Shows
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhen Did I Get Saved?
For lots of Christians knowing when they were saved is very important, and knowing the date they were baptized or the date they first believed becomes a way to assure themselves of the security of their relationship with God. There are two questions behind this issue: first, am I saved because of a decision I’ve made or a decision God has made.
Chuck and Aaron talk about how our salvation is completely founded on God’s decision to rescue us, and even when our initial realization of the truth of the Gospel resulted in what...2025-04-2335 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhy All the Violence?
All the statistics point to an increase in acts of aggression and violent crime in our society. But why is this happening? Secular thinkers used to opine that religion exacerbated violence; the theory being that commitment to absolute truth would cause people to insist that their viewpoint must be adhered to and that violence would be the tool most readily used by close-minded bigots to force others to change. But the twentieth-century gave the lie to this notion - instead of the religious zealots being the violent ones, it turns out that the atheists and pagans (from...2025-02-2633 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodIs the Bible a “Love Letter” from God?
An idea frequently heard from contemporary Christians is that the Bible is God’s “love letter” to humanity. But is this true? And if it is, why does so much of the Bible not read like a love letter? In this episode Chuck and Aaron discuss the question of the Bible’s genre and its relationship to God’s love.
While a main theme of the Bible is God’s love for his human creatures, it–contrary to a popular evangelical trope–is not a love letter to us.
First of all, the genre of scriptu...2025-01-1534 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Divine Call to Pastors
How do pastors become pastors? How does God make pastors, and how do they know that’s what God wants them to be? And how do they know what church they should be at. In this episode Chuck and Aaron answer these questions and also talk about Aaron’s call to be a pastor.
Pastors are called by God to preach and teach the Gospel to the Christian church. In this sense the call is unique to this particular ministry. But in another sense the call to be a pastor is no different than the call...2025-01-0135 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodIs Confession Good for the Soul?
In Christianity there are two different, but related, senses of the word confession. On the one hand, there is a confession of faith - the public and private statement of what Christians believe. On the other hand, there is also a confession of sin - the public and private statement that God is right and his human creatures are wrong. What these two confessions have in common is they both are fundamentally an agreement with God, that he is right and we are wrong.
These confessions carry with them a lot of benefit for the...2024-10-2335 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodTo Sing or Not to Sing
Music has a power which logic and rationality do not - the power to tap into the human emotional experience. This experience is no less spiritual than understanding and reflecting on the truth of the gospel intellectually, merely different. Music evokes memories that mere words cannot, connecting us to our experience of God in worship from the past. Music taps into our creativity, allowing us not merely to participate in worship but become authors and creators of Christian worship ourselves. And music fires our imagination, allowing us by faith to experience the universal church on heaven and...2024-06-1935 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHow Did We Get the Books of the Bible?
What makes the books of the Bible sacred scripture is that they were written by prophets (Old Testament) or apostles (New Testament). The books of the New Testament bear witness to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, either as a first-hand account of his life, death, and resurrection (we call these the four Gospels) or by reflecting on and applying this Gospel to the life of the Christian communities of the first century (these are the epistles written by Paul, Peter, and others).
These books were not “decided upon” by anyone; instead, the earliest Jesus foll...2024-06-0536 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodAngels, Demons, and Ghosts
After a discussion about how it’s impossible to prove things like whether spirits exist or not, Chuck and Aaron talk about how the Bible describes the spiritual world.
The existence of angels - powerful, supernatural beings whose job it is to serve God - is assumed by the Bible, and there are times when angels interact with humans. Most of us have never had an experience of an angel, but the Bible says that sometimes humans can interact with them without being aware they are talking with an angel. The Bible also describes fallen an...2024-05-2235 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHow Do I Know I’m Saved?
For Christians, the question of how we can be saved has too often been framed as a future question: how can I know I’m going to heaven when I die? But the Bible just doesn’t talk enough about going to heaven when we die for us to justify making that the baseline of our assurance of salvation.
Instead, the Bible talks about our assurance in terms of what God has done in the past and is now doing in the future; namely, he has become a human being in space and time so that...2024-05-0835 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Great Flood
For the past three hundred years it has seemed obvious to many modern Westerners that cataclysmic, global floods are impossible, and so the biblical story of the great flood has been seen as a legendary myth highlighting the vindictive judgment of the Bible’s angry God.
But this assumption fails to acknowledge the existence of great flood narratives spread throughout the ancient world - from the Cheyenne in North America, to the Chinese, to the Mesopotamians. How could all these different groups tell such similar stories? Is this a coincidence? Or instead does there remain in...2024-04-2439 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhy Go to Church
The question of whether Christians should go to church or not can only be answered by answering the question, are Christians the church or not.
Once again, Western-style individualism blocks us from even understanding the nature of the problem. The Bible insists that our highest value comes not from our individuality but from how our individuality flourishes in community. By ourselves we have no way of overcoming our personal weaknesses, but in community others cover up these weaknesses with their strength, as we do for them.
Unfortunately, Christians in America tend to be...2024-04-1038 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and Legalism
Legalism is the belief that humans flourish best when they have order, structure, and rules to guide them. The opposite philosophy is liberty - the belief that humans need freedom from restrictions to flourish. Christianity, while definitely promising freedom from the burden of sin while also providing order and rules for living, definitely holds that humans flourish best when in relationship, especially the relationship all humans were created for - with the creator God in Jesus.
Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert
Subscribe to the show at https://cacg.saintjamesglencarbon.org.
...2024-03-2739 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodIs Christianity a Psychological Crutch?
Is Christianity merely a crutch for those who believe - a sort of whistling-in-the-graveyard, a head game naive and superstitious people play to avoid the hard reality of materialistic realism? The rise of the psychological sciences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries might lead us to think so. But what psychology does well - describe the human mind, human emotions, human behavior, and human relationships - does not begin to answer all the questions humans have about ultimate reality.
