Partakers Christian Podcasts

Easter 2016 - I AM The Good Shepherd

Easter 2016

Part 4: Who was Jesus?

I AM The Good Shepherd

John 10:7-11 & 14-15: Therefore Jesus said again, "I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. I AM the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.

Play or download the audio mp3 to find out more about this Jesus as the Good Shepherd and what that means for you today!

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Easter 2016 - I AM The Light of the World

Easter 2016

Part 3: Who was Jesus?
I AM The Light Of The World

John 8:12 - Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I AM the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life."

Play or download the audio mp3 to find out more about this Jesus being the Living Bread. What did he mean by that and why?

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Easter 2016 - I AM The Living Bread

Easter 2016

Part 2: Who was Jesus? I AM The Bread of Life

John 6:35, 48, and 51: Jesus said: "I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; this bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."

Play or download the audio mp3 to find out more about this Jesus being the Living Bread. What did he mean by that and why?

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Easter 2016 - Who was Jesus?

Easter 2016

Part 1:  Who was Jesus? The I AM 01

Exodus 3:13-14: Moses said to God, "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?" God said to Moses, "I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'

Isaiah 41:4: “Who has done this and carried it through, calling forth the generations from the beginning? I, the LORD -with the first of them and with the last—I am he”

John 8:58: “I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “Before Abraham was, I AM”.

Play or download the audio mp3 to find out more about this Jesus!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 23

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 23: John 5:25 & 28
Now and then

These verses appear at first glance to be about us – our chances to cross over from death to life but the true focus is on Jesus.

Here they are: verse 25 says, “Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.”

And verse 28 says, “a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. The first of these verse is about a time and the time is now; the second is about a time and the time is sometime in the future.

Two things are in common between these two verses:

1. It is fundamentally important to hear the voice of Jesus
2. Those that do, will live.

Bearing in mind those two similarities let’s look at them in more detail and see what the differences are.

The first of them starts with ‘very truly’, which is literally ‘Amen, amen’ and it means ‘I am going to say something particularly important so listen closely … ‘; so listen we must!

It goes on to talk about the dead – who will hear his voice now, which is a bit of a puzzle. To make any sense at all it must mean those who are spiritually dead but physically alive. So it is of direct relevance to us. If we hear the voice of Jesus, here and now, we have crossed over from death to life. John is using the word ‘life’, as he does elsewhere, to mean a full, proper, well lived life, not the shabby imitation of proper living that so many people strive after with drink, or drugs, or excitement, or ever new experiences and, of course, lots of money. John has already told us “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind” (John 1: 4); he will go on to remind us that Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14: 6); later he calls Jesus the ‘Word of life’ (1 John 1: 1) .

We, you and I, if we have believed in the Father God by hearing the voice of Jesus, have been given the supreme gift of eternal life. WOW! This is not something that we shall be presented with once we die physically; it is something we have and should be enjoying right now. Are you? We are back to the idea of membership of the Kingdom, something we have been given the passport to and are to enjoy even now.

And now to our second verse: number 28. Here it is again, together with the following verse: “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.”

We are clearly into the future now. The Greek that the NIV has translated as ‘will rise to live’ actually uses the word for resurrection so should more literally be ‘come forth to a resurrection to life’ and similarly ‘to death’ in the following phrase. There was a growing expectation amongst the Jews of those days of a resurrection based on passages like this from Ezekiel 37, “the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. … I will open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live.” But what they expected was a general resurrection; not that one man would be resurrected ahead of everyone else as Jesus was. The other thing they very definitely did not expect was that this would happen, ‘when all who are in their graves will hear his voice’; the voice of Jesus that is.

All this must be enormously encouraging for us, and also enormously challenging because it tells us that we shall at that final day be judged by what we have done since we set out to follow Jesus – good or evil. But that is not the purpose of these verses, which is to explain more about the supreme position of Jesus. He is now the touchstone of all those who would seek a new and much better way of living. He is the one who will eventually have the responsibility of sorting out those who have done good from those who have not.

What exactly happens to those who have received the gift of grace but have subsequently failed to live up to what should follow from that is never made completely clear in the Bible. C.S. Lewis, in his pictorial representation of the moment of final judgment, has it that all who could not meet the eyes of the Christ figure – disappeared into his huge black shadow and were never seen again. He adds ‘I don’t know what became of them’ and that is probably as good a way of looking at it as any.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. He is the giver of life now and the judge of the ages later, ‘that in everything he might have the supremacy.’

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Friday Prayers 4 March 2016

Partakers Friday Prayers!

4th March 2016

We pray together and when Christians pray together, from different nations, different churches and different denominations - that reveals Church unity! Come! Let us pray together!

