Trusting Jesus with Our Lives with Jonathan Martin #LectioCast

In a world where people enact laws, run for office, vote, and protest as people of faith, how do we know when we are in the right? How do we know the Christian story when we see it? This week’s passages give us some pointers. They invite us to be the people who are entrusting… Read more about Trusting Jesus with Our Lives with Jonathan Martin #LectioCast

In a world where people enact laws, run for office, vote, and protest as people of faith, how do we know when we are in the right? How do we know the Christian story when we see it? This week’s passages give us some pointers. They invite us to be the people who are entrusting our lives to Jesus, entrusting our lives to God as Jesus himself did when he laid down his life for his friends. 

John 17:20-26 When Jesus prays for people who have to listen to boring academic sermons! Jesus challenges us with the hope and expectation that we will all be one—something to discomfort us as we find ourselves quite at home in our particular tribes. Jesus elevates his followers as bearers of God’s glory—as we follow him in laying down our lives for our friends.

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21  Are we, the bride, calling for Jesus to come? Or are we too content? Are we calling people to join us, as the Spirit calls out to them to join? Revelation unsettles us with its back-and-forth between being terrifying and comforting, calling us to works and calling us to Jesus’s death on our behalf. It leaves us with the question: how do we confront empire?

Acts 16:16-34  “The wrong spirit can say the right thing.” Preach, brother Jonathan. “How many of us would put up with a Jesus who took away our way of making money?” Stop preaching, brother Daniel. Then there’s the jailer—who washes the wounds of the apostles.

Psalm 97  The story can’t be contained: what God is doing in Israel is for the sake of the world.

Make sure you grab your tickets to Wild Goose Festival in Hot Springs, North Carolina on July 7-10! We’ll be recording and I’d love to meet more LectioCastians.

 Jonathan Martin is sacramental hillbilly Pentecostal mystic. He is the author of the forthcoming How to Survive a Shipwreck and Prototype. He serves as teaching pastor at Sanctuary Church in Tulsa, OK, where he now resides. He is a graduate from Gardner-Webb University, has an MA from Pentecostal Theological Seminary, and a ThM from Duke University. His website is http://www.jonathanmartinwords.com. He tweets at theboyonthebike.

Daniel Kirk is a writer, speaker, blogger, and New Testament professor who lives in San Francisco, CA. He holds a Ph.D. in New Testament from Duke University and is the author of a pair of books, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God and Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? His third book A Man Attested by God: the Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, is off to the printers. He blogs regularly at StoriedTheology.com  (http://patheos.com/blogs/storiedtheology). You can follow him on Twitter @jrdkirk and on Facebook at Facebook.com/jrdkirk.