Exploring My Strange Bible Podcast
Exploring My Strange Bible is Tim Mackie’s personal podcast, produced by BibleProject. It’s an anthology of Tim’s lectures, sermons, and classroom teachings collected over the last 20 years.
Jonah is portrayed as God’s prophet, but ironically, he is the only person in the book who refuses to listen to God. How can this story invite us to consider our own lack of perception and awareness of God’s voice in our lives? In this message, Tim explores Jonah chapter 1, looking at the many ways that the prophet seems unable to hear God directly or through anything else that God sends his way. This message was given on August 11, 2013, at Door of Hope Church in Portland, Oregon.
Many of us know the story of Jonah as the prophet who gets swallowed by a whale. And while that is part of the story, it’s only a couple sentences in a longer narrative. So who is Jonah? Why did he flee from God and board a boat to Tarshish? And why is his story even in the Bible? In this first message of a five-part series, Tim lays the groundwork for exploring Jonah’s story and also ponders why Jonah runs from God’s vision for his life—a choice we all face at some level in our lives. This message was given on August 4, 2013, at Door of Hope Church in Portland, Oregon.
In 2016, we began releasing this collection of sermons and lectures that Tim Mackie gave over almost twenty years as a teaching pastor and professor. Then in 2019, we stopped releasing new episodes because that was all of Tim’s teaching! But starting today, we’re excited to begin re-releasing the episodes, now remastered and sounding much better. Plus, we’ll occasionally drop in a new sermon or lecture that Tim has given in the years since the conclusion of the show’s original run. In this short introduction, Tim shares his own story of going from life as an aimless skateboarder in Portland, to encountering Jesus, to becoming a Bible scholar, pastor, and co-founder of BibleProject.
Hope is an important virtue that God’s people have actively cultivated for thousands of years. And the messianic hope we see throughout the Hebrew Bible is a kind of hope that followers of Jesus still need today. So what does this hope look like for us now as we wait for Jesus to return and fulfill all of the Bible’s promises? In this message from the Advent season, Tim explores a number of passages from the book of Isaiah, focusing on how what we hope for shapes what we live for.
After his baptism and testing in the wilderness, Jesus leaves Nazareth for Capernaum. There, he begins his public ministry, inviting fishermen to follow him and calling on people to “repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.” So what is the “Kingdom of Heaven,” and what does it mean that it has come near? In this message, Tim teaches from Matthew 4:12-25 on Jesus’ beginning proclamation, the call of the first disciples, and his pattern of Kingdom teaching and healing, which still challenges how we order our lives and values today.
We explore the FINAL story in the Gospel according to Matthew in this episode.
In this episode, we continue exploring the Gospel of Matthew (almost done, folks!).
