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Daily Transcripts
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10/30/2015
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Lamentations 3:1-66 ~ Hebrews 1:1-14 ~ Psalm 102:1-28 ~ Proverbs 26:21-22
Today is the 30th of October. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I'm Brian. It’s really good to be here with you today. Boy, tomorrow we are finishing our 10th month in a row together for the year 2015 and, man, we’re beginning to round the corner here on this year. I can’t process that. It goes by too fast. But there is so much more in store for us. So we are going to begin a new book that we’re going to kind of settle into for a little while when we get to the New Testament and that will be the book of Hebrews, but before that we’re working our way through the book of Lamentations in the Old Testament. This week we’re reading from the Names of God Bible and today we’ll read Lamentations chapter 3.
Introduction of a New Book
The book of Hebrews, this is one of the most compelling exhortations to keep and stay true to the faith in all of the New Testament. And while that is true, the letter is a bit of an anomaly because we don’t fully know its origins. Although the apostle Paul has been credited with authorship in lots of traditions, this is pretty unlikely. It is also unclear which Hebrews are being written to. It could have been Jewish Christians in Jerusalem or maybe in Rome.
Biblical hermeneutics is the study of the where, the why and the when of a sacred writing, believing that God inspired something to be written at a specific time and that specific time matters in our later interpretations. We can’t fully do that with the book of Hebrews, but we can get close. Timothy, Paul's spiritual son, is mentioned in this letter so it is contemporary with Paul's writings or maybe just a little bit after. What is very clear is that persecution has begun to take place in the Jewish community. This isn’t as severe as martyrdom. What has happened is that the Jewish believers and the Jewish sympathizers to the faith have begun to suffer ridicule. They are looked at contemptuously and they are thrust to the sidelines, to the margins of culture as weird people. They are irrelevant weird people. This part we can apply directly to our cultures around the world today as the efforts of the media try to frame followers of Christ as irrelevant, backwards, a little weird. The pressure placed on these Jewish believers because of this was making many fall back into the woodwork, hiding their faith, doing what they could to blend in and at the same time others were just turning their backs on the faith altogether and just moving back into Judaism.
The letter to the Hebrews steps into that and encourages the Jewish believers to stay faithful to Jesus and not to turn back to their former ways. It encourages them to hold fast and through them it tells us to hold fast to the hope that we have in Christ without wavering at all. This is a very important message for believers today given brilliantly through the Jewish heritage and the lens of the Old Testament because it is written obviously to the Hebrews.
So we begin Hebrews chapter 1.
Commentary
We can’t not talk about the proverb. I mean, we have to consider what is being said here. It had been being said, we’re just kind of taking it piece by piece as we do with the Proverbs.
What we say has an enormous amount of creative power. Think about that. We are created in the image of God and one thing that we know about God is that he speaks and things are created, things happen. We are created in his image. When we speak things happen. We may not have the sovereign power to just speak light and physical light is formed or speak land and physical land is formed, but from a spiritual perspective we speak light and light is formed or we speak dark and darkness is formed. There is probably not something darker than gossip. Gossip has the power to absolutely destroy relationships, to destroy communities by causing division.
So let's not get all spiritual in division and unity – let's just call it what it is. When something is divided that was once whole, then it is no longer whole. It is divided. Nothing is more divisive than gossip in our lives, when we get together over coffee with these tasty morsels of information that may be half-baked pieces of information loaded with assumptions that could be complete false realities, and then pass them on to our friends. What the scripture says is that the words of the gossip are swallowed greedily because it is just tasty entertainment. When we go around talking about other people and then reading into what these other people are doing with our assumptions, the thing we have to consider that is being sad in the book of Proverbs is that even though those may be tasty morsels swallowed greedily, those things go down into a person's innermost being. When you sit down and somebody comes to you and begins to gossip about somebody else or a group of somebody else’s and you eat that and swallow it greedily, you have to understand that according to the scriptures that is going down into the core of who you are. That is going to your innermost being. It is not like this casual little thing. When we swallow gossip that is half-baked and full of assumptions and false realities, then we are allowing something very false to go down into our innermost being.
So the next time that you want to be a purveyor of gossip, you have to understand that what you are dishing out isn’t something that is giving you some social currency and making you look in the know. It is a half-baked piece of partial reality mixed with falseness because you don’t have the person that you're talking about there to defend or clarify the situation, so you're passing out little morsels of potential poison in the communities and relationships that you have. Really nothing good can come from that. If you are a connoisseur of gossip, if you are in every little conversation, if you are in every little bit of information and you like to talk about people and then pass on what you think you know, you have to understand that you have a lot going on down in your innermost being that isn’t true. Nothing good can come from that.
