Podcasts about telling the story

acts 1:8 telling the story chris curtis

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2026 8:02

Telling the story 3 | Chris Curtis - 9 August | 930AM - Acts 18:18-26 by Holy Trinity Claygate

Telling the story 3 : Chris Curtis - 9 August : 6PM - Acts 18:18-26

acts 1:8 telling the story chris curtis

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2026 20:28

Telling the story 3 : Chris Curtis - 9 August : 6PM - Acts 18:18-26 by Holy Trinity Claygate

Telling the Story: Part 4

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2026

Telling the Story: Part 4 Acts 7:35-53 by William Klock Not very long ago I got into an online discussion with someone about evangelism. The people I was interacting with were telling me things like, “I don't confront, I just plant seeds” and “We're suppose to share the gospel, not tell the gospel” or “If people are getting mad at you, you're doing it wrong” and “Jesus just loved people. He wasn't confrontational”. I found myself wondering if these people read the same Bible I read. And I was thinking about that whole conversation off and on these last few weeks as I've been working through Stephen's address—his very confrontational address—before the Sanhedrin. Because there's nothing namby-pamby or wishy-washy—or uh, I mean, “non-confrontational”—about Stephen's address. I expect that if you set Stephen down in our context today and let him do what he did, a lot of modern Christians would be misquoting Matthew 7:1 at him. You know, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” But, of course, being confrontational, calling people to repent, proclaiming the good news about Jesus and the truth that he is Lord as something more than just another choice on the religious smorgasbord has nothing to be with being judgemental. It has everything to do with knowing and having experienced the reality of God's goodness in Jesus and the Spirit and it's about having a vision, a hope of this broken creation—and of humanity—set to rights and God coming to dwell with us forever. We've made our way through Stephen's address over the last three Sundays. They accused him of blaspheming the torah and the temple and Moses and instead of defending himself, Stephen instead told the story they all knew so well. But going back to Abraham and working through it all the way to their present day, he showed how the law and the prophets, the torah and the temple had been signposts pointing the people to Jesus the Messiah. And so it wasn't Stephen who was blaspheming torah and temple—it was them—because they'd rejected Jesus. The Christians were the true followers of the law and the prophets, the true children of Abraham and Moses, because they recognised that that's what the story was working toward all this time. But that wasn't what they wanted to hear. But if we've heard the story that Stephen told, we ought to be prepared. Rejection is how God often works. Joseph had been rejected, but God worked something amazing from it. Moses was rejected, but God worked something amazing from it. Jesus was rejected, but God worked something amazing from it. So if Stephen is rejected, we can be confident God will work something amazing from it. I think they understood, which made them all the more angry, because they understand: if they reject Stephen, they're actually playing right into his narrative. But they do it anyway. We'll pick up with Acts 7:54. [Page 1088 in the pew Bibles.] Luke tells us: “What Stephen said was a blow right to the heart. When they heard it, they gnashed their teeth against him.” Picture them, sitting in their dignified counsel, the priests and leaders of Israel. But there's no response they can give that won't condemn them, so they just sit there glaring at him as they gnash their teeth. To us that's probably just a picture of rage, but Luke is pulling this image of gnashing teeth from the Old Testament—particularly from the Psalms—where it's always the wicked who gnash their teeth at the righteous or the wicked who gnash their teeth in frustration, aguish, and rage at God after finding themselves on the wrong end of his judgement. Luke wants to make it clear that these are the leaders of Israel—the men who were supposed to know and to represent God—but instead they've rejected his Messiah and are revealing their wickedness. Think of Jesus in John 8, addressing a crowd of angry scribes and Pharisees. “We've got one father and that's God,” they yelled at him. And he said back, “If God were really your father, you would love me, because I come from God…No, you are from your father, but your father is the devil.” And then, in stark contrast, Luke describes Stephen in verse 55: “He, however, was filled with the holy spirit, and looked steadily up into heaven. There he saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at God's right hand. ‘Look!' he said. ‘I can see heaven opened, and the son of man standing at God's right hand!' They've rejected Jesus. They sit there, almost demonically gnashing their teeth at him—the posture of the wicked who stand condemned before God. And Stephen stands before them full of the Spirit and with the very vision of heaven those men had longed for. Luke said at the beginning of all this that as they looked at Stephen his face was like the face of an angel. And Stephen shouts out to them, “Look!” I can imagine them looking around, wondering what he's insisting they look at, because of course, no one else is seeing what he sees. But the fact that his own face had been transformed—or even transfigured—says that he must have been seeing something and they knew it. And he goes on, “I can see heaven opened and the son of man standing at God's right hand!” I think that whenever I've read this, I've tended to picture Stephen looking up, pointing past the ceiling of the room they were in, as if he's been given a glimpse into—you know—heaven—up there. But the more I think about the imagery and context here, I don't think that's it. I think we should be thinking back to episodes like the one in 2 Kings 6. Israel was under attack by the Arameans. The Prophet Elisha and his servant, Gehazi, were staying in the city of Dothan when it was surrounded by the Aramean army. They woke up in the morning to see the huge army surrounding the city and Gehazi began to worry. “What shall we do?” he asked Elisha. And Elisha calmly told him, “Don't be afraid, for those who are with us are great than those who are with them.” I picture Gehazi standing there wringing his hands. And so Elisha prays, and as he prays, Gehazi's eyes are opened and on the hills all around he sees horses and chariots of fire surrounded the Aramean army. And that heavenly army didn't arrive when Elisha prayed, like heaven, it was there all along. The miracle was simply God's gracious allowance to open the eyes of Elisha's servant to see it. It's a reminder that heaven isn't up there, some far away place. Heaven is here. God created earth and heaven to overlap, for us to live in his presence. Our sin has driven a wedge between the two. But God and his realm are never far away. As Gehazi was reassured that day as he saw a glimpse of heaven, so Stephen was reassured as the stood before the Sanhedrin. As the highest court of the Jew was about to render a judgement against him and condemn him to death, I think we should understand what he saw as a sudden revelation of the heavenly court. And there stood Jesus, the son of man. The son of man was the character in Daniel's vision who rose to take his throne at God's right hand and from there to quelled the angry kings and nations that raged against God. And now Stephen sees the ascended Jesus, not now sitting on his throne as Lord, but standing at the right hand of God, the great judge, to act as his advocate and witness. The court of Israel was condemning him to death, but the heavenly court, the heavenly judge was ruling in his favour. What's interesting about this comparison between the chariots of fire and Stephen's vision of the heavenly court, is the result, the aftermath, the response of God's man. Because the chariots of fire didn't swoop down to crush the Aramean army. Instead, Elisha prayed again and God blinded the Arameans. And Elisha then went out and convinced the blinded Arameans to follow him to Samaria, where Elisha prayed again and the Lord opened their eyes. The king wanted to slaughter Elisha's “prisoners”, but Elisha warned the king. It wasn't the king who defeated and captured them, God had done that. So instead the king prepared a feast for them and then sent them on their way home. This was Israel in one of her finer moments, obeying God, being light to nations, making known the grace and glory of God. And I'll come back to it shortly. I think Luke's main point in telling us about this heavenly vision of Stephen's ties in closely with the theme of Jesus and the church being the new temple—something that comes up over and over through Acts. Remember that for the Jews the temple was the supposed to be the place, not just where heaven and earth overlapped, but the thin place between them where God's people could meet him. Not fully, of course. His presence was in the holy of holies where no one could go. But if they offered the sacrifices that would purify them from the stain of sin and death, they could draw near. The irony was that God's presence had been gone from the temple for hundreds of years. They'd rebuilt it when they returned from their exile in Babylon, but God's presence had never come back. As if God was hinting to them there was something new and better to come. And Stephen's been preaching on that theme. The old temple was a signpost pointing to Jesus and to a new temple, not this time made with hands, but established by God himself and filled with is Spirit. And in as much as I expect this miracle vision of the heavenly court was a gift to Stephen to encourage him—even though he doesn't seem to have needed much of that kind of encouragement—the gospel was enough—it highlighted to everyone present that day the thing that Isreal so longed for in the temple—the convergence of heaven and earth—was now happening in Jesus and his people. And while Stephen's vision seems to be unique in Christian history, we see saint after saint, martyr after martyr going to their deaths with the same sort of calm and composure that we see in Stephen. I have to wonder if God has given others similar visions to which, for obvious reasons, we simply aren't privy. Polycarp, Perpetua and Felicity, Ignatius, Thomas Cranmer, Nichols Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Maximillian Kolbe—all died with the gospel and prayers for those who killed them on their lips. Brothers and Sisters, that's the witness of men and women who are confident in the gospel, in the lordship of Jesus, and in the hope of resurrection and new creation. These are men and women who understood what the gospel is—not good advice, not another option to try on the religious smorgasbord, not something you should give a try; they knew it to be true and they knew it to be truly good news—the way, the truth, and the life. They knew the grace of God so powerfully, that they went to their deaths praying that those who killed them would one day know it. So Luke goes on in verse 57: “But they yelled at him at the tops of their voices, blocked their ears, and made a concerted dash at him. They bundled him out of the city and stoned him. The witnesses laid down their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul. So they stoned Stephen. “Lord Jesus,” he cried out, “receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and shouted at the top of his voice, “Lord, don't let this sin stand against them.” Once he had said this, he fell asleep. “Now Saul was giving his consent to Stephen's death. That very day a great persecution was started against the church in Jerusalem. Everyone except the apostles was scattered through the lands of Judaea and Samaria. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. 3 But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.” It's not just that Stephen stood firm on the gospel before the Sanhedrin and it's not just that he had a vision of heaven in which he was vindicated and could go to his death with calm and confidence. His prayer for his enemies speaks volumes—it's a powerful witness—to the gospel itself. I can't image what it was like for Stephen. In high school I was hit in the throat by a softball trying to catch someone's pop fly. It hurt. Apparently I was lucky it didn't crush my trachea. And that was a softball. Stephen stood there—and I expect pretty quickly knelt and then lay there—as people threw rocks at him. The biggest rocks they could find and still throw with force. It was an absolutely brutal way to die and I can't imagine what kind of sadistic person would take joy in doing it to someone. I guess that's yet more testimony to the influence the gospel has had on our culture. And there, at a little distance stood Saul of Tarsus, having given the green light to the angry mob, supervising them as they threw their stones. Keeping guard over their coats. But as the rocks were hitting Stephen—imagine a rock breaking your jaw, crushing your nose, breaking your skull—Stephen cried out to God. He cried out for mercy on those who were killing him. And that stands out as another witness to the gospel. Because the whole going to a martyr's death, calmly and confidently and stoically, that's admirable, but other people had done that before Stephen. About two centuries before, in the days when the Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes, ruled Judaea, there had been a lot of Jewish martyrs. Antiochus wanted to break the Jews, get them to forsake their “law”. Get them to become more Greek, and they'd be an easier people to rule. And so he desecrated their temple. He made it illegal for them to circumcise their sons. And his soldiers would round up the openly rebellious and force them to eat pork on pain of death. 2 Maccabees 7 tells the story of one family of Jewish heroes. Seven brothers are tortured and, one by one, martyred as they stand firm in their faith, as they refuse the soldiers' order to eat pork. They bore witness to their faith in God, to their hope in the future resurrection of the dead, but they also call down horrible curses on those pagan soldiers as they died. With their last breath, they called down God's judgement on their enemies. But Stephen: Like those Jewish martyrs, he stood firm in faith. He warned his accusers and his killers of God's coming judgement. But he didn't lay it down as a curse. He laid it down as a warning, a call to repentance—and with his last breath, a prayer for grace. One of those Maccabean martyrs had yelled out, “This mighty power will torture you and your descendants!” And Stephen, raised on those same stories of the martyrs, he saw that same divine persistence, but in light of Jesus he saw it very differently. Stephen knew there is no escaping the Hound of Heaven. But instead of divine judgment pursuing his enemies, he saw divine grace hounding them, the redeeming love of God pursing them—and if they would not be caught by it—it would pursue and catch and enfold and transform their descendants. Somehow, someday the grace of God in Jesus, the renewing power of the gospel would catch them, because—Stephen was absolutely certain—that power will one day change the entire world. That was the point of his powerful speech before them, after all. From Abraham to Joseph, from Jospeh to Moses, from Moses to Jesus. That's what the story is about: the grace and glory of the God of Israel to save his creation—not just Abraham's family—but all of creation. It's about God, in love, giving himself to purify us from the stain of our rebellion, so that he can come home to live with us. To restore heaven and earth. And that gospel knowledge, that good news changed everything for Stephen. Brothers and Sisters, think about this. Imagine people knew nothing of Jesus or the gospel or Christianity other than the astounding fact that Christian martyrs go to their deaths, not hurling curses, but calling down blessing and forgiveness from heaven on the very people torturing and killing them. That, in itself, says something powerful about Jesus and the gospel and Christianity. That in itself, would, I think, make a lot of people constructively curious. That this is what we see from Christian martyrs down through history is witness to the gospel and to the very nature of our faith in the God of love who shed his blood to reconcile his enemies to himself. A witness to the Jesus who, as he died on the cross, prayed that those who killed him would know God's forgiveness. Would that we, Brothers and Sisters, would be captivated by this same gospel of grace and the same sure and certain hope of reconciliation and resurrection and new creation. Because our generation of Christians seems to be losing it. We no longer think of the gospel as good news to proclaim, but as good advice to share, because Jesus is no longer the way, the truth, and the life, but now a way, a truth, a life. We no longer have a clear hope and vision of creation set to rights by Jesus, maybe because we twisted this idea of “heaven” into a distant, ethereal, disembodied realm, instead of God's realm, present, but unseeable because of our sin. And so we're afraid to speak of sin as that great evil that keeps us from God and we're afraid to call people to repentance and we're afraid to speak of that day when God will, once and for all, wipe the last traces of sin and evil from the world, to heal the breach between heaven and earth, to pull out the wedge we've so firmly driven between them. And, in the same way, having consigned Jesus' lordship to a distant heaven, we fear to proclaim that most basic Christian creed—the one carved on our lychgate: “Jesus is Lord”. Lord, not just in a far away heaven, not just someday in a far away future, but here and now. Brothers and Sisters, we need Stephen's witness just as much as the Sanhedrin did that day. I pray that we would take it to heart. And if we lack his confidence, if we lack his hope, if we lack his vision, or if—in contrast to Stephen—we find ourselves gritting our teeth in anger and calling down curses on our enemies, that the Lord would give us a clear vision of his grace, of his kingdom, of his glory. Amen.

