Episodes

Today is the first of a three part series on a Parable you may think you know well. The Prodigal Son is almost aways covered in a 30 minute bible study. That in no way let’s this text breath. Sit back, we’re going deep. You know this story. You probably think it ends at the party. It doesn’t. But before we get to the party, we have to go where the son went. Jesus wasn’t talking to runaways. He was talking to religious men at the edge of a crowd, grumbling because He ate with sinners. And ...

You have never felt lost. That might be the problem. Everyone loves the lost sheep. Nobody sees himself in the lost coin. A coin doesn’t wander. It doesn’t feel the dark. It lies on a clean floor in a familiar house, perfectly content — and perfectly lost. Jesus didn’t tell this story to the runaways. He told it to the respectable men at the edge of the crowd, murmuring because He welcomed sinners to His table — the same men He had just told, at their own table, to invite the people who could ...

Anyone who has lost a child in a crowded store knows the feeling. For about ninety seconds, nothing else exists. You don't care about the cart, and you don't care who's watching. Nobody could talk you into calming down and being grateful for everything you didn't lose. You search until you find, and when you find, you don't scold. You grab that kid and hold on. Jesus told a story like that, and most of our Bibles put a heading over it: The Parable of the Lost Sheep. But Luke never wrote that he...

A lot is happening in the news and just to be sure it wasn’t just something I’m seeing because it’s something I’m interested in (which is how news is curated to the individual these days), I went to Google trends for some perspective. We looked at both Israel and Iran and then a lot of other stuff. Then when we felt we were on solid ground, we checked the headlines. Not the ones on the local news feeds. We checked the headlines of prophecy to build the picture of what we’re seeing. In fact, we r...

I was going to apologize for the length of this podcast but I think I'll refrain. I've already listened to it twice and I think it is one I will come back to many times. Yes! I listen over and over to my own podcasts. You see, I started this journey to learn, not to teach. I hope you're riding this journey right along beside me. I'm not your pastor, I'm your brother. Our church has adopted the practice of teaching new Christians about the journey they are embarking on. It is the opposite of th...

You know this one. The invited make excuses, the poor get the seats, and everybody nods about how the outsiders got in. Read it again, and read what happened five minutes before it was told. Jesus is at a Pharisee’s table on the Sabbath. The lawyers are watching Him to catch Him. A sick man is set in front of Him and He heals him — with His hands, in full view — and sends him out the door. Then He tells the guests where to sit and tells the host whom to invite. And then one man on the couches f...

OK, imagine this revised version of musical chairs. The dress code at this party is quite formal. The game: Twelve people are invited to a dinner. Each invitation carries a number from 1 to 12 under a scratch-off panel, and the number cannot be read until the guest is at the table. The chairs are in two columns down a long table, and at the head sits the host — the man who assigned every number before anyone arrived, according to whom he wants nearest him. The guests come in and take seats, and ...

I listened to a recent podcast by Tom Bilyeu, and it is brilliant in its scope. But I don't think it goes far enough, and in Tom's secular world, it wouldn't. Tom is not coming at this from Scripture, so you might write off the title of his video as nothing but clickbait: "AI Antichrist." Don't. You can watch the whole thing here: A.I. AntiChrist. It's worth watching, and worth understanding. Tom is a marketer who built and sold a company, and he knows what a product launch looks like. What he s...

We had some fun with this chapter and I think you'll find the written narrative worth the download. If you consider the nature of teaching and learning in the 1st century, they weren't all sitting around reading scrolls. They couldn't just grab their phone, load up their favorite Bible app (we like BlueLetterBible.org). The were telling and recounting stories. So we took the Chapter of Matthew 18 and created a telling of a story as if the narrator was sitting near a 21st century campfire with h...

So by now, if you’ve been paying attention to the world of AI, then you’ve heard about the breach from OpenAI. OpenAI’s internal AI agents escaped their testing sandbox, hacked parts of OpenAI’s own systems, and then breached Hugging Face’s infrastructure—ultimately involving a swarm of ~700 autonomous agents that tried to cover their tracks. I use Claude, so right off the bat, opening a discussion of this nature has a strange atmosphere. I was not surprise to see Claude to be, or at least to a...

We grew up with the parable of the Lost Sheep. The 99 and the 1 that went astray. We all picture the return - the sheep draped across the shoulder of the shepherd. The celebration of his return. Well, if you were in my Bible study, I'd have you read ALL of Matthew 18. Don't let the parable of the lost sheep sit there without its context. You have heard this parable a hundred times. A shepherd, a hundred sheep, one lost. He leaves the ninety-nine and goes after it. You have heard it preached as...

The word "WORD" is heavier than at first glance. I heard this stated in a video. "A word is the way the inside of one person reaches the inside of another." There is a thought locked inside your head right now that nobody can see. It has no shape, no color, no sound. Then you speak and suddenly that invisible thing is in the room, crossing the air, landing inside someone else's mind. They know what you were thinking. The hidden became visible. The silent became heard. That is what a word does...

