcb-sermons or Apple Podcasts (https://apple.co/4ccZPt6), Spo....This item belongs to: audio/first-church-brooklyn-sermons.This item has files of the following types: Archive BitTorrent, Columbia Peaks, Item Tile, Metadata, PNG, Spectrogram, VBR MP3

Sunday Worship July 26th, 2026   “Noticed V. Seen” Acts 17:1-9 Rev. Tyler Dirks   Sermon Audio   Sermon Outline: Coping Strategies Christ Strange Reflection Questions: Are you in love with being noticed, but afraid of being seen? Will you hurt anyone who gets too close, but also anyone who will not look? Which way […] The post Noticed V. Seen appeared first on East Charlotte Pres.

Worship Guide | Contact Us | Watch 

Rev. Dr. Ben Sanders III, Guest Preacher

You're listening to the Two Rivers PCA church podcast. We are a family of faith gathering around God's redeeming love, growing in the grace of Jesus Christ, and going to serve our neighbors.For more information, visit us at tworiverspca.org.

Never Forever Grace Presbyterian Church Download Title: Never ForeverSpeaker: Brian BultScripture: John 4:1-26Date: Jul 26, 2026

Psalm 103Sermon Praying Our PraiseUddingston Park United Free ChurchSunday 26 July 2026Rev Russell Brooks

1) Could you explain why you left the Presbyterian church?2) What is the difference between the Temple and the Synagogue?3) Why did the Israelites cry out for meat to eat when they had all their sheep and cattle?4) What Old Testament scriptures were fulfilled through Jesus' resurrection?5) Was Simon the sorcerer in Acts 8 saved?

Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves: Otis Pickett on Presbyterian Missionaries, Race, and the Antebellum SouthWhy is Sunday morning still one of the most segregated hours in American life? That question — sparked by a line from Martin Luther King Jr. that Dr. Otis Pickett encountered in seminary — set him on a twenty-year search through the archives. In this episode, Chad sits down with Dr. Otis Westbrook Pickett Sr., University Historian at Clemson University, to discuss his first book, Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves: Presbyterian Domestic Missionaries and Race in South Carolina, 1802–1874.Otis and Chad examine the nineteenth-century Presbyterian missionaries — most prominently John Lafayette Girardeau and T. C. Stuart — who worked to bring enslaved and later freed men and women into the life of the church, and who faltered when that calling collided with the racial hierarchy of a slaveholding society. The conversation traces how theology and ecclesiology shaped interracial encounter within the Presbyterian church and in Southern society more broadly, the uneasy coexistence of enslavement and "ecclesiastical rights," and the role religion played in shaping both slavery and Native American removal — along with how these ideas fared through the Civil War and helped lay the groundwork for the segregation that followed.Dr. Otis Westbrook Pickett Sr. is University Historian and clinical assistant professor in the College of Education at Clemson University. He holds an MA from Covenant Theological Seminary, an MA in history from the College of Charleston, and a PhD in history from the University of Mississippi. He is also co-founder and co-director of the Prison to College Pipeline Program, the first program in Mississippi to offer tuition-free, credit-bearing college courses to incarcerated students. AmazonLinks:

Send us Fan MailThis week Greg sat down with Andrew Rappaport. They discussed the dangers of being in a Christian echo chamber, tribalism, and steps you can take if you find yourself in that type of situation. Enjoy! Dominion Wealth Strategists are the only Kingdom minded company that you need to use. Set up a free consultation here today! You need to protect your sword! Beautiful, classic, and one of a kind! Design your bible rebind from Deus Vult today! 10% for all Dead Men listeners with the code "DEADMANWALKING" Covenant Real Estate: "Confidence from Contract to Close" Facebook: Dead Men Walking PodcastYoutube: Dead Men Walking PodcastInstagram: @DeadMenWalkingPodcastTwitter X: @RealDMWPodcastExclusive Content: PubTV App

The US launches strikes on Iran as Trump warns of attack on a key nuclear site; Iran closes its last evangelical Presbyterian church; how Israelis are dealing with war; and one endowment gives more than a billion dollars to Christian groups.

The US launches strikes on Iran as Trump warns of attack on a key nuclear site; Iran closes its last evangelical Presbyterian church; how Israelis are dealing with war; and one endowment gives more than a billion dollars to Christian groups.