Telling the story 2 | Derek Chambers - 2 August | 9:30AM - Acts 8:4-40

chambers acts 8 telling the story

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2026 15:50

Telling the story 2 | Derek Chambers - 2 August | 9:30AM - Acts 8:4-40 by Holy Trinity Claygate

Telling the story 2 | Frances Reeve - 2 August | 11:15AM - Acts 8:4-40

acts 8 reeve telling the story

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2026 14:56

Telling the story 2 | Frances Reeve - 2 August | 11:15AM - Acts 8:4-40 by Holy Trinity Claygate

Telling the story 2 | Frances Reeve - 2 August | 6PM - Acts 8:4-40

acts 8 reeve telling the story

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2026 17:58

Telling the story 2 | Frances Reeve - 2 August | 6PM - Acts 8:4-40 by Holy Trinity Claygate

Telling the Story of a Run Using 80's Song Titles

Coach Bennett's Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2026 29:15

Episode 153. Telling the Story of a Run Using 80's Song TitlesWhat can I say? I love 80's music. I love telling stories. And I love running. Seems like the perfect combination to give myself the excuse to mix them all up together for an episode of Coach Bennett's Podcast. This one was a fun one to make and because I love all of you so much I decided to make a companion playlist that you can listen to on your runs or in traffic or while you cook or party or shower or dance. No need to thank me for creating your new favorite music playlist. Just promise me that you'll share this episode with someone you care about and share this sport of ours with them too. Cheers and thank you for listening,Coach BennettListen to the companion music playlist here on SpotifyGet those PRE-ORDERS in for a signed copy of my book in before August 1st hereSend us a messageMy book This Is About Running. This Is Not About Running. is now available for pre-order!USA readers can pre-order my book by clicking this sentence. USA readers can pre-order an autographed copy of my book hereGLOBAL/INTERNATIONAL readers can pre-order my book by clicking this sentence.________________________________________________________________________AFTER DARK TOUR SERIESIf you have a question or story for the special After Dark Tour series of episodes please leave me a voicemail by tapping this sentence. __________________________________________________________________________Be sure to send any and all questions and comments for Coach Bennett to the mailbag:Coach Bennett's Podcast 57 South Main Street #215, Neptune, NJ 07753Be sure to check out the Two Coach Bennetts Merch Store for t-shirts, hoodies, coffee mugs, pint gl...

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Acts 21:37-22:29: Telling the Story

Thy Strong Word from KFUO Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2026 55:09

Standing on the barracks steps with an angry crowd below him, Paul does something disarming: he tells his story. He was once the most zealous opponent the church had, holding coats while Stephen died, certain he was doing God's work, and the man now preaching grace had to be knocked flat on a road before he understood it. Personal testimony still carries a weight that argument alone cannot, because no one can dispute what Christ has actually done in a life. This episode invites the listener to consider what their own before-and-after looks like. The Rev. Mitchell Gowen, pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Aiea, HI, joins the Rev. Dr. Phil Booe to study Acts 21:37-22:29. To learn more about Our Savior in Aiea, visit oursaviorhawaii.com. The book of Acts picks up where the Gospels leave off. Jesus has risen. He has ascended. And now what? Acts answers that question. Luke tells the story of how the Holy Spirit built the Church from a handful of frightened disciples in Jerusalem into a movement that reached Rome itself. Along the way, you get Pentecost, the first sermons, the first martyrs, the conversion of Paul, the first church councils, shipwrecks, riots, and the persistent, stubborn work of God through Word and Sacrament even when His people didn't have a plan. If you've ever wondered how we got from Easter morning to the Church you sit in today, this is the book. Tune in for this new series on Thy Strong Word with Pastor Phil Booe and guest pastors as we open up the Book of Acts. Thy Strong Word, hosted by Rev. Dr. Phil Booe, pastor of St. John Lutheran Church of Luverne, MN, reveals the light of our salvation in Christ through study of God's Word, breaking our darkness with His redeeming light. Each weekday, two pastors fix our eyes on Jesus by considering Holy Scripture, verse by verse, in order to be strengthened in the Word and be equipped to faithfully serve in our daily vocations. Submit comments or questions to: thystrongword@kfuo.org.

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Episode 435: Matt Everatt is Making the Invisible Profession Visible

