dizziness
Christopher Gillespie

📖 New sermon
Who Are the Violent?
Who are the violent who take the kingdom of heaven by force? Sinners with empty hands take hold of Christ and His mercy. The King suffered every blow our sins deserved, and He gives His kingdom freely.
Read it: #naddr1qq…nkju
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/3mvWbwYIQIs
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/who-are-the-violent-the-festival-of-the-reformation-2026/

2026-10-25 21:59:00 UTC

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New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapters 1–25 Review
We review Jeremiah 1–25 by returning to the prophet’s call: God put His words in Jeremiah’s mouth and sent him to speak them. From Jeremiah we follow the promise of the Prophet like Moses to Jesus, who drank the cup of wrath His prophet could only carry. We also consider what it means to hear Christ today through the men He sends to preach His Word.
Read it: #naddr1qq…l7fa
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/DtVlPPCUo-g
Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapters-1-25-review/

2026-10-24 00:18:10 UTC

Banned Books 457: Post-Conference Debrief
Donavon Riley and Christopher Gillespie debrief the 2026 Here We Still Stand conference and the preaching method of Rev. Dr. James Nestingen. Nestingen's stories were never illustrations: each one exposed the bondage of the will, and then Jesus broke in. The story you tell about your life is your confession of bondage, and Christ turns it.
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/zLV5ksuYF9Q
🎧 Listen & boost: https://fountain.fm/show/l4LPiVNnJDAcH9ZrAv0u
📖 Show notes: https://bannedbooks1517.org/episodes/ep-457
#BannedBooks #Lutheran #Nestingen #Theology #Podcast

2026-10-22 15:13:43 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Friend, How Did You Come In?
The man the King walks up to is not a scoffer who stayed home. He is the pious man in the pew, dressed in his own clothes, and the Law shuts his mouth. But there is another speechless man in Matthew's Gospel: the Son, who was bound, stripped, and cast into the dark in his place, so that the baptized wear Christ and have their mouths opened to sing.
Read it: #naddr1qq…khn9
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/1--R0oDTy8c
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/friend-how-did-you-come-in-trinity-20-observed-2026/

2026-10-21 20:47:23 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Built from His Side
God built Eve from Adam's side while he slept. Christ slept in death on the cross, His side was pierced, and from the water and the blood God built His Bride, the Church. A marriage God builds does not rest on how well the couple builds. It rests on Christ, who gave Himself for them.
Read it: #naddr1qp…r35s
🔗 https://sjrl.org/built-from-his-side-holy-matrimony-of-justin-schaetzer-and-micaela-caples-2026/

2026-10-20 23:27:51 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapter 25
Jeremiah 25 reads like a list of verdicts on nations nobody can find on a map. The easy reading is that God is settling accounts with Judah's enemies. That is half right. The cup begins in Jerusalem, and God puts it in Jeremiah's own hand: "Take this wine cup of fury from My hand" (v. 15). Every nation drinks, God's own city first, and the chapter points ahead to the One who drank it in their place.
Read it: #naddr1qq…nfhz
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtube.com/live/ZtkRfnQzBJ8
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-25/

2026-10-20 23:25:54 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Peace to This House
The Lord's words to the seventy end in a house, not on the road. The peace they speak is not theirs; it is His, sent before His face. It can be sent back by the house that smiles and never lets it in, and by the one who hears "son of peace" and counts himself out. But a son of peace is simply the one it was sent to, and the Lord who set His face toward the cross now comes to this house as host and speaks it first.
Read it: #naddr1qq…5qnf
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/l7d2v8QIeCM
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/peace-to-this-house-feast-of-st-luke-2026/

2026-10-15 14:02:09 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Light Commands in a Heavy Time
The disciples ask Jesus when; He tells them how to stand. St. John says His commands are not heavy, yet Mark 13 lays on councils, betrayal, and the hatred of all. The weight is real, but every command comes with Jesus Himself attached. He was delivered up in your place, He endured to the end for you, and the victory is already yours.
Read it: #naddr1qp…0jrt
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/mKkFdKf1e2g
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/light-commands-in-a-heavy-time-friday-of-trinity-19-observed-2026/

2026-10-12 15:25:33 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapter 24
Two baskets of figs sit in front of the temple, one good and one so rotten it can't be eaten. The easy reading is that God keeps the good people and throws out the bad, so be a good fig. That is half right. It misses who lands in which basket, and who does the work. The good figs are the exiles Jerusalem wrote off, and every verb in verses 5 to 7 has God as its subject: "I will give them a heart to know Me."
Read it: #naddr1qq…j6n8
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtube.com/live/CDxoVmJJXxk
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-24/

2026-10-12 13:59:55 UTC

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📖 New sermon
A Pardon with Your Name on It
Jesus does not tell the paralytic that God forgives sinners. He says, “Your sins are forgiven you.” A general pardon lets you stay in the crowd; Christ puts the pardon in a man’s mouth, on earth, with your name written on it.
Read it: #naddr1qq…mjhf
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/RwfrqR4OsIU
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/a-pardon-with-your-name-on-it-trinity-19-2026/

2026-10-08 15:48:47 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The Least of All the Seeds
The Lord picks a speck of a seed and a woman's hidden leaven, and we grade the kingdom by what we can count. But the seed is Christ Himself, small enough to step on, sown in a garden and hung on a tree. The one who grades, and comes up short, is the bird He has given a place to land.
Read it: #naddr1qq…lhdq
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/v4QWjDwI-Ps
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-least-of-all-the-seeds-friday-of-trinity-18-observed-2026/

2026-10-06 01:18:51 UTC

Banned Books 456: Nestingen — The Gospel and Repentance
Donavon and Christopher finish James Nestingen's "Preaching Repentance," reading Luther's Antinomian Disputations against Agricola. The Holy Spirit, working through the gospel, is the law's only legitimate user. Christ ends the law twice, by fulfilling it and by silencing it, and absolution is where repentance comes to rest in faith. "Only sinners are forgiven." The episode ends on Zacchaeus, and on why "doable" law empties churches.
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/jguEbDJCTqQ
🎧 Listen & boost: https://fountain.fm/show/l4LPiVNnJDAcH9ZrAv0u
📖 Show notes: https://bannedbooks1517.org/episodes/ep-456
#BannedBooks #Lutheran #Nestingen #Theology #Podcast

2026-10-05 15:50:56 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapter 23
This week the chapter Advent made famous. God turns on the shepherds who scattered His sheep and promises to raise up for David a Righteous Branch, a King who will execute judgment and righteousness in the earth (Jer. 23:5), the very thing chapter 22 demanded and no king did. Then God names Him. Judah's last king was Zedekiah, whose name means "My righteousness is the LORD." He wore the name and lived nothing like it. God gives the true King that name turned around: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS (Jer. 23:6). The rest of the chapter goes after the prophets who preached peace out of their own dreams, and God answers them with His word: Is not My word like a fire? says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces? (Jer. 23:29). The hammer comes first. Then the name.
Read it: #naddr1qq…4c0u
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtube.com/live/aXNWmEs8ywE
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-23/

2026-10-05 15:39:46 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The Little Monk
There is a little monk in all of us who says real service to God is somewhere else, so we look down on the ordinary work God gave us and step over the neighbor at our elbow. Jesus answers the temple lawyer with a kitchen answer: love God, love your neighbor. David's Lord came down, kept both commandments in the carpenter's shop and on the cross for you, and now He sits. Under His wings the diaper, the combine, and the drive to your mother's appointment are done to God.
Read it: #naddr1qq…ppee
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/1mXNkOJwaQU
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-little-monk-trinity-18-2026/

2026-10-01 15:21:28 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The Same Pilate
Bad news always gets to church first, and the people who bring it to Jesus have already sorted the dead. Jesus takes away both explanations, Pilate's sword and Siloam's tower, and says twice, "unless you repent." Then the same Pilate asks whether Jesus is a Galilean, and at the cross the blood is the sacrifice itself, poured now into the cup for you.
Read it: #naddr1qq…q92w
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/v4csgAZdrQ8
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-same-pilate-friday-of-trinity-17-2026/

2026-09-29 10:52:09 UTC

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Love it!