In other words, if there is nothing more to humans than humanity, religion is...2024-03-1337 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and Stoicism
Stoicism, which flourished in Greece around 250 years on either side of Christ’s birth, taught that the highest good for humans is to be ultimately happy. This happiness, though, is far different from our culture’s notion that happiness is equal to personal pleasure; instead, Stoicism held, true ultimate happiness can be experienced only through the practice of virtue - especially the virtues of courage, wisdom, justice and moderation.
This has been seen by many to be a welcome alternative to our culture’s current credo of “do what feels good,” and to the extent that Stoic...2024-02-2837 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodAre Atheists Smart and Christians Dumb?
While the Bible insists that those who deny the reality of God are fools, this in no way means such skeptics are unintelligent. The biblical idea of “fool” and “foolishness” has less to do with brain power and more to do with an unwillingness to conform to reality: it’s foolish to not go to the doctor when you have cancer because it doesn’t align behavior with the real-life situation. Many smart people (like Steve Jobs, for instance) have made this fatal error. And atheism is the same - it’s not dumb to disbelieve in God, it’s fool...2024-02-1438 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and Islam
Islam and Christianity share a lot in common: they’re both Abrahamic religions - tracing their heritage back to God’s call of Abraham and the promises God made to his offspring, they both insist that polytheism is wrong and that there’s only one true God, they both hold that this one true God is holy and cannot tolerate sinful behavior. But the main thing they disagree about is the Muslim insistence that Jesus was only a human prophet and the deeply-held Christian belief that in Jesus the eternal creator God has become man to rescue his cr...2024-01-3134 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and Current Events
When it comes to current events Christians too frequently fall into one of the twin ditches of either allowing themselves to become spokespeople for one of the approved cultural positions (usually either “conservative” or “liberal”) or withdrawing from the world in the name of “separation of church and state”. The key is understanding that the Gospel of Jesus’ kingdom stands over against all human systems, so the Christian church - while its proclamation will from time to time mirror certain conservative or liberal talking points - must not allow itself to be co-opted by any political or cultural group...2024-01-1738 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodShould a Christian Watch Modern Movies?
The content of movies has changed dramatically in the last 100 years. What once was considered offensive and even pornographic is now commonplace.
The false dichotomy of either mindlessly enjoying all contemporary media or withdrawing from and rejecting it undermines the Christian’s vocation to both be separate from the idolatrous values of the world and simultaneously live redemptively in and for the world Jesus died to redeem. The key to living in this tension is to use the Christian Story (the story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration in Jesus) to critique the culture’s alte...2024-01-0340 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHow to Walk with Someone Who is Suffering
Our first impulse when someone we know and love goes through a season of suffering tends to be either to try to assert ourselves too much - by talking too much, using trite cliches, or by trying to cheer our friend up by distracting them, or by avoiding them altogether - frequently by rationalizing to ourselves that our friend probably needs some alone time. But both these paths fail to show genuine love to the sufferer by making the primary goal of the relational moment ourselves and our comfort.
Instead, genuinely walking with those who...2023-12-2036 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristian Masculinity
The two most common notions in the West of what makes a man masculine are, on one hand, a physically strong, domineering man who leads through sheer force of physicality or personality and, on the other hand, a sweet, sensitive man who refuses to assert himself.
Both of these visions, while acknowledging some important aspects of what men should be, have resulted in the fostering of a self-absorbed narcissistic man who, in the first case, is mainly obsessed with his own quest for power and control and, in the second case, is mainly obsessed with...2023-12-0636 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodLiving Hope in a Secular Age
The Western Liberalism of John Locke, Rousseau, and the founding fathers of America, promised to set us free from the tyranny of kings and priests. That the God of the Christian Bible would be a casualty in this great purge seemed to many to be a necessary step on this path to liberation. But far from making us happy and free, sociologists, counselors, and therapists (not to mention the billion dollar pharmaceutical industry) agree that we are of all people most lonely and hopeless. What happened to the freedom we were promised?
Chuck and Aaron...2023-11-2236 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and America
The separation of church and state is taken for granted in the current West, but this sort of division between a person’s religious beliefs and his or her public persona finds no place in the biblical worldview. So how are Christians supposed to think about their relationship with their country?
The key is to recognize the difference between one’s identity and one’s vocation. The Christian’s identity should only and always be in Jesus - no other loyalties must be allowed to compete with or claim equality with the Christian’s citizenship in heaven...2023-11-0838 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodGrace
One mistaken notion about Christianity is that its primary goal is to foster good ethical behavior. But the biblical reality is that Christianity is fundamentally God’s plan to rescue his humans and creation as a free act of grace. This grace is both necessary (since we humans have rebelled against God we have rendered ourselves unable to do anything to make ourselves right) and loving (God is completely unobligated to do anything to rescue us but does so because of his deep love and commitment to us).
Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert
...2023-10-2534 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodSpiritual Gifts
When Christians talk about the spiritual gifts, they frequently get hung up discussing the so-called charismatic gifts - healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy, etc., but this unfortunately short-circuits the very important discussion about what the spiritual gifts actually are, and (maybe more importantly) what they do. Chuck and Aaron have just this discussion.
The spiritual gifts are different roles that the Holy Spirit empowers Jesus’ people with to love and serve the one family of God in Christ. This gifting creates what Paul calls the body of Christ, with the different members - each gifted un...2023-10-1135 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodDating
Dating, since it is a fairly new phenomenon in how humans relate to each other, is not mentioned in the Bible. But the Bible has much to say about romantic relationships, and how we should look for a future spouse.