Voices from The Bench

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2026 58:50

Hey there Voices of the Bench community, this is Trish Jones with Ivoclar. If you've been curious about fast-firing zirconia to improve efficiency but aren't convinced it can deliver predictable, high-quality results, I'd encourage you to connect with us. Our new IPS Emax Zirconia offers multiple fast-fire protocols designed to help save you valuable production time while maintaining consistent results. Time is money in every lab. Don't wait. Reach out to your local Ivoclar rep today and discover how IPS Emax Zirconia can help streamline your workflow. As full-arch dentistry continues to grow, so do the demands on today's dental laboratories. That's why Knight Dental recently launched SimplyARCH Studio, a dedicated production environment built exclusively for full-arch restorations. To support this specialized workflow, Knight invested in an XTCERA milling system and carefully evaluated multiple CAM software solutions before choosing hyperDENT. The decision came down to exceptional milling quality, minimal hand finishing, and impressive production efficiency. But what truly set hyperDENT apart was the implementation process. From the very beginning, the team provided more than software training—they shared the knowledge and experience needed to build an optimized workflow for complex full-arch cases. With proven expertise in advanced milling strategies and laboratory production, hyperDENT helped ensure SimplyARCH Studio was designed for long-term success from day one.Matt Everatt joins Elvis and Barb for a fascinating conversation that takes a deep dive into his journey through the dental laboratory industry and the story behind his book, The Invisible Profession. From discovering dental technology at 16 and specializing in maxillofacial prosthetics and orthodontics to working in hospitals, developing early sleep-apnea appliances, and nearly leaving the profession altogether, Matt's career has taken some seriously interesting turns. Eventually, he helped co-found S4S, building a successful business around sleep-apnea appliances, occlusal splints, orthodontics, and more before eventually stepping away from ownership. Matt Everatt joins Elvis and Barb for a fascinating conversation that takes a deep dive into his journey through the dental laboratory industry and the story behind his book, The Invisible Profession. From discovering dental technology at 16 and specializing in maxillofacial prosthetics and orthodontics to working in hospitals, developing early sleep-apnea appliances, and nearly leaving the profession altogether, Matt's career has taken some seriously interesting turns. Eventually, he helped co-found S4S, building a successful business around sleep-apnea appliances, occlusal splints, orthodontics, and more before eventually stepping away from ownership. But this conversation goes far beyond Matt's career. His book, The Invisible Profession, explores how the dental laboratory industry arrived at a place where technicians and laboratories are often undervalued, pushed into price competition, and expected to simply keep their heads down and produce. Matt shares his thoughts on the "million little things" that shaped the industry, the danger of becoming a "busy fool," and why laboratories need to stop competing solely on price and start becoming known for the value, expertise, and partnership they bring to the dental team. Elvis, Barb, and Matt also talk about the changing landscape of digital dentistry, AI, 3D printing, speed, service, and why the labs that embrace change and remain agile will be the ones positioned for the future. It's an honest, thought-provoking, and ultimately optimistic conversation about where the dental laboratory profession has been, where it is today, and where it can go next.Special Guest: Matt Everatt.

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Telling the Story: Part 3

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 26, 2026

Telling the Story: Part 3 Acts 7:35-53 by William Klock “Made by hand.” When we see that, it usually means something good, doesn't it? Someone careful hand crafted this thing. Carefully stitched it together. Put care into baking it. You can probably trust it, because it was well made. And, of course, it was made with love. But if we went all the way back to ancient Israel, “Made by hand” had a very different meaning and connotation. For us it (usually) signals something good; for them it signalled idolatry. “Made by hand” said that this thing was not made by God or that God had not commanded it to be made, but wicked humans made it anyway. And when it came to things involved in worship, it meant idolatry. This idea has come into our language too. You'll sometimes hear Christians—usually on the Puritan end of the spectrum—talk about this or that thing in worship or this or that doctrine being “man-made”. The Puritans called it the “Regulative Principle” and the idea was that everything Christians do in worship should either be something God explicitly commanded (like reading the Bible or singing or preaching) or something that good and necessary consequence demands. We Anglicans follow what's called the “Normative Principle”, which means that we have freedom in our worship, as long as what we do is not forbidden by scripture or goes against biblical principles. But you'll often hear folks who follow the Regulative Principle say things like, “Your liturgy or your hymns are ‘man-made'” or “Your traditions of using musical instruments or observing Easter, Christmas, and other holy days are ‘man-made'” and by that they mean that they're unbiblical and wrong. Some would go so far as to call these things “idolatry”. The “RP” isn't our tradition, I think more than anything else in Protestantism it has led to sinful, ungodly, and unwarranted schisms, but I do respect the fact that it grew out of a commitment to take worship very seriously. People who follow it understand that how we worship God is serious business, not something frivolous. I think most Christians today err in taking zero care in how they worship God. But you can't read the New Testament and you certainly can't read the Old Testament without realising that how we worship is serious business. God takes it seriously and so should we. I'll come back to this, but keep it in the back of your mind as we work through the end of Stephen's speech. I want to pick up where we left off in Acts 7. We've been making our way through Stephen's speech before the Sanhedrin—the body of Jewish elders. He's been accused of blasphemy and of speaking against torah and the temple and Moses. And instead of defending himself, what he's done is to tell the story of Israel and Israel's God. He's telling it in a such way that they should—hopefully—see that he's not speaking against any of those things that defined them as Jews. He's telling the story in such a way that they'll see—hopefully—that the gospel is not a departure from Israel's story, but rather the very culmination of it—the very thing that torah and temple and Moses were pointing toward all along. And so he began with Abraham and the call of Israel, and then Joseph, and then Moses. And as he's telling not just the story, but their story, he's highlighting its themes of forgiveness and grace and also that when God acts, when God does new things, it's almost never what anyone expected—but afterward you can always see that, in fact, the signposts had always been pointing to that new thing. Like I said last week, the figure of Moses towers over the story of Israel and Stephen knew that. But he also knew, as Moses towered over the story, he did so like a signpost, with his arm outstretched, pointing the people straight to Jesus. He knew, you can't use Moses to argue against the gospel. So let's pick up at Acts 7:35 where we left off. [Page 1087 in the pew Bibles, way down in the very bottom right corner of the page.] “So,” Stephen continued, “this same Moses—the one they rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler or judge?'—this is the man God sent as ruler and redeemer, by the hand of the angel who had appeared to him in the bush. He did signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and led them out, through the Red Sea and for forty years in the wilderness. This is the Moses who said to the sons of Israel, ‘God will raise up a prophet like me from among your brothers.' And this is the one who was in the assembly in the desert with the angel who had spoken to him on Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living words to give to us.” Stephen's continuing the story of Moses he began in last week's text. Moses was rejected by his own people—at least at first. And there was nothing controversial in telling this part of the story. And there's nothing controversial in his reminding the Sanhedrin that despite that early rejection, Moses was indeed the ruler and redeemer the Lord had sent to his people. Moses did signs and wonders in both Egypt and in the wilderness. He's the one who parted the Red Sea. He's the one who met God on the mountain and came down with God's living words, with the torah and with the instructions for the tabernacle. And—Stephen makes a really important point here—Moses was also the one who told the Israelites that he was not the end-all-be-all of rulers, redeemers, or messiahs, because one day the Lord would raise up a “prophet” from amongst them—a prophet in comparison to whom Moses would pale. The Sanhedrin knew he was talking about Jesus. The people had already suspect that Jesus was this greater prophet whom Moses had prophesied. More than once he was asked, “Are you the prophet who is to come?” So Stephen's making it clear, just as Moses had been rejected by the Israelites of his day, so Jesus was rejected by the Israelites of his. We've touched on this last week. But now Stephen takes it a step further. Look at verse 39. It's not just that Moses was rejected by his people in the days before he was actually called by God. The more embarrassing thing for Israel was that they'd rejected Moses after he'd been called, after they'd been through the Red Sea, after they'd seen the signs and wonders and had the torah and the tabernacle. Stephen goes on: “This is the one whom our fathers had not wanted to obey, but instead rejected him and turned back in their hearts to Egypt, by saying to Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go before us; for this Moses, who brought us out of the land of Egypt—we don't know what has become of him!' They made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice to an idol. They celebrated things their own hands had made.” Remember what happened in Exodus? Moses went up the mountain to meet God. And he was up there for forty days and nights receiving the law. And the people became afraid. They thought that Moses surely must have died on the mountain, so they gave Aaron their gold and implored him to make a golden calf, an idol, so that they could have a god who would protect them. It was a shameful moment for Israel. They'd just received the Ten Commandments. They'd just been told by God: You shall have no other gods. You shall not make a carved image. And Moses had asked them, “Will you do all these things? Will you give yourself to the worship and service of the God of your fathers, the God who has saved you from Egypt? The God who has decalared, ‘I will be your God and you will be my people?” And the people had enthusiastically declared, “We will! All this we will do!” And just days later, they didn't. As eating the forbidden fruit was the primal sin of the human race, idolatry was the primal sin of Israel: worshipping something as if it were God when it wasn't. Aaron had tried to explain to Moses that he'd merely thrown the gold into the fire and that the calf had formed and jumped out of its own accord, but everyone knew that's not how it works. Idols are made by human hands and the prophets drove that point home over and over down through Israel's history. To worship an idol was absurd. The pagans were fools for doing so. First, you create a god with your own hands and then you worship it. “How stupid is that?” the prophets asked. And yet the golden calf wasn't the last time Israel would worship an idol. That primal sin came back over and over and over. When Jeroboam rebelled and led ten of the tribes of Israel to form their own nation, he set up two golden calves, one at Bethel and one at Dan to discourage his people from going to the temple in Jerusalem. No matter how devoutly Israel worshipped the Lord, idolatry was never far off. Look at verse 42: “Then God turned and handed them over to worship the host of heaven, as it stands written in the book of the prophets: ‘Did you bring sacrifices and offerings to me in those forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? You took up the tent of Moloch, and the star of your god Rhephan, the carved images you made to worship! I will remove you beyond Babylon!'” Stephen quotes Amos 5. Even during Israel's honeymoon period with the Lord, Amos condemned them. Even then, while they brought their sacrifices to the Lord, they were worshiping pagan gods like Moloch and Rhephan and all the “host of heaven”. So the Jewish priests and rulers have charged Stephen with blasphemy and now he turns the tables. He never actually defends himself. Instead, he retells the story of Israel from the beginning and shows how it leads straight to Jesus and now, again, he turns the tables on them. He accuses them of the very thing they've charged him with. Just as Israel had rejected Moses, so Israel's priests and rulers have rejected Jesus. And—since their most significant charge seems to have been that he was speaking against the temple—and that was precisely the same charge on which Jesus was arrested and crucified—Stephen makes his second point or his second charge against them. Verse 44: “Our ancestors had the ‘tent of meeting' in the desert. [That's another name for the tabernacle.] God had commanded Moses to make it according to the pattern which he had seen. Our ancestors in their turn brought it in when, with Joshua, [meaning they brought it with them into Canaan, the promised land] they dispossessed the nations whom God drove out before our ancestors, and it was there until the time of David. David found favour with God, and requested permission to establish a Tabernacle for the house of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built him a house. [Stephen is referring to the permanent temple in Jerusalem.] Now his key point: “The Most High, however, does not live in shrines made by human hands. The prophet put it like this: ‘Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool! What sort of house will you build me, says the Lord, Or what place will you give me to rest in? My own hand made all these, did it not?' Yes, David planned the temple. Solomon built it with the Lord's blessing. But Stephen quotes Isaiah 66. The Prophet Isaiah had rebuked the people using the very words that Solomon had prayed at the dedication of the temple. It is God who has made all things. The idea that human beings can make anything—even the temple—that can contain God, well, that's the real blasphemy. Solomon knew that with this glorious temple on the mountain top, that with God's presence manifest in a cloud of glory, that Israel—always prone to idolatry—would start to think that they had God in a box—to put as we might put it. Solomon warned them. Isaiah warned them. And now Stephen is pointing his finger at the Sanhedrin and is saying, “When Jesus said he'd tear this building down and rebuild it in three days, he wasn't blaspheming it. When I said that this is precisely what Jesus has done and when I say that Jesus has, indeed, built a new temple by purifying a new people and filling them with God's own Spirit, I'm not the one blaspheming the temple. No! You're the one's blaspheming God! You think you've got God in a box. You're thinking like the pagans. You've gone back to our people's primal sin! Heaven is God's throne and earth his footstool. The entire cosmos he's made cannot contain him. What fools you are to think your puny temple can contain him! The temple was the signpost pointing the way to what God's done in Jesus and the Spirit. It was the signpost telling us all along that God's plan was one day to enter this world as one of us, as the Righteous One, so that he could rescue us—from sin, from death, from the idolatry that has plagued us from the beginning—by filling us with his Spirit and turning our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. By filling his people, not so we can guard it a box of stone, but so we can carry his presence to the ends of the earth. But just like our ancestors, you refused God's redeemer because you couldn't let go of your building, your box made by hands.” You can almost imagine Stephen standing there in front of the Sanhedrin and with him stand Moses and Isaiah and Amos and all the other prophets nodding at his words. He closes his speech in verses 51-53: “You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are uncircumcised! You always resist the holy spirit, just as your ancestors did before you! Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? And you killed those who announced in advance the coming of the Righteous One—and now you have betrayed him and murdered him. You received the law at the command of angels, but you didn't keep it!” They were the people God had chosen to steward his glory. They were the keepers of the great story of God and his redemptive plan. They, of all people, should have known better, but when the story came to its climax, they refused to listen. They'd stried to slam the book shut. It's not just that they rejected the Messiah and handed him over to the pagan Romans to be crucified. Stephen's point is that they were doing what idolatrous Isreal had always done. Even though the kind of obvious idolatry that had got them exiled to Babylon had been rooted out since their return to Judaea, they were still at heart idolators. As Stephen recounts the story of Israel, what we find is that it's not just a story of redemption. It's also a story of rebellion that reminds us how desperately humanity needs God's redemption. Even the people with the law and the temple, even the people with Moses and the Prophets suffered from the same rebellious attitude that infects the human race. As Calvin once put it, the rebellious human heart is a factory of idols. We can take even the good things of God and turn them into idols as the Jews had done. Stephen takes the high ground. He stands with Abraham and Moses, with Solomon and David, with Isaiah and Amos. The Sanhedrin, for all their moral posturing and charges of blasphemy, Stephen opens the book they'd slammed shut and shows that in reality they stand with Joseph's wicked brothers, with the Israelites who rejected Moses, with the Israelites who had given their gold to Aaron to cast a golden calf, with Jeroboam and all the others who had set up idols throughout the land. The temple was good, but it was made with hands. God had promised through the Prophets that one day he would make another, a better temple—and it would be better precisely because it wasn't made by human hands. Brothers and Sisters, that's us. And as I was thinking and meditating on this over the last few weeks, I was wondering what this means for us. I think the biggest takeaway from Stephen's speech—at least this part of it—is simply to hear him proclaim the glory of the God who has become present with us in Jesus, the Righteous One. Jesus has, like a greater Moses, delivered us from our bondage to sin and death. I don't think it's likely that we're going to end up like the Sanhedrin, rejecting Jesus and the Spirit in favour of the temple and the torah. But, I do think there's a warning here, even if it's a little oblique. Brothers and Sisters, it can be very easy for us to make idols out of otherwise good—and even essential—things. In an age of apostasy—and especially for those of us who came out of the battles for orthodoxy within Anglicanism, it can be very easy to make an idol of our theology and of our orthodoxy. We can make idols of the traditional Prayer Book, of the old hymnals, of our classical Protestant worship. Good things. Orthodoxy—right doctrine, right theology, right understanding of God and of ourselves—is absolutely essential. But Brothers and Sisters, none of these things stand in place of Jesus; none of them stands in the place of the Spirit; none of them stands in place of the Triune God. None of them ought to undermine the unity that Jesus and the Spirit have given us with other believers. Bp. Cummins understood this and it's why the Reformed Episcopal Church exists: because Bp. Cummins knew that Christian unity is rooted not in bishops or in sacraments, but in Jesus the Messiah. It's good to be right in our doctrine and practise. We should take theology and worship seriously, but we should also be humble about them. We should acknowledge that despite our best efforts, none of us will ever—at least not this side of eternity—have a perfect theology or perfect worship. And we ought always to guard against pride, because being proud in our imperfect theologies and imperfect worship inevitably causes us to treat them as idols. We lose our focus on Jesus. And no matter how right we may be, we lose our witness and cease to give glory to God. So let Stephen be a reminder to us to keep Jesus at the centre of our being and of our life together, at the centre of our church. Let our good doctrine and our good worship be the things that keep him there. But let him always be our God, let him always be the one we worship and glorify. And, I think, if are faithful in that, we will be faithful in giving glory, not to ourselves, not to our theology, not to our Prayer Book, not to anything made with hands, but to the God of glory. Let's pray: God of glory, as we hear your word, as we learn the story of redemption, teach us to see and to keep Jesus, the Righteous One, always at its centre. Give us the grace and wisdom necessary for sound doctrine and worship, not that we be “right”, but that we might always keep Jesus at the centre of our life together, that we might worship you and faithfully make your glory known to the ends of the earth. Amen.

