Welcome to the Love in Context podcast of Unscripted Conversation with Ben and Spencer.
We're so glad that you could join us today, whether that's from your car, office, home,
church or wherever you're at.
We did have a few sound quality issues with our first few episodes.
Those have been resolved.
So if you do notice that the sound is funny in the first couple of episodes, we do apologize
for that.
If you want to contact us, you can email us at loveincontext.gmail.com.
Also follow us on Instagram at loveincontext.
All right.
So episode one, here we are.
Yeah, this is Love in Context with Ben and Spencer.
Ben does most of the talking.
Spencer does most of the editing.
That is, that's kind of our MO in general.
Whenever we talk and you're like, Ben does a lot of the talking.
But we are people who just have been involved in church ministry a long time and we just
also have encountered just a lot of church ministry that's just been hurtful, harmful
and where they proclaim a lot of truths.
But then really when you boil it down, there's very little love in it.
So we want to come back to an understanding of what scripture is, what scripture is teaching
us, what it's saying, the fact that it's living, breathing, it's active.
And we want to just come to a point where we are approaching these things in love.
But because in my opinion is that like 90% of the arguments we have in church are kind
of petty and pointless.
Right.
We've talked about when we've talked about like Jesus's disciples, you've got Essings
in there, you've got zealots in there, you've got women, which yes, listeners, I'm sorry,
there are women who followed Jesus.
It says that in the Bible.
You've got these people who have different socioeconomic backgrounds, different belief
systems, different ideas of who Messiah was going to be.
And Jesus called to them is really simple.
He says, hey, come follow me.
And a lot of times we're having these conversations amongst ourselves about, oh, is this piece
right?
Is this piece going to, you know, am I more right than my brother or sister?
And the issue with that is, is that we forgot that we're supposed to be following, not debating
about which road is the right one to follow.
The right one to follow is the one Jesus is on.
I heard it said a long time now, like, you know, you can have the best doctor in the
world, but if you're not actually obeying what Christ calls you to do, then what are
you actually doing?
And I mean, that's a fair statement to say, because it's like, if you do know everything
on you can engage scripture on a level that's just knowledge.
And while knowledge is good, it needs to lead us to action and needs to lead us to a deeper
relationship with Jesus and a deeper following to who he is.
Totally.
Well, and so the name of the podcast is Love and Context.
One of the things that you and I have talked about a lot is Christianity came from somewhere.
It's based on Christ, who was a Jewish Messiah.
And so understanding the context of Judaism, both in the time of Jesus and when you're
interpreting the Old Testament is really important.
So we talk about love and context.
Now why love before context?
I think that if we look in like 1 Corinthians, where Paul is talking about, hey, if I could
talk in the voice of men and angels and I could do all these things, I could sacrifice
my self to the flames.
If I don't have love, man, it's worthless.
You may as well just throw it in the garbage.
So love has to be the first thing that we look through.
And then we want to talk about now this faith that we follow Jesus with.
Let's put some context around it so we understand what it meant in the day.
So today as followers of Jesus, what does it mean for us today?
Yeah, 100%.
And like, and what like when you're talking about what does it mean for us today?
One of the things that 1 Corinthians 13 passage that I think we often overlook is at the end
of that chapter, Paul is saying, hey, three things are main faith, hope and love.
And the greatest of these is love.
So if we're viewing scripture through a context that is not loving, that's not engaging in
love and who Jesus is, we have a huge problem.
Right.
One.
Also, what Paul is not saying is he's not saying that faith and hope aren't important.
He's saying that these things are interpreted through the lens of love, which once again,
you come back to the teachings of Messiah Jesus and he says, you interpret all of scripture
through this lens, love your neighbor as yourself and love Lord your God with all your hearts,
soul, mind and strength.
Now, I flipped those, of course, somebody who is listening is probably going to be like,
he flipped them heretic.
And you know what?
We welcome that feedback.
But Jesus is telling me as a follower and telling his disciples, if you're going to
look at the law and the prophets, they're all going to hang on.
Do you love God and do you love other people?
Now there's context in that because love doesn't mean whatever you want it to mean.
It has to mean like love the way that God loves, the way that Jesus loves.
So you have to put that in context.
So I don't want to pretend like there's no context in that.
And it's just so you have to accept any definition of love.
I think that would be foolhardy.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, completely.
It's love is a tough thing, right?
We've lived in a culture where where truth and knowledge is what we want.
Right, we're coming at you from America.
You can't tell our English is horrible and we stutter in our speech and you know, all
that stuff.
Lots of euphemisms, lots of idioms, lots of random phrases that are really suspect.
Yes, 100%.
And then you're probably hearing me say 100% all the time, as I like to do that.
But we only says it like 95% of the time.
I'll try to cut back to 80.