First, the Bible highly values the marriage relationship, so any effort put into finding a spouse is worthwhile. But second, it must be recognized that our current system (in the West at least) of dating tends to be selfish, tending towards a commercial view of human relationship: i.e., “trying out” different people until we find...2023-09-2737 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodParenting
In a culture obsessed with individual rights and personal autonomy, parenting and raising kids remains - mostly - a relationship recognized as being valuable to the extent that it is self-sacrificial. What is it about our relationship with our own children that glorifies and valorizes the type of love that gives and expects nothing in return?
Chuck and Aaron talk about how the relationship between parents and kids points us to the relationship God the Father has with his adopted children, and how the self-sacrificial love at the heart of the universe can be displayed...2023-09-1336 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodMarriage
Why is marriage so important? The Bible describes God not as one powerful being, but as three persons - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - who have always known and loved each other with complete commitment. And when they decided to create human beings in their image, they decided to create a married man and woman so the humans could experience in their lives together what the Trinity has always experienced in its life together. And this reality extends to all human relationships - whether marriage, family, friends, or Christian community - but marriage...2023-08-3033 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodBeauty
It’s true that different people find different particular things beautiful, ugly, or plain. This seems to validate the notion that beauty is subjective, that there is no accounting for taste, as the saying goes. But everyone agrees that eating really delicious food can be an experience of beauty, as is falling in love or seeing a wonderful site of nature. Perhaps there are standards of beauty that can help us understand what is truly beautiful and what it means.
Chuck and Aaron talk about how the Creator God made the world to reflect the be...2023-08-1637 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHow Can I Love Myself?
Jesus, quoting Moses, says that the greatest good for a human is to love God with all our being and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. This at least implies that self-love is good and healthy, but it places healthy self-love in the context of relationship.
We love ourselves truly when we find who we are in the context of our personal connection with God and others. Paul explains self-love the same way in Ephesians 5 - pointing out that for a husband to truly love himself he must give himself up for his...2023-08-0236 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHow to Know Things
In spite of our culture’s current skepticism about knowledge, people nevertheless are desperate to know what’s real and true. How is this possible? How can we find a model of knowing that doesn’t artificially divide “faith” and “knowledge”? How can we avoid the postmodern trap of confusing power for knowledge?
In order to know things, we have to give up the Enlightenment error of connecting knowledge to provability; in other words, there are many things we know not by proving them but by living in them. In the Bible, knowing is a relational act...2023-07-1937 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodDealing with Anger
Anger is not inherently good or bad, but is right or wrong depending on its motive and its object. Righteous anger, in fact, is necessary for a healthy humanity - to be confronted by gross injustice and not be angry would be inappropriate and (perhaps even) evil. But nevertheless, it’s clear that anger can sometimes be incredibly damaging.
What is the difference between righteous anger and damaging anger? Righteous anger happens when the character of God has been challenged; unrighteous anger happens when our own glory and importance has been challenged. But whether it’s ri...2023-07-0538 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and Hinduism
Hinduism, as an eastern religion, emphasizes the ultimate spiritual reality of humans and nature. Contemplating this truth can provide a welcome corrective to American Christians who tend - along with the rest of our culture - to value and emphasize the material world at the expense of the spiritual.
Hinduism, though, ultimately lacks a grounding in the physical world since it denies that the material has any kind of fundamental reality. Jesus of Nazareth, the God who became man, brings together in himself and equally values true spirituality and true physicality. The invisible God becomes...2023-06-2137 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Dark Valley
Depression, far from being a purely physical or purely psychological or spiritual problem, affects every part of the person who is experiencing it. Physical remedies - everything from eating right and becoming more active to perhaps taking doctor-prescribed medicine to break out of a damaging cycle - should be a part of anyone’s grappling with chronic emptiness or sadness. But since humans were created by God to be both bodies and souls, it should come as no surprise that depression can only be dealt with by also examining and addressing the spiritual problems at the root of...2023-06-0737 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodContradictions in the New Testament Gospels?
Skeptics claim that there are contradictions between the texts of the four Christian gospels. But on closer inspection, what are frequently called contradictions are better understood - not as errors - but as differing perspectives on the same events.
The resurrection narratives are perhaps the most notable example: four separate accounts of the same event that differ in details - the sort of details that are easily understood as perspectival differences, but fundamentally agree in the main feature - that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. Whether or not that event truly happened, it’s...2023-05-2437 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodSelflessness
One of the defining features of our current postmodern world is an increase in selfishness, a rise that has resulted from the lack of a controlling belief system. With nothing larger than oneself to believe in, our natural tendency will be to act, think, and speak in ways that serve ourselves. The Bible describes this desire as the primal problem of the human situation - the centering of ourselves over against all others; fundamentally, the desire to be God.
The solution to this problem is to A) realize that happiness lies in the happiness of...2023-05-1040 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHow to Read the Bible
The key to understanding the Bible is recognizing the genre: it’s not primarily a book of rules, it’s not primarily a book of inspiration, it’s not even primarily a book of religious belief - it’s primarily a story, narrative. And the Bible claims to be the story of everything, the story of how God created a beautiful world which humans messed up and which he is redeeming back to himself. Another key is to realize that this story invites us to become an active participant, in fact to enter into a relationship with the auth...2023-04-2637 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and Fundamentalism
There are roughly two parts to Christian fundamentalism: a commitment to the fundamental truths of the Bible, and a strong impulse to separate from the surrounding culture. Aaron and Chuck talk about what’s biblical and what’s unbiblical with this definition of Christianity, and discuss Aaron’s background in a particular version of American Christian fundamentalism.
The difference between biblical Christianity and fundamentalist Christianity is not in the details of what is believed, but in biblical Christianity’s insistence that Jesus calls the Christian Church to love the world by living in it, living with it...2023-04-1237 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodDoes Satan Exist?
