PODCAST · religion
Small Steps with God
by Jill from The Northwoods
Small Steps with God is a practical guide to learning how to study the Bible thoughtfully and faithfully. Through clear teaching on exegesis, historical context, and careful reading, this podcast helps listeners move beyond surface-level interpretations and grow in confidence as students of Scripture. Episodes explore how meaning is drawn from the text—not read into it—along with series like MIRRORS, which examine biblical figures and historical groups to reflect on faith, obedience, and daily life. This is a place for steady growth, honest thinking, and learning to walk closely with God—one small step at a time.
Episodes
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MIRRORS: Faith Has Generations Too
The MIRRORS series turns toward Seth and the generations leading to Noah. Genesis tells us very little about many of these people, but it gives us glimpses of worship, walking with God, remembrance, and hope. Their quiet place in the story invites us to consider who helped us know Christ and whom...
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Who Is Watching When You Fail? It is Not God!
When you mess up, who do you imagine is watching? A lot of Christians carry an image of God with crossed arms and a clipboard, waiting for the moment they fail. Scripture gives us a very different picture of accusation, temptation, warning, forgiveness, and the God who wants sinners to come home....
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MIRRORS: Cain and the Sin Crouching at the Door
Have you ever done something halfway, then watched someone who gave it their whole heart get the praise, and felt something ugly rise up in your chest before you could even think? That's Cain's story, and most of us know Cain better than we'd like to admit. In this MIRRORS episode, I walk through...
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Mirror: Eve, the Mother of All Living In The Face of Death
Would you have eaten the fruit? Most of us like to think we wouldn't have, but if we're honest, we're not so sure. In this episode of the Mirror series, we look at Eve, the first woman, the first mother, and the first mirror any of us has ever been handed, walking through her story letter by…
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MIRRORS Are you Like Adam?: Accepting, Silent and Blaming
# Adam's Silence: The Sin Before the Sin Have you ever stood next to someone while something was going terribly wrong and said nothing at all? That's where Adam's story met me this week, closer to home than I expected. **Eden Was a Real Place** Genesis names actual rivers, the Pishon, Gihon,...
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Why Did Sabbath Become So Complicated?
Flag before publishing: the raw transcript cites "Exodus 28" for the Ten Commandments passage, that's actually Exodus 20. I've corrected it in the cleaned transcript and the notes below, but worth double-checking your script. I grew up with a rules-heavy version of Sabbath, the kind where you...
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Genesis 1 Says You Were Never a Mistake
I've been sitting with an uncomfortable question this week: if I really believe every person carries the image of God, does that change who I'm willing to be patient with? This episode doesn't tie up neatly, and I don't think it's supposed to. **The King's Statue, Reimagined** In the ancient…
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169 - Genesis - Where the Story Begins
We just closed the entire New Testament with the last word of Revelation, and now we’re doing something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: starting the Old Testament. But we’re not doing it the same way. Instead of walking chapter by chapter the way we did through the Gospels and the...
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168 - The Shape of the Old Testament (Before We Start Genesis)
Thirty-nine books, more than thirty authors, a thousand years of history, and somehow it’s one story. If you handed that pile of material to anyone cold, you’d expect a mess. Instead you get the Old Testament: one God, one promise made early and kept slowly across kings, shepherds, prophets, and...
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167 - The NT - How Do 27 Books Written 50 Years Apart Tell One Story?)
Twenty-seven books, written by eight different men, fishermen, a doctor, a tax collector, a rabbi-turned-church-planter, and the half brother of Jesus who didn’t even believe in him until after the resurrection, across fifty years and three continents, without any of them meeting to compare…
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166 - Why God Cares About Structure (And You Should Too)
What if God’s first action wasn’t creation out of nothing, but organizing something that was already a mess? In my twenties, I loved chaos — it felt interesting, like things being shaken up. I’ve since learned two things: I don’t actually love chaos, and God’s original work in Genesis was to get...
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165 - C.S. Lewis's Paradox: Taking The Next Right Road
Have you ever known — actually known — that you were on the wrong road, but kept walking anyway? I've done that literally, driving lost and just deciding to see where it goes. But I've done it with my life too: moving forward, making real progress by every visible measure, while some part of me...
