Partakers Christian Podcasts

Gospel of Mark - Chapter 2

The Gospel of Mark - Mark 2

G’day and welcome to Partakers! We are reading together through the Gospel of Mark together, to get a broad view of the life of Jesus during his time here on earth.  Today we are looking at Chapter 2. Come on in!

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** We are reading from the World English Bible translation, which used to be the American Standard Version. It is in the Public Domain and therefore copyright free. Come inside to hear and see! The World English Bible (WEB) is a Public Domain (no copyright) Modern English translation of the Holy Bible. That means that you may freely copy it in any form, including electronic and print formats. The World English Bible is based on the American Standard Version of the Holy Bible first published in 1901, the Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensa Old Testament, and the Greek Majority Text New Testament.

Bible Reading - Psalm 34

Psalm 34

By David; when he pretended to be insane before Abimelech, who drove him away, and he departed.

1 I will bless Yahweh at all times. His praise will always be in my mouth.

2 My soul shall boast in Yahweh. The humble shall hear of it, and be glad.

3 Oh magnify Yahweh with me. Let us exalt his name together.

4 I sought Yahweh, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.

5 They looked to him, and were radiant. Their faces shall never be covered with shame.

6 This poor man cried, and Yahweh heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.

7 The angel of Yahweh encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.

8 Oh taste and see that Yahweh is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

9 Oh fear Yahweh, you his saints, for there is no lack with those who fear him.

10 The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger, but those who seek Yahweh shall not lack any good thing.

11 Come, you children, listen to me. I will teach you the fear of Yahweh.

12 Who is someone who desires life, and loves many days, that he may see good?

13 Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking lies.

14 Depart from evil, and do good. seek peace, and pursue it.

15 Yahweh's eyes are toward the righteous. His ears listen to their cry.

16 Yahweh's face is against those who do evil, to cut off their memory from the earth.

17 The righteous cry, and Yahweh hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles.

18 Yahweh is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves those who have a crushed spirit.

19 Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but Yahweh delivers him out of them all.

20 He protects all of his bones. Not one of them is broken.

21 Evil shall kill the wicked. Those who hate the righteous shall be condemned.

22 Yahweh redeems the soul of his servants. None of those who take refuge in him shall be condemned.

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Gospel of Mark - Chapter 1

The Gospel of Mark - Mark 1

G’day and welcome to Partakers! We are reading together through the Gospel of Mark together, to get a broad view of the life of Jesus during his time here on earth. Today we are reading Chapter 1. Come on in!

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** We are reading from the World English Bible translation, which used to be the American Standard Version. It is in the Public Domain and therefore copyright free. Come inside to hear and see! The World English Bible (WEB) is a Public Domain (no copyright) Modern English translation of the Holy Bible. That means that you may freely copy it in any form, including electronic and print formats. The World English Bible is based on the American Standard Version of the Holy Bible first published in 1901, the Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensa Old Testament, and the Greek Majority Text New Testament.

Bible Reading - Psalm 149

Psalm 149

(As read by Anne)

149:1 Praise Yahweh! Sing to Yahweh a new song,

his praise in the assembly of the saints.

149:2 Let Israel rejoice in him who made them.

Let the children of Zion be joyful in their King.

149:3 Let them praise his name in the dance!

Let them sing praises to him with tambourine and harp!

149:4 For Yahweh takes pleasure in his people.

He crowns the humble with salvation.

149:5 Let the saints rejoice in honor.

Let them sing for joy on their beds.

149:6 May the high praises of God be in their mouths,

and a two-edged sword in their hand;

149:7 To execute vengeance on the nations,

and punishments on the peoples;

149:8 To bind their kings with chains,

and their nobles with fetters of iron;

149:9 to execute on them the written judgment.

All his saints have this honor. Praise Yah!

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Gospel Of Mark - An Introduction

New Testament

Book of Mark

Summarised in 1 Minute

Key Verses

Mark 8:34 He called the multitude to himself with his disciples, and said to them, "Whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. Mark 10:45 - For the Son of Man also came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Summary

Matthew wrote primarily to Jews who knew the Old Testament. He wrote to present Mark presents Jesus as Servant of the Lord, coming in fulfilment of the Old Testament. Jesus offers His credentials, gathers His disciples, while offering the Kingdom of God and its message. Jesus' teaching is seen in short parables, which hide the truth from those hardened against Him, yet prepares and instructs those responsive to Him. Overall Jesus calls those who follow him to serve others and to deny themselves by taking up their own cross, just as He took up His.