2026-09-28 21:14:33 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The Thirst that Swells
Luke gives you one table on one afternoon: a man with dropsy, drowning in water and still thirsty, and a room full of people swollen with the same thirst for the good seat. You cannot humble your way out of pride any more than he could drink his way out of dropsy. But the Lord who heals took hold of the sick man, took the sickness into Himself, and carried it to the cross, where He cried, “I thirst.” The Host gives the seats by mercy, and the water He gives fills you without swelling you.
Read it: #naddr1qq…fn3s
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/kDvxdxoNQlY
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-thirst-that-swells-trinity-17-2026/

2026-09-27 00:32:22 UTC

Banned Books 455: Nestingen — Preaching Repentance Is a Problem
Riley reads his teacher James Nestingen's 1989 essay "Preaching Repentance": why the call to repent is a problem theologically, pastorally, and for the preacher's own survival. The law always accuses and is never neutral, and the preacher's work is to name it, as Nathan named David. Part one of two; the gospel comes next week.
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/TFD9IVe9v0I
🎧 Listen & boost: https://fountain.fm/show/l4LPiVNnJDAcH9ZrAv0u
📖 Show notes: https://bannedbooks1517.org/episodes/ep-455
#BannedBooks #Lutheran #Nestingen #Theology #Podcast

2026-09-24 14:01:56 UTC

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📖 New sermon
When and As He Willed
Why did Jesus heal the blind man at Bethsaida with two touches? Not because faith comes in stages, and not because He failed the first time. He showed His majesty when and as He willed, and the spit He put on blind eyes is the spit He took on His own face at the cross. The same hands keep touching you at font and rail, until your body rises and sees everyone clearly.
Read it: #naddr1qq…mj89
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/TyVnAMreby4
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/when-and-as-he-willed-friday-of-trinity-16-observed-2026/

2026-09-21 02:23:49 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapters 21-22
This week Jeremiah is sent to the palace. Zedekiah asks him for a miracle while Babylon is at the wall and gets the answer nobody wanted — I Myself will fight against you (Jer. 21:5). Then chapter 22 walks back through the four kings Jeremiah outlived and measures every one of them against a sentence spoken twice to the house of David: execute judgment and righteousness. In the middle of the worst of them God stops and points at the good one: Josiah judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well — and then the line this session hangs on, Was not this knowing Me? (Jer. 22:16). It ends where nobody wants it to. God swears that if Coniah were the signet ring on His own right hand He would tear it off, and tells the scribes to write this man down as childless (Jer. 22:30) — and Matthew's family tree of Jesus runs straight through that man.
Read it: #naddr1qq…xv5s
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtube.com/live/b8UjUKJ9wNo
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapters-21-22/

2026-09-21 02:22:13 UTC

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📖 New sermon
A Word With Nothing Under It Yet
Nobody in Nain sent for Him. The widow did not pray, the boy certainly did not, and there is no faith in this story anywhere — only a Man coming the other way through the gate who tells a mother at her son's casket to stop crying. It is a command with nothing under it yet: the boy is still cold and gray when Jesus says it. That is where the church lives, between "Do not weep" and "arise," holding a word with nothing in our hand but the promise.
Read it: #naddr1qq…d97n
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/8W6EjX6-gGY
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/a-word-with-nothing-under-it-yet-trinity-16-2026/

2026-09-19 22:53:17 UTC

Banned Books 454: Elert — Church Fellowship in the Local Congregation
Werner Elert's last book, in Norman Nagel's translation, reads the first four centuries and asks what actually held a congregation together. Not brotherly love, not charity, not shared morals — the common celebration of the Supper, a fellowship exclusive by design. Gillespie calls it the book that moved him to weekly communion; Riley was uninvited from his circuit's koinonia meetings for bringing it along.
▶️ Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/JHeziXOdZwE
🎧 Listen & boost: https://fountain.fm/show/l4LPiVNnJDAcH9ZrAv0u
📖 Show notes: https://bannedbooks1517.org/episodes/ep-454
#BannedBooks #Lutheran #Elert #Theology #Podcast

2026-09-17 15:46:54 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Asking the Son for His Papers
The Sanhedrin's question — by what authority? — is not illegitimate; checking a teacher's call is exactly their office, and our Confessions call that mercy, not bureaucracy. The tragedy is structural: servants in the house have stopped the Son at the door of His own house and demanded His papers. He never produces papers — He produces the house, answering not with a credential but a crucifixion, and naming us the very masonry He set at the font.
Read it: #naddr1qp…2rdz
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/HNgPVLWtfy8
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/asking-the-son-for-his-papers-friday-of-trinity-15-observed-2026/

2026-09-14 15:30:41 UTC

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📖 New sermon
A Handful of Flour
A widow at the gate of Zarephath has a handful of flour, a little oil, two sticks, one son, and a plan to eat it and die. But before she ever picked up a stick, the LORD had already said, "I have commanded a widow there to provide for you." The cake goes to the prophet first because the promise is in the prophet's mouth, and the promise is the one thing in the story that never runs out. Christ came hungry to your gate and went out with wood on His back to make the meal where He died and you get to eat.
Read it: #naddr1qq…hjrl
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/D4JurD0WXjs
🎧 Listen and boost: https://fountain.fm/show/nJo9UCXmgHzaFEVnRjdd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/a-handful-of-flour-trinity-15-2026/

2026-09-12 17:13:21 UTC

Banned Books 453: Athanasius — Against the Wiles of Satan
Athanasius wrote the Life of St. Antony around 356; the section we read is Antony's own address to the monks, on daily discipline, what possessions are actually worth, and how the demons operate. Antony went into the desert and found the same enemies waiting — solitude doesn't remove the battlefield. And Athanasius's real counsel turns out not to be the desert at all, but the church.
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/FftLJi6ZNqA
🎧 Listen & boost: https://fountain.fm/show/l4LPiVNnJDAcH9ZrAv0u
📖 Show notes: https://bannedbooks1517.org/episodes/ep-453
#BannedBooks #Lutheran #Athanasius #Theology #Podcast

2026-09-10 12:21:57 UTC

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📖 New sermon
He Came to Be Your Estate
A man interrupts the sermon to ask about money, and Christ refuses the case: “Who made Me a judge or an arbitrator over you?” He gives a farmer instead — the barns, the succession plan, and then the religious upgrades, the pledge card and the estate gift. Luther’s verdict on all of it is not greed but idolatry, the most common idol on earth. But the appointed reading does not stop at “Fool.” It runs on to the ravens: the one creature in the chapter with no storehouse and no barn is the one God feeds. He will not divide your estate. He came to be your estate.
Read it: #naddr1qq…6h5m
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/xN47i4hPTvY
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/He-Came-to-Be-Your-Estate-Friday-of-Trinity-14-observed-2026-e3ol6gl
🔗 https://sjrl.org/he-came-to-be-your-estate-friday-of-trinity-14-observed-2026/