Prayer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray
And to concentrate my thoughts on you;
I cannot do this alone.
In me there is darkness,
But with you there is light;
I am lonely, but you do not leave me;
I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;
I am restless, but with you there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways,
But you know the way for me.
Restore me to liberty,
And enable me to live now
That I may answer before you and before men.
Lord whatever this day may bring,
Your name be praised.
Amen

 

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Think Spot 29 February 2016

Think Spot - 29 February 2016

How is your Christian life going? As you look back on your life, can you see how you have changed and been transformed from the time you came to acknowledge that God was God and entered into a relationship with Him? You can? Good! Let God WOW you with Himself as He transforms you in the power of the Holy Spirit who lives within you, into the image of Jesus, the Son of God.

Your transformation, however quickly or slowly, is evidence of your relationship with God. Are you aware of that? WOW! As you put into practise what you learn about Him, your life has that God WOW factor about it. As you let God take control of your life, bit by bit, you become less self-absorbed and more God-absorbed and caring about others people. Get God's WOW in your life. Let Him change and transform you.

Are you in situations where change is needed? Then instead of wanting to change the situation, change yourself, change your attitude and grasp hold of the God you claim to be your - Father, Son and Holy Spirit! Go into this new week, this new month, knowing you are God's child, that He loves you and wants to transform you greatly. Let your life be a WOW about God- a WOW about God to those that know Him and a WOW about God to those who don't know Him yet.

If you need help, ask us at Partakers.co.uk or buy our books at  http://www.pulptheology.co.uk and on Amazon sites, which will help your thinking.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 22

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 22: John 5:22
The Royal Agent

There is an idea that can be used to explain what Jesus is meaning when he says, “Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgement to the Son, that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father. Whoever does not honour the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.” It is the idea of agency. They, in those days, had a rather stronger idea of what the implications of being an agent were than most of us will have.

If we talk to a salesman in a car showroom about buying a car, which of course means much argument about how much it is going to cost us, our discussion will come to the point where the salesman will say something like: ‘I must check that out with my boss’ and go off to do so. He is acting as an agent for the head salesman. If he is doing something more significant than buying a car, perhaps as an ambassador making an agreement about how two countries are to interact, and he is overseas, then he may still say ‘I must check that out with my boss’, who might now be the president or prime minister of his country. He can do that quickly and easily through his mobile phone etc.

100 years ago he could have done much the same thing but more clumsily and much more slowly by sending a telegram down the wires connecting him back to his own country.

200 years ago things would have been very different. He could only communicate with his home country by sending a message by horseman or sailing ship. He would get the answer only weeks later by which time the situation might well have changed beyond recognition. Consequently he would have had to act without that sort of reference back to base. He would have been a true agent acting on his own initiative on behalf of his firm or his country. That is the sort of agent we read about in the Bible. They might say ‘a person’s agent is as himself’. The agent had to take decisions that would need to be supported in full by his boss when he eventually got to hear what they were. If the boss did not support the agent’s decisions he would be a very bad and difficult person and not a good manager. Also any slight to the agent would be considered a slight to the boss.

We see this in the episode in Mark 12 where we read, “A man planted a vineyard … He rented the vineyard to some farmers … At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit. But they sent him away empty- handed … He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed … He sent his son (the usual full agent) last of all, saying, ‘they will respect my son.’ But the tenants said to one another … let’s kill him … What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.”

Coming back to John’s gospel we see that Jesus is given full authority as the agent of the Father over the judgements that are to come at the end of the age.

Later Jesus talks about, “a messenger is not greater than the one who sent him.” The messenger there is an ‘apostolos’ – the word that we translate as ‘apostle’ which essentially means ‘sent one’ or ‘ambassador’, or we might say: ‘agent’.

Jesus was the apostle sent by Father God. We are apostles sent by the Lord to the world around us. What a huge privilege that is, and what a responsibility. How good an agent are you?

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Friday Prayers 26 February 2016

Partakers Friday Prayers!

26 February 2016

We pray together and when Christians pray together, from different nations, different churches and different denominations - that reveals Church unity! Come! Let us pray together!

May God the Father,
And the eternal High Priest Jesus Christ,
And the indwelling Holy Spirit
Build us up in faith and truth and love,
And grant us our portion among the saints
With all those who believe on our Lord Jesus Christ.

We pray for all saints,
for kings and rulers,
for the enemies of the cross of Christ,
And for ourselves
we pray that our fruit may abound
and we may be made perfect
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen

Based on a prayer of Polycarp (AD 80 – 167)

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Thursday - Testimony - John

John's Story

"Feeling on the path to nowhere but there is a light at the end."

Today our testimony is from John... John is 32 years old, lives in the UK with his wife Nicole and has learning difficulties and epilepsy due to Tuberous Sclerosis...

Play or download the mp3 file to hear how John came into a dynamic relationship with God because of Jesus Christ. John - a 21st century Christian because of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Why not make a comment below to encourage John?

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