Just about everyone agrees that evil exists, but why it exists causes much disagreement. According to the Bible, the evil things that happen in our universe - things like genocide and wars - cannot be explained in purely materialistic terms; after all, if the universe is nothing more than matter, than what humans call evil - including genocide and wars! - are just natural events that can be explained on purely empirical grounds. And if this is the case then there really is no such thing as evil.
But the Bible insists that what we...2023-03-2937 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and Buddhism
The heart of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths: the reality of suffering, the reality of desire, the goal of nirvana, and the solution of the eight-fold path. In the case of suffering and desire, Buddhism and Christianity agree that all of life is broken, and at the heart of that brokenness is human desire.
But they disagree in two important areas: first, the Buddhist goal of nirvana is an impersonal one - salvation in Buddhism is a matter of losing one’s identity and ceasing to exist; but for Christians, salvation is a redemption an...2023-03-1541 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodLet’s Bring Back Sin
One of our most basic assumptions in the West is that each person should be allowed to judge for themselves what’s right and wrong. This, along with the companion belief that God - if he does exist - does not interact with our world means that anything that happens, even those things we know are evil, are just random events without any sort of correspondence to good and evil.
But if God is real, and he has spoken to us, telling us what to do, then what he wants is good and what he fo...2023-03-0141 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWho Made God?
The Bible claims that there is one creator God, Yahweh, who made everything that exists. Some people wonder then if there was someone or something that made God. But the uncreatedness of God is, in fact, one of the most basic ways to understand what or who God is, since if there is someone who made God that person would by definition be the creator of everything and therefore, God.
Chuck and Aaron also discuss the ontological argument for the existence of God - the idea that the fact humans can contemplate the Infinite is...2023-02-1538 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodSome Questions About Christianity
One of the most common misunderstandings about the Bible is that it can’t be trusted because it’s been translated so often. The English versions one can buy in any bookstore or online are not translations of translations, but are translations from the oldest manuscripts of the original biblical languages, Greek and Hebrew.
Some question whether we can really know anything about Jesus since the gospels, it’s commonly thought, were written long after the events they claim to describe. But we know that the stories of Jesus found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John w...2023-02-0137 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhy Doesn’t God Show Himself?
If God wanted people to believe in him, it seems like it would be wise on his part to show himself to everyone. But everyone agrees that knowledge of God, if he exists, hasn’t happened in that sort of way. But while God doesn’t typically appear to people in visions or dramatic circumstantial experiences, the Bible insists a couple things: first, the reason he doesn’t is because it’s not safe for weak and sinful humanity to be exposed directly to the powerfully holy person of the deity; and second, that God has figured out a wa...2023-01-1843 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhy do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
When the Bible says that no one is good, it’s comparing fallen humans to the greatness, power, and moral purity of God. This doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as a good human - when we compare ourselves to other humans it’s hard to escape that some of us are well-behaved and some of us are scoundrels. The trick in defining human goodness is to not confuse these two relative categories: compared to each other we are more or less good, but compared to God none of us are good at all. So, wh...2023-01-0438 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhat is Christmas All About?
Christmas is unavoidable. Politicians utilize it to create a good vibe of accessibility and gentleness around themselves; the entertainment industry uses it to churn out cheap movies and even cheaper music, gobbled up by millions of consumers every year; and of course the commercial interests have nearly successfully turned Christmas into an essential end-of-year financial harvest. But because the annual Christmas celebration - in spite of its shallowness - is ubiquitous, the question of what it means is always on the table. And as long as people are asking the question of Christmas, the answer that God...2022-12-2138 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodDoes God Want Me to Be Happy?
Happiness is vitally important to the human experience, but in spite of our culture’s conviction of the primacy of happiness, and in spite of our culture’s current ability to easily acquire those items and experiences we all are convinced have the ability to make us happy, we now find ourselves in the position of being profoundly and chronically unhappy.
The problem, from the Christian viewpoint, is that God has created us to be happy only in him, and that all attempts to find happiness outside of him are doomed to failure. However, by loca...2022-12-0741 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhat is Freedom?
The modern west holds that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that this enlightenment principle of human liberty is “self-evident.” But this deistic idea of God-created principles of freedom which are available to humans without revelation from God (“self-evident”) is founded on the misguided belief that humans are equipped and desire to provide freedom for each other on their own. The failures of this system are evident all around us now in the proliferation of wilful addictions in our society - whether to overtly addictive things like drugs and al...2022-11-2338 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodAre Humans Good or Bad?
We all know people who are good people, and we all know people who are bad people. But does the human race as a whole tend to be one or the other?
While the tendency, in our Instagram culture, is to see people as either good guys or bad guys, Christianity insists that humans are both beautiful and good because we’re made to look like God, but we’re also broken and evil as a result of our collective rebellion against the creator God who designed us.
The Bible says that while we a...2022-11-0941 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodCan Prayer Change God’s Mind?
If God is God then his human creatures shouldn’t be surprised that he isn’t completely comprehensible. So when the Bible says that he is sovereign and does whatever he wants but also that he genuinely engages his people in conversation in prayer and adjusts what he does based on their requests, the argument that this is necessarily a contradiction because we can’t understand how it works is illegitimate.
It seems strange to us that God could be completely in charge of everything that happens in human history - even, mysteriously, evil things, and at...2022-10-2638 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodIs God Angry With Me?
The Bible describes God as a God of love, but also frequently describes him angrily judging sins. For many people, Christians as well as non-Christians, these descriptions are very disturbing.
If God is a God of love we don’t like to think about him getting angry. But if we reflect on our own relational experiences we know this is not possible. God gets angry precisely because he is a God of love, and when something he loves is hurt he rightly gets angry.