2026-09-06 20:21:58 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Two Sermons Were Preached That Day
All ten lepers believed Jesus, and all ten were cleansed by nothing but His word on the road. Then the priests preached them a second sermon — only God cleanses leprosy, your obedience did this, don't you dare give the glory to a man from Nazareth — and nine believed that preacher instead, praising God with their tongues while blaspheming Him in Christ. They had a Bible verse, and they thought they did well. "Your faith has saved you" is Christ's ruling handed down against theirs: not the going, not the offering, but faith alone, because Jesus alone was already cleansing before they had walked ten steps.
Read it: #naddr1qq…9e53
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/cfqsYuR7eSk
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/The-Sunday-of-the-Ten-Lepers--September-6--2026-e3oe82p
🔗 https://sjrl.org/two-sermons-were-preached-that-day-trinity-14-2026/

2026-09-06 20:08:31 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapter 20
Last week Jeremiah smashed a jar in the garbage valley. This week we find out what it cost him: Pashhur, the chief officer of the temple police, beats him and locks him in the stocks overnight, and Jeremiah opens his mouth and says the worst thing anybody says to God in the Old Testament — O LORD, You induced me, and I was persuaded (Jer. 20:7). Then watch one word walk through the next five verses: God prevailed over him, his friends expect to prevail against him, and they will not — because nineteen chapters back the promise was already standing, they shall not prevail against you (Jer. 1:19). His enemies cannot win against him precisely because God already did.
Read it: #naddr1qq…kyrn
▶️ Watch: https://youtube.com/live/pTTgQRKbqRw
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-20--September-6--2026-e3oe81k
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-20/

2026-09-03 15:16:38 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Strive to Enter but Only through Christ
Jesus commands you to agonize your way through the narrow door, and in the same breath says the many who try will not be strong enough. So the striving He commands cannot be strength. Luke uses that agony word exactly twice — once here, where Christ commands it, and once in a garden, where Christ does it. He did the agonizing, and He heard “Depart from Me” at the shut door, so that the sentence over you is that He knows where you are from: the font.
Read it: #naddr1qp…m89k
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/mM3LegqMLgQ
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Friday-of-Trinity-13-observed--September-2--2026-e3oa038
🔗 https://sjrl.org/strive-to-enter-but-only-through-christ-friday-of-trinity-13-observed-2026/

2026-08-30 22:09:44 UTC

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📖 New sermon
He Had Compassion On You
The lawyer answers rightly — love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself — and then negotiates the second table: Who is my neighbor? Jesus tells of a man stripped, beaten, and left half dead, seen and passed by priest and Levite, and found by a Samaritan whose guts turn with compassion, who pours oil and wine, carries, and leaves a blank check with the innkeeper: whatever more you spend, I will repay when I come again. You are the man in the ditch, and He had compassion — He came where you are, bound you in oil and wine, brought you to the inn, and paid it all.
Read it: #naddr1qq…2kan
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/WDgnQFl9BlQ
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/He-Had-Compassion-On-You-Trinity-13-2026-e3o3o2o
🔗 https://sjrl.org/he-had-compassion-on-you-trinity-13-2026/

2026-08-30 21:57:00 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapter 19
Last week the Lord sent Jeremiah to the potter's house to watch wet clay wadded up and made again. This week He sends him to buy a finished flask — fired, narrow-necked, the kind that cannot be mended — and to carry it through the Potsherd Gate to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, where Judah burned its sons to Baal, a thing God says never came into His mind. Before the elders and the priests he smashes it on the ground, and the word with the shards is that it "cannot be made whole again" — the Hebrew is healed (Jer. 19:11).
Read it: #naddr1qq…5zzg
▶️ Watch: https://youtube.com/live/Pk8IQ7RkKlA
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-19--August-30--2026-e3o3mbd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-19/

2026-08-27 14:57:09 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Capernaum Needed to Hear ‘For You’
Jesus pronounces woe on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum — and says it will be more tolerable for Sodom on the day of judgment. Capernaum was His own town, the place He moved to and lived in; nearness to Christ is exactly what condemned it. What makes that same nearness a mercy at the altar rail is not proximity but the words attached to the bread and the cup: given and shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins.
Read it: #naddr1qp…8ae2
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/V6uaZN6da9Q
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Capernaum-Needed-to-Hear-For-You--Friday-of-Trinity-12-observed-e3nvfut
🔗 https://sjrl.org/capernaum-needed-to-hear-for-you-friday-of-trinity-12-observed-2026/

2026-08-24 18:15:34 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The Sigh of God
Of everything Jesus does for the deaf man — the fingers, the spit, the word of power — St. Mark writes down the sigh. A sigh is the sound the curse makes coming out of a human being, and ours do nothing: we can't sigh a tumor out of a body, or our dead back to life. Jesus takes the whole weight of it into His own chest and breathes out one word. It cost Him heaven's silence on the cross to say it.
Read it: #naddr1qq…cg3a
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/wHHGVLiFrlg
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Trinity-12-2026-e3nr51j
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-sigh-of-god-trinity-12-2026/

2026-08-24 17:54:10 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapter 18
God sends Jeremiah to a shop near the clay pits — a wheel, a kiln, and a heap out back of the pieces that didn't come out right. The Hebrew word for that tradesman is yotzer, the one who forms. It is the same word God uses in verse 11 for what He is making now: a disaster. The Potter is still at the wheel, and the vessel is not fired yet — which is why He says, "Return now every one from his evil way" (Jer. 18:11).
Read it: #naddr1qq…43xd
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/7hinj5zoNeM
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-18-e3nr4ve
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-18/

2026-08-22 15:51:04 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Dan is a Son and He is Home
A fourteen-year-old stood at this altar fifty-eight years ago and was handed a verse to carry home: “If you abide in My word.” Fifty-eight years later, you watched that verse get tested — and learned it was never Dan’s grip on Christ that held him, but Christ’s grip on Dan, sealed in his Baptism as a one-month-old. A slave doesn’t get to stay in the house forever. A son does. Dan is a son. Dan is home.
Read it: #naddr1qq…clam
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/n_0sSU6tn3A
🎧 Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2X3FiiRqNFQMXhwAPa0IXh
🔗 https://sjrl.org/dan-is-a-son-and-he-is-home-funeral-of-daniel-e-heidemann-2026/

2026-08-20 14:07:28 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Where the Eagles Gather
The Pharisees want a date. Jesus won't give one — He takes the question apart and rules out both places we look for the kingdom of God: out there in the headlines, and inside your own chest. So the disciples finally stop asking when and ask the right question: "Where, Lord?" And the answer is wherever the Body is — on this altar, in a piece of bread you couldn't tell from any other.
Read it: #naddr1qq…kgzl
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/qJH9fOEB2RU
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Where-the-Eagles-Gather-Friday-of-Trinity-11-observed-e3nliam
🔗 https://sjrl.org/where-the-eagles-gather-friday-of-trinity-11-observed-2026/