Telling the story 1 | Steve Cramer - 26 July | 6PM - Luke 2:36-38

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 26, 2026 18:36

Telling the story 1 | Steve Cramer - 26 July | 6PM - Luke 2:36-38 by Holy Trinity Claygate

luke 2 telling the story steve cramer

Telling the story 1 | Steve Cramer - 26 July | 11:15AM - Luke 2:36-38

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 26, 2026 17:02

Telling the story 1 | Steve Cramer - 26 July | 11:15AM - Luke 2:36-38 by Holy Trinity Claygate

luke 2 telling the story steve cramer

Telling the story 1 | Katherine Miller - 26 July | 9:30AM - Luke 2:36-38

luke 2 telling the story katherine miller

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 26, 2026 12:14

Telling the story 1 | Katherine Miller - 26 July | 9:30AM - Luke 2:36-38 by Holy Trinity Claygate

424: Telling the Story You Can't Forget

Getting Unstuck - Shift For Impact

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2026 11:32

The story behind this episode The story I relate in this episode emerged when, in September 2019, I walked some of the World War I battlefields in Belgium and France with my guide, Iain McHenry. As we walked along where a trench had existed during the war, Iain told me the story of an archaeological dig that recovered and eventually identified the remains of a British soldier who was killed there in November 1914 in a German mortar attack. The story has stayed with me because of how the soldier, Richard Lancaster, was finally identified and because there are literally thousands of other Richards who've never been found. Rather than tell the story as a straight historical narrative, I wanted the piece to have a distinct voice, so I chose to write it from the perspective of Richard's unique dog tag, which led to his identification. After we visited the site where Richard was found, we visited where he was later buried. (see the photo) Our final stop on this part of the journey was the nearby Principals Cindy House is the author of Mother Noise, a memoir in essays and a regular opener for David Sedaris on his tours across the country. She teaches nonfiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop. She also offers private writing classes. Cindy is my writing coach, and our Friday meetings are a high point of my week. This essay came out of a prompt she suggested: "Write about a headline that never left you." She epitomizes good teaching: she is quick to challenge me to "dig deeper for my real story," offers sound suggestions, and then praises me when I hit a strong note. I can't imagine taking this writer's journey with anyone else. When we had completed the essay, I asked her for her thoughts on producing an audio version. Unexpectedly, she was quick to offer her voice. You can't see me smiling, but trust me, I still am. Iain McHenry was born in Belfast and, after leaving school, joined the British Army, embarking on a career that took him all over the world. He was stationed in Germany, Northern Ireland, Canada, the Falkland Islands, and Belgium, and he has completed operational tours in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone. He has always had a passion for WW1, and after leaving the army, he started his own business in Belgium, working as a WW1 researcher, battlefield guide, and published author.

