September 2022 – Essential Church

Episode 136: Discerning Christ in the Old Testament with Chris Green (Part 1)

In this episode we sit down with our friend Dr. Chris Green to talk with him about what it means (and how!) to discern Christ in the Old Testament. This is part 1 of 2. Be sure to catch part 2 next week!

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One of the real tragedies of the American culture wars is that the Bible is divided as we have been divided… there are texts that are too “progressive” for some and too “conservative” for others…

You can often tell where we are aligned politically and socially in the culture wars by which texts of the Bible trouble us… which do we find difficult to handle or tough to swallow?

We’ve all been conditioned to believe that the truer something is, the simpler it is… but when you read the church fathers, you start realizing that we have an allergy to difficulty… traditionally, Christians have embraced the difficulty of the text…

When we’re teaching people the faith, we often say, “Jesus was a simple teacher…” but when you read the Gospels, you realize that isn’t true… we need to realize that God teaches us the way we need to be taught, not the way we want to learn…

The demand of the Old Testament is that God is riddling us… we’re not used to that…

Our relationship to Jesus as our rabbi requires that we search for him in the Old Testament, because he is using these texts to teach us… he is giving himself to us in these texts…

Not only was Jesus raised in and trained in these texts… but these are always his… he is the one who inspired them in the first place… that’s where you have to begin… these are his words…

The right reading of Scripture always has “salt” in it… often the plain reading will meet the “rules” of interpretation… but that’s not yet Jesus… and when Jesus speaks, he’s never “plain”, it’s “salty”, it has an edge or a burn to it… that’s how we discern if we’re reading in the right spirit or not…

There are lots of readings of the Old Testament (and the Bible in general) that we can justify but don’t actually sanctify us… if our reading of the OT doesn’t cripple our self-righteousness, we haven’t yet touched the Spirit of Christ…

We need to acknowledge that we come to these texts as guests… these are Israel’s texts that God has invited us to read… if I ever lose that sense of having been shown hospitality, I will go wrong…

Episode 135: Streams in the Wasteland

In this episode Daniel and Andrew sit down to talk about Andrew’s recently released Streams in the Wasteland: Finding Spiritual Renewal with the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Grab your copy on Amazon!

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We moved here in 2017 after having been a pastor for eight years in Denver… and I was not prepared for the spiritual crisis that would create… it felt like getting put in a witness protection program… I couldn’t find my equilibrium…

In the midst of that, someone told me I needed to read the desert fathers and mothers… when I asked why, he said, “Because the thing that you feel like is being thrust upon you, they sought out, and found it to be a place where God could be found…”

They gave me language to make sense of the desolate space… God’s people find God in the wilderness… my own healing was not complete where I got to the point where I never needed to lead again… I fell in love with “My God and my All…”

It’s easy for us to look at them as socially awkward misanthropes who justified their retreat with spiritual language… but sometimes a situation is so toxic that you have to separate yourself in order to find the love of God and others again…

A mischaracterization of them is that they severed themselves from the truth… even if they create some creative distance, they still live in community and they still go to church…

Thomas Merton said that now, the wasteland is everywhere… which means that the wisdom of the desert is wisdom for our time… what does it look like to cultivate true humanness?

Our speech is one of the most critical issues in our moment… social media invites and even rewards us for adding more heat to the conversation than light, which is why we’re living in an increasingly polarized society…

God’s speech is creative speech that gives life, and he gives that same gift to human beings… fallen man can take the power of the word and warp it and cause reality to fray… it grieves the Spirit when we use our words to tear down…

Maybe the greatest moral achievement of our age is can we sit in a room with people with whom we vehemently disagree and neither feel the need to conquer them or feel the need to bail out and run away…

Episode 134: 10 Keys to Finishing Well

In this episode we celebrate Pastor Brady and Pam’s 15 year anniversary at New Life Church by reflecting on some keys to finishing well. You can download the full list HERE. You can also purchase Brady and Pam’s devotional Oceans of Grace HERE.

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I’m sobered by how quickly people can rise and fall… the enemy hates the church and so he targets those who lead it…

I’m not thinking about finishing in five years… I’m thinking about finishing today… I want to go bed tonight with a clean heart… the micro decisions are really important…

We need to pray all the time… the common thread among men and women who have moral failures is that somewhere along the line they lost their private devotion with the Lord…

You also need to surround yourself with honest friends… with people who like you but are not impressed with you… I’m not looking for constant critics… if something that I’m doing is bad, friends will tell me without harming me…

Remember, we’re all interim pastors… New Life Church will be around after my funeral… it’s not built around me… pastors, we need to learn to hold our congregations loosely… we go from dust to dust, and need to remind ourselves of that…

The reason most pastors don’t transition well is they have nothing else to do… ending well is hard for pastors for whom ministry has become an unhealthy identity…

When I die, what I want on my tombstone is this: Here lies Brady Boyd: A Faithful Husband and a Good Dad… if my wife and kids can say that about me, that’s enough for me…

We need to forgive quickly and hold no grudges… the only way to become a gentle, tender old shepherd is to learn to give away those offenses and hurts that inevitably come our way in ministry…

Learn to share the credit… the mark of a spiritual mom and dad is the ability to walk away from the spotlight and watching others succeed…

Keep Jesus at the center of it all… if people are walking out of your church talking about you rather than talking about Jesus, you have had a terrible Sunday…

Laugh at yourself—you’re not that important…