2026-08-17 18:32:42 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The Mercy Seat is Jesus Christ
Two men go up to the temple at the hour of the lamb, blood being shed a few steps away in plain sight. One of them never mentions it — his religion is complete without the blood, and that religion sits in the pew and climbs into the pulpit. The other says one sentence, and the word he uses is not the ordinary word for mercy. It is the mercy-seat word: let the blood be over me. And the mercy seat is no longer a gold lid in a room no one may enter. It is a Man.
Read it: #naddr1qq…tv7p
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/mddOVLBH2Y8
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/The-Mercy-Seat-is-Jesus-Christ-Trinity-11-2026-e3nhbeu
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-mercy-seat-is-jesus-christ-trinity-11-2026/

2026-08-17 18:14:00 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapters 16–17
Last week Jeremiah called God a stream that runs dry and his own wound incurable. This week God uses that same word of the human heart — "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" (Jer. 17:9) — and then, five verses later, the man with the incurable wound asks to be healed anyway: "Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed" (Jer. 17:14). He even gives God back the name he'd thrown at Him as an accusation, calling Him the fountain of living waters (Jer. 17:13). Chapter 16 is how he got there. God takes away his wife, his funerals, and his feasts, until there's nothing ordinary left to lean on. He isn't being punished. He is being made into the message.
Read it: #naddr1qq…hlvz
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/2qaxlVNC5lk
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapters-16-17--August-16--2026-e3nhad0
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapters-16-17/

2026-08-13 16:47:33 UTC

Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
--Flannery O'Connor

2026-08-13 16:20:16 UTC

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📖 New sermon
You pray to be stood up; Christ stands you up!
The snare of the last day falls on those sitting — and you sit because you cannot carry what you already hold. Every program you have run, from the budget to the devotional with the ribbon, set one more thing on your back and told you to stand. But the verb in the Gospel is passive: you are told to beg that somebody would stand you up. Christ has done it, and He says so out of a preacher's mouth — holy, blameless, above reproach, today, before you have improved by one ounce.
Read it: #naddr1qp…tkjh
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/5KIP6AnRzic
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/You-pray-to-be-stood-up-Christ-stands-you-up--Friday-of-Trinity-10-observed-2026-e3nc5eg
🔗 https://sjrl.org/you-pray-to-be-stood-up-christ-stands-you-up-friday-of-trinity-10-observed-2026/

2026-08-10 02:34:12 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapters 13–15
God made His people to cling to Him the way a sash clings to a man's waist (Jer. 13:11). A sash that stops clinging rots in a hole by the river and is good for nothing. Then the prophet who preached that ends up praying his people's own words back to God — they say they are called by Your name, and so does he; they say there is no healing for us, and he says my wound is incurable (Jer. 14:9, 19; 15:16, 18) — and he accuses God of being a stream that runs dry. God doesn't defend Himself. He answers with the very thing Jeremiah has been preaching: "If you return, then I will bring you back" (Jer. 15:19). Our Confessions file that line under the Gospel.
Read it: #naddr1qq…chaj
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/E8tqtvg-1lk
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapters-13-15--August-9--2026-e3n6nb2
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapters-13-15/

2026-08-10 02:07:24 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The Tears of Your Savior Settle It
Jesus cries twice in the Gospels — once at a grave, and once outside a church. The grave we understand. The other one is worse, and it is the only thing in that whole city worth crying about. You can read God's oath that He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked and still lie awake wondering whether He meant it about you — but the tears of your Savior settle it.
Read it: #naddr1qq…v6jq
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/G4qB7Jr2US0
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/The-tears-of-your-Savior-settle-it-Trinity-10-2026-e3n6m8a
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-tears-of-your-savior-settle-it-trinity-10-2026/

2026-08-06 14:08:46 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Without Leaving the Others Undone
Jesus comes to dinner and will not wash His hands. The mint was never commanded — grain, wine, flock, that is what God said to tithe — but a tenth of the mint costs nothing, and being seen to give it is worth a great deal, so justice gets stepped over on the way to the herb garden. Christ does not cancel the mint; He keeps the weightier matters and the little ones both, and leaves not one undone. He keeps none of it for Himself: the hands He would not wash at that table are the hands they nailed down.
Read it: #naddr1qp…a7jg
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/kSBM4qOCbW0
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Without-Leaving-the-Others-Undone-Friday-of-Trinity-9-2026-observed-e3n2d7j
🔗 https://sjrl.org/without-leaving-the-others-undone-friday-of-trinity-9-observed-2026/

2026-08-03 02:41:56 UTC

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📖 New Bible study
Jeremiah Chapters 11–12
This week the preacher becomes the sufferer. Jeremiah announces the covenant curse (Jer. 11:3) and then learns that the men of his own hometown have marked him for death (Jer. 11:21). Three handings-over run through these chapters: Judah handed over to the curse she chose, Jeremiah handed over like a docile lamb brought to the slaughter (Jer. 11:19), and God's own dearly beloved of My soul handed over into enemy hands (Jer. 12:7). When Jeremiah asks the oldest question, why do the wicked prosper, the answer isn't information. It's a warning that the running gets harder, from the God who has run it Himself.
Read it: #naddr1qq…u387
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/E5Cn_CXH7kw
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-11-12-e3mspue
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapters-11-12/

2026-08-03 02:18:07 UTC

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📖 New sermon
He Was Faithful the Whole Time You Were Not
Jesus tells the parable of the unjust steward immediately after the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. Johann Gerhard saw why: Christ knows how easily we misuse that teaching for carnal security, taking the sweetest thing God ever said and turning it into a permission slip. Paul answers that man with a desert full of graves. Israel was baptized into Moses, ate the same spiritual food, drank from the Rock that was Christ, and two of them reached the Promised Land. The warning lands on the man who thinks he stands. So does the promise: God is faithful, the way of escape has an address, and the door behind you was never bolted.
Read it: #naddr1qq…e53s
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/ocrwQqqPcs8
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/He-Was-Faithful-the-Whole-Time-You-Were-Not-Trinity-9-2026-e3msp29
🔗 https://sjrl.org/he-was-faithful-the-whole-time-you-were-not-trinity-9-2026/

2026-07-30 15:16:55 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Holiness Runs Down from God and Never Back Up
The men haggling in the temple courtyard knew which oaths could be collected on. Swear by the gold and you're bound; swear by the temple and you can walk away. Jesus calls that blindness: holiness runs down from God to the thing and never back up, and the temple is holy only for Him who dwells in it. We do the same arithmetic with our years and our giving, wanting a righteousness we can audit. But the altar was holy before you got here, and the gift on it is Christ's own body and blood.
Read it: #naddr1qp…vrns
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/C3QLfHNvsTc
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Holiness-Runs-Down-from-God-and-Never-Back-Up-Friday-of-Trinity-8-2026-e3moht9
🔗 https://sjrl.org/holiness-runs-down-from-god-and-never-back-up-friday-of-trinity-8-observed-2026/

2026-07-27 16:09:08 UTC

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📖 New sermon
You Were Carried Through the Door Before You Could Walk
Two cries stand side by side in this Sunday's readings: "Lord, Lord" and "Abba, Father." The first belongs to an applicant outside the office door with his accomplishments in a folder; the second to a child who never wondered whether he was allowed in the house. Jesus doesn't dispute the applicants' resume. He disputes that it ever mattered. What every false prophet wants is to turn sons back into applicants.
Read it: #naddr1qp…3xzk
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/ysdzSQ4xz3M
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/You-Were-Carried-Through-the-Door-Before-You-Could-Walk-Trinity-8-2026-e3mk420
🔗 https://sjrl.org/you-were-carried-through-the-door-before-you-could-walk-eighth-sunday-after-trinity-2026/