In other words, God is not vindictive or petty or...2022-10-1238 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodLoving the World
In the Bible Christians are told to not love the world, but we’re also told to bear God’s image, and God describes himself as loving the world. This makes sense if we understand what St. Augustine meant by not loving anything or anyone out of order; in other words, loving what we should love in the right order: God first, our fellow image-bearers next, and his good creation third. So Christians should love the world, but not more than they love God.
But we must also understand that the Bible uses the word “world”...2022-09-2837 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristianity and the Environment
Christians agree that God created the whole universe, but what does this mean for how humans are to rule over or take care of his environment? The Bible says that God created humans to be his representative on earth, which means we are to take care of the world like he does, with care and love and stewardship, not manipulation and selfishness.
So Christians, of all people, should be leading the way in caring for and stewarding God’s creation. This servant-based leadership is counterintuitive in a world where power means manipulation, but Jesus empowers us...2022-09-1437 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodPraise
The God of the Bible commands his creatures to praise him - to talk and sing about how great he is, but the idea of a God like this who would demand praise and worship from his creatures is seen as incomprehensible and even offensive by many non-believers. Why would the greatest Being in the universe need to be told how great he is? Is he insecure? Is he needy? Why would he use dictatorial powers to command his lackeys to bow down to him?
But what God knows is that all humans praise, naturally...2022-08-3136 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodChristians and Humility
Humility is almost universally admired in the West, and people who are full of themselves are almost universally avoided. But although this value is common, humility is a uniquely Christian virtue.
Only if there is a God who created all things and people and transcends his human creatures is the refusal to think of other creatures as less than ourselves wrong. And according to Christianity, because we are sinners who have violated God’s law and broken ourselves and our world, we have no grounds for thinking we’re something we’re not, but because all hu...2022-08-1742 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodMarriage, Part 2
The Bible describes marriage as two people becoming “one flesh.” This incredible concept is more than just a helpful metaphor - in marriage (and through sex within marriage), God has created a new singular unit out of two separate people. In this way God has designed marriage to make concrete what He himself - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - has experienced from eternity past - absolutely perfect union within personal diversity. The best way to live in this reality is to live in mutual submission - wives submitting to their husbands and husbands giving up their live...2022-08-0336 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodMarriage, Part 1
Marriage has always been both beautiful and difficult, and never more than it is now. Our cultural conviction that we as individuals are more important than our relationships butts heads with our desire to experience love and acceptance. But God has created marriage to be a way for couples to experience what it means to find themselves in a mutual, self-sacrificial commitment. And this experience points us to the deeper reality that God has given himself to us in self-sacrificial commitment. Our desire to be loved and accepted, with no questions asked, and no conditions demanded can...2022-07-2038 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodScience and Faith
Many secular people believe that science has made religion obsolete - that since we now have rational explanations for natural phenomena we no longer need God. This assumes that religion’s job is to explain natural phenomena, but while science’s job is to explain such phenomena, religion’s job is to tell us why such phenomena exists and how to live as relational and moral beings in our physical world.
Another problem with the belief that science makes religion obsolete is the false belief that science is based upon objective reason, whereas religion is based...2022-07-0640 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodSin
The word “sin” is a largely forgotten word. People in our culture find it an oppressive and judgmental word, and so we typically use it ironically or pejoratively. But the idea of a “sin” is one that’s held by all people everywhere, because sin is simply the violation of a received moral code.
In our culture’s case, the idea of sin (if not the word) is reserved for violations of our culture’s moral code - the rights of the individuals, the importance of physical beauty, the value of money and material objects, etc. But in th...2022-06-2242 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHidden Faith
In our philosophically relativistic culture, telling someone that you believe in a universal truth is at best, weird, and at worst, offensive. How should Christians, who are commanded by Jesus to “go into all the world and preach the gospel” to everyone, live out and talk about their faith in a world that finds such conversations triggering.
Chuck and Aaron discuss the need for wisdom - to know where and in what situations it is appropriate to talk about deeply held ideological beliefs. They also talk about how relationships must be built so people don’t feel...2022-06-0839 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWork
When you compare what the Bible says about jobs and vocations with what our contemporary, materialistic, Western culture believes, it’s clear that our work is both less important than we’ve thought, and also more important than we’ve thought. Less important, because work promises to be a portal to money and things; hence, a pathway to fulfillment and importance. However, it’s clear from the shattered dreams, dreary slavery, and broken relationships of a money-obsessed society that this promise has not paid out. But on the other hand, according to the Bible our work turns out to b...2022-05-2539 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodRepentance
When non-Christians hear Christians talk about repentance, they usually think it’s an attempt by the Christians to call them out for their sins, but the biblical idea of repentance is much bigger than individual sins; repentance is about changing your entire way of life from one outlook, worldview, motives, aims, etc., and substitute that for an entirely new way of being you.
Likewise, when Jesus calls us to “repent and believe in the gospel”, he is less interested in us giving up our vices and bad habits and more interested in us giving up our wa...2022-05-1137 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHoly Communion
All Christians agree that Holy Communion was instituted by Jesus on the night before he was killed, but there the agreement frequently ends. Is the bread and wine we receive at communion an object lesson that helps us to remember and think about Jesus, or does Jesus actually come and give himself to us when we celebrate his supper? While the latter view is the historical view of the church, the former view has gained in popularity the past several hundred years thanks to the Platonic/Enlightenment notion that the physical world has no value in itself...2022-04-2738 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodPraying as Conversation
If God saves humans in order to have a relationship with them, then prayer is less a spiritual discipline that must be exercised, or a ritual that must be performed, or a “spiritual” way to work on our psychological help. Instead, prayer is a vital part of our relationship with him.