#56 in our series, "The Book of Romans: A Theology of Hope"

Joe Clifford's sermon for Sunday, July 19, 2026, at Myers Park Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, NC. Subtitles/closed captions for this video are available by clicking the “CC” button on the video player. Full sermon manuscripts can be found at myersparkpres.org/manuscripts.

8th Sunday after Pentecost; Sermon based on Mark 6:1-13. Preached at The First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn (https://linktr.ee/firstchurchbrooklyn). Podcast subscription is available at https://cutt.ly/fpcb-sermons or Apple Podcasts (https://apple.co/4ccZPt6), Spotify, Amazon, Audible, Podcast In....This item belongs to: audio/first-church-brooklyn-sermons.This item has files of the following types: Archive BitTorrent, Columbia Peaks, Item Tile, Metadata, PNG, Spectrogram, VBR MP3

On this episode of The Bandwich Tapes, I sit down with Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, guitarist, and music director Evan Zee for a conversation that begins with musical connection and quickly opens into something deeper. I first found Evan while researching for another interview, tracing a path from Larry Goldings to Lila Forde and then to Evan. That kind of chain reaction is one of my favorite things about this show, and in this case it led to a conversation about listening, community, faith, family, and the way music can widen a person's heart.We begin by talking about Evan's musical relationship with singer Lila Forde and how their collaboration grew out of church work, friendship, and time spent simply playing together. Evan reflects on the importance of “big ears” as a musician, the kind of listening that goes beyond technique and becomes a way of serving the song, the people around you, and the moment itself. What follows is one of my favorite kinds of conversations: one that starts with music but naturally opens into larger questions about how to live.From there, Evan speaks with real honesty about marriage, fatherhood, and how family life changed his voice, his art, and his sense of purpose. He describes becoming a parent before he felt ready, and how that experience forced him to confront fear, insecurity, and the need for growth in a way that ultimately deepened his artistic expression. It is a thoughtful and moving part of the conversation, and one that gets at something I care deeply about on this podcast: how life itself shapes the music.We also spend time talking about Evan's long history playing in church, from starting as a teenager to later studying at USC, moving to Los Angeles, and navigating his own spiritual unraveling and reconstruction. Today, as music director at a Presbyterian church in Santa Monica, he has built a creative community around intention, trust, and “the hang.” He shares how that environment led to a new record featuring close collaborators including Lila Forde, Misha, Carl McComas-Reichl, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Tom Frazier, and Darla, and why he wanted the session to feel playful, immediate, and alive.We close by talking about a powerful live performance in the wake of the Eaton fire, which displaced Evan and his family from their Altadena home, as well as his deep love for Joni Mitchell and the spiritual force he hears in her writing. This episode is about much more than career milestones. It is about listening as a musical value, as a human value, and as a way of moving through the world with greater presence.Key TakeawaysEvan Zee talks about why “big ears” may be one of the most important qualities a musician can have, both on and off the bandstand.He shares how his collaboration with Lila Forde grew out of church work, friendship, and hours of unpaid playing simply for the sake of getting better together.Evan reflects candidly on how marriage and fatherhood reshaped his artistry, deepened his voice, and changed the way he experiences music.He discusses his journey through faith, deconstruction, and a more expansive understanding of music as a spiritual practice.As a music director in Santa Monica, Evan has created a scene built around trust, intention, generosity, and what musicians call “the hang.”He gives insight into a new record built with a close-knit cast of players including Lila Forde, Carl McComas-Reichl, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Tom Frazier, Misha, and Darla.We also talk about Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, live performance after loss, and the role music can play in grief, healing, and community.Music from the EpisodeWarm and Right - Evan Zee (Live in LA)Never Leave a Moment - Evan ZeeLong Lost Lover - Evan Zee (Live in LA)Love - Evan Zee (Live in LA)About the PodcastThe Bandwich Tapes is a podcast where I sit down with musicians, songwriters, producers, and creative people for thoughtful conversations about craft, career, collaboration, and the experiences that shape a life in music. It is a show about process, humanity, and the stories behind the work.Connect with the Showcontact@thebandwichtapes.com

From the "It Matters" sermon series. Preached by Ben Burlingham.