2026-07-27 15:41:07 UTC

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📖 New biblestudy
Jeremiah Chapter 10
This week's class takes up Jeremiah 10, the prophet's longest satire on idols: a god cut from a tree, dressed in silver, nailed down so it will not topple (Jer. 10:4), a scarecrow in a cucumber field, carried because it cannot walk. Over against it stands the true God, the living God and the everlasting King (Jer. 10:10), who needs no carrying but carries His people (Isa. 46:3–7). Which direction the carrying runs is the whole difference between idolatry and the Gospel.
Read it: #naddr1qq…6xrj
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/uiZFurfrCQM
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-10-e3mk2oa
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-10/

2026-07-23 14:49:39 UTC

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📖 New sermon
They Kept the Husk and Threw the Kernel Away
On the Sabbath, the Pharisees found a rule to keep and lost the mercy it was meant to carry — husk without kernel. James diagnoses the same disease in the church: zeal that hides self-seeking envy. Christ, the One greater than the temple, was Himself crushed like the grain, so that guilty husk-keepers might be fed with mercy instead of judged by the letter.
Read it: #naddr1qp…nwdh
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/PQYU4Kqa1Tc
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/They-kept-the-husk-and-threw-the-kernel-away--Friday-of-Trinity-7-2026-e3meq7m
🔗 https://sjrl.org/they-kept-the-husk-and-threw-the-kernel-away-friday-of-the-seventh-week-after-trinity-2026/

2026-07-23 14:08:35 UTC

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2026-07-20 16:53:07 UTC

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📖 New sermon
You Have Come from Afar
The four thousand Jesus feeds in Mark 8 are Gentiles — outsiders with no claim on the God of Israel. Paul says the same of us: once strangers, far off, until brought near by the blood of Christ. What Christ did on that Gentile shore, He does again in the Sacrament, filling those who have no right to the table with more than enough.
Read it: #naddr1qq…ecqs
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/cIkx0OGxEVw
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/I-Have-Compassion-on-the-Crowds-Trinity-7-2026-e3mahi1
🔗 https://sjrl.org/you-have-come-from-afar-the-seventh-sunday-after-trinity-2026/

2026-07-20 16:04:08 UTC

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📖 New biblestudy
Jeremiah Chapter 9
This week's class takes up Jeremiah 9, where the prophet names the root sickness twice — **"they do not know Me"** (Jer. 9:3, 9:6) — and hands us the one boast that survives it: **"that he understands and knows Me"** (Jer. 9:24). Paul later routes the whole Gospel through that verse: no flesh may boast, unless it boasts in the Lord (1 Cor. 1:31).
Read it: #naddr1qq…jzk5
▶️ Watch: https://youtube.com/live/5vGiC089c_A
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-9--July-19--2026-e3mahlj
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-9/

2026-07-16 15:24:35 UTC

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📖 New sermon
He Crossed the Water for This
The Gerasene demoniac was a man no one could bind. James names the wisdom that builds a life like that: earthly, unspiritual, demonic, breeding envy and self-seeking until it makes "every evil thing." Then Jesus crosses the sea to unclean pagan ground for this one man, and with a single word, "Come out," He drowns Legion under the water. The man is left sitting, clothed, in his right mind. That is his Baptism, and ours, where the same word of Christ still drowns what binds us and seats us at His table.
Read it: #naddr1qq…zeu2
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/dwttk9J7_gk
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/He-Crossed-the-Sea-for-This-Friday-of-Trinity-6-2026-e3m5oh1
🔗 https://sjrl.org/he-crossed-the-water-for-this-friday-of-trinity-6-observed-2026/

2026-07-12 20:17:12 UTC

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📖 New biblestudy
Jeremiah Chapter 8
Jeremiah 8 is a chapter of missed chances. Judah will not turn back — the stork in the sky knows her seasons, but God's people do not know the time of the LORD's judgment — and the prophets cry 'Peace, peace' where there is no peace. 'The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.' And then the ache that gives the chapter its name: 'Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?' — a question the whole Gospel rises up to answer.
Read it: #naddr1qq…cchl
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/s3dHIMhOZLE
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-8--July-12--2026-e3m068b
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-8/

2026-07-12 20:04:15 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Christ's clean heart is reckoned to you
Jesus stops the worshiper at the altar: first be reconciled to your brother. The Fifth Commandment reaches the heart — anger, 'Raca,' the grudge nursed since Easter — so no one comes with clean hands, and God will not accept half a sacrifice. But this altar faces the other way: God left His throne and reconciled us by Christ's blood while we were still His enemies. So the righteousness that exceeds the scribes and Pharisees is not one we scrub up in ourselves; Christ's clean heart is reckoned to us and given again at the rail.
Read it: #naddr1qq…zx30
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/DieAejMZ_0s
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Christs-clean-heart-is-reckoned-to-you-Trinity-6-2026-e3m060j
🔗 https://sjrl.org/christs-clean-heart-is-reckoned-to-you-trinity-6-2026/

2026-07-06 12:15:45 UTC

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📖 New biblestudy
Jeremiah Chapter 7 Bible Study — July 5, 2026
This Sunday Jeremiah stands in the gate of the temple and preaches against the one thing Judah trusted most — the building itself. "The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD," they chanted, certain God would never let His own house fall, even while they stole, murdered, and burned incense to Baal. But the house is no shelter for the people who profane it. The Lord names what it has become — a den of robbers — the very words Jesus would carry into that same temple, overturning the tables and driving out those who had made His Father's house a market.
Read it: #naddr1qq…pp8u
▶️ Watch: https://youtube.com/live/5fVbsgL_Otk
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-7--July-5--2026-e3lnd8g
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-7-bible-study-july-5-2026/

2026-07-06 11:59:29 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The freedom no country can give you
Beneath all our Fourth-of-July talk of freedom lies a deeper freedom no fireworks can give and no tyrant can take away. Out on the open sea Simon Peter thought himself free — his own boat, his own water, his own catch, answerable to no one — and pulled up empty nets all night long. Then Christ climbs uninvited into the boat, the nets tear with the catch, and Peter falls down terrified: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man." The Lord does the one thing the open sea never can: He does not depart, but catches the sinner alive — "Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men."
Read it: #naddr1qq…m9u0
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/z_8NQceoVuE
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/The-freedom-no-country-can-give-you-Trinity-5-2026-e3lncqg
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-freedom-no-country-can-give-you-trinity-5-2026/

2026-07-02 14:43:01 UTC

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📖 New sermon
Clouds Without Water
St. Jude will not let us grow comfortable: the Lord saved a people out of Egypt and then destroyed those who would not believe. Faith can die, and a baptized man can become a cloud without water — all the look of a Christian with no rain in him. But the same Lord who judged the unbelieving in the wilderness comes down the mountain to a demon-tormented boy and a father who can barely pray, and He is faithful where our faith is little. Our safety is not the strength of our grip on Christ but His grip on us.
Read it: #naddr1qq…rue2
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/NR3zKysZ1Ok
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Wednesday-of-Trinity-4-observed-2026-e3limhc
🔗 https://sjrl.org/clouds-without-water-friday-of-trinity-4-observed-2026/

