Christian Meditation for A Bigger Lif...
Christian Meditation can help refocus your mind and recalibrate your body to get the stress, anxiety and anger out of your heart and out of your body. Spend about 23 minutes to "be still" with God as each episode uses a different biblical image to experience God's presence and promises in a way that brings relaxation and renewal. Look for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.
426
Lifting Our Eyes | Psalm 47
While all the Psalms were written centuries before Jesus was born, Psalm 47 (much like we saw in our last episode on Psalm 45) brings the future reign of Jesus into our present praises. And in doing so it helps us to lift up our eyes to see the bigger ...
22 min
427
The Life-Giving Power of the Bigger Story | Psa...
Everyone has a mental narrative inside their head of what story they want to live and whether or not they are fitting inside that narrative right now in their lives. And what happens is we have a false narrative inside of our head that is not reality, ...
24 min
428
Living As Though the Truth were True | Philippi...
I often ask myself what did the apostles who saw the risen Jesus know about Jesus that I don’t know? I read where a Jesuit once said of Dorothy Day that she lived “as though the truth were true.” That’s a big statement when you really think about it. S...
17 min
429
When Those Who Reject God Prosper | Psalm 37
It’s easy to get drawn in or intimidated by culturally powerful people. Especially when they are culturally powerful or prosperous because they openly disregard or reject God’s righteousness. It can cause us to lose courage in our faith and commitment ...
24 min
430
Dealing with Those Who Want to Harm You | Psalm 35
Anyone who takes the Bible seriously knows we live in a world where there is real evil. And that evil can take deep root in people’s lives so that they are motivated to bring evil into our lives. To do us harm. To hurt us in some way. That was David’s ...
19 min
431
Imagining Biblical Pictures of God | Revelation...
Imagine writing a letter to a loved one without ever imagining them in your mind as you write. Not much of a conversation. Now imagine conversing with God without using your imagination. Again, not much of a conversation. But the Bible gives us poetic ...
26 min
432
Approaching God with Biblical Imagination | Psa...
As you come before God to pray, what are you usually thinking? To some degree you are using your imagination, picturing in some way God with you and listening to you. But in the Psalms David imagined much more than that. If you pay attention you’ll not...
19 min
433
Seeing Your Poetic Present and Your Literal Fut...
As a psalmist uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit (Matt 22:43), King David’s prayers were often prophetic; describing poetically/figuratively what will ultimately be literal in the future through the Son of David, the Messiah (the Christ). For example...
21 min
434
Coming to God Emotionally Expressive | Psalm 28
I think in some ways the reason we lose emotional control at work or at home or in traffic or wherever is because we keep too much emotional control when talking to God. We have it backwards. Learning to be more emotionally expressive, even dramatic, t...
24 min
435
What is the Bible’s Biggest Truth for Your Life...
What is the number one truth of life in the Bible? The Bible’s big truth for your life? Here it is: Only God’s will brings life; and every other will brings destruction. Dependence upon God brings life; independence from God brings death.This is the en...
16 min
436
Why Should You Choose God Over All Else? | Pra...
Why should you choose God over anything else? I always have to remind myself why following (seeking, trusting, obeying) Christ is always worth it more than not. My guess is you do too. This is a great Psalm to remind you of who God really is for you, a...
15 min
437
How Jesus Redirects Our Fears | Prayer on Matth...
Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:29-31 have been some of his most important words in my life because of their powerful picture of God’s detailed care and involvement in my life. Jesus emphasizes our eternal value to the God who created everything in this un...
18 min
438
How Jesus Challenges Your Anxiety and Worry | P...
We all worry. We all deal with anxiety. Most of the time it’s the back-burner feeling that’s like a slow leak in our joy. In Matthew 6 Jesus directly challenges that kind of anxiety and worry. Think about it this way -- the creator of the universe -- Y...
20 min
439
Seeking the Face of the King of Glory | Prayer ...
The risen Jesus told his disciples that ultimately what is written in the Psalms points to him (see Luke 24:25-27, 44 below). We especially see this in Psalm 24, written by King David a thousand years before Jesus was born. I love these messianic psalm...
25 min
440
Praying David’s Spirit-foreshadowing Crucifixio...
Jesus quoted the first line of Psalm 22 on the cross. It was a prayer of anguish as he took upon himself the wrath of the Father for the sins of his people. But it was also Jesus’s way of pointing his disciples to the rest of Psalm 22. And it’s amazing...
26 min
441
Praying David’s Spirit-foreshadowing Promises o...
Jesus saw the Psalms as written by their human author, but also by the Holy Spirit (see Matt 22:41-46 below). Although King David lived over a thousand years before Christ, he is one of the Bible’s primary foreshadowing figures of Jesus as Christ. That...
17 min
442
Rejoicing In Our Resurrection | Prayer on Psalm 18
This is a rare Psalm where David no longer feels any threats to his life. God has completely delivered him from all his enemies, including his most dangerous enemy in King Saul. The poetic images David uses in this Psalm are so illustrative in ascribin...
26 min
443
Praying to Pray | Prayer on Psalm 17
Usually when we get past the wall of not wanting to pray, and just start praying aloud to God, it feels good to our soul. And we realize it wasn’t that hard after all. When we can take the “horizontal” concerns in our life that weigh us down and make t...
23 min
444
Praying to Living Into Salvation’s Narrative | ...
What narrative for your life are you living into most of the time? That’s the big question from Psalm 14. There’s the narrative of “the fool” who lives most of the time as if “there is no God.” Then there’s the narrative of those “who understand”...
24 min
445
How to Focus on Christ’s Return through Prayer ...
Our life won’t make any sense to us in any given moment if we don’t keep Jesus’s return as the focus of our life’s story. Revelation 21:1-7 is one of the best places in the entire Bible to do that. Especially when reading it in meditation and prayer. A...
23 min
446
Let God Light Up Your Eyes Through Honest Praye...
This is one of those Psalms of David where he starts off accusing God of ignoring him and forgetting about him. It says something about God that he would want to inspire David to write such an honest Psalm and put it in His Word as part of Scripture. G...
16 min
447
Praying Some Favorite Verses in Psalms
I’ve been praying through the Psalms for over 40 years now. So inevitably there have been some verses in the Psalms that I’ve personally found particularly powerful for prayer. I come back to them over and over, which means eventually I had them ...
21 min
448
Praying to Put On God’s Righteousness | Prayer ...
In our last episode we looked at Psalm 38 and David’s frustration with himself for being his own worst enemy. It’s a psalm where David confesses his overwhelming sin and how that’s made his life stink and fester. I’m thankful the Holy Spirit has inspir...
27 min
449
Praying When Your Foolish Sin Stinks Up Your Li...
Psalm 38 is a great example of the power of poetry to make us feel. We can feel David’s own misery and frustration with himself in this psalm. He realizes how much his own stupid and foolish sins have stunk up his life and his relationships, and he nee...
32 min
450
Praying the Bigger Life for You in Christ | Pra...
In Colossians 1:12-20, Paul is finishing a prayer he has for the Colossian believers, and then he quotes what many scholars believe was an early Christian hymn. As such, these are some of the most powerful truths in the Bible. And the more we understan...
32 min