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Bible Reading - Psalm 128

Psalm 128

A song of ascents for pilgrims ascending to Jerusalem.

128:1 Blessed is everyone who fears Yahweh, who walks in his ways.

128:2 For you will eat the labor of your hands. You will be happy, and it will be well with you.

128:3 Your wife will be as a fruitful vine, in the innermost parts of your house; your children like olive plants, around your table.

128:4 Behold, thus is the man blessed who fears Yahweh.

128:5 May Yahweh bless you out of Zion, and may you see the good of Jerusalem all the days of your life.

128:6 Yes, may you see your children’s children. Peace be upon Israel.

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The Big Story - Part 12

 

Big Story - Act 5 Scene 3:

The Church at the End of the Ages

with Roger Kirby

 

There is a marvellous unity to the Bible story even though it was written by many different people over many hundreds of years.

It began, after the Creation, with a garden; it ends with a garden city in Revelation 22: 1 – 4 : “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.”

There are two great differences between them: the garden has only 2 people in it; the city is full of people, all those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. Only God walks in the garden; the Lamb walks with him in the city and the people walk by the light of the lamp, which is the Lamb. Wow! And triple Wow!

Unfortunately I find it difficult to write this chapter because there is so much disagreement about how we should understand what the Bible says about the End of the Ages. That Jesus Christ will revisit the scenes of his triumph, his death on the Cross, is beyond doubt. What will happen to us is much less clear.

The popular picture seems to be of us sitting on the clouds, playing harps, but that is an old idea from a few hundred years ago and is not the Biblical picture at all.

About 200 years ago the idea was spread about that when 1 Thessalonians 4: 17 says “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever,” means that the Lord will come halfway to earth to collect his people and take them back to heaven with him in what is called the Rapture.

But that is not really the picture here. The scene reflects what happened if Caesar visited a city in one of his outlying provinces. The people of the city would come out to greet the Emperor and then escorted him on into their city. Caesar kept going in the same direction; it was the people who reversed their direction. Yet in the popular teaching of the Rapture it is the Lord who reverses while the people keep going in the same direction! I cannot begin to unravel which is correct. Fortunately Jesus himself said: “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” And we should heed that warning.

The book of Revelation is a an uncertain guide here for there are so many ways to understand its amazing images, but it is useful to illustrate what the more straightforward parts of Scripture say.

Nowhere is more straightforward than the book of Romans and there we read in 8: 18 – 23 : “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.”

This says that our final destination is not heaven, floating in the sky, but here, on earth, part of the New Heaven and New Earth.

And that is what the book of Revelation also says in 21: 1 – 3: “Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”

When John was writing he said that there would be 144,000 people there – a big enough number that all followers of Jesus might expect to be included but not so big that all might presume to be included. (I have ignored the distinction between those described as of Israel and the great multitude. In this age we, the people of God are all Israel. ) That number is 12x12x10x10x10. If he was writing today he would have needed to add 2 more 12’s and 2 more 10’s to get a number slightly bigger than 2 billion so that we might all hope to be present but not presume on it. See you there!

This is what one writer has called ‘life after life after death’. ‘life after death’ is our immediate presence with the Lord which is what Paul meant when he wrote Philippians 1: 21, 23b: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.

Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far”. Unfortunately this is what there is so much argument about.

Our ultimate goal is beyond dispute as Revelation 22: 1 – 5 says: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.”

 

So what?

This is the promise for all of us that believe in Jesus and seek to follow him. It is hard to get your mind round how the New Heaven and New Earth could possibly be. Sitting on clouds is far easier to think about, but this is what Scripture and therefore the Lord tells us.

It will be obvious to you that I have left out many things that could be included in the Big Story of the Bible. I think the really interesting one is that last Scene where I thought about the church NOW. We should not, and cannot, replicate any of the previous scenes ourselves. We can only live now. How we behave, how we act, how we serve is inevitably bounded by the world we live in and who we are. The important thing is to worship and serve the Lord within those bounds. For many of you, many of us, that means working with Dave in the WOW church, on the Internet. The Lord is Worthy-Of-Worship indeed. Our way may well be in this very new, very different, very important development. Go to it!

The Lord bless you.

 

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Bible Reading - Psalm 15

Psalm 15

15:1 Yahweh, who shall dwell in your sanctuary?

Who shall live on your holy hill?