2026-06-29 23:33:59 UTC

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📖 New sermon
The Teacher Who Is Mercy Itself
You have been somebody's disciple since the day you were born, and Jesus warns that you never rise above your teacher — given enough time, you simply become him. The world is a blind guide that trains us to judge first and forgive slowly, and we have become blind guides ourselves, reaching for the speck in a brother's eye with a plank in our own. But there is another Teacher: Jesus is the Father's mercy in the flesh, who takes our score-keeping heart to the cross and trains us in Baptism, Word, Absolution, and the Supper until we begin to look like Him.
Read it: #naddr1qq…w8uw
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/tIyrLMGH8MI
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/The-Teacher-Who-Is-Mercy-Itself-Trinity-4-2026-e3lerb0
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-teacher-who-is-mercy-itself-trinity-4-2026/

2026-06-25 13:32:17 UTC

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📖 New sermon
“Cursed on the tree so the barren tree could live.” Friday of Trinity 3 (observed) 2026
A fig tree in full leaf promises fruit and has none. Jesus walks from the cursed tree into a temple just as green—a house of prayer turned into a market—and James names it a third time: a church that seats the poor man at the footstool. All leaves, no figs. But the Lord of glory is hanged on a tree and made a curse in the barren tree’s place. He becomes the poor man so the poor man can be seated in glory, and He is Himself the new house of prayer where you are welcomed and fed. Living faith receives Him, and the figs follow—not to be saved, but because the tree is alive.
Read it: #naddr1qq…t7ap
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/V3v9E2U0bxo
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Cursed-on-the-tree-so-the-barren-tree-could-live--Friday-of-Trinity-3-observed-2026-e3l92jp
🔗 https://sjrl.org/cursed-on-the-tree-friday-of-trinity-3-observed-2026/

2026-06-22 16:20:31 UTC

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📖 New sermon
“He isn’t using a club. It is a broom. He’s sweeping you home.” Trinity 3 2026
The affliction that sweeps through your life is not a club driving you out but a broom sweeping you home: His pursuit, not your punishment. He answers the charge that He receives sinners with the lost sheep and the lost coin—lighting the lamp of His Word, laying the sheep on His own shoulders rejoicing, carrying you to the rail. You came in a lost coin and go out treasure in the King’s own hand.
Read it: #naddr1qq…8anp
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/fLtWSNtVpEY
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Trinity-3-2026-e3l4mlf
🔗 https://sjrl.org/he-isnt-using-a-club-it-is-a-broom-hes-sweeping-you-home-trinity-3-2026/

2026-06-22 15:59:09 UTC

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📖 New biblestudy
Jeremiah Chapter 4–5 — The Foe from the North
The Lord sends Jeremiah running through Jerusalem to find one righteous man so the city may be pardoned—and finds none. The foe gathers from the north and Jeremiah’s vision unmakes creation itself over a people wise to do evil. The one Just Man is found at last outside the walls, and for His sake the city is spared.
Read it: #naddr1qq…vf0e
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/q4Lt-hEPfNc
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-4-5-e3l4jrl
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-4-5-bible-study-june-21-2026/

2026-06-18 12:08:02 UTC

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📖 New sermon
There's Always More Where That Came From
For twelve years she had been unclean — exiled from the assembly, emptied by physicians who took everything and healed nothing. So she comes to steal a cure from the fringe of Jesus' garment, certain God's mercy runs out like everything else has. But His power goes out from Him and nothing is subtracted: she came to take a cure and leaves a daughter. There is always more where that came from.
Read it: #naddr1qp…zg49
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/3HntNRng2I8
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Theres-Always-More-Where-That-Came-From-Friday-of-Trinity-2-observed--June-17--2026-e3kv777
🔗 https://sjrl.org/theres-always-more-where-that-came-from-friday-of-trinity-2-observed-2026/

2026-06-15 00:17:39 UTC

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📖 New biblestudy
Jeremiah: Chapter 3 — Bible Study, June 14, 2026
In Jeremiah 3:1–4:4, the Lord does the legally impossible: He calls back the wife the Law itself would bar from return. Yet mercy overrules statute — "Return, backsliding Israel," He says, "I am merciful." The one condition He names is not penance or probation but honest confession: "Only acknowledge your iniquity."
Read it: #naddr1qq…fy8r
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/BqQsfTE0ttQ
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-3-e3kpotd
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-3-bible-study-june-14-2026/

2026-06-15 00:05:29 UTC

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📖 New sermon
"Blessed are you who eats bread in the Kingdom of God now!" Trinity 2 2026
A man sitting next to Jesus says it will be blessed to eat bread in the kingdom of God — someday. Jesus answers with a supper that is ready now. Three guests excuse themselves with fields, oxen, and a wife; where the fear of God dies, the Giver is ranked below His gifts, and the feast goes untasted. The master throws the doors wider and fills the hall with the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind — those with empty hands and no reason to refuse. Come, for all things are now ready.
Read it: #naddr1qp…0xkv
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/oEZjwQAynD0
🎧 Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4V6UP1pqPJdm5xeHNLtWYl
🔗 https://sjrl.org/blessed-are-you-who-eats-bread-in-the-kingdom-of-god-now-trinity-2-2026/

2026-06-12 18:00:38 UTC

2026-06-11 15:22:27 UTC

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📖 New sermon
“A mustard seed faith in the Lord of heaven and earth moves mulberry trees”
Jesus warns that offenses are inevitable, and the worth of a single soul makes leading one of His little ones to fall worse than drowning. Yet He commands forgiveness seven times a day — a demand that drives the disciples to cry, “Lord, increase our faith.” The answer is not a bigger faith but a faith fixed on the right object: a mustard seed will do, because the power belongs to the Lord of heaven and earth, not to the one believing. Even when every duty is done we remain unprofitable servants, standing not on our works but on our Master — who girds Himself and serves His own at the Supper.
Read it: #naddr1qp…qqwm
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/R3P8EH4vb0s
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/A-mustard-seed-faith-in-the-Lord-of-heaven-and-earth-moves-mulberry-trees-Friday-of-Trinity-1-2026-e3klh99
🔗 https://sjrl.org/a-mustard-seed-faith-in-the-lord-of-heaven-and-earth-moves-mulberry-trees/

2026-06-07 22:54:01 UTC

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📖 New biblestudy
Jeremiah: Chapter 2 — Bible Study, June 7, 2026
"For My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns — broken cisterns that can hold no water." (Jer. 2:13)
Read it: #naddr1qq…wpdq
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/6FTsMYhv19Q
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/Jeremiah-Chapter-2-e3kfdem
🔗 https://sjrl.org/jeremiah-chapter-2-bible-study-june-7-2026/

2026-06-07 22:40:50 UTC

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📖 New sermon
"The poor one has a name. Lazarus. God is my help." Trinity 1 2026
You have what Lazarus had. You have a name, given in the water. You have the promise — eternal life on account of the promise, not on account of your merits. You have Moses and the Prophets and the One they promised, who is here, on this altar, in your mouth and in your body.
Read it: #naddr1qq…xh8y
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/Oj9Zh3b0HUw
🎧 Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stjohnrandomlake/embed/episodes/The-poor-one-has-a-name--Lazarus--God-is-my-help--Trinity-1-2026-e3kfe4l
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-poor-one-has-a-name-lazarus-god-is-my-help-trinity-1-2026/

