Taylor Mertins
Dettagli canale
Taylor Mertins
thirty something pastor, podcast host, and fan of parables
Episodi recenti
450 episodi
The Church Is God's Message For the World
It’s by grace, and only by grace that Jacob makes it to the well and to the banks of the Jabbok river. It’s by grace, and only by grace, that the conn...
The Relief from Captivity
From his very first sermon Jesus identifies the work of the Lord with rescue, release, and relief.
And the rest of the New Testament is...
The Relief from Productivity
One of the most compelling and evergreen reasons to follow Jesus is that discipleship is playful. There’s a dance to the life of faith and it’s fun, o...
The Relief from Keeping Up
Dave Zahl writes, “The very notion of a weekly Sabbath breaks the twenty-four-seven cycle of more and reminds us that we are God’s treasured children,...
The Relief from Status Anxiety
When Jesus commands the disciples to be like children, he’s telling us to recognize how much we’re like children no matter how old we actually are. Be...
The Relief From Control
We're all obsessed with control and we tend to mask it under the guise of efficiency. We adopt and adapt new behaviors and practices that promise orde...
The Relief From Rejection
Salvation has personal, domestic, social, economic, and theological dimensions. Salvation, in the New Testament, is the same word for health and well-...
The Relief From Regret
All of us have some moment we would redo if given the chance, some past decision or action or utterance that we would take back if we could.
The Relief From Deserving
The prodigal perfectly proclaims the paradox of the gospel: Jesus dies and is resurrected for us whether we deserve it or not. Like the younger brothe...
The Place of Grace
Hosea’s life becomes the parable of his preaching.
Gomer, Hosea’s wife, mother of his three oddly named children, whom he loves and cheri...
The Story of Starting Over
It’s not too late to change your mind
It’s not too late for the truth this time
It’s not too late to fall on your knees
It’s not to...
The Surprise of Salvation
When healing comes, its usually quiet and unexpected and surprising. Sometimes it requires a crack in the sidewalk before the root of healing can take...
The Truth Is A Cave
Elijah climbs the mountain on a hope and a prayer, looking for a theophany. He comes looking for fire, wind, smoke, and earthquake, a decisive declara...
The Slippery Slope of Sin
One day, in the city of David, shadows darken as a cross is raised. Upon which is nailed the last king to come from the line of David. What does God d...
The Early Church
There’s only once church that matters, and it’s not a church that’s wealthy, or powerful, or prestigious, or bursting at the seems, or filled with acc...
Praise Is Awe Leaving The Body
Idolatry is real and it is more destructive than anything we can imagine.
Idolatry is believing that social media is actually social whe...
Blessed To Bless
Saint Augustine said, “You are the Body of Christ. In you and through you the work of incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken. You are to be...
Pursued By Mercy
Hear the Good News: The mercy of God is going to catch you. It might happen in a backyard summer celebration. It could happen in church on a Sunday. O...
Praise Is What We're Made For
The world rings with praise only because the whole of creation is in on it!
Praise the Lord! The sun and moon, the sea, fire and snow, s...
Graves Into Gardens
God works in ways seen and unseen. The psalmist can only sing this song as one who has made it to the other side and is able to look back and see how...
Today Is The Only Day There Is
Good music, and I mean good in the true and beautiful sense, good music has a magic to it. It hits us, brings forth from us feelings we didn’t know we...
But
Matthew tells of an angel who comes like lightning to roll back the stone. Mark recalls the women waking up early to go anoint Jesus’ body, John start...
The Liturgy of Love
If you don’t have one already, Holy Week will give you a low anthropology. It shows us at our worst. It’s not just the story of good vs. evil. It’s al...
Learning By Heart
There are these threads in the scriptures that if you just start to pull on one of them you’ll begin to see how the whole thing is bound together. And...
The Liturgies of Life
Little things matter! Everything we do, whether we realize it or not, enfolds us and those near us into a vision of what we might call “the good life....
The Spirit Meets You Where You Are
Our God is nothing if not incarnational. That is, despite what others may say, we have a very materialistic faith. God takes on flesh and moves into t...
You Might Not Love What You Think
Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook (just to mention a few) are frighteningly good at captivating and capturing our imaginations as we spend our days expl...
You Are What You Love
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, explains the power of the heart over the mind like this: “If you want to build a ship, don’t dr...
The Commands
Will Willimon tells of having once served a church where there was a long standing tradition in which lay leader would rise at the conclusion of the s...
The Teaching
Robert Jenson once said, “It is a great achievement to know yourself a sinner.” It sounds paradoxical, but to know you’re a sinner puts you (and me) i...
The Call
People always assume that the church’s primary business is to get people to behave themselves, to teach morality, and then keep them on the right trac...
The Response
There’s nowhere Jesus goes without outsiders becoming insiders. That’s part of the mission. But it’s nothing new! Over and over and over again in scri...
The Sermon
Whenever there is deliverance, liberation, recovery, and release, there is the preaching of the Gospel.
In other words, preaching isn’t...
The Wedding
Robert Farrar Capon said, “Whatever the church is, it should enable us to realize we are at a party of outrageous proportions; and, at the same time,...
The River
With the magi and the manger we discover how the kingdom inaugurated in Jesus extends even to the Gentiles.
And with the baptism in the J...
Paradoxology
The wild proclamation of the Gospel, made manifest in a baby in a manger surrounded by some certainly strange gifts, is that God knows everything abou...
The Time Being
The strange and serious proclamation of Christmas is that though things change, we’re always in the moment of Christmas. Even when we snuff out the ca...
The Wonder of the Word
Here’s the truth of Christmas, the great proclamation of the Gospel - God makes time for you and me. And not only that, but God has given us all the t...
The Fullness of Time
Mary praises God through song for cracking open the heavens and pouring out justice on a world thirsty for it. She points to the power of the Spirit b...
Firewood For The Future
Willie Jennings says that Joy is an act of resistance against despair and its forces.
Again, it’s not living in denial, it’s not pretend...