Shane Willard 2010 (2 of 5) Shane Willard 22.04.2010 pm
[Shane Willard] Very good. We'll be done by nine o'clock tonight. You can spend some time looking at our resource table again. I appreciate you coming back there. It's the only way that we fulfil what our mission is in the world and I just appreciate you being a part of it. A couple of things about it; we've got some new stuff, one on the beatitudes will come out throughout the whole week. It will sell out by Sunday so if you want it I'd go and get it, and also the Jewish Roots of Easter as well. Those two will sell out pretty good. Let me tell you real quick about something we've done that I'm very excited about. I and my brother, we have started a - my brother developed it and I'm just showing up in there. He developed an online classroom where I can go in there and my goal is to teach people the same things my rabbi taught me, and so once a month, it's only once a month for one hour I'm in there to sort of teach people to enhance their Bible study. It's not meant to replace a Bible college or [unclear 00.01.06], it's not meant to replace anything. I definitely don't want to be your pastor. [Laughter]
What I'm offering is - [unclear 00.01.14] - I know I don't, you've got a good pastor - amen. What I'm offering to do is to teach you guys or whoever wants to be in there the very things that my rabbi taught me all the way from the beginning. We've already done it; we've done two sessions. Anything you've missed is archived. All you've got to do is click on it, you can listen to it and catch right up no problem at all and so I'd love if that's something you'd want to do, I'd love to have you in there. You can check out website out, it's just right on the front page of our website, shanewillard.org and you can check that out. Our next class will be somewhere around the second week of May. What I do is I do several classes every month that are time zone specific, so we have like a South Pacific time zone one, we'll have an American time zone one and a South African time zone one. Of the three or four you'll find something that fits your schedule. If you can't find something that fits your schedule change your schedule - I'm just kidding. [Laughter] If you can't find something that fits your schedule then it'll all be archived. All you've got to do is click on it at your convenience anyway okay? So you could check that out.
Alright, now what I want to do now is I want to talk to you about euphemisms, idioms, things like this that'll make the Bible come alive. We won't get through most of them tonight. We'll have to come back tomorrow because there's just too many to do and so the first one I want to talk to you about is the idea of kingdom, kingdom. In the Bible when you see things like kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven, let me just give you a couple of phrases that mean the exact same thing: kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven, or they sometimes use this phrase: inherit the land or inherit the earth. The kingdom of God had nothing to do with going to heaven one day, nothing. The phrase the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, inherit the earth, things like this, these were all synonymous of what life would be like if God was in charge now. Jewish Christianity, rabbinical Christianity was nothing about going to heaven one day. It was all about what can we do to bring heaven to earth. It wasn't about a journey into something; it was about bringing that something to us and to everybody we encounter.
It was a summary statement of the things God is for coming over the top of the things that are absent of what God is doing. It was a summary statement of what would life be like. See it was all about bringing something to earth. The birth of the church, which we'll talk about later - not tonight, at a later time - the birth of the church was all about creating a community of people who are a radical new culture that's going to show the whole world what God would look like if He were living it out. It's not so much a group of people who are on their way to heaven. That's ridiculous - as much as it was a group of people who were bringing heaven to a community. Are you with me? Its two totally different things. Even their concept of hell was mostly - if you want a whole teaching on the Jewish concept of hell, which is nothing like what we think, it's back there. It's called All Access Pass - but their concept of hell was mostly hell on earth, like let me give you what I mean.