Briarwood Fellows Podcast | Podcast on RSS.com

Briarwood Fellows Podcast

Briarwood Fellows Podcast

by Chad Escue

Christianity Spirituality Relationships

Do This in Remembrance of Me

In the Lord’s Supper, “remembrance,” means that the past act of Christ’s redemption and the future hope of consummation become contemporary to the people remembering. In a similar way, the generations of Israelites after the Exodus who had never even seen Egypt were to confess at the Passover Feast, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, and Yahweh our God brought us out from there with a mighty hand” (Deut 6:21). When we partake of the Lord’s Supper in the present, we participate in his redemptive death and resurrection in the past, and we proclaim his death until he comes in the future.

My Testimony (Chad Escue)

I got to record my testimony when introducing the series to the Next Steps class this past Sunday. I'll just post it here in case anyone is interested. The sound quality isn't great, sorry about that.

Season 1

Anatomy of the Soul 01: The Emotions of God

Does God have emotions? How we answer that question will have tremendous implications for our lives. We become what we worship. Worship a cold and distant emotionless deity and you will become cold, distant, and emotionless. But what if you worship Yahweh? "Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God; slow to anger and overflowing with loyal-love and faithfulness" (Exodus 34:6). The God of the Bible has revealed himself as a God who is deeply and emotionally invested in his creatures. How can we reconcile the idea that Yahweh's very name is "passion" (Exodus 34:14) with the idea that with him, "there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17)?

Anatomy of the Soul 02: The Happy God

A. W. Tozer said that what comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. What is the default position of God's face? Do you imagine God with resting grump face? Or, could it be that the God revealed in the Bible is actually happy!? Paul calls the Father, "The happy God" (1 Timothy 1:11) and, what's almost more audacious to us, he calls Jesus, the man of sorrows (Isaiah 53:3), "the happy and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords" (1 Timothy 6:15). How would it change your life to know that God is the Happy God?

Anatomy of the Soul 03: The Pursuit of Happiness

Last week we learned that our God is the Happy God (1 Tim 1:11; 6:15). In today's lesson, we're going to focus on happiness again, but with the goal of discovering how we can find happiness. Every moral philosophy is centered on a profound question: "What is the good life?" Or, "How do we pursue happiness and human flourishing?" Psalm 1 gives the Bible's definitive answer to that question and warns us about three groups who claim to know the way to happiness but whose way leads to misery.

Anatomy of the Soul 04: God's Grief

If happiness is the emotional experience of fullness, our reaction to knowing all of our deepest needs are met, then what happens when our fullness is diminished? How do we experience the loss of the things we need for life? That experience is called grief. In this episode, we look at God's grief from its first explicit appearance in Genesis 6:1-11 to understand grief's true purpose and pattern.

Anatomy of the Soul 05: Good Grief

We typically think about grief, sorrow, or sadness as "negative" emotions. But, God has given us the capacity for grief as a reflection of his own nature and to accomplish his purpose of making us more like Christ. Grief is the emotional equivalent of physical pain and, as when we feel physical pain, we must learn to use emotional pain to find what's out of joint so we can begin to heal. In Psalms 42 and 43, we have a front row seat to someone analyzing his emotional pain through the process of lament. We're looking at the condition of grief and its causes and cure.

Anatomy of the Soul 06: God's Anger

If you've spent much time in the church in America, you might have a view of God's anger that is far too simple. The Bible gives a complex portrait of God's anger that often gets dumbed down by reading it in where it isn't. In today's podcast, we take a look at the first three instances of God's anger in the Bible (Exodus 4:14; 15: 4-8; 32:10) and learn some surprising things about why God gets angry and how he expresses his anger.

Anatomy of the Soul 07: Anger Management

Anger is the emotional response to injustice and evil. It's an emotion designed by God to destroy obstacles to justice and provide the energy for bringing restorative justice. But handling anger can be like handling dynamite. You can use it to move mountains, but handled without due care, it will destroy you. Psalm 137 gives us a model for owning, praying, and limiting our anger that is shocking and scandalous, but if we take the time to listen, we'll find anger a manageable and powerful tool for justice and holiness.

Anatomy of the Soul 08: The Fear of the Lord

Is fear a good thing? On the one hand, the most common command in the Bible is "Don't be afraid!" It occurs 365 times, one for every day of the year. But, on the other hand, the fear of Yahweh is the fundamental principle of all knowledge and wisdom (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10) and the defining characteristic of Jesus' delight (Isaiah 11:1-3). How do we reconcile the concept of fear in the Scriptures with everything our modern culture of fear is telling us about fear as a purely negative reality?

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