So may we consider how insidious gossip can actually be to our own innermost being and to the relationships and communities that we are a part of. There is no more compelling argument than this one, although we run into the concept of gossip and how divisive it is in a number of places in the scripture, but come face to face with the fact that, hey, when I do this, this isn’t surface. This is stuff that is going into a person's innermost being. I'm either handing something to a person to eat, this tasty morsel of gossip and it goes into their innermost being and it shapes and shifts their perception of other people and reality or I'm just an open gate, I'm just eating this stuff like it is candy. It explains a lot when you realize that you have so much of that empty falseness inside of you. It breeds offenses that never needed to happen, that really aren’t even there. So, I don’t know, may we stop it. May we just not be a part of that. May we just not do that anymore. It is not healthy.
Prayer
Father, the only truth and the only nourishment that we want in our innermost being is that of your Holy Spirit. So if this kind of stuff can go down into our innermost being at the level of our identity, then forgive us for what we have put into our spiritual lives. Forgive us for what we’ve done. It's just very rarely looked at for what it is, so we need to certainly ask your forgiveness, but we also yield to the power of your Holy Spirit and ask you to come and root out all that stuff that we’ve allowed to be down in our innermost being, root that out, erase that, repair the broken relationships, the offenses that we’ve taken on that aren’t ours and the ones that we have been unwilling to let go of and so we keep spreading them around. Forgive us for being divisive and helpless to change that completely. May the words that come from our mouths that carry the potential of creating behind them be words that speak life and light and not darkness and falseness. Come Holy Spirit, we pray, in Jesus’ name, amen.
Announcements
Www.DailyAudioBible.com is the website, home base. It is where you find out what is going on around here. We had a great time last night finishing up our Periscope Reframe small group. You can certainly rewatch all of those and continue in the discussion of Reframe at the group that we formed on Facebook: Www.Facebook.com/Groups/ReframeBook. That has been very enlightening, encouraging and humbling in so many ways to just see how the message has connected. So certainly check that out.
Looking forward to this weekend, we will be in Louisville, KY, with the Reframe message at New Song Christian Fellowship. That will be Sunday, November 1st and their website is www.NewSongLouisville.org and you can get the address and service times there.
Then next weekend, the 8th, we will be in Chattanooga, TN at Mission Chattanooga. Their website is www.MissionChattanooga.org. They have several services, so check that out. See you in Chattanooga.
And then we will end our six straight weeks of touring for this year in the San Diego area on the 15th of November at La Jolla Christian Fellowship. Their website is www.ChurchatLaJolla.org. Looking forward to being with you in one of these areas. It's been great. We’ve had a lot of fun. It's a lot of work to be on the road, but we’ve had a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to seeing you at one of these events somewhere down the road.
Today is the 30th. There is only one more day left in this month and all of the month of October we’ve been saying, hey, form a group context for Reframe. Get together with friends and talk through this. Stick into this message. Don’t let it just be another book, stay with this. So what we’ve said is if you’ll grab seven copies of Reframe during the month of October, we will mail you, postage paid to your door, done deal, the Reframe Films Group Study. If you end up getting 10 or more books, we’ll give you the Group Study DVD and then you can also download the films, but we will also throw in another Reframe, a signed first edition copy of Reframe. So that is today and that is tomorrow, so if you haven’t gotten onboard with that yet, please check it out at www.ReframeBook.com. There are direct links to all kinds of places that you can grab copies of Reframe, so check it out.
If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at www.DailyAudioBible.com. There is a link in the upper right-hand corner of the home page. If Daily Audio Bible is a life-giving force in your life, then thank you for being a life-giving force to the community. If you prefer, the mailing address is P.O. Box 1996, Spring Hill, TN 37174.
And, as always, if you have prayer request or comment, (877) 942-4253 is the number to call.
And that is it for today. I’m Brian. I love you. I’ll be waiting for you here, tomorrow.
Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports
Hi, this is __________ in Colorado, a first time caller. I'm calling because I have __________. They found cancer on my liver and I'm going in for a biopsy on the 29th of October. I ask that you pray that all goes well. Thank you.