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Telling the Story: Part 2

Renovaré Podcast with Nathan Foster

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2026

Telling the Story: Part 2 Acts 7:1-16 by William Klock When I was an American school kid in the 70s and 80s I learned that the defining events in the history of the United States were was the founding of Jamestown in 1607; the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620; and, of course, the Revolutionary War that began in 1775 and the signing of the Declaration of Independence—well—almost exactly 250 years ago. There were plenty of other events that shaped the story, but those were the events that set the United States on its trajectory: a heritage from Britain with a good dose of religious freedom and Protestant work ethic coming together in a grand expression of the rights of man shaped by the Enlightenment. Were there flaws? Yep. Slavery was a big one. But the way I learned the story, the British mainland colonies of North America were on the fringe of the slave trade. We received a tiny fraction of it. The real slavery problem was in the Caribbean and Latin America. Plus, we dealt with it. The whole Civil War thing—a tragedy. But it was a story to be proud of. But in 2019, the New York Times began a new publishing project. They called it The 1619 Project. It was subtitled, “A New Origin Story”. Why 1619? That was the year the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. Before the Pilgrims. Before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It was a deliberate attempt to reframe the story of the United States. Instead of a story rooted in a proud English heritage and religious liberty and Enlightenment ideals of freedom and liberty, the 1619 Project told the story of the United States as one rooted in racism and slavery and oppression. Instead of a story that makes you stand proud, it's a story meant to instil shame and guilt. The 1619 Project didn't come out of nowhere. It made public a story that many people had already been telling, especially to younger generations. And, as you would expect, this resulted in a great cultural clash. Both sides shouting at the other, basically saying, “How dare you tell our story wrong!” It wasn't so much a matter of the events themselves. Both versions of the story involved the same events, the same people, and all of that. But it highlights how much how you frame a story, how much you stress certain events and people and ideas over others, that you can end up with stories that are essentially the same, while dramatically different. One instils national pride; the other instils national shame. That doesn't mean there's no right or wrong. Framing the American story as if slavery and racism are its fundamental core is dishonest. But at the same time, telling a story that glosses over those evils for the sake of instilling pride, well, that's a problem too. And as much as this Postmodern metanarrative dilemma was nowhere on the radar of First Century Jews, I think it's a good way to understand what was going with Jews in those days and it's a good illustration of what Stephen is doing in his speech before the Sanhedrin in Ats 7. [It's page 1087 in the Pew Bibles.] There were different “parties” competing for influence and control in First Century Judaea and as much as they all told the same story of Israel, reaching back to Abraham and Moses and David, to the law and the Prophets, all rooted in the same exodus and exile and the same promises, how they told the story produced very different results, different feelings about Israel's present situation, different ideas about the future and how to get there—just as how I learned American history makes you smile when you see the Stars and Stripes, but others, having learned The 1619 Project story, feel shame. For Pharisees, unfaithfulness to the law resulted in exile—one that was still effectively ongoing—and only national faithfulness to the law would get them out of it. For the Sadducees, that was all in the past. God had restored them from their exile, and the temple and its priests were the proof. All was well. For the Zealots, the story said that armed revolution was the only way out of their oppression. For the Essenes, the group responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, the story said that the everyone and everything had been defiled by unfaithfulness, even the temple itself. God would wage holy war on the unfaithful, so they—the only truly righteous ones—retreated to the desert to wait and to keep pure. And there was the historian Josephus. A generation later, he told the story—after the disaster had happened—to say that the Jewish revolutionaries had brought God's wrath on themselves and that God had raised up the Romans to act as his instrument of judgement. Same story, but the different ways they told it, the different parts they emphasised, the way they interpreted certain events like the Babylonian Exile, landed them in very different places. Like I said last week, the story got them to the airport, but they were all waiting at different gates—and none of them the right gate for the God's real homecoming. That said, all of them held the same markers of Jewish identity dear: the torah, the temple, the promised land, their circumcision. They disagreed on a lot, but attack any of those things and they'd all join in stoning you after charging you with blasphemy. So what Stephen is doing before the Sanhedrin, backing up all the way to Abraham and telling the story yet again, was in good keeping with what was going on in First Century Judaea. So—in case you missed last week or have forgotten—in the first sixteen verses, Stephen began telling the story of Jesus and the Spirit by going back to Abraham. This was the moment when the God of glory—Stephen wants to stress that he's here to glorify the God of Israel, not blaspheme him or his holy things—Abraham was the moment when God stepped into the darkness and misery of his broken, fallen, corrupted creation and called to Abraham. In Abraham, God was launching his project to restore rebellious humanity to himself and to set to rights the creation that we broke. Now, there was more to it than this—it's online if you missed or forgot it—but Stephen's main point is that the gospel is not a departure from the story of Israel. It's not something new that has no roots in what happened before. He's saying to the Jewish elders: When the God of glory, the God of Israel called Abraham out of Ur and settled him in the promised land and established his covenant with him to make him a nation, that was the beginning of the story that brings us to Jesus, to the cross and the empty tomb, to the ascension and to Pentecost. The story of Abraham is the story of the gospel and vice versa. Remember, they accused him of blaspheming torah and temple and Stephen's saying, “No way! Torah and temple are good. They're glorious. They're how God prepared us and brought us to Jesus.” Like I said last week, when you leave your car and board the ferry, you are in no way saying your car was bad. It got you to the ferry. But you can't drive on water. Now it's time do something new—to do the very thing your car brought you to do. And then from Abraham to Joseph. Stephen tells Isreal's story in such a way to highlight that when the God of Israel acts to bless and to save his people, it's often in unexpected ways. Abraham was promised the land of Canaan, but never had any more of it than a little burial plot. And Jacob and his sons were forced to flee the land of Canaan in order to survive a famine. And Jacob's sons were wicked men who sold their brother, Joseph into slavery after nearly choosing to murder him. And Joseph went from slavery to prison. How was God going to work anything good from any of that? But he did. The sovereign God was at work all along. Slavery and prison led Joseph to the premiership of Egypt just in time deliver his family when they arrived. None of them had ever expected any of that. But God delivered them. And Stephen's telling of the Joseph story also highlights that gracious forgiveness has always been at the heart of the story of God and his people. There was Joseph, hated, abused, sold into slavery by his brothers, but instead of taking revenge, he welcomes them and throw a party. This is what Jesus had been doing as the lost sheep of Israel, the tax collectors and sinners, came to him in repentance and faith. And this is the sort of rejoicing that would take place in heaven were the Sanhedrin to see how the story leads to Jesus and repent. God was waiting for them with open arms and a promise of blessing, and they should know that, because that's how God's great story has always worked. It's the key in which this great symphony is written. So now, Moses. As important as Abraham and Joseph were, Moses stands like a colossus over the story of Israel. Moses was the deliverer who led Israel out of Egypt and parted the sea. It was Moses who went up Mt. Sinai and saw God for himself. It was Moses who came down and delivered the torah to Israel. It was under Moses that God made a nation out of Abraham's family. And this is where they've accused Stephen of blasphemy. They've accused him of speaking against the torah and temple and Moses. So look at Acts 7, beginning at verse 17. Stephen highlights three things about Moses. The first thing he stresses is how Moses was raised up by God to be the right man at the right place at the right time—even though no one would have guessed at the beginning that Moses was God's man for the hour. Stephen says: “God had sworn an oath to Abraham. [Remember the promise to make him a great nation and to give his descendants the land of Canaan?] When the time drew near for this promise to be fulfilled, the people had increased and multiplied in Egypt, until another king arose over Egypt, one who had not known Joseph. He got the better of our people, and ill-treated our fathers, forcing them to abandon their newborn children so that they would die. It was at that time that Moses was born, and he was pleasing to God. He was nursed for three months in his father's house. But, when they abandoned him, Pharaoh's daughter claimed him and brought him up as her own son. So Moses was educated in the full teaching of Egyptian wisdom, and he was powerful in what he said and did.” Already, in the life of Joseph, Stephen has stressed that God works human evil for good. Nothing escapes his sovereign hand. And just so with Moses. First, this new Pharoah decides to make slaves of the Hebrews. Not good. And then, when their numbers increase so prolifically that Pharaoh fears being able to control them, he hatches a plan to murder all the baby boys. And so Moses ends up in a basket in the river, where Pharaoh's daughter finds him and decides to raise him as her own. God turns Pharaoh's hate, prejudice, and injustice against him, sovereignly placing one of those Hebrew boys right in Pharaoh's own home, raised at Pharaoh's expense, and tutored by Pharaoh's own tutors in the famed wisdom of the Egyptians. God ensure the story is full of irony. Pharaoh unwittingly nurtures and educates the very man who will be his downfall. And Moses, himself, receives the training needed one day to oversee, to govern the people of Israel. Again, at the time, none of this made any sense. No one could see any significance to the story as it was unfolding. But God has a plan and one of the things the Jewish people learned from Moses' story—and so many others—is to trust God. In the famous words of William Cowper, God moves in a mysterious way. It's another motif in the divine symphony—one that comes back over and over and that God's people out to recognise when they hear the music. Second, Stephen stresses the rejection of Moses by his own people. Look at verse 23: “When he had grown to forty years old, it came into his heart to see how his brothers, the sons of Israel, were doing. He saw someone being wronged, and came to the man's defence; he took revenge on behalf of the man who was being oppressed, by striking down the Egyptian. He thought his kinsfolk would grasp the fact that God was sending him to their rescue, but they didn't. “The next day he showed up as two Hebrews were fighting, and he tried to bring them back together again. ‘Now then, you two,' he said, ‘you are brothers! Why are you wronging each other?' But the man who was wronging the other wasn't having it. ‘Who made you a ruler or judge over us?' he retorted, pushing him away. ‘Do you want to kill me in the same way you killed the Egyptian yesterday?' At that word, Moses ran away, and lived as a guest in the land of Midian, where he had two sons.” Yet another motif in the symphony, another recurring theme in the story. Jesus wasn't the first of God's deliverers to be rejected by his own people. The story highlights that this is sometimes how God works. Now, there's no one-to-one equivalence between Moses and Jesus. Moses was rejected because he wasn't ready yet. He had a desire to see his people freed, but he hadn't yet been called by God to that mission, nor had he received instruction on how to do it God's way. This way of telling the story, this way of looking back to the Old Testament is something we see all through the New Testament. I think of the way Matthew regularly explains how something in the Jesus story “fulfils” this or that thing from the Old Testament. And often we're left wondering how the connection works. Thanks largely to the Church Fathers, we've been taught to see these connections as literal prophecies or as “types”, as spiritual shadows that prefigure Jesus and various events in his life. That's kind of close, but it's not quite what Stephen (or Matthew) do. When Matthew, for example says that in the birth of Jesus Isaiah's words about the virgin conceiving and bearing a child are fulfilled, we wonder how that works. Isaiah was talking about a young woman in his own day bearing a child…and she wasn't a virgin. What Matthew was doing was pointing back to an event in Israel's past, in Israel's story, where the birth of a child to a young woman—maybe a princess, maybe the Prophet's wife…it's not clear—but where the birth of this child signalled that God was about to act to deliver his people. Matthew latched onto that. This is how God works, but this time—in the birth of Jesus—it's not just a young woman, it's an actual virgin, and this time God's not just delivering his people from a foreign king; this time it's deliverance from sin and death. Matthew recognised the motif in the music. It was there in Isaiah's day, a lone violin telling a story that most people missed, but in the birth of Jesus that motif returned, and this time the whole symphony was playing it. Stephen's drawing on the story of Moses the same way. Moses was rejected by his own people. A repeating theme in the story that the Sanhedrin—people who know this story, know this symphony so well already—a theme they ought now to see plain as day in what happened to Jesus. It should be obvious. They were the ones playing the instruments this time, after all. And then, third, Stephen stresses how through Moses, the God of glory, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God Israel had known for two thousand years, had revealed himself in a new way that no one had expected. Look at verse 30: “After another forty years, an angel appeared to him in the desert at Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush. When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the vision. But, as he came closer to see, there came the voice of the Lord: ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.' Moses was very frightened, and didn't dare to look. But the Lord said to him, ‘Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have looked long and hard at the trouble my people are having in Egypt. I have heard their groaning, and I have come down to rescue them. So, come on now: I'm going to send you to Egypt.'” Stephen wants to be clear—and we see this all through early Christian preaching—the God revealed in Jesus the Messiah is not new. He is the same God who has been directing this story, this symphony from the beginning. This is the God of their fathers, the God who has been rescuing his people according to his promises for two thousand years. The God they know. The God whose character and ways they ought to have recognised in Jesus. Yes, Stephen's saying, Jesus was not what we expected. In Jesus—and now in the Spirit—God is doing something amazing, something astounding, something new. And that's why you rejected him. But knowing the story, knowing the music, we should have expected God would do precisely this: something new, something wild, something we didn't expect. Because the story is already full of episodes where God does just that. No one, least of all Moses, exiled to the wilderness, tending his father-in-law's sheep—expected the burning bush. And yet in that moment, heaven and earth came back together, God spoke, a man was called, and the world was never the same again. And Stephen's point is this: You can't predict the unexpected thing that God will do; but you can be sure—because the story is full of such moments—that God does act unexpectedly to do the things he's promised and that we expect, the very things in which we hope. Holy ground, for example, was something Stephen and his fellow Jews understood. The temple was holy ground. It was where heaven and earth met. But it wasn't the end-all-be-all of holy grounds. It began at Mt. Sinai—not in Isreal, but in the wilderness—where God met Moses in the burning bush, where the plan to rescue Isreal from her bondage began. When the Israelites built the tabernacle and the cloud of God's glory descended to fill it, God upstaged what he'd done at the burning bush. And then again, with the temple. As if it were the strings playing the motif at the burning bush, and in Exodus 40 as God's glory fills the holy of holies, the woodwinds join them. And the music was good and it was beautiful, but the Sanhedrin should now be hearing that same motif as, in Jesus and the Spirit the whole symphony comes together to play. Stephen isn't disparaging Moses. He's not blaspheming the law or the temple. He's saying, “Can't you hear it? Their beautiful theme is now being woven into something far grander and played by the whole symphony. The motifs have been there all along, the story has always been told this way. Don't plug your ears to this new thing. Listen. And hear how it's taken up all the old themes into something that is nothing short of glorifying to the conductor, to the God of glory. That's as far as we have time to go this morning. Like I said, Acts 7 is long and there's a lot to unpack. But I think the great take-away for us from this part—in addition to learning to hear the great story of God and his people—I think the most important thing here is to know that God really does do new and unexpected things. As we get to know the story, we ought to expect for God to do the unexpected, for God to do new things that upstage what he's done in the past. And yet, the story also emphatically tells us that as much as God does new things and upstages the things he's done before, those new things are always in keeping with what he's done before. The past always points to the future and the future never undermines the past. As the writer of Hebrews tells us, “God is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” We live in an age where too many people are ready to do something new themselves—something that breaks from what or how God has already revealed himself, something that breaks from or that disparages or that blasphemes God's past actions or his past instructions—they take this new human thing and declared that God is doing a new thing. Andy Stanley saying we need to unhitch from the Old Testament so that God can do something new. No! Churches embracing sexual immorality and post-modern notions of identity and sexuality and family and marriage and then saying, “See, God is doing a new thing!” A thousand times, no! Brothers and Sisters, the theme of the story, the key of the symphony doesn't change. God does new things, but those new things follow from what God's already done. On the other hand—and I think it's mostly in response to all the proclamation of “new things” that aren't godly at all—on the other hand, we can become too fearful, too conservative and we can end up where the Pharisees and Sadducees and the Essenes were: locked down, afraid of the new, and turning away from burning bushes, and unwilling to go where God is actually leading. This why we need to steep ourselves in the story. This why we need to immerse ourselves in the great symphony and to let the music wash over and through us. Brothers and Sisters, we need to know the themes and the motifs, to learn the key in which God is playing, to be intimately familiar with how they interact, weaving around and through each other, so that as the story continues to unfold, as the symphony bursts into new movements, we can hear God bringing those old familiar themes to new heights, while also being able to recognise when a different story is being told, or a different symphony is being played. I've said over and over, Brothers and Sisters: God's word is life. Know, meditate on it, let it mould you, and then let it pour forth from you to give life to others. Let's pray: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Mark Buchanan — Telling the Story of Le Chambon