So I started today like it was going to be another Parable podcast. But it was a single line and didn't feel too difficult to grasp. I had in my notes that we were going to cover Matthew 13-51-52 as a Parable podcast but it was short and honestly didn’t need a lot of teaching. I still hold to the idea that it is not worthy of a separate parable study. But I couldn't walk past the scripture that is pointing straight back at me. And so today is a bit more of a personal deep dive into the journey ...

You might be tempted to skip this. The Lamp on the Stand is often taught as part of the Salt and Light parable from Matthew. But strip Matthew from the equation, focus only on Luke and Mark and you get a completely different take on the Parable of the Lamp on the Stand. Often, we try to harmonize texts across gospels. In this case, if you take that approach, you miss a LOT of what Luke and Mark are telling you. Let's face it, we live in a distracted world.How often do you walk into a room, or...

Perhaps the best test for watchfulness is for times when you could be wrong. We considered the possibility of the person holding on to the pretribulation rapture theology. He has a chart. He knows the order. He knows which stage he will not be here for. And it doesn't happen the way he knew it would... Jesus told His disciples something else. He sealed the hour and He said so. And then He told them exactly what they would be here for: synagogues, magistrates, delivered up, afflicted, killed. In...

Solving the Mystery of the Restrainer was the subject of a recent podcast. However, once we landed on the identity of the restrainer, we noticed a whole new window of revelation open. The baseball coach or the tennis coach refers to the follow-through. You don’t swing at the ball; you swing through it. Done correctly, the ball flies much farther. The original article opened some doors that were literally that - open. Once you walk through the doors, you see what’s on the other side with amazing...

There’s a passage that was uttered by Paul in Thessalonians that has puzzled Christians for centuries: 2 Thessalonians 2-5-7. Something or someone was restraining the full appearance of the lawless one until God's appointed time. Paul assumes his readers knew the identity of this restraining force from previous teaching. There are many theories and that’s all that you can call them. And that’s how we left it in our prior podcast. But then I decided to dig deeper on the premise that no, we don’...

They watched Him heal a man who was blind and mute, and they called it the devil. Nobody in that crowd said the man was still blind. Nobody said the demon was still there. The miracle was admitted in full. Then the men in charge — the scribes down from Jerusalem, the Pharisees who had already met to decide how to kill Him — gave it a new name. This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils. They did not say it to His face. They said it to the crowd. The crowd h...

If you haven't heard Ray Comfort's sermon called "Hell's Best Kept Secret", it is worth listening to. It is a fair indictment of the use of the altar call and the sinner's prayer. Revealed by his own analysis, "80 to 90% of those making decisions for Christ were falling away from the faith that is modern evangelism with its methods was creating something like 80 to 90 backsliders with every hundred decisions for Christ." He goes on to cite this statistic: "in 294,000 decisions for Christ in just...

We’ve fallen for this, I admit it. I mean us too. Rabbit Holes and Meditations is a journey. You can easily pull up our podcasts on Rapture and see a variety of interpretations. We don’t hide what we used to believe. The point is that we keep searching. Today, I rest in this one thought. If a person can imagine an end times scenario where he is looking up to the heavens and wondering why he is still standing there and his brother was taken, wondering why perhaps his brother was raptured and he ...

I know you're hearing it in every religious circle. We are in end times. Right? It's right around the corner. We will see Christ return in our lifetime. There is a lot going on in the world. Iran! AI! Economic uncertainty. Christian persecution (if you're not seeing this, you have to perhaps look outside your own social bubble), Political uncertainty. Transhumanism. Israel instability. Ukraine. and on and on. And very often, in that same circle, the is a person with the charts - mapping out th...

You're in a discussion and Jesus is pointing out the obvious errors of a person you recognize. The example is plain to everyone. You're all nodding up and down in concert. Yeah, I know that guy. Then something lights up in the deep dark recesses of your brain. It's only a faint spark but it's there. It is the spark of recognition, and the recognition is that Jesus is actually talking about you. Don't be ashamed... you were all nodding up and down. You are all there with the same level of convict...

There is going to come a time where you question what you should be doing vs. what God can and will or will not do. Ultimately the outcome is His, so you ask yourself, what’s the point of me even trying to do something, really? Not to take the credit but to contribute in whatever way you can in the outcome. You have the motivation and the desire; you don’t want any of the credit. You just want the issue solved and you can’t just stand idly by. It is a tension worth wrestling with. Notes for The...

You've heard it, usually from the person who is suggesting that you may be right in principle, but you have no right to point the finger. Well... it's more complicated than that. Notes for To Judge or Not to Judge Episode Link: https://www.rabbitholesandmeditations.com/to-judge-or-not-to-judge/