Jason Sterling July 19, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL 

Audio Recording Pride Rev. Scott Strickman Download Sermon OutlineSpeaker: Rev. Scott StrickmanSermon Series: ProverbsProverbs 11:2, 16:18, 18:12, 21:24, 25:6-7 (ESV)11:2 When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble is wisdom.16:18 Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.18:12 Before destruction a man's heart is haughty, but humility comes before honor.21:24 “Scoffer” is the name of the arrogant, haughty man who acts with arrogant pride.25:6 Do not put yourself forward in the king's presence or stand in the place of the great,7 for it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.Sermon OutlineThe problem of pride is deep within us, but with wisdom we can recognize it and grow in true humility.1. Let it pass by.11:2 “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble is wisdom.”16:18 “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”18:12 “Before a disaster the heart is haughty, but before honor is humility.”2. Recognize the place you want to be.25:6–7 “Do not put yourself forward in the king's presence or stand in the place of the great, for it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.”21:24 “Scoffer” is the name of the arrogant, haughty man who acts with arrogant pride.”3. Listen to the right person.25:7 “it is better to be told ‘come up here'”Prayer of ConfessionOur great God, there is none higher than you. Instead of rejoicing at your greatness, we have puffed ourselves up. Craving the admiration of others, we suffer envy and arrogance. We are guilty of pride. Our sins have merited disgrace. Forgive us. May the mind of Christ, who humbly bore our sin and shame, be in each of us. Amen.Questions for ReflectionWhat makes true humility hard?How does pride show up in your life? What are some subtle signs that you are being tempted by pride?What are some of the negative effects of pride? What damage does it do? What problems does it cause?How can you let pride pass by when you recognize its voice? If you can't get rid of it, how can you reduce its influence? What markers of status are you particularly drawn to? What forms of humiliation do you fear? What does that tell you about values that may be out of balance in your thinking and perception?What can we learn from the humility of Jesus? How does the humiliation he willingly endured create new possibilities for us?How does the gospel invite you to humble yourself? How does the gospel call you to a better life?What new possibilities come with a life that is both humble and hopeful?

Sunday Worship July 19th, 2026   “The Bullies & The Bereans” Acts 17:10-15 Rev. Tyler Dirks   Sermon Audio   Sermon Outline: The Bullies The Bereans The Body Reflection Questions: When (and how) have you been a bully? When have you been preoccupied with a particular brand of Christianity (or theology), and/or the celebrity appeal […] The post The Bullies & The Bereans appeared first on East Charlotte Pres.

In this free-for-all episode of Christ the Center, Camden Bucey is joined by Derrick Brite, Lee Hutchings, and Dan Borvan for a wide-ranging conversation following the summer season of Presbyterian and Reformed assemblies. They reflect on the PCA General Assembly, the OPC General Assembly, and the URC Synod, considering overtures, church order, the spirit of deliberation, and the practical realities of Presbyterian polity.The conversation also turns to Reformed witness in Italy, Roman Catholicism, and the need to speak the truth clearly and charitably. Camden previews upcoming discussions on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Catholic social teaching, artificial intelligence, human dignity, and the need for a sound Reformed anthropology in an age of rapid technological change.Mentioned in this episode:Join Us In Person: Four Upcoming Reformed Forum EventsBefore today's episode, Camden Bucey shares four opportunities to gather with Reformed Forum in person over the coming months: Apologetics and Evangelism Seminar — August 4–5, 2026, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Taylors, SC. Camden Bucey and Carlton Wynne lecture on apologetics and evangelism for the pastor at the GPTS Summer Seminar. Details: https://reformedforum.org/event/apologetics-and-evangelism-seminar-greenville-sc/ Discovering Christ in All of Scripture — August 28–29, 2026, Cahaba Park Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL. A Friday evening and Saturday morning seminar exploring how every part of Scripture reveals God's redemptive plan in Jesus Christ. Details: https://reformedforum.org/event/birmingham-alabama-seminar/ 2026 Annual Theology Conference — September 25–26, 2026, Lakeland Church, Gurnee, IL. The Covenant of Grace: One Savior, One People, One Purpose, featuring Dr. G. K. Beale. Early-bird pricing ends August 31. Register: https://rf26.reformedforum.org/ Christ the Center 1000th Episode Celebration — February 19–20, 2027, Hilton Austin, Austin, TX. A live recording of episode 1,000, a shared dinner, and conversations with longtime friends of the ministry. Details: https://reformedforum.org/event/christ-the-center-1000th-episode-celebration/ Seats are limited — register today at https://reformedforum.org/events