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164 - Art as Worship: A Biblical Case for Creativity
Strip every work Christian faith ever inspired out of Europe, and the skyline changes completely — no cathedrals, no Bach, no Michelangelo, no illuminated manuscripts, no universities that grew out of monastery schools. In this episode, I ask a question most Christians don’t spend much time on…
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163 - Stop Polishing Your Prayers (and Your Life)
“How are you?” “Fine. Busy, but good.” We’ve rehearsed that answer so well we barely notice we’re doing it — and here’s the uncomfortable part: we do the exact same thing with God. We walk into prayer already polishing the message before we hand it over. This week I want to talk about why we do...
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162 - Introduction to Revelation: Who Wrote It, and When?
Before we open Revelation itself, we need the background: who wrote it, when, and why it took so long to earn its place in the canon. Revelation has a reputation as confusing or frightening — my own first encounter was a terrifying ’70s movie as a 12-year-old — but understanding where it came…
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161 - The Letter of Jude: The Skeptic Who Became a Servant of Christ
Who actually wrote the book of Jude — and why does it matter? Before diving into the text verse by verse, this episode lays out the full case for authorship: who tradition says wrote it, what the earliest church fathers believed, and why an obscure letter from “the brother of James” is more…
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160 - How to Actually Read the Book of Revelation
I’ll be honest — when I was a kid, a movie based on The Late Great Planet Earth (which is loosely about the book of Revelation) kept me up for a month. So when I decided to start a Revelation series in The Bible in Small Steps, my first thought was “this might be the scariest thing I’ve ever...
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159 - John's Letters and the Church in Crisis
Have you ever trusted someone completely, only to have them start picking apart the very foundation of what you believed? That’s the situation the original readers of 1 John were living in — and it’s why this letter was written. Before we get into the text itself, I wanted to slow down and answer...
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158 - The Mozart Problem - Stop Measuring Gifts
I’ve been obsessed with the story of Amadeus for about forty years. And I’ve been sitting with a question it raises for just as long. What do you do when the most gifted person in the room is also the messiest, most broken person in the room? And what does it mean when God seems to work through...
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157 - Letters of Peter - Do We Hear the Real Peter in His Letters?
I’ve been spending a lot of time in 1 Peter lately, and before we dive into the chapters, I wanted to take a step back and ask a question that kept nagging at me: can you actually hear Peter’s voice in these letters? Not just a theological voice, but the Peter — the impulsive, passionate,...
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156 - MIRRORS: Jonathan — Faithfulness Without the Crown
What do you do when someone else gets what you expected to be yours? Not a stranger — someone you know, maybe someone you love. That's the question Jonathan's life puts in front of us, and it's one of the most searching questions in all of Scripture. Jonathan was Israel's crown prince — a proven...
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The Letter of James - James: Faith That Has to Show Up
What if the most spiritual thing you could do today isn't a ritual, a reading plan, or a theological position — but something as ordinary as how you treat the person standing in front of you? That's the provocation that opens the letter of James, and it's what we're starting today. Who Was James?...
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154 - Did God’s Plan Fail? Walking Through the Covenants of Scripture
If you’ve ever read through the Bible from beginning to end, you’ve probably noticed it: the arrangements keep changing. A garden. A flood. A promise to a wandering man. A law given at a mountain. A shepherd made king. And then a prophet speaking about something entirely new, written not on stone...
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153 - MIRRORS: Samuel: The Man Who Spoke and Wasn’t Heard
Have you ever said the right thing and watched it go nowhere? Warned someone, told the truth, gave the best counsel you had — and the person nodded and did exactly what they were going to do anyway? That feeling has a name in Scripture, and it belongs to one of the most faithfully obedient people...
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152 - How to Use Bible Commentaries Without Getting Lost
How to Use Bible Commentaries Without Losing Your Own Voice Every time I open Hebrews, there's a moment where the questions start stacking up. What did that mean to someone in Jerusalem in 60 AD? What is the "order of Melchizedek" anyway? Is that something I'm supposed to already know?…
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151 - The Letters to the Hebrews - For the Tired, Scared and Isolated
Before we dive into Hebrews chapter by chapter, there's a mystery to solve — and it's been unsolved for nearly two thousand years. We don't know who wrote this book. What we do know is why it was written, who it was written to, and why it still cuts so close to the bone. A Word of Exhortation...