2026-06-06 11:48:38 UTC

Banned Books 442: Giertz — A Shepherd's Letter
Riley and Gillespie sit with Bo Giertz and read his open letter to the churches. Crisis, liberal theology, the shallow eschatology of liberalism, and the church's endurance through every age of the evil world.
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/HQkh5U08jZg
🎧 Listen: https://www.1517.org/podcast-overview/442-giertz
📖 Show notes: https://bannedbooks1517.org/episodes/ep-442
#BannedBooks #Lutheran #Giertz #Theology #Podcast

2026-06-04 15:06:01 UTC

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📖 New sermon
"The age to come arriving in this age, located, given out" Wednesday of Holy Trinity 2026
You went into that water still carrying the old premise — still asking what resurrection could possibly mean, still uncertain whether the age to come is anything more than this age with the dying removed. And you came out having been given something you did not generate, extra nos, outside yourself, from the One whose Name was spoken over you.
Read it: #naddr1qq…cqvr
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/BkbxvKURF_c
🎧 Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HzOFXeFoupzfvvfd3TifJ?si=WOVZlhhcRey0ekYmQ_IxBQ
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-age-to-come-arriving-in-this-age-located-given-out/

2026-06-01 16:53:01 UTC

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📖 New article
Teaching Evangelical Repentance to Children
Your kid bullied another kid. You said, “Tell him you’re sorry.” You taught him penance, not repentance. Penance trusts the child’s willpower. Repentance kills the old child and raises a new one. New blog: how parents and teachers preach the Gospel in real time.
Read it: https://njump.me/naddr1qq4hgetpvd5xjmn894jhvctwvajkc6trv9kz6un9wpjkuarpde3k2tt5dukkx6rfd3j8yetwqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hszrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqygpy35rhu9ex3hhz2w33cv7dtj5gatqrr57e3awapvuhen4nwlrz9upsgqqqw4rstr06f3
🔗 https://sjrl.org/teaching-evangelical-repentance-to-children/

2026-06-01 16:52:29 UTC

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📖 New sermon
“The Spirit gives you the peace Christ bought” Pentecost 2026
He who scattered at Babel gathers here at Pentecost. He who divided the tongues there of evil, now unites them here for good. The same Spirit. The same fire. At Babel, God came down and scattered. At Pentecost, God came down to gather, and He gathered by preaching. Not by making the nations speak one language. By making the one Gospel spoken in every language. Every tongue heard the same thing: the Spirit gives you the peace Christ bought.
Read it: https://njump.me/naddr1qqahg6r994ehq6tjd96z6emfwejhxtteda6j6argv5khqetpvdjj6cmgwf5hxapdvfhh2emgwskhqetww3jkxmmnwsknyvpjxcq3gamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwv3sk6atn9e5k7qgdwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkcq3qyjxswlshy6x7uff6x8pne4w23r4vqvwnmx84m59njlxwkdmuvghsxpqqqp65wx5ps7d
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/T0IzCfhVJ_Y
🎧 Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/stjohnrandomlake/episodes/The-Spirit-gives-you-the-peace-Christ-bought-Pentecost-2026-e3js2he
🔗 https://sjrl.org/the-spirit-gives-you-the-peace-christ-bought-pentecost-2026/

2026-06-01 16:51:51 UTC

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📖 New sermon
“Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world!” Friday of Exaudi (observed) 2026
Take heart. He did not say try harder. He did not say believe more. He did not say feel something. He said take heart. Be of good cheer. Because — and this is the only because that holds — “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). He has done it. It stands done. It will be done tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and the morning your believing finally collapses entirely. The I that holds you is not yours.
Read it: https://njump.me/naddr1qpykyefddanz6em0dajz6cmgv4jhyttf945xzan994hhvetjvdhk6efdw35x2tthdaexcepdveexjerp0ykk7e3dv4uxzatydykk7cnnv4e8vety95erqv3kqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hszrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqygpy35rhu9ex3hhz2w33cv7dtj5gatqrr57e3awapvuhen4nwlrz9upsgqqqw4rs5x3mpm
▶️ Watch: https://youtu.be/VkMQCJZKEvo
🔗 https://sjrl.org/be-of-good-cheer-i-have-overcome-the-world-friday-of-exaudi-observed-2026/

2026-05-07 14:59:35 UTC

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The new commandment is a finished love. Christ made it on a cross. He gives it to you here in water and word and bread and wine. It is yours. The commandment and the gift are one. Faith and love are baked together like one loaf. Christ holds the one, and you hold the other, and there is no separating them. Christ went where you could not go, so that you could love as you have been loved.
#biblestr
#naddr1qv…n5h6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLXy2EAzvWg

2026-05-05 20:02:38 UTC

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This is the advantage. Not God near in the way you wanted. Better than that. The Spirit who convicts — your sin named and buried, Christ’s righteousness declared and given, the ruler’s judgment executed and delivered — doing his work here, in this service, for you.
#naddr1qv…degd
https://youtu.be/Wk9spwWAZug

2026-05-05 19:55:29 UTC

The garden in Genesis has no prices. God gives, Adam and Eve tend, nothing is traded.
Scarcity enters in chapter three. Need, surplus, and something to measure both accumulate across twenty chapters before Abraham weighs four hundred shekels of silver at a gate in Hebron to buy a grave.
That weighing is the Bible's first monetary transaction. After it: a boy sold for twenty shekels, Passover plunder redirected into a tabernacle, a hidden gold bar buried in a tent, 666 talents filling Solomon's treasury, a denarius with Caesar's face, two bronze coins worth almost nothing, thirty pieces the priests refused to touch.
https://christophergillespie.substack.com/p/when-nothing-had-a-price?r=eye8m
https://blossom.primal.net/07208001ad4fbddb39331ab1ede6895596a0b526a8fa72d46e1cca189e67c9d9.jpg

2026-04-27 14:44:28 UTC

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Two kinds of time run through this Gospel. Chronos, which counts every loss and draws its conclusions. And kairos, which speaks the word of the risen Christ into the middle of those losses and names them for what they are: labor pains, not graves.
#naddr1qv…3m2z
https://youtu.be/fiFt8wFHQXc

2026-04-19 20:50:10 UTC

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The hireling runs. That is the only fact Jesus gives you about him. He sees the wolf coming, and he runs. The sheep scatter, the wolf takes what it wants, and the hireling is already down the road. Jesus does not tell you the hireling's reasons. He does not need to. The man ran. That is his whole character, stated in a single act. Set that figure next to the Good Shepherd, and you have the entirety of the Gospel for this Sunday: He stayed.
#naddr1qv…clu6
https://youtu.be/NWxDdkWmpNk

2026-04-16 13:50:56 UTC

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You want joy without the terror of standing before the God who raises the dead. Or you settle for dread with no hope of mercy. The women leave the tomb with both, and Matthew does not apologize. He tells you: this is what the resurrection does. It gives you fear and joy together, because the One you meet at the empty tomb is both Judge and Savior, both Holy God and your Brother.
#naddr1qv…u39r
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGtF7k-S2T4

2026-04-12 20:29:46 UTC

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Faith is born from the breath of God. The pneuma of Christ fills us. We live. We believe. We are blessed, because we have not seen and yet we have believed. The Spirit has breathed. The word has raised us. We stand. We confess. We live in His name. #biblestr
#naddr1qv…xuky
https://youtu.be/mqkaQ7dqruQ

