Eden Teachings Podcast
by Eden Church
As a brand new church community in Charlotte, we are seeking to simply practice the way of Jesus, together, for the renewal of our city. As we see it, to be a disciple, or an apprentice of Jesus of Nazareth, is to order your life around three goals: be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did. Our dream is that as we live this way, our lives, our communities, and our city will be transformed: in Charlotte as it is in Heaven.
Episodes
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The Wisdom of Death | Chapter 1
In Chapter 1, Paul's main concern is Corinth's understanding of wisdom. What is it? Where does it come from? How does one get it? Does everyone get it? The dominating understanding in their day was wisdom comes from within. That we can be our ultimate authority, and there is no higher calling…
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Nevertheless... to the Saints | 1 Corinthians Intro
Yesterday we started our journey into 1 Corinthians, situating the text into its moment in time. To understand letters, like 1 Corinthians, we first have to understand something right off the bat. Each letter in the NT is written to a specific group of people, with a specific set of…
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12 Service: Kinship
We would have to ignore large portions of Scripture to avoid God’s concern for the poor and his desire for his people to care for them. In the first century, the poor or “the needy” would have included widows, orphans, or those in prison.Today, this could be children in the foster care system, a...
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11 Service: Availability
Jesus lived a remarkably interruptible life. More than 30 stories in the Gospel of Mark alone hinge on Jesus’ ability to see an interruption as an invitation. And these are just the stories that were recorded from his life. We can never know just how many people received Jesus’ loving attention…
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10 Service: Hiddenness
Where does your imagination go when you consider where you can serve?Perhaps it leads you to your local church, the care home nearby, or the low- income neighborhood in your city. For some of us, these very well could be the places Jesus is leading us to give more of ourselves — more on that in…
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09 Service: Love
Service has always been a defining characteristic of those who apprentice under Jesus.In the first century, this obscure group, who called themselves “followers of the Way,” took their Rabbi Jesus’ teachings and example seriously. They called the marginalized “brother” and “sister,” cared for the...
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08 Share the Good News
Among the words the New Testament writers used to describe followers of Jesus, perhaps none hit quite so close to home as the Apostle Peter’s description: “foreigners and exiles.”Walk the streets of most cities in the post-Christian West as a follower of Jesus, and you’re likely to feel the force...
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07 Practicing Lament
To be effective witnesses in the world, we have to be pained by the things that pains God. In fact, we cannot offer the gospel of hope to people whose grief we cannot acknowledge. But in our culture, we tend to treat grief like a disease that might infect us if we let it get too close.But this is...
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06 Partner with the Holy Spirit
The invitation to witness to the good news of Jesus can give rise to many different emotions — excitement and expectation, but also anxiety and, at times, overwhelm.Often, that particular feeling of overwhelm can come from feeling like: “It is my job to bring God to people.”Now, if that were…
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05 Neighborliness | A Look Inward
Yesterday, we took a look at three things that keep us from loving our neighbor and expanding our circles: 01 Embracing Discomfort 02 Inattentional Blindness 03 Implicit Bias To love others well requires looking inward and becoming aware of prejudices present in our hearts— becoming aware of the...
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04 Practice Hospitality
While our witness should take many shapes and forms, in a post-Christian culture that is often apathetic to the Gospel, confused about the gospel, or at worst hostile to it, our method for joining Jesus in his mission to “seek and save the lost” must become more about compassionate presence.How…
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03 Neighborliness
Who is your neighbor? We have to start here if witness + service, or justice and evangelism, is going to make sense. We’ve got to define and redefine neighbor. For Jesus, it appears it’s any image bearer. Any other human. And to be a good neighbor means making other people's problems and concerns...
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02 Begin with Love
Many of us may admittedly experience a certain allergic response to the idea of “evangelism.” It brings up images of uncompassionate preaching on street corners, unsolicited conversations, or perhaps more painfully, well-meaning invitations and interactions that are met with hostility. But what…
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01 What does the Bible say?
The church bears witness through practicing justice and righteousness. We bear witness to the Kingdom in what we say and how we live. Meaning, not only is it unkind to preach the gospel without demonstrating the gospel (justice and righteousness), but biblically speaking, you actually are not...
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00 Witness + Service | An Introduction
Robert Mullholland defines spiritual formation this way: "Spiritual formation is becoming like Jesus for the sake of others”. Spiritual maturity is not measured by how much we know, but how we love others. The invitation into a life of apprenticeship to Jesus is to come and die. An invitation to…
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When God loves your enemies | Jonah 4
In Jonah 4, God’s call to Jonah was a kind of love towards people that don’t deserve it. One that would cost Jonah something: releasing bitterness and contempt in his heart towards Nineveh. It was a call to love his enemies. The book ends with a question: should I not care for them? Jonah doesn't...