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2026 36:51

On Life With God, Nathan has a fascinating conversation with author Mark Buchanan about his WWII novel, What Is Left of the Night—why he wrote it, what he learned, and how it offers a vision of kingdom living we can carry into present-day crises.

night world war ii discipleship spiritual formation dallas willard telling the story christian growth ecumenical richard foster mark buchanan le chambon

‘Who's telling the story about us?' A conversation with curator Onaje Henderson

Race Unwrapped

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2026 34:07

So far this season, we've been talking to people who create art. But art also needs an audience — people who receive it, and let it change how they think and feel. So in this episode, we're talking to someone whose role is to create an environment where folks can bear witness to art. Onaje Henderson is a co-owner and curator of ZuCot Gallery, a Black art gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. He joins us to talk about the world of fine art, and who decides what art we get to see at all.Learn more about ZuCot Gallery at zucotgallery.com, or on Instagram: @zucotgalleryThis season of Race Unwrapped is supported by the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage, and by our listeners. Click here to help make this work possible (and we'll send you a Race Unwrapped sticker)!

black conversations henderson curator telling the story kentucky center

Telling the Story: Part 1

jesus christ telling the story

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2026

Telling the Story: Part 1 Acts 7:1-16 by William Klock Last Sunday, in Acts 6, we saw Stephen confronted as he preached in the synagogue. We don't know exactly what he was preaching, but from the accusations that were made against him, he was—of course—preaching that Jesus is the Messiah, but must also have been talking about the way in which Jesus and the Spirit fulfil God's promises to Israel, the law and the prophets, the torah and the temple. We can surmise that, because what they accuse him of is saying blasphemous things against God in general and specifically against Moses. They accuse him of saying that Jesus will destroy the temple and change the customs that Moses had handed down to them. We can surmise this, too, because this is what we've been hearing Peter preach in the earlier parts of Acts. Never in the early church do we see the apostles or anyone else just launching into a sermon about Jesus. They always and consistently preach Jesus as part of the story of the God of Israel and his people. That's important. In fact, it's critical; it's essential. Leave out the story that leads to Jesus and you just may lose Jesus himself. That's what happened with Marcion of Sinope back in the Second Century. His was one of the very first heresies the church had to confront. He threw away the Old Testament. He believed the God of the Old Testament was an evil, sadistic god and not the same God we see in the New. So he just unhitched the Old Testament and left it behind. And that heresy has been cropping up throughout church history in one form or another ever since. A few years ago, ex-evangelical pastor, Andy Stanley, caused a big stir when he preached that the church has to unhitch itself from the Old Testament. Even if we don't cut out the Old Testament from our Bibles, even if we cherish the Old Testament, if we lose the story it contains, we're going to get ourselves into trouble. Men like Tertullian and Justin Martyr addressed Marcion and he was eventually excommunicated. The church would always hold tenaciously to the Old Testament. But it wasn't even a hundred and fifty year later that we started to undermine its story-telling. As the church became increasingly dominated by gentiles, we started to read the Old Testament (and the New), not as the story of the God of Isreal and his people, but as a book of moral allegories and of types that pointed to Jesus. We flattened it out and made it abstract. We “spiritualised” it. We knew the story of the God of Isreal and his people was there, but we denigrated it. That was the simplest, the least important, the least “spiritual” way to read the Bible. And by the grace of God we didn't lose the gospel, but gradually we started putting the em-PHA-sis in the wrong places. What we see in the Bible, in the Gospels, in the teaching of Jesus, and in the teaching of the apostles in their epistles, and in the examples we see through Acts, is that the good news about Jesus is deeply rooted in the Old Testament and in Israel's story. You cannot separate the old and the new. The story tells us the problem of human sin and rebellion and of the corruption of Gods' good creation. The story shows us how God has stepped into the world to set it to rights. The story shows—long before we ever get to Jesus—the goodness and faithfulness of God. The story shows why the Israelites could and should trust the God who spoke through Moses and the Prophets—and eventually through Jesus and the apostles. The story prepared them—and it prepares us—for Jesus, for his death and his resurrection and his ascension and his kingdom and it prepares us to know the Spirit and to be the temple, purified by the blood of Jesus and made a dwelling place for God, to be a the truly heaven-on-earth people God had promised to make Israel; to be the beginnings, the firstfruits of his new creation, his new age, his kingdom. That's what Stephen was getting at when he reminded his fellow Jews about the day when Jesus had said that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. It wasn't about the end of Moses or torah or temple; it was about fulfilling them. They were signposts point into God's future—a future in which God would live with his people, not in a building, but actually in them, and a future in which the law would no longer be carved on stone tablets, but written on human hearts. But they refused to hear. They drummed up false witnesses and they dragged Stephen before the Sanhedrin, the governing body of the Jews. Look at Acts 7. [Page 1086 in the pew Bibles.] Having been dragged before the Sanhedrin, “The high priest addressed Stephen. ‘Are these things true?' he said. ‘Brothers and fathers, hear me,' replied Stephen. ‘The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he moved to live in Haran.'” Let me pause there. Notice how Stephen is going all the way back to the beginning. He speaks first of the God of glory, which might not seem very important to us, but it's noteworthy that “God of glory” is not a common way to speak of God in the Old Testament. In fact, Psalm 29:3 is the only place this title is used. On the one hand, I suspect Stephen uses it to make the point that he has no interest in denigrating or blaspheming the God of Irael. Stephen is invested in proclaiming the glory of God, and that's exactly what he's about to do by reminding them of their own story—and, most importantly, how it ends with Jesus and the Spirit. But Stephen is also invoking Psalm 29 as it ascribes glory to the God of creation, the God who is enthroned, sovereign over the seas and over the forests, sovereign over the nations, the God who blesses his people as they cry out in his temple, “Glory!”. This is the God of creation. And then to mention Abraham in the next breath is to set the opening scene. God created the heavens and earth. God created human beings to serve as his stewards and his priests in this creation. And we rebelled. We broke it. We corrupted it. We introduced darkness where there was supposed to be light. We drove a great wedge between heaven and earth, between God and man as we claimed his creation for ourselves, to do with as we pleased, to try to rule it as if we are gods ourselves. To write our own stories instead of living in the one he's given us. And it was into that darkness, into that void in which men and women had lost all knowledge of their creator and had turned to idols, God spoke. And he called to Abraham. That call was the beginning of a new story—a story to set creation and to set humanity to rights. A story that would, one day, culminate in God returning to dwell with his people. It's the story that everyone in Israel new, inside-out, backwards and forwards, top to bottom. And yet something had gone wrong in the telling. Because when God returned, Israel had rejected him. Because when Stephen proclaimed Jesus and the Spirit, the people accused him of blasphemy. Because as faithful as they were to the story, they hadn't got it quite right. Remember last week I talked about how you might take a trip to the other side of the country. You drive your car to Nanaimo, then you leave it there and take a ferry to Horseshoe Bay, then you get off the ferry and take a bus downtown, and then you get off the bus to get on Skytrain to the airport, and then fly in airplane to your final destination. That journey might break down at any number of points. We might really, really like to drive our car and we can't bear to think of leaving it parked at the ferry terminal and taking a ferry instead. And so we refuse to stop driving. When our friend tells us you can't drive on water, we get angry. We accuse him of being a car-hater. We accuse him of saying that cars are bad and evil and no good. And we wait for the ferry to leave and then we drive full-speed down the ramp and crash into the water and drown. Not because cars are bad, but because cars were simply never designed to drive across water. That's what's going on with Stephen's accusers. Stephen never said that torah or temple were bad things. They were good things. They were wonderful, spectacular, glorious gifts of God's great grace. They were signposts leading Israel to Jesus. It's just that in this new age, God's given something even better. There's a new law and a new temple. Those things were the promise, but now the fulfilment of the promise is here. But they don't want to hear that. But let's image you managed to transition from car to ferry to bus to Skytrain and you get to the airport, but instead of looking at the departures board to find your gate, you just walked down the concourse. And you looked for the gate you liked best. You stopped at one and you looked out the window and on the horizon, across the Strait, you could see Vancouver Island. And it was comforting and you decided this was the right gate. You could sit and wait for your plane to Montreal and never lose sight of the Island. And you waited and waited, but no plane came. And eventually you asked a gate agent, and she said, “Oh, you're at the wrong gate. Your flight's leaving from such-and-such gate.” But you didn't listen. You liked this gate with the view of home. And a while later they announced your flight—and the gate—but you ignored it. Eventually you even heard them page you: “Passenger So-and-so, this is your last call for boarding at gate such-and-such.” But you just sat there. This gate was nice. Everyone else was wrong. Eventually the plane will come. And that's what most of Isreal did. The Messiah came to fulfil the law and the prophets, but people already had their ideas of who and what the Messiah was be and to do. Because they'd got the story wrong. Not all wrong. They'd got to the airport after all, but wrong enough that they were convinced it was this gate, not that one. So Stephen's going