2026-04-09 14:48:26 UTC

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The risen Christ opens what we cannot. He opened Scripture and showed them it was all about Him. He opened His wounds and proved He is no ghost but God in flesh. He opened His mouth and ate their food to demonstrate the resurrection of the body. He opened their understanding so they could comprehend what Moses and the prophets had been saying all along. He opened the mission to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem, proclaiming repentance and remission in His name. He continues to open these gifts—opening eyes in the Word, opening mouths at the Altar, opening the kingdom of heaven and bringing us through.
#naddr1qv…yz9e
https://youtu.be/49OBNRkuVW0

2026-04-07 13:59:21 UTC

The Disciples on the Road to Emmaus—Luke 24:13-27 #biblestr
The disciples knew the details of the last three days, but they did not understand what had happened. They needed to be catechized by Jesus, that is, they needed the Scriptures explained to them. It is the same for all of us. The Word of God needs to be preached and taught among us so
that faith might cling to the truth of Christ. It was not the seeing which brought faith, but the hearing of the Word of God, which would be the key to their faith. All the Scriptures testify of Jesus. Jesus made it clear that the entire Old Testament is about Him.
https://youtube.com/live/dTTGQJMqR8E

2026-04-04 15:58:13 UTC

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You have been singing David's words all evening. The psalms of this service are the prayers of a man hunted by enemies — "Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men; preserve me from violent men, who plan evil things in their heart" (Psalm 140:1–2). David wrote those words. He knew what it was to have his own counselor betray him, his own son conspire against him, his own people turn their backs. But when Jesus crossed the Kidron, David's prayers found their final answer. The Son of David walked into every snare, every trap, every evil that David had begged God to deliver him from — not to escape them, but to spring them on Himself, so that they would be spent and emptied forever.
#biblestr
#naddr1qv…f0ks
https://youtu.be/MCZQ1dinuX0

2026-04-03 21:52:16 UTC

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You are here this afternoon because the Holy Spirit has not finished building. He still calls by the Gospel. He still places stones. The cornerstone holds. The building rises. The Church endures — not by your effort, not by any human strategy, not by the wisdom of her architects — but by the blood of the Lamb laid into the earth's foundation, and raised again on the third day.
#biblestr
#naddr1qv…8v4u
https://youtu.be/6A2Gz1kzXZw

2026-04-03 21:42:10 UTC

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God is Most High. His eyes look down. He sees what you are — the poverty, the squalor, the weight of it all. He sees it, and He does not look away. He comes down. He comes all the way down, down to the floor, down to the cross, down to this altar. The Most High becomes the Most Low so that the lowly might be raised to the Most High.
#biblestr
#naddr1qv…qvs9
https://youtu.be/m5CgSsbyGq8

2026-04-01 16:22:37 UTC

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There was no one to help. So He helped. "He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors" — which is to say, for all of us standing here with nothing in our hands, who fled and denied and handed over and washed our hands and turned, every one, to our own way. He did not need your help. He needed your sin. He took it. This is He whom you kneel before. Your Helper.
#naddr1qv…dg7m
https://youtu.be/MJBniUSocyw

2026-04-01 16:21:17 UTC

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You might be tempted to read those men as the villains of the story and yourself as a bystander. But sit with the word inconvenient. Every one of us has found Jesus inconvenient at some point — His claim on our time, His call to die to what we want, His refusal to be the kind of Savior we would have designed. We have all wanted a Jesus who costs less. Who asks less. Who fits more neatly into the life we have already arranged. The conspirators spoke aloud what the rest of us are thinking silently.
#naddr1qv…rlt6
https://youtu.be/XWryrtbjw4w

2026-03-30 15:57:42 UTC

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"Zechariah saw it all. Isaiah saw it all!" Holy Monday 2026 #biblestr
#naddr1qv…h8hw
https://youtu.be/By7KTnBnF-g

2026-03-29 20:40:23 UTC

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The Son who from eternity has known nothing but the Father's love cries out of abandonment. Real abandonment. He goes all the way in — to the bottom of the forsakenness, to the place where there is nothing left, no comfort, no light, no answer. He goes there, so you will not have to. He is forsaken so that you will not be. That is the exchange. That is the whole thing.
#naddr1qv…9x53
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUa9UQu4dMA

2026-03-26 15:02:02 UTC

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The cross is coming. You can feel it gathering through these weeks. Every story this season — the plotting, the stones, the thickening opposition — it is all converging on Jerusalem, converging on one man walking steadily toward it. No one takes His life from Him. He lays it down. For sheep who wander. For sheep who sleep in Gethsemane. For sheep who deny three times before the rooster finishes crowing. For you.
#biblestr
#naddr1qv…l49p
https://youtu.be/KKsAVaXvfyY

2026-03-26 15:00:19 UTC

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This is where the whole Old Testament has been driving. For centuries, the blood of bulls and goats was poured out. Morning and evening, the smoke of the burnt offering rose from the altar. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest passed through the veil into the Most Holy Place, carrying the blood of the sacrifice for himself and for the people. All that blood. All those animals. All that smoke. And none of it could take away a single sin. The sacrifices covered. They pointed forward. They were a constant reminder that something else was needed, someone else was coming. The blood of animals could purify the flesh, could make a man ritually clean. But it could not touch the conscience. It could not reach the place where sin lives.
#biblestr
#naddr1qv…nuhr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKAUU6xpYbI

2026-02-23 15:37:45 UTC

The Death of the Firstborn—Exodus 12:21-30 #biblestr
https://www.youtube.com/live/jPoOjJIFEUc

2026-02-23 14:06:35 UTC

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And He goes as the Second Adam. The first Adam was placed in a garden. Surrounded by abundance. No hunger. No thirst. No thorns. Only one prohibition. And he fell. The Second Adam stands in a wasteland. No food. No comfort. Forty days of fasting. And there He stands for you.
#biblestr
#naddr1qv…378d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeON3H0FD7U

2026-02-21 15:03:20 UTC

Sunday’s OT and Epistle—Genesis 3:1-21; Hebrews 4:14-16
#biblestr
https://youtube.com/live/aYluh988g14

2026-02-18 14:54:52 UTC

Ash Wednesday: Consecrate a Fast—Joel 2:12-19 #biblestr
https://youtube.com/live/8Khdfy1cCkE

2026-01-13 16:32:45 UTC

Radical proposal: give a tithe of your time to hearing, study, meditation, and prayer of God's Word.

2026-01-13 14:56:31 UTC

John the Baptist Prepares the Way of the Lord—Mt 3:1-12
#biblestr
https://youtube.com/live/eOScV50g88Y

2026-01-12 17:30:45 UTC

10 For even when we were with you, we commanded you this: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. 11 For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but are busybodies. 12 Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread.
sjrl.org/media/bible-study-1-thessalonians-41-12-november-30-2025-e6zb3-rhbps-4wg2y-r8rbc #biblestr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=936sqYvMXo4

2026-01-12 17:13:26 UTC

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So what is the Father’s “business”? To send His Servant, His Son, filled with the Spirit, to bring justice, to be a covenant, to open blind eyes, and to free prisoners. That is not a vague “mission statement.” That is concrete: forgiveness for the guilty, light for darkened consciences, and release for people chained to their sins and fears.
#naddr1qv…npft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjgB6z4DAGk