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Nineveh repents. And God does too? | Jonah 3
In Jonah 3, we see that Jonah does the bare minimum of what God asked him to do, doesn't even mention God in his gospel presentation, goes in reluctantly and angry, and the entire city repents. What is going on here? Remember, Jonah is satirical. This passage shows 1) How little the mission of…
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Jonah's "prayer" | Jonah 2
In Jonah 2, we wrestled with the reality that Jonah may have been just paying lip service; not really repentant of his tribalism and racism and disobedience. And while the author is not clear, in the context of the entire book, it would seem Jonah is simply regurgitating (no pun intended)...
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Jonah lost the plot | Jonah 1
Jonah 1 is a sobering passage because he is depicted as a human who is fully bought into the serpents lie — you don’t need God. In fact, you’re better off without him. You can have the life you want without God.Jonah has lost the plot. He has heard the screams of Nineveh, and chooses to run the...
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Relearning the Scroll of Jonah
Jonah has long been misunderstood as the focus is put more on Jonah being swallowed by a great fish. Because of this, a fight has broken out within the church over 1) did this actually happen, 2) if you don’t believe it happened as it is laid out, then you don’t believe in the authority of the...
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Scripture as Communal Literature
In contemporary Western Christian culture, most people engage the Bible by themselves. Typically referred to as “quiet time,” there is richness and beauty to be gained from a time of personal reflection on the Scriptures. However, that method has not been the norm throughout most of Church…
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Study Scripture
The Bible is not a book; it’s a library. And it was written thousands of years ago, in three different languages, by dozens of different authors and in multiple genres of literature. As you would expect, it can be very hard to understand at times, and we can easily get lost or turned around as we...
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Put Scripture to Memory
In the Bible, the word for "Remember” is used 352 times in the scriptures. When its variants are counted, that number jumps to more than 550. In John 16, Jesus promised his apprentices that the Holy Spirit would remind them of his words. But to do that, we have to have Jesus’ words in our…
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Meditate on Scripture
In our current day and age, we read things quickly, scanning and scrolling, and mainly for information. But the Scriptures were not designed for fast reads and immediate understanding. They were meant to be meditated on. Scripture assumes you will come back to it over and over; it does not give…
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Read Scripture
Historically, there are four practices the church has done that we believe are essential to life with God in the Scriptures: 01 Reading through the entire Library of Scripture 02 Meditating on the Scriptures (Lectio Divina) 03 Studying the Scriptures 04 Putting the Scriptures to Memory We believe...
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Scripture as Wisdom Literature
The Biblical authors actually believed that wisdom (or HOKMAH) and knowledge of what is actually true and going on in reality can be found in a person. That God himself is the access point for all reality, and salvation is that awakening to reality. By living under the authority of the Bible, we...
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Scripture as Meditation Literature
Everything in our culture screams quick, fast, efficient. But the Bible is the opposite. It’s designed for the reader to go slow, with ongoing consideration for a lifetime. It's designed to be meditated on.We delight in what we meditate on, and vice versa, we meditate on what delights us. In the...
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Scripture tells a better story
Human beings are wired for story. We are narrative animals. We can’t help but ask the questions who are we? What does it mean to be human? We cannot function without some story to make sense of reality. So the question is not are we religious or have a story. The question is what story do we live...
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How do we approach the Scriptures?
This past Sunday, we started a new teaching series on Scripture, exploring what it is, and what it is not. Scripture is NOT:- A systematic theology, or theological reference book- A moral handbook- A "devotional grab-bag"We see a lot of problems surface when we approach the Scriptures in these...
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Why did Jesus die?
In the West, many people have deconstructed from their "Christian upbringing" because they are seeing a wide gap in what Christians "believe" and how they actually act. The root cause for this gap is how the gospel is being preached today. The gospel has been ripped away from the story the...
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And there was darkness
Many have chosen to focus on the gore of the crucifixion. But when we read this scene, this isn’t what the gospel writers choose to focus on. Certainly, it’s sobering what was done to Jesus. But the focus was not blood and guts, but his enthronement. The focus is how God became king. At the…
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The arrest of Jesus
In this passage, Jesus is arrested and put on trial. There's much that could be said in this narrative, but specifically what's striking is the way Mark contrasts how Jesus handles suffering verses how the disciples did. For Jesus, suffering led to honest prayer and ultimately trust. For the...
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The meal Jesus gave us
This past Sunday, we looked at the Last Supper. It was in the final meal with his disciples that Jesus gave us one of His greatest gifts to the church: Communion. It was here that Jesus modeled life around a table, with Him at the center. And every time we participate in this meal, we share in…
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The end times?