to do what Jesus had done and what he'd heard Peter do. He's going back to the very beginning of the story and he's going to tell it again. He's going to tell it so they can understand that leaving the car and getting on the ferry doesn't mean you hate cars or think they're evil—and that the same goes for Moses and the Prophets and torah and temple. And he's going to tell it so that when they do get to the airport, they be willing to trust the departure board and the gate agents and the pages about the right gate—so that they'll see how the story was, all along, leading them to Jesus. The real key here is to pay attention to the bits of the story that Stephen—inspired by the Holy Spirit—decides to emphasise. There are a thousand parts to this story, but—Stephen is saying—look at it this way and you can't help but recognise that in Jesus, the Messiah has come. So, again, picking up at verse 2: “The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he moved to live in Haran. ‘Leave your land and your family,' he said to him, ‘and go to the land which I will show you.' So he left the land of the Chaldeans and went to live in Haran. Then, from there, after his father's death, God moved him on to this land in which you now live. God didn't give him an inheritance here, not even a place to stand up in. Instead, he promised (when Abraham still had no child) that he would give it as a possession to his seed after him. This is what God said to him: that his seed would be strangers in a foreign land, that they would serve there as slaves, and that they would be afflicted for four hundred years. But God said that he would judge the nation that had enslaved them, and that they would then come out and worship him ‘on this mountain'. And he gave them the covenant of circumcision. So Abraham became the father of Isaac, and he circumcised him on the eighth day. Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of the twelve patriarchs.” You can't understand Judaism or Christianity without understanding Abraham. This is where the story of God's rescue begins. With this call, God's plan to set the world to rights begins to unfold. Israel wasn't just some random nation in history. God's calling Abraham out of the darkness of ignorance and sin and idolatry is what sets the story on its trajectory to Jesus, it's what establishes that this is the story of how God will rescue human beings and fix his creation that we broke. It's like Stephen is answering the charge of blasphemy by affirming that, no, he is actually affirming the story they knew; he's affirming God's call; he's affirming the special status of Israel. Just because we also had to take a ferry, doesn't mean the car was a bad thing or that it didn't have a good and useful purpose. And Stephen makes a point of zeroing in on Genesis 15. That's the part of Genesis where Abraham has been faithful to God and followed him to the holy land, and God responds by establishing his covenant with him. We see this, too, over and over in the New Testament, especially with Paul in Galatians 3 and Romans 4. This is a vitally important part of the story that leads us to Jesus. And so Stephen stresses: God promised the land to Abraham's descendants. The most Abraham would ever have it was a burial plot that he had purchase. But after his descendants had been strangers in a foreign land for four hundred years—he's talking about Israel living as slaves in Egypt—he would judge that land and its people, and he would bring Abraham's children out of Egypt to worship him “on this mountain”. Why was that important? Because it shows how God works. He makes promises and he keeps them, but he does so in his own good time. If Abraham hadn't know better, he might have thought God had failed. Moses might have said, “I don't think this is what was promised.” But instead, Abraham trusted. Instead, Moses believed and followed God as he did a new thing. And I think that's why Stephen phrases this bit about “on this mountain”—that was originally God's promise to Moses that he would bring the Israelites back to the place where God had met him in the burning bush and they would worship there, but Stephen connects that with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Already—long before Jesus—God was fulfilling his promises in ways that were unexpected. Mount Sinai points to Mount Zion. For Jews in the First Century, the temple had become a symbol of the land of Israel and of God's promise to Abraham. That's why they were so angry at Stephen when they thought he was blaspheming the temple and saying it was no good or that it would be destroyed. You might as well say—in their thinking—that God was going to abandon his promise to Abraham. So Stephen connects this all together. He affirms the promise; he affirms the covenant; he affirms God's promise of the land; and most of all he affirms the temple. Most importantly, what he's doing is affirming that God has called this people and given them a purpose. Through them he's going to save the world. They knew that, but they'd muddled the story just enough that they'd got the “how” part of it wrong. Stephen's on his way to Moses now. We'll look at that part of what he says next week. There's too much to his speech to cover it all in one sermon. But on the way to Moses, Stephen pauses. He needs to remind them of the part of the story about Joseph. Look at verses 9-16: “Now the patriarchs became angry with Joseph, and were jealous of him. They sold him into Egypt. But God was with him, and rescued him from all his troubles an gave him grace and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, making him ruler over Egypt and over all his household. But then there was a famine over the whole of Egypt and Canaan, which resulted in great hardship. Our ancestors couldn't find food to eat. Jacob, however, heard that there was grain in Egypt, and sent our ancestors there on an initial visit. On their second trip, Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and revealed to Pharaoh what family he was from. So Joseph sent and summoned Jacob his father and all his family, seventy-five people in all. Jacob came to Egypt and he and our ancestors died there. They were brought back to Shechem and buried in the tomb which Abraham had bought with silver, at a named price, from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.” Before Stephen gets to Moses, there's Joseph and Joseph's story. Abraham (and Moses as we'll see next week) point to Jesus through their calling and the promises God made to them. Joseph points to Jesus another way and he's particularly relevant to the current situation. Joseph was rejected by his brothers, but it was precisely in that rejection that God was work. It was through his rejection and through Joseph's unjust suffering that God raised him to govern the whole land of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh. When famine came to Canaan and Egypt, it was Joseph whom his brothers came to for food—the man they'd been jealous of, the man they'd abused, the man they nearly murdered, the man they sold into slavery. And yet, what happened when they came to Joseph. Instead of being angry, instead of retaliating, instead of getting revenge, Joseph was gracious. He wept for joy to see his brothers again and invited them to come and live with him in a land of plenty. I hope that sounds familiar. I hope you can hear echoes of Jesus there. I can't help but think of the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son and the rejoicing that Jesus says happens in heaven when sinners repent. I hope you can see in Joseph's story, particularly as Stephen tells it, how God was preparing his people for his son. This is how God works: through humility, through rejection, through letting sin and evil and human rebellion do their worst, and then rising triumphant. This is how God works, Stephen declares: He is loving and gracious and merciful toward those he has created. One day, when he finally finishes the work of setting creation to rights, it'll mean wiping from its face all those who persist in their rebellion, who persist in sin and evil. God does not rejoice in the destruction of those he loves. And so he rejoices—just as Joseph did—to welcome the repentant, to welcome those who want to be part of God's new world, to welcome those who come to be washed clean in the blood of Jesus and to be filled with his Spirit, to become new creations themselves, to become part of his new temple. Stephen's pointing back to Joseph to tell the Sanhedrin: There is grace, there is forgiveness for you too—even for those who cried out “Crucify him!” I suspect there were some men there in that meeting of the Sanhedrin that day who saw where Stephen was going with this. Like I said, this is as far as we'll go with Chapter 7 today. It's too much for one sermon. But the real takeaway from these first sixteen verses is, I think, simply to understand what Stephen, inspired by the Spirit and steeped in the scriptures, is doing here. This is—or it should be, because it sadly usually isn't—this is the great art of Christian apologetic and Christian preaching and the proclamation of the good news about Jesus. It's to tell the story of God and his people, to have the wisdom to know which of the thousand and one details is relevant to the immediately situation or immediate audience, and then to tell that story as the story that leads to Jesus as its fulfilment and its climax on the one hand, but that also proclaims God's glory by showing his goodness and faithfulness in the story that brings us to Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, the Old Testament is not just a collection of useful stories for teaching morals nor is it a collection of allegories that foreshadow Jesus. It is, first and foremost, the story of how God has been at work to save us and to save his creation from sin and death. And we need to learn it. We need to learn it well. So that we can tell the story in a way that doesn't leave us behind as the ferry sails away or that leads people stranded at the wrong gate at the airport. We need to tell the story in way that honours the old covenant, torah and temple, but we also need to tell it in a way that reveals Jesus as the fulfilment of them, a story that faithfully follows the signposts as they lead us to Jesus and to the Spirit, to the cross and to the empty tomb, to the ascension and to the creation of this new temple, not made of stones, but made of people washed clean by Jesus and filled with God's own Spirit. We need to learn to tell the story so it gives glory to God for his goodness and faithfulness, for his grace and mercy, not just when we get to the part about Jesus, but at every step of the way: from Abraham to Joseph to Moses to David to Jesus—and then to you and to me, and to those who are lost and whom God so longs to rejoice over. Let's pray: Father, in the Collect we acknowledged your goodness and your promises that exceed all we can desire. Remind us always that we know your goodness, because we know your story. Capture our hearts and minds, we pray, by the glory of that story, that we might immerse ourselves in it, that we might meditate on it, that we might in habit it, and that we might tell it over and over and over until the whole world knows your glory. Through Jesus our Lord, through the one who embodies your glory in all its fullness, we pray. Amen.

