All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 30 of 108 in total
Episode 1: With love, anonymous
Reading the letters of the apostle John is a little like listening in on one side of a phone conversation. Even if you can hear what John is saying, he often speaks in...
Episode 2: But that's not what I meant...
We have to read between the lines of John’s letters to get at his reason for writing them. We might think of him as the lead pastor of a community of house churches. I...
Episode 3: Beginnings
Anyone who reads the four Gospels can easily see how different John’s gospel is from the other three, in both style and content. Much of John’s first letter reflects s...
Episode 4: Making common cause
When we write messages to other people, it’s common to use pronouns like “I” and “you.” But in the opening four verses of 1 John, the apostle repeatedly says, “we.” Wh...
Episode 5: A tangible love
One of John’s purposes in writing his letters is to correct the false ideas about Jesus that people in the community had heard. To that end, he sometimes seems to emph...
Episode 6: Vertigo
As suggested earlier, John claims to give reliable eyewitness testimony to Jesus. But the full truth about Jesus can't be seen by the naked eye nor reduced to the repo...
Episode 7: The fellowship of believers
In the life of the church, we use the word “fellowship” often, and without much thought. But what does it mean? Enjoying each other’s company? Having fun together? The...
Episode 8: The fellowship of communion
In this episode, I ask you to reflect on both the way that you have experienced communion or the Lord’s Supper in your church—and then to imagine what John might have ...
Episode 9: Joy-full
In this podcast, we will continually draw connections between the letters of John and his gospel, particularly to what’s known as the “Upper Room Discourse,” or Jesus’...
Episode 10: God is light
In John’s gospel, Jesus declares himself to be “the light of the world.” Indeed, throughout that gospel, John seems to play with images of darkness and light: Jesus wa...
Episode 11: The light of the world
John isn’t the only one to use images of dark and light to convey meaning; you can see it in movies all the time if you look for it. Light versus darkness often symbol...
Episode 12: What we say and what we do
As mentioned in previous episodes, we have to guess a bit at the controversies that were troubling John’s community. Five verses into 1 John, we begin to get some hint...
Episode 13: The hard truth
Reading between the lines of John’s letter, it seems that some folks in his community may have begun to believe and teach that it was somehow possible to be sinless. I...
Episode 15: Sin--and amazing grace
Does it sound strange that folks in John’s community may have claimed to be sinless? Perhaps. But in this episode, I want us to consider why we ourselves often have su...
Episode 14: Without sin?
Who would dare claim to be without sin? As the story of the adulterous woman in John 8 suggests, not even the self-righteous Pharisees would do this. But some people i...
Episode 16: A bit of fatherly wisdom
Imagine having the pastoral responsibility of teaching a community about the reality of sin, even confronting people who may be in denial about its seriousness. That w...
Episode 17: Do we need to lawyer up?
The word “advocate” may conjure up images of attorneys and courtrooms, and rightly so. John is the only New Testament writer to use the word, which was typically used ...
Episode 18: Loving the unlovely
As we’ve seen, chapter 2 of 1 John opens with identification of Jesus as our advocate. John also calls him the “atoning sacrifice” for our sins. Some older translation...
Episode 19: Knowing versus knowing about
You probably know a lot of people, and a lot of people know you. But how many people really know you for who you are? Similarly, what does it mean for someone to say t...
Episode 20: The apostle of love
John is sometimes known as the “Apostle of Love,” and for good reason. He is not only believed by many to be the so-called “disciple whom Jesus loved,” but also writes...
Episode 21: Do as I say...and do as I do
If you’ve ever raised kids, you may already have discovered that “Do as I say, don’t do as I do” isn’t a terribly effective way to engender discipline. We are models f...
Episode 22: You already know this
Beginning with verse 7 of chapter 2, John tells his readers that he’s not writing about a new command, but an old one…and then says it actually is a new command. We’ll...
Episode 23: The next chapter of an old story
What’s the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament? The latter doesn’t replace the former; it continues the ancient story. Similarly, when John sp...
Episode 24: Blind to our blindness
Reading between the lines, it seems that some folks in John’s community considered themselves to be enlightened, but had some odd ideas about the Christian life. John ...
Episode 25: Stumbling in the dark
As suggested in the previous episode, John would describe those who aren’t following Jesus’ commandment to love one another as stumbling in the dark. As we’ll explore ...
Episode 26: A little encouragement, please!
Although at this point in the letter John hasn’t mentioned it yet, some people have left the community. People who have been through church splits know the pain and co...
Episode 27: Hang in there, baby!
As we’ve seen, John wants to give some pastoral encouragement his readers, who have probably been deeply disillusioned by what we might today call a “church split.” In...
Episode 28: A new covenant
John’s encouragement in the middle of chapter 2, as we’ve seen, is highly stylized, as if he were quoting from somewhere else. As we’ll explore in this episode, when J...
Episode 30: Flesh and bone
We were created by God to live in bodies. And with that bodily existence comes a host of needs and desires. Because we live in a fallen world, what otherwise would be ...
Episode 29: Don't love the world
The first command John gives in his letter comes in 1 John 2:15: “Do not love the world or anything in the world.” But many of us have memorized John 3:16—doesn’t God ...