Like any relationship, God wants to hear our voice, to know what we’re thinking about, to open ourselves up to him so he can know us. And he also wants us to hear his voice, know what he’s thinking about, and give himself...2022-04-1339 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodDenominations
Christian unity frequently seems to be a reality in theory only. There are so many different opinion groups within the Christian world, so many denominations, and so many subgroups even within those denominations.
The primary reason for disunity in general, including in the Christian church, is that we humans have been damaged by the fall and now value power over truth. The result is inevitable – disunity. But a lot of disunity doesn’t come from active fighting, but from the way different people groups and historical groups have grappled differently with how the gospel applies to t...2022-03-3036 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodEvangelism
Evangelism is inherently uncomfortable in our postmodern culture – the notion that one person has a right to tell someone else what they should think is deeply troubling to many of us. Chuck and Aaron discuss how to do Christian evangelism in a way that respects this concern, and lives and speaks the gospel in a context of relationship-building.
When Christians allow the Holy Spirit to lead and guide relationships to the point where the gospel can be spoken into life situations, Christians will find that people are ready to listen to someone who loves them an...2022-03-1636 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodSaint and Sinner
Are we good or are we bad? This is a complex question. When we compare humans to each other it’s hard not to notice that some people are nicer, kinder, harder working, more honest, etc., than others. And in our relationships with other humans, trying to do good and help our neighbors is definitely a good thing! But the Bible insists that, however good or bad someone may be, before God they are not good. The reason is that God can see into our motives, and he knows what even we sometimes aren’t aware of – that a...2022-03-0239 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhy Being Good Isn’t Enough
Just about every human agrees that being a good person – doing kind things for others, being honest, working hard, etc. – is important. And this is true! But the problem is when we begin using these good things as a way to give ourselves value and try to locate our identity and meaning in these things, because when we examine ourselves closely and honestly we find that our words and actions can’t carry the weight of our own self-perception.
There is nothing we do, think, or say that is not to some degree turned in oursel...2022-02-1642 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWorship
Worship, or the act of ascribing worth, is a universal human activity. Every human being has something that he or she counts as the highest value in their life. These values will inevitably manifest themselves in worship activities: rituals, meals, economic activity, etc. Christian worship is no different: ascribing the highest worth to the creator God who meets us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians join together as a community to share a sacred meal, hear the sacred scriptures, and sing praises to the One they value highest. This value doesn’t make sense to mo...2022-02-0237 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodIs Christianity Inclusive or Exclusive?
The Bible claims that God loves all the world. Every ethnic group, language group, and nationality; men and women alike; both rich and poor as well as young and old, are welcomed into the family of God. In other words, Christianity is the most inclusive group in the whole world.
But the Bible also says the only way to become a member of this family is by faith in Jesus Christ. In other words, Christianity is definitively exclusive. And while this exclusivity might be offensive to the current postmodern westerner, the fact is that every...2022-01-1937 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodIs God in Charge?
The Bible claims that the creator God is a God of order and purpose, but everyone agrees that life frequently seems to be out of control. But God’s sovereign rule doesn’t always mean that life will be comfortable, prosperous, and orderly. In fact, God’s order and control is so all-encompassing and powerful that it contains apparent chaos, and he is using what looks like chaos to us to produce goodness and justice.
But the other reason it’s difficult to believe that God is in charge is that we ourselves long to be in ch...2022-01-0536 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhy Did Jesus Have to Die?
The death of Jesus of Nazareth, by crucifixion, is an irrefutable historical fact. But what his death means, if anything, is the subject of much debate.
On one level, Jesus was the casualty of Imperial Rome’s claims to universal power – his claim to be in some sense a king came into conflict with Caesar’s claim; but on another level, Christians insist that Jesus’ death paid for the sins of the world and, along with his resurrection, have turned the course of history from unrighteousness and death to righteousness and life. In this telling, the main...2021-12-2236 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodAngels
We see lots of angels portrayed in religious art, and there are even television shows and movies that revolve around the activity of fictional angels, but what does the Bible say about angels, who they are, what they look like, and what they do?
In this episode Chuck and Aaron talk about what the Bible says about angels. Angels look different at different times – sometimes they are clearly powerful and supernatural and inspire awe, but sometimes they look like ordinary humans. However, at all times their main job is to function as messengers and servants of...2021-12-0836 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Rapture
The idea of the rapture, a time when Jesus will come and take his followers out of the world, has been popularized in the broader culture through books like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series. And while the Bible teaches that when Jesus returns he will raise his people from the dead and gather those who are still alive up to meet him in the air, the word that is used for “meet” there is a technical word for going out of a city to meet a visiting dignitary in order...2021-11-2435 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodDoes God Care About the World?
In a world that, from the perspective of many people, is getting worse all the time, can we know if God is interested in this world?
One of the problems with this question is that American Christians tend to have a Deist view of God – a God who lives in the sky and is disengaged from our world. This view of God makes the belief in a apathetic God the default mode. And while this means that Christians and non-Christians tend to agree that the problems of this world are caused by humans, the question of...2021-11-1037 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe End of the World
In the midst of wars, violence, and global pandemics, it’s hard not to think about the end of the world. Especially since the end of modernism, with its bright optimism, almost everyone in the contemporary postmodern world are convinced the world is becoming a worse place and is headed for some sort of large-scale destruction. This fear has exposed our culture’s gods – science, medicine, money – for the fakes they are, and has left us hopeless and in despair, with a deep sense that the eventual end of the world is out of our control. Meanwhile, politici...2021-10-2736 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodFaith and Hope
We all need something to trust in – something that we can rely on when the chips are down. We also need hope – the belief that things are going to work out – in order to stay sane and committed in our daily lives.