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150 - Letter to Philemon - The Overlooked Letter That Shows You the Gospel
It's only 25 verses. You can read it in four minutes. But Philemon may be the most concentrated picture of the gospel in the entire New Testament — and one of the most overlooked books in the Bible. In this episode, we take a flyover of the whole story: a runaway slave, a wealthy believer, an...
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149 - Titus: A Letter Written for Chaotic Times
Some letters in the New Testament feel written for a specific ancient crisis. Titus doesn't feel that way — it feels written for right now. A young, unstructured church, false teachers already at work, a surrounding culture known for instability and self-indulgence, and one trusted person left to...
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148 - Your Occupation Is Not a Waiting Room for God
If you look at the famous names of the Bible and ask what they did for a living when God called them, the answer is almost never: official religious work. Fishermen, tentmakers, tax collectors, seamstresses, shepherds, government administrators, an innkeeper, a foreign field laborer, a nameless...
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147 - When Are You Going to Start Living Like Psalm 23 Is True?
When are you going to start living like Psalm 23 is actually true? That question stopped me cold. I had been talking through a difficult personal pattern with an AI tool—how I've always felt like the only adult in the room, responsible for everything—and the response that came back changed...
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146 - Introduction to 1 & 2 Timothy: Fight the Good Fight
Have you ever received a letter from someone who believed in you more than you believed in yourself? That's exactly what Paul's two letters to Timothy are — urgent, personal, and deeply encouraging correspondence from a seasoned mentor to a young man in way over his head. Today I'm introducing…
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145 - Can the Bible Actually Protect You from Being Deceived?
Can deep Bible knowledge actually protect you from being misled, manipulated, or spiritually shaken? I think it can — and in this episode I'm making the case that the Bible isn't just here to inform us. It's here to form us into something harder to deceive. We Live in a World Full of Loud Voices...
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144 - MIRRORS: David -What It Really Means to Be a Man After God’s Own Heart
What does it really mean to be a man after God’s own heart? The life of David shatters our assumptions about faith, failure, and repentance. His story is not about perfection—but about a heart that keeps turning back to God. This episode explores the life of David as part of the Mirror series,...
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143 - Letters to Thessalonians - wo Letters to One Struggling Church
Why did one struggling young church earn two letters from Paul — letters that may be the oldest surviving Christian documents we have? The answer takes us to one of the most important cities in the ancient Roman world, into a clash between a brand-new faith and the most powerful empire on earth,...
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142 - Letter of Colossians - Spiritual Upgrades That Aren't
Something subtle can be more dangerous than something obvious. The church at Colossae wasn't in open rebellion. Nobody was walking away from Christ. They were faithful, hardworking, genuinely devoted believers — and they were quietly being told that Jesus wasn't quite enough. That there were...
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141 - Letter To The Philippians: Joy, Citizenship, and Living Differently in a Roman World
What if joy isn’t the absence of suffering—but the defiance of it? What if a prison cell became the birthplace of one of the most hopeful messages ever written? And what if ordinary people in a divided city discovered a citizenship that changed everything? This episode explores the real people...
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140 - Circumcision of the Heart: Why God Has Always Wanted More Than Ritual
Circumcision of the heart sounds strange, even unsettling—but it carries one of the deepest spiritual truths in Scripture. This ancient phrase cuts straight through ritual, tradition, and appearances to expose what God has always wanted. If faith has ever felt mechanical, empty, or performative,...
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139 - Why Paul Wrote Ephesians: Identity, Power, and Spiritual Confidence
A powerful ancient city. A fearful spiritual world. One letter that redefined identity, belonging, and courage for generations. This episode explores why Paul the Apostle wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians, and why this letter mattered so deeply to believers living in the city of Ephesus.…
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138 - MIRRORS: Saul: The King Who Couldn’t Trust—What His Life Says About Ours
In this episode of the Mirror Series, we take a deep look at the life of Saul, Israel’s first king. At first glance, Saul seems like the perfect leader—tall, strong, chosen by God, and celebrated by the people. But beneath the surface, his story reveals a struggle many of us know too well: the...
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137 - Letters to the Galatians - Understanding the Galatians: History, Culture, and Paul’s Urgent Message
Understanding the Galatians: History, Culture, and Paul’s Urgent Message In this episode, we explore the background of the Book of Galatians and why Paul wrote such a passionate and pointed letter to this particular group. Before jumping into the text itself, we take a closer look at who the...