This past Sunday, we looked at the entirety of Mark 13. Many have taken this passage to be a proof text for the end times, as if Jesus was laying out a scene by scene movie of what will happen. This interpretation, though relatively new in the scope of church history (i.e. the 19th century), has...
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I pledge allegiance to...
In Mark 12, Jesus is being interrogated from the leaders of his day as they are trying to trap him in his words and either start a revolution against Rome, or side with the oppressor. Jesus does neither, and instead challenges them on where their allegiance actually lies. It's a scathing…
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Prayer and Proximity
In the final week of his life, Jesus enters Jerusalem to pronounce judgement on the Jewish leaders who were supposed to shepherd God's people. Instead, they were extorting the poor, making a mockery of the temple, and making it impossible for Jews (and Gentiles) to know the One true God. Jesus…
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Rule of Life
At Eden, we believe that how we live together matters as much as our beliefs and convictions. And so, we are shaped by an ancient practice, used by communities of Jesus followers for nearly 2000 years, called a Rule of Life. The meaning of Rule comes from the Greek word for trellis; a tool…
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Life Together
There’s an ancient proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.”You can’t follow Jesus alone. Not you shouldn’t; you can’t. The way God does this work of healing is through healthy relationships, through familial love. Why? We are both hurt at the...
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Meeting God in Pain and Suffering
Jesus of Nazareth once said, “In this world, you will face trouble.” (John 16v33). Suffering comes to find all of us — the loss of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, the breakdown of a relationship … And over time, emotional pain accumulates in our soul. We carry our history in our body and live…
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Healing from Sin
We take a look at what Jesus said is wrong with the world: sin. Now, “sin” is an emotionally loaded word for a lot of people. You may hear it and instantly feel a kind of inner allergic reaction. But sin is just the word Jesus used to name a reality that all the brightest minds agree on –…
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Counter - Formation
For those of us who desire to be formed to be like Jesus, we don’t start with a blank slate! We’ve already been deformed. Not into the beauty of Jesus but into the ugliness of sin and shame. Therefore, to some degree, all formation in the Way of Jesus is counter-formation. To be formed to be like...
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Discipleship according to Jesus // Formation part 1
Who are you following? Everybody is following somebody. Or something. Put another way, everyone is a disciple. The question isn’t, “Are you a disciple?” It’s, “Who or what are you a disciple of?” We explore in this session what Jesus had in mind for discipleship (or apprenticeship), along with...
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What is the thing?
This passage is not about wealth, though Jesus had a lot to say about money; this is a story about your heart. What is it that is keeping you from fully taking on the yoke of Jesus and experiencing life to the fullest as he put it? For this man, it was his money. For us, it could be all sorts of...
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Which way will you choose?
Typically, the "Triumphal Entry" (i .e. Palm Sunday) is depicted as a happy scene. The gospel writers would say otherwise. As Jesus approaches Jerusalem, he weeps. He weeps because he knows that while the people hail him as king, they want a violent overthrower, not what Jesus was offering. They...
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Jesus on divorce
In this passage, we see a debate between Jesus and the Pharisees on the topic of divorce. Typically, this passage becomes an air-tight theology on divorce, but this is not the aim of this passage. Instead, He uses the conversation about legal divorce in the 1st century to expose and rebuke the...
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A flavorful presence
Mark 9.42-50 is arguably one of Jesus' tougher teachings. Where generally this passage has become a doctrine about hell, Jesus is after something more pressing for the present. The way we live now matters. We have real power in the words we say and actions we do to push people away from Jesus, or...
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Servant of all
The kingdom of Jesus is an "Upside-Down Kingdom". Meaning, His kingdom does not look like the kingdoms of the world. Power is not through taking, but giving. Not by wealth, status, or influence, but through becoming a servant. Jesus refuses to play into the structures of power and influence of…
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Light in dark places
The Great Commission is spiritual warfare." - Michael Heiser. In this famous, and regularly misapplied, story of the transfiguration, we see Jesus declaring turf war against the gods of darkness. And when we follow Jesus, we are called to bring that same light into dark places. But in order to do...
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Come and die
In Movement 02 of Mark's biography, we see the disciples wrestling with what it means for Jesus to be king. In this story, Jesus challenges their (and our) understanding of king, and gives his famous call to what it means to be his apprentice: "deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me"....
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Bonus: Prayer Practice Rule of Life
Listen along for tips and suggestions on how to implement the prayer practice into your rule of life. Slides
About this show
As a brand new church community in Charlotte, we are seeking to simply practice the way of Jesus, together, for the renewal of our city. As we see it, to be a disciple, or an apprentice of Jesus of Nazareth, is to order your life around three goals: be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did. Our dream is that as we live this way, our lives, our communities, and our city will be transformed: in Charlotte as it is in Heaven.
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Eden Church
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