Chuck and Aaron talk about faith and hope, what they are and how they overlap in meaning but are slightly different angles on how humans engage the world. For Christians, faith is not based on evidence but on relationship. Within the relationship Christians have with God and the world, they lean on God and tr...2021-10-1335 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHypocrisy
Many non-Christians see Christians as hypocritical – people who do not live up to their own stated standards. But this isn’t a particularly Christian problem, it’s a human problem: no one lives up to the goals and ideals of their own ideology.
When non-Christians correctly point out the hypocrisy of the Christian church, Christians must be repentant. If hypocrisy is a human problem, then Christians must present an alternative to the normal human pattern of self-defense and denial by being quick to acknowledge when they have not lived up to the standards of righteousness.
...2021-09-2940 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodBaptism
The Christian New Testament teaches that Christians must be baptized. In this episode, Chuck and Aaron talk about the meaning of Christian baptism, the proper biblical mode of baptism, and the proper subject of baptism.
They also talk about the Bible’s teaching that baptism has the power to save: because baptism is the Word of God in liquid form it has the ability to do all the things holy scripture can do – create faith, sanctify, and bestow grace. Baptism has this power because it connects us to the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Ho...2021-08-1838 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Psalms
Following up on the last episode about prayer, Chuck and Aaron talk about the value of the Psalms as a way to intimately connect with God.
The Psalms not only contain a wide variety of types of prayer, but all the Psalms work together to tell the story of God’s plan of salvation: they work through the reign of David, the loss of that reign in exile, the heartbreak of separation from God and his temple, the return of the David kingdom, and the subsequent renewal of all creation and the universal praise and wo...2021-08-0436 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodPrayer
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Christian God is his desire to have a relationship with his human creatures. He wants to talk to us and wants us to talk to him, and we call this prayer.
God saves his human creatures because he wants children. This means prayer is, fundamentally, our relational connection with him. And this communication is in many ways more powerful than our communication with each other, because while communication between two humans is by its nature colored with distortion and misunderstanding, God understands us completely because by his Holy...2021-07-2135 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhat Does God Think About Me?
Serious Christians spend a lot of time thinking about God, but in today’s episode Chuck and Aaron talk about what God thinks about his creatures.
Some people tend to think of God as a judge, and this of course is the way the Bible frequently talks about him as well. But the message of the gospel is that when God judges those who believe in Jesus he judges them “not guilty.” In other words, God’s attitude toward his people, even when he judges them, is acceptance and love: he thinks of them as his chil...2021-07-0735 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodHeaven and the New Creation
In a prior episode, the question of what Christians believe about the final destination of the Christian believer was raised. For many years, the Christian church has lived in the legacy of the medieval Catholic church’s teaching that the goal of Christianity is to get the believer to heaven after they die. But the Bible never uses the word “heaven” to refer to the place where Christians’ souls reside postmortem.
Instead, heaven is the seat of the power of the Creator God in Jesus Christ, a power that is taking over the creation now through...2021-06-2334 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodCraving?
The title of our podcast is Craving Answers, Craving God, but what do we mean by the word craving? And, outside of food, what do people crave? And specifically, do people crave answers? Do they crave God?
Chuck and Aaron talk about how everyone wants answers to questions, but how our postmodern culture’s belief that there are no real answers to any of these questions means existential conflict, leading to anxiety and depression. And while the Bible insists that no one, on their own, is looking for God, the deepest human cravings for success, or...2021-06-0933 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhat Use is the Church?
Christians believe that God has called the Church to be his agent for change in the world.
Chuck and Aaron talk about how to define the word “world”, and how God loves his creation – both people and nature, but that sometimes the Bible uses the word “world” negatively: as the broken and rebellious system determined to oppose God and his Messiah.
God’s whole goal in creating his Church is to work out his determination to win back his rebellious world to himself. He does this by using his Church to transform the culture into...2021-05-2636 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Problem of Hell
Christians and non-Christians alike are uncomfortable with what Jesus teaches about hell. But the difference between the two groups is that Christians don’t usually like to talk about hell, whereas non-Christians are very interested in talking about how Christians can believe something as horrible as the doctrine of eternal separation from God.
It’s important to understand that the Bible’s teaching on hell is the negative side of the Bible’s much more positive offer of new creation and restoration, and the imagery of torment is a highly powerful vehicle for communicating the horror o...2021-05-1231 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Trinity
Unbelievers find the Christian doctrine of the Trinity confusing and contradictory, and believers sometimes are confused about what the point of the Trinity is. But the Bible insists the only way to really know God is to know him in the story of the Bible – a story that describes him, even as early as Genesis 1, as existing in multiple persons and then, later, as One.
This notion of God as always existing in a relationship of three people is key to knowing who God is. He is not primarily a God of power, and even no...2021-04-2832 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodFacing our Fears
In the last episode Chuck and Aaron talked about fearing God. In this episode they talk about facing our fear of things that God doesn’t want us to be afraid of.
While some types of fear can be helpful – the brief momentary fears that give us bursts of focus and energy are a gift of God to help keep us safe. But the deep, chronic fears that paralyze us are symptoms of idolatry: we fear loss, and the prospect of losing things we love and trust necessarily create fear. But God wants us to trus...2021-04-1432 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodFearing God
Is fear a good or bad thing? The Bible tells us not to be afraid, but it also tells us to fear God.