15:2 He who walks blamelessly does what is right,

and speaks truth in his heart;

15:3 He who doesn’t slander with his tongue,

nor does evil to his friend,

nor casts slurs against his fellow man;

15:4 In whose eyes a vile man is despised,

but who honors those who fear Yahweh;

he who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and doesn’t change;

15:5 he who doesn’t lend out his money for usury,

nor take a bribe against the innocent.

He who does these things shall never be shaken.

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The Big Story - Part 11

 

Big Story - Act 5 Scene 3:

The Church Today

with Roger Kirby

Yes, I know! The church today is not really part of the Biblical story in any direct way, but there is another chapter to come on the Church at the End of the Ages and it would leave rather a long gap to say nothing about the in-between times. All of church history could be here but that would be far too much so I will only say anything about one previous event: the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, of some 300 years ago that has affected so much of our present Western culture. More of that later.

We live in an amazing and very exciting period of church history. There are more Christians of every sort alive today than ever before; in fact, more alive now than all that have ever lived and died; one third of all the people on the earth. This is mainly because of the recent huge growth of the church in Africa, South America and, to a lesser but increasing extent, in Asia. At the same time the old core areas of the Faith in Europe and North America have declined somewhat, so the centre of gravity of the World-Wide Church has moved south and east. At last the glorious vision of Isaiah 43: 6, 7 “I will say to the north, ‘Give them up! ’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back. ’ Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth — everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” is being fulfilled as the followers of Jesus now make “disciples of all nations”.

One other remarkable factor is worthy of note. For the first time since the days of the Roman Empire there is one language understood through nearly all the known world. Then it was Greek; now it is English. It is not the language spoken by the most people as their mother tongue but, thanks to the Internet, it is the most widely understood language. And hey! – you guys and girls out there and listening to this are at the very forefront of this great development. Congratulations!

Of course, being a partly human institution not everything in the World is perfect. Obviously, resurgent, militant Islam is a concern. How is an essentially peaceful faith (in spite of some bad mistakes such as the Crusades) to react to an aggressively warlike one? That dilemma has never been satisfactorily resolved in these nearly 2000 years of the church.

How deep in spirituality and knowledge are all those billions of Christians? In one country I was in I was reliably told that there were so called ‘Christian villages’ where not one single person in the village knew who Jesus was! Where were all the people from the better developed Christian world who should have been out there teaching them?

Then there are all the deep problems in Europe and North America that stem from the Enlightenment. 300 years ago in Europe, men, fed up with the interminable religious wars of the previous century, turned to human reason as the best judge of what is right or wrong. From that move has come the modern Western idea that each person is autonomous, that is - able to make up his or her own mind about how to live, whether to believe or not, and what to believe. The result has been apathy to faith in Europe and consumer oriented churches in North America. Both have led to a sad decline in true faith and personal commitment.

So what?

That is a hard question to answer when these words may be read or heard in so many different places by people in so many different cultures and circumstances. Let me repeat what I said before to try and hammer it home (!): we, Dave Roberts and all his band of helpers, are trying to use the new opportunities that world wide interconnections and the use of the English language open up so effectively in the service of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Make sure this is made as effective as possible. Tell other people how to connect to Dave’s sites. Share what we say and write with other people. Translate as much of it as you can into your local language, if that is not English, and then spread it as wide as possible. By all means and in every possible way join in this great enterprise of the World-Wide Church and our little corner of it. May the Lord bless you as you do so.

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Bible Reading - Psalm 26

Psalm 26

26:1 Judge me, Yahweh, for I have walked in my integrity.
I have trusted also in Yahweh without wavering.
26:2 Examine me, Yahweh, and prove me.
Try my heart and my mind.
26:3 For your loving kindness is before my eyes.
I have walked in your truth.
26:4 I have not sat with deceitful men,
neither will I go in with hypocrites.

26:5 I hate the assembly of evildoers,
and will not sit with the wicked.
26:6 I will wash my hands in innocence,
so I will go about your altar, Yahweh;
26:7 that I may make the voice of thanksgiving to be heard,
and tell of all your wondrous works.
26:8 Yahweh, I love the habitation of your house,
the place where your glory dwells.

26:9 Don’t gather my soul with sinners,
nor my life with bloodthirsty men;
26:10 in whose hands is wickedness,
their right hand is full of bribes.
26:11 But as for me, I will walk in my integrity.
Redeem me, and be merciful to me.
26:12 My foot stands in an even place.
In the congregations I will bless Yahweh.

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