In this free-for-all episode of Christ the Center, we welcome Derrick Brite, Lee Hutchings, and Dan Borvan for a wide-ranging conversation following the summer season of Presbyterian and Reformed assemblies. […]

Did Christians really try to amend the U.S. Constitution to formally recognize Jesus Christ? In this episode of The Magistrate, Josh Howard and James Baird uncover the forgotten story of the National Reform Association and its 19th-century effort to acknowledge God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible within the Constitution. They explore how leading Presbyterians, Old Princeton theologians, and the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1864 understood civil government, religious liberty, and Christ's authority over the nations. Whether you agree or disagree with their conclusions, this remarkable chapter of American history raises important questions about Christianity's role in public life and what has been lost in our national memory.

Mary welcomes back Pastor Andy Woods to talk about all the ways the world is heating up and bringing pressure to bear on believers and Jews alike – and prophecy fulfillment marches on. Today we look at the scary upgrade to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). While some communities will surely wrestle with a tech that can provide entry points to our vehicle worlds in multiple ways, regardless of the pushback they will likely prevail. What kind of intrusion is this? A massive one. We also look at Canada’s C9 bill that tightens the noose around believers who wish to quote the Bible for all things pertaining to life and godliness. Is anyone home up north anymore with a conscience? We follow the story of the Jewish man in Ohio who simply wanted a prayer meeting in his home but was harassed at every turn. More stories: Erdogan’s Ottoman ambitions; Iraq port and highway development plan; the Presbyterian’s presbyopia about divestment and LGBTQ pastors; and the Scofield kerfuffle (this is a doozy). A very full hour with a fantastically knowledgeable guest.     Stand Up For The Truth Videos: https://rumble.com/user/CTRNOnline & https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgQQSvKiMcglId7oGc5c46A

Who was Joseph Smith and what childhood experiences shaped his life, worldview, and the start of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? What are some of his positive characteristics that drew so many people to him and what were his flaws? How did his theology develop throughout his life? In this interview, Sean and Scott talk with John Turner about his fascinating biography: Joseph Smith: The Rise & Fall of an American Prophet.John Turner is a cradle-to-halfway-to-the-grave Presbyterian (straddling mainline and evangelical Protestantism) and belongs to Burke Presbyterian Church. He came of age in evangelical parachurch organizations, namely Young Life and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. One of the things that drew him to the study of U.S. History was a desire to understand the institutions and personalities that had shaped my own religious culture. His dissertation-turned-first book, Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America, won Christianity Today's 2009 prize for best History / Biography.==========Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture is a podcast from Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, which offers degrees both online and on campus in Southern California.   Find all episodes of Think Biblically at: https://www.biola.edu/think-biblically.   To submit comments, ask questions, or make suggestions on issues you'd like us to cover or guests you'd like us to have on the podcast, email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu.  

Today’s show is a short one. Tom and Glenn are out of the country, but Chris is joined by repeat guest, Dr. George Grant to discuss a recent article he published with Ligonier Ministries about Rev. John Witherspoon, the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence! The Presbyterian Rebellion: https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/the-presbyterian-rebellion?utm_id=97757_v0_s00_e0_tv2_a1dennhbd1uaq2 Foundations of Freedom: A 250 Year Experiment in Liberty: https://a.co/d/0eBWx4cD Support the Theology Pugcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8 Learn more about First Pres. Battle Ground: https://www.solochristo.org/ Follow Glenn Sunshine on Substack: https://substack.com/@glennsunshine Connect with WileyCraft Productions: https://wileycraftproductions.com/

Today's show is a short one. Tom and Glenn are out of the country, but Chris is joined by repeat guest, Dr. George Grant to discuss a recent article he published with Ligonier Ministries about Rev. John Witherspoon, the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence!The Presbyterian Rebellion: https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/the-presbyterian-rebellion?utm_id=97757_v0_s00_e0_tv2_a1dennhbd1uaq2Foundations of Freedom: A 250 Year Experiment in Liberty: https://a.co/d/0eBWx4cDSupport the Theology Pugcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thetheologypugcast?fbclid=IwAR17UHhfzjphO52C_kkZfursA_C784t0ldFix0wyB4fd-YOJpmOQ3dyqGf8Learn more about First Pres. Battle Ground: https://www.solochristo.org/Follow Glenn Sunshine on Substack: https://substack.com/@glennsunshineConnect with WileyCraft Productions: https://wileycraftproductions.com/