Hello and good morning my beautiful Daily Audio Bible family. This is Jay calling from New Jersey. Let's pray. Mighty God, Creator of heaven and earth and everything in between, Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your love. We thank you so much, God, for your grace. Mighty God, we thank you for your mercy. Father, we come before you now praying, Lord God, that you will forgive us for any and all sins that we have or may have committed knowingly or unknowingly. Father, we pray for the sins of commission and omission, Father. And we thank you for that forgiveness, God. Mighty God, we pray for our friends and family that are dealing with sicknesses, diseases, illnesses. Father, we pray for the ones that have been injured in one way or another. We pray for our friends and family around the world, God, that are dealing with __________, that are dealing with spiritual and demonic attacks against them, their livelihoods, their family, and anything else that they may own or __________, Father. We plead the blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, against anything that comes against us, Father, because we know that there is power in the blood of Jesus Christ. Father, we thank you for your protection. Jesus Christ, we thank you for your power. We thank you for your sacrifice. And we praise you __________. We pray all these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. Daily Audio Bible family, have a super awesome day. I love you all. Bye.
Good day Daily Audio Bible. This is Nathan, Gift of God from Illinois. Sorry if I sound a little rough. I'm fighting through a cold, but I was two days behind listening. I was listening to the commentary from October 23rd and I got smacked in the face, which is a good thing. You know, several years ago when I first started listening to Daily Audio Bible, I had an iPod that somehow sped the audio track up and my goal was to get through the Bible. I just had to get through the Bible. I’ve done it before and gonna do it again. I would skip the prayers, but hey, at the end of the year I could say ta-da! Look what I did! Look what I did! I did the whole Bible. Then I realized that I had missed the Bible because God said, now, who are you again? Because I don’t remember what we talked about. I only know what you heard. That is what the commentary was really about. It's not that you get through the process of listening to the Bible. It is the journey. How many times have we heard it? It's not the result. It's the journey we go through. What did God say to me today? Tomorrow I will say what did God say to me today, not yesterday, not tomorrow, right now. And so I needed that smack in the face, that it is not a ritual. It is not a process. It is a relationship. God wants to know me and I'm glad that he does. I'm seeking every day to know him. I challenge you that you seek him every day today. Thanks guys. Have a great day. Make it a great day.
Good morning. This is Janet from Central Arkansas. I'm calling regarding a lady who called a few weeks ago about her marriage and she was concerned about safety. I share a similar story. People who have not been through this particular type of situation, it is not something that is just solved by more prayer or more submission or more typical marriage strategies. It is a whole different kind of situation and you may feel as if everything you’ve tried has not worked because it just doesn’t work. Anyway, this book lays out some specific strategies in moving forward and I'm happy to say that I have moved through this. It did end up in divorce, but I'm not in that situation every day. Now, to that end, God has been with me and he is moving me towards another goal that I didn’t even realize was part of this plan until the separation took place. I would like to ask for prayers for that. That is I'm going to actually be going back to grad school and I need to take the GRE this Saturday, the 31st. I would love prayers for that and that God would just lead me to the right grad school. I know God has a wonderful plan for you and just hang in there. The main thing, too, is God's timing. That is probably the most important thing. Do it in God's timing.
Hey Dabbers, this is Slave of Jesus in North Carolina. Alright, Holy Spirit, let's roll. Lord, we ask you to watch over Mike from New Mexico. Great to hear from you again, Mike. We ask that you would give financial favor to Mike in dealing with his family. We ask you to bless him and his family so that he can honor you in every way, in Jesus’ name. Amen. Lord, we also ask you to watch over Pablo. Lord, we know that cancer is a horrible thing for any family and we ask that you spread your glory over Pablo and his family and maybe give them some supernatural healing over two family members and friends to glorify your name, in Jesus’ name. Amen. You guys can pray for me. I committed to doing a men's ministry. Whenever you commit to something like that, the enemy comes against you. Last night was the first night. We had our first leader's meeting before we had our meeting and I went to bed and I have had no problems sleeping. I’ve been able to sleep great. I have sleep apnea, but I’ve been sleeping great and not even waking up. I even bragged to my wife last night that I haven’t even woke up once in the middle of the night. But tonight I could not go to sleep. I got like two hours of sleep. Driving in here today I even had a thought at one point like, man, what is the purpose of all this Christian crap stuff? So the enemy is coming against me hard. If you guys could pray for me. I definitely need to get my energy scripture out and I need to say it and I have said it and it will get me through the day. It is out of Isaiah 40:31 – But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint. So I claim that scripture to my name and against anything evil that is coming against me and draining my energy, in Jesus’ name. Amen. If you guys could definitely pray for Slave of Jesus and the men's ministry I'm getting involved in. Thanks.
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Tamarie 10/30/2015 09:47 |
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