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136 - The Bible Changes You: Exegesis vs. Eisegesis and the Way We Read Scripture
The Bible Changes You: Exegesis vs. Eisegesis and the Way We Read Scripture In this episode, we’re unpacking one of the most essential practices in Christian life: how we read and interpret the Bible. At the heart of this conversation are two critical approaches—exegesis and eisegesis....
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135 - Build a Bible Habit That Actually Sticks
Build a Bible Habit That Actually Sticks In this episode, I share why so many Bible reading plans fall apart—and offer a practical, grace-filled approach to making your Bible reading more meaningful and sustainable. Whether you’re a first-time reader or a long-time believer feeling stuck, this...
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134 - 2 Corinthians: Ministry, Pain, and the Power of Reconciliation
2 Corinthians: Ministry, Pain, and the Power of Reconciliation In this episode, we explore the profound emotional and spiritual depths of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Far more than a follow-up to his first letter, this message reads like a vulnerable journal entry from a pastor who…
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133 - Why “Share” Completes the RAMPS Bible Study
Why “Share” Completes the RAMPS Bible Study This episode explores the essential final step in the RAMPS Bible study method—Share. Originally structured as Read, Analyze, Meditate, and Pray, the method served as a powerful tool for personal growth in Scripture. However, the realization soon…
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132 - Prayer That Transforms: The "P" in the RAMPS Bible Study Method
Prayer That Transforms: The “P” in the RAMPS Bible Study Method In this episode, we explore the role of prayer in the RAMPS Bible study method. After reading, analyzing, and meditating on scripture, prayer becomes the essential step that turns study into relationship. It’s not just about talking…
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131 - What Is Christian Meditation Really About?
What Is Christian Meditation Really About? In this episode, we explore the often misunderstood practice of Christian meditation. While the world associates meditation with emptying the mind and Eastern practices, Christian meditation invites us to fill ourselves with the presence and truth of…
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130 - How to Analyze the Bible Like a Pro (Without Going to Seminary)
How to Analyze the Bible (Without a Seminary Degree) In this episode, we explore the “Analyze” step in the RAMPS Bible Study method—a practical and approachable way for everyday readers to deeply understand scripture. Many of us have read the Bible, but how many of us have truly analyzed it? We...
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129 - Why Reading the Bible Still Matters
Why Reading the Bible Still Matters In this episode, I talk about why reading the Bible is a foundational practice for every believer. We’re kicking off a mini-series based on the RAMPS Bible Study method—starting with the “R” for Read. I explore why scripture reading has always been vital, how…
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128 - MIRRORS: Loved by Jesus: The Lazarus Story and the Hope That Waits
Loved by Jesus: The Lazarus Story and the Hope That Waits In today’s episode, I reflect on the powerful and deeply human story of Lazarus of Bethany — the man Jesus raised from the dead. But this isn’t just a miracle story. It’s a story about silence, grief, waiting, and hope. Lazarus never…
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127 - MIRRORS - Mary of Bethany - Quiet Love, Eternal Legacy
At His Feet: The Stillness That Changes Everything In this episode, we step into the home at Bethany and meet a woman whose worship was quiet but unforgettable—Mary of Bethany. While others rushed to serve or explain, she simply sat at Jesus’ feet. Through her story, we explore how stillness can…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Small Steps with God is a practical guide to learning how to study the Bible thoughtfully and faithfully. Through clear teaching on exegesis, historical context, and careful reading, this podcast helps listeners move beyond surface-level interpretations and grow in confidence as students of Scripture. Episodes explore how meaning is drawn from the text—not read into it—along with series like MIRRORS, which examine biblical figures and historical groups to reflect on faith, obedience, and daily life. This is a place for steady growth, honest thinking, and learning to walk closely with God—one small step at a time.
HOSTED BY
Jill from The Northwoods
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How many episodes does Small Steps with God have?
Small Steps with God currently has 179 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Small Steps with God about?
Small Steps with God is a practical guide to learning how to study the Bible thoughtfully and faithfully. Through clear teaching on exegesis, historical context, and careful reading, this podcast helps listeners move beyond surface-level interpretations and grow in confidence as students of...
How often does Small Steps with God release new episodes?
Small Steps with God publishes regularly with 179 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Small Steps with God on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Small Steps with God?
Small Steps with God is created and hosted by Jill from The Northwoods.
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