Telling the Story of Jesus

Haven Today

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2026

How would you tell the story of Jesus to someone who had never even heard His name?

Telling the Story

Kingdom Life

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2026 32:10

This sermon centered on the importance of remembering and retelling the stories of God's work in both American history and our personal lives. The conversation focused on how, as the nation nears its 250th anniversary, recounting true accounts of God's guidance provides hope and direction for facing today's challenges. A key theme that emerged was the biblical call to remember God's deeds and pass them down to future generations, as highlighted by Psalms 77 and 78. The sermon explored the spiritual decline before the First Great Awakening, followed by renewal through prayer and revival, with examples from Jonathan Edwards and the widespread impact of the Great Awakening uniting people across divides. The discussion emphasized that remembering and sharing these stories fosters faith, shapes character, and connects generations. Several points were raised, including the need to resist cultural forgetting and to courageously share personal testimonies of God's transformation. The message concluded by urging listeners to approach communion with gratitude, to keep recounting the story of Jesus, and to keep praying for God's renewing presence today.

god jesus christ american psalms great awakening jonathan edwards telling the story first great awakening

Telling the story of the grid

Volts

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2026 33:30

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.volts.wtfBen Eidelson and Anay Shah run the Stepchange podcast, which recently put out a magisterial four-hour (!) episode on the history of the US electricity grid. I talk with them about some of the colorful characters and stories involved, the big fights and broad lessons learned, and how the history echoes in today's political and technological struggles.

grid telling the story stepchange

Telling The Story

First Baptist Church Indian Trail

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2026 43:18

telling the story

That You Remember: Telling the Story Buffalo Creek Couldn't Keep

Appalachian Shine

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2026 37:11

In the early morning hours of February 26, 1972, a wall of black water tore through a narrow Appalachian hollow in Logan County—erasing communities, taking lives, and leaving behind a silence that still echoes today. The Buffalo Creek Mine Disaster wasn't just a tragedy—it was a moment that changed families, reshaped a region, and raised questions that have never fully settled. But history doesn't always capture what it felt like to live there… to lose everything… to remember. In this episode of Appalachian Shine, we sit down with Isabel Reddy, author of That You Remember, a powerful novel inspired by the people and stories of Buffalo Creek. Through fiction rooted in a real tragedy, Reddy explores the emotional aftermath of disaster—the grief, the resilience, and the burden of memory carried by those who survived. Together, we talk about the real communities that were lost, the responsibility of telling stories drawn from tragedy, and what it means for Appalachia to remember—not just what happened, but who it happened to. Because some places don't disappear…they live on in the stories we choose to tell. #ThatYouRemember #IsabelReddy #HistoricalFiction #BooksThatMatter #AuthorInterview #BuffaloCreek #BuffaloCreekDisaster #WestVirginiaHistory #AmericanHistory #ForgottenHistory #AppalachianShine www.supportappalachia.org

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#155 | Devarim ch.1 - Re-telling the Story

The Tanakh Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2026 13:47

A class for Erev Pesach and Devarim ch.1Devarim is called Mishneh Torah - the "review" of the Torah. But is Moshe repeating the stories and laws, or adapting them?

torah devarim telling the story mishneh torah

Telling the Story

BelPres Sermons

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 29, 2026 29:14

Anthony Ballard

telling the story

Telling the Story of Yesiat Misrayim

Rabbi Avi Harari

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 26, 2026 11:15

Telling the Story of Yesiat Misrayim by Rabbi Avi Harari

story telling the story

How Photojournalists are Telling the Story of Anti-ICE Movements w/ Rae Breaux and Brooke Anderson (G&R 480)

Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2026 45:35

Across the country, photojournalists, videographers, live steamers and other documentarians are telling the story of resistance to ICE. They do this at great personal risk, both physical and legal. In our latest, we talk with movement photojournalists Brooke Anderson and Rae Breaux about their work in telling the story of anti-ICE movements, as well as many other movements, in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and how other documentarians are doing it across the country. This is an episode about getting the shot, staying safe and defending a free press. Bios//Rae Breaux is an organizer, trainer, and movement photographer based in Los Angeles, CA. She has over fifteen years of experience developing intersectional, cross-movement strategies around race, class, gender, and the systemic drivers of the climate crisis. Rae has a strong background in coordinating and implementing creative actions, building cross-issue coalitions, and using photography and the power of imagery to create narratives and tell the stories of people and the planet. She is on Instagram at @craezin.Brooke Anderson is longtime organizer turned freelance photojournalist based in Oakland, CA. She covers movements for social, economic, racial, and ecological justice. Her most recent work can be found in Prism, Convergence Magazine, YES! Magazine, Teen Vogue, In These Times, and Earth Island Journal. She is a proud member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, CWA 39521. She is on Instagram at @MovementPhotographer.---------------

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Tome 394 2024 Monster Manual Part 17 The Mechanics are Not Telling the Story

The Tome Show

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 16, 2026 71:42

In this episode Jeff and Tracy sit down with Brandes Stoddard and Jared Rascher to talk about the 2024 5e D&D Monster Manual - this is part 17 of a multi-part series. Thanks to our Sponsor: The Tome Show's Awesome Patreon Patrons!!!!!!!!!!!! Links: Jared on the Web Jared on Gnome Stew THAC0 With Advantage Podcast Brandes on the Web Brandes on Bluesky Brandes on Mastodon Brandes at Tribality Patreon.com/BrandesStoddard Jeff on Twitter Tracy on Twitter Tracy on the Web Thetomeshow.com Patreon.com/thetomeshow

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March 14 - Telling the Story of God's Faithfulness

Daily Joy: A 365-Day Devotional for Women

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2026 10:20

We hope you enjoy today's Scripture reading and devotional aimed at motivating you to apply God's word while strengthening your heart and nurturing your soul. Today's Bible reading is 2 Samuel 22. To read along with the podcast, grab a print copy of the devotional. ESV Bible narration read by Kristyn Getty. Follow us on social media to stay up to date: Instagram Facebook Twitter

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Telling the Story for My Sake - Dr. Jacob Hawk - March 1, 2026 First Service

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2026 70:25

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Telling the Story for My Sake - Dr. Jacob Hawk - March 1, 2026 Second Service

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2026 68:50

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Telling the Story for My City's Sake - Dr Steve Cloer

Real Good Courage - The Westwood Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2026 44:30

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Forgiveness: Telling the Story

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2026 26:19

Telling the story is a part of the process of forgiveness, whether that story is of how we were hurt, or how we hurt others. And yet, it may not be quick, as we need time to grieve, process, and recover. A question is who can help by holding our stories? Friends and family members, and even groups can help us heal. god tells us that he will be with us and join us in our story. Our message today comes from Pastoral Intern Aaron. Our scripture lessons are from Psalm 130 and Genesis Chapter 37, verses 1-4 and 12-26.

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Telling the Story - Praise and Worship

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2026 23:05

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Telling the Story: Engaging the World with Meekness - Dr. Phillip Thompson

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2026 50:46

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Telling the Story for My Friend's Sake - James Glenn

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2026 64:00

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Telling the Story: Engaging the World with Meekness - Dr. Phillip Thompson

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2026 50:18

Subscribe to PRESTONCREST - with Gordon Dabbs on Soundwise

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Telling the Story for My Family's Sake - Trey Morgan

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2026 54:45

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Telling the Story for my Church's Sake - John Bradshaw Jr.

RealAgriculture's Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2026 60:27

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RealAg Radio: Hauling grain, biofuels, crop margins, and telling the story of Canadian ag, Feb 26, 2026

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 26, 2026 55:08

Welcome to the Farmer Rapid Fire on RealAg Radio brought to you by Corteva Crop Protection! On today’s show, host Lyndsey Smith is joined by: Kevin Buchner of Brownsville, Ont.; Chris Allam of Edmonton, Alta.; Robert Brunel of Ste. Rose, Man.; Nick Dubuc of Southwest Que.; Corteva Agronomist Linda Hinz, based out of Sask, Thoughts... Read More

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RealAg Radio: Hauling grain, biofuels, crop margins, and telling the story of Canadian ag, Feb 26, 2026

RealAg Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 26, 2026 55:08

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Telling The Story 4th Annual Church Growth & Evangelism Conference - February 27th - March 1st