The fear of God begins with his holiness. Chuck and Aaron talk about the possibility that the reason why we humans struggle with the notion of fearing God is that we aren’t enough in his presence. And this is the foundation of the healthy, biblical fear of God: recognizing that the things we’re afraid of and the things we’re afraid of losing have a god-like power over us which should...2021-03-3132 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodForgiveness, Part 2
Chuck and Aaron continue their discussion about forgiveness by thinking through the notion of the forgiveness of sins. In one sense some people need more forgiveness because some sins are more bad, more damaging. But in another sense, because all sins are equally wrong, everyone needs the same amount of forgiveness. God gives this forgiveness once for all time, to all who believe in Jesus; but in the life of the Christian, although the guilt is gone, the culpability for sins still has ramifications and so must be constantly repented of.
Chuck and Aaron also...2021-03-1732 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodForgiveness, Part 1
Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian faith, but it’s such a difficult concept to understand in our culture. Currently, everything is either permitted or unforgivable.
Part of this unwillingness to grapple with the notion is the understandable concern that forgiveness means saying that damaging and painful things that have been done are somehow “okay”. But real biblical forgiveness means recognizing that painful things that have been done to us by someone else are genuinely broken and wrong but choosing to carry that pain on oneself and not turn it back on them. One al...2021-03-0333 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Identity of Jesus
Who is Jesus, and why does he matter? Christians claim that Jesus stands in a special relationship with the creator God, but many others claim that he was merely a wise teacher or a powerful prophet. Chuck and Aaron talk about how Jesus fits into the Jewish story of the Bible as God’s special and unique agent to bring about his own kingdom of righteousness, justice, and peace.
Jesus has long been a contentious figure in cultural history – he is so important to so many people, both Christians and non-Christians, that the question of who...2021-02-1731 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Problem of Evil, Part 2
Chuck and Aaron talk about the difference between a Christian and non-Christian
definition of evil. Almost all people believe in evil – that there are things
that violate ultimate value. Both groups, in this sense, use the word evil in
this same way. The difference is that the values by which both groups judge an
event to be evil or not is drastically different. For Christians, the character
of God is the most deeply held value, while for our culture pleasure, or
materialism, or individual sovereignty are examples of popular ultimate values.
In fact, while Christians and non-Christians wi...2021-02-0331 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Problem of Evil
What is evil? And how could a good and all-powerful God allow it to exist? Chuck and Aaron discuss
the relationship between moral evil and creational evil; the philosophically unanswerable question
of how, if God exists, he could allow suffering; and the Bible's practical, two-part answer to
this question.
From a Christian perspective, evil is broader than just moral violations, it also encompasses all
the many things that don't work according to God's design. These two are related: Christianity
insists that the brokenness of this world has been caused by moral evil. The philosophical problem
...2021-01-2034 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodReligion and Christianity
Is Christianity a religion? What is religion? Chuck and Aaron discuss the similarities and differences between the religions and worldviews of the world and the religion of Christianity.
Christianity is seen by many as one of the world’s great religions, but is there a distinction between Christianity and the other world religions? What does it mean to be spiritual? Is it possible to be spiritual but not religious?
Chuck and Aaron discuss these questions, and talk about whether or not there are any differences between the spirituality and practice of Christianity an...2021-01-0632 minCraving Answers, Craving GodReligion and Christianity
Is Christianity a religion? What is religion? Chuck and Aaron discuss the similarities and differences between the religions and worldviews of the world and the religion of Christianity.</p>
Christianity is seen by many as one of the world’s great religions, but is there a distinction between Christianity and the other world religions? What does it mean to be spiritual? Is it possible to be spiritual but not religious?
Chuck and Aaron discuss these questions, and talk about whether or not there are any differences between the spirituality and practice of...2021-01-0632 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodLoneliness and God
Many people struggle with chronic loneliness, a sickness not always alleviated by the presence of other people. Why do we, in spite of all the people around us, feel so disconnected? Chuck and Aaron talk about how our culture became so bored, how this boredom cannot be alleviated by joining special interest clubs, and how having a relationship with Jesus in the Christian Church not only alleviates our chronic boredom but connects us to the heart of God.
Loneliness is a massive problem in our culture. This is not just an issue for people who...2020-12-2335 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodWhy Church?
Many people in our culture identify as “spiritual” but find the idea of belonging to a church or other religious group hard to swallow. But even though we reject the thought of community, we find ourselves – in our increasing loneliness as a culture – craving community at the same time. Is it possible that this craving comes from our being made in God’s image, and thus made for the very community we reject?
The Bible tells the story of God’s plan to create a new humanity for himself, a new people. We as postmoderns in the conte...2020-12-0934 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Truth of the Bible’s Story
With all the competing stories in our culture, how can we know that the story of the Bible is the right one? Chuck and Aaron talk about how the story of the Bible takes into account all the different aspects of life in God’s creation in ways that all the alternate stories can’t.
The story of the Bible claims to be the one true story of all reality, and its reliability can be experienced when we allow its story to subsume our own stories, giving them meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, the competing stories that...2020-11-2540 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodOther Stories
If the Bible exercises its authority as a Story, what are the alternative stories that challenge the Bible for this authority? Chuck and Aaron talk about competing stories that contemporary culture tells itself that all claim to have authority.
The story of the Bible tells the story of Creation (Where did we come from? What are we meant for?), Fall (What went wrong? Why are we in the trouble we’re in?), Redemption (What’s the solution? How are things getting fixed?), and Restoration (How will the Story end with a happy ending?).
Chuc...2020-11-1132 min
Craving Answers, Craving GodThe Story of the Bible
Christians claim that the Bible is authoritative, but how can an ancient document written in a specific historical time and geographic place be authoritative over people living here and now?
Chuck and Aaron discuss the problem of authority claims in an anti-authoritarian culture, and how and why our culture got to the point where it views authority claims as oppressive. They discuss how science and rationalism replaced God as the ultimate authority in our culture for several hundred years, but how postmodernism has now also abandoned science as an ultimate authority. This means that the...2020-10-2832 min