But we come from a culture where we want to be right, where we want to have the right
knowledge, we want to have the right interpretation of everything.
We want to make sure we're speaking the one truth, the one whatever.
Right.
And if you don't believe me on that, just look at it.
I mean, just look at what happened during COVID.
You have one side of the aisle saying this is what you have to do.
And you have the other side of the aisle saying that's completely wrong.
This is what you have to do.
And then they started like fighting over a cat turd in the sandbox, like two five year
olds.
And that's the extent of political ranting you're going to get on this podcast.
I was going to say episode one, you're like, hey, why don't we talk about COVID?
Yeah.
Well, actually, actually, you know what?
Why don't we talk about COVID for a second, actually.
So taking a step back, we're talking about defining love, right?
I have a four year old, you have a five year old, almost five year old.
Yeah.
And James says to me the other day, my son's name is James.
He says, I told him he needed to go brush his teeth and he says, you don't love me.
Okay.
Now James doesn't understand really what love means yet.
Like he understands love is affection, love is, love is acceptance.
Like he is learning what love is.
I don't accept James's definition of love when I go and learn how to love God and love
my neighbor.
Like if God doesn't give me what I want, it doesn't mean that God doesn't love me.
It means he can see something better than what I can see.
And when I go and love my neighbor, it's not always going to be something that they're
going to, well, for lack of a better term, love.
They may interpret it differently, but my perspective should always be showing the compassion,
the grace, the mercy of who Jesus is.
Like I have similar stories with my daughter where she's really into, hey, you hurt my
feelings or like you hate me because you asked me to clean up my room.
And it's like, no, that's not it at all.
Kid, like I love you deeply.
I didn't hear a title to feel how you want to feel about it, but like I love you deeply.
And because I love you, I'm asking you to do some stuff that's challenging and difficult
so that you can become a good person.
Right.
So with that in mind, let's talk about COVID.
And there were two sides to a lot of those situations.
And I don't particularly care which side you were falling on, whether you thought that
churches should have shut down.
You thought churches should have stayed open.
You thought people should have masked.
You thought people shouldn't mask.
You think people should all get the vaccine.
You think nobody should get a vaccine.
You're all entitled to your own opinion.
What you are not entitled to is your own perspective on grace and love.
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
The thing I told people a number of times is like, it doesn't matter what side of the
aisle you're on when it comes to COVID.
It doesn't change who Christ has called you to be.
Your politics should not be your faith.
100%.
And I want to say that like 75% of the time, no.
But it doesn't change who you are called to be.
Like you are called to love your neighbor.
You're called to have such a deep love for your neighbor through the power of Christ
in you that it's transformational to the community around you.
Now, if you are now, if you're going around and you are just yelling at people because
you're like COVID is a scam, you should not wear your mask or you're going around yelling
at people, you should get vaccinated.
If you don't, you're killing everybody.
Is that actually portraying the love of Christ?
That's a rhetorical question, by the way.
So one of the things that you should know, again, this is episode one, so we want to
make sure that you kind of understand who we are.
And we're not, this is kind of just trying to introduce you to who we are.
It's an unscripted conversation.
We're going to ramble.
We're also incredibly sarcastic.
You're probably going to hear me say some things that are a little bit sarcastic.
So always understand things are a little bit tongue in cheek.
We are very serious about Jesus and following Jesus.
And what we want to talk about is how do we love each other well, but also engage the
Bible from a contextual piece.
So a couple of things that we've talked about that if you want to listen to this, things
that we would expect as listeners with the way we're going to engage this is we're going
to talk about different passages from the Bible.
It's going to be talked about.
And if we throw something out there that we're going to discuss, like for example, we're
actually going to be getting into Torah, first five books of the Bible.
And we're going to give you ideas of like where we're going to go.
You should probably read those before you listen and definitely read those before you
write us any comments.
Yes.
And if you haven't read Torah, you should go do that.
We have a couple of expectations that we'll have is we're going to, I mean, over the next
few weeks, we're going to be going through parts of Genesis, particularly the creation
story, we're going to move some different parts after that.
But if you have it, we'll reference what scripture we're going to be in.
We want you to read that scripture or have your Bible open and have it and be studying
along as we talk about it.
If you are like, oh, they're talking about this scripture.
Haven't read that yet.
Okay.
Pause the podcast.
It's a new newfangled technology.
You can pause it.
Yeah, you can pause it.
You could hit the pause button and come back and it'll be fine.
And you could or hit the pause button, turn it off.
You know, that's great too.
Whatever, whatever floats your boat, but pause it, go read that passage or go grab your Bible
so that you can understand what is happening and you can be walking through the text with
us.
So that would be one of our expectations.
Another expectation would be that we want you to engage back with us and there's going
to be people who listen, who disagree with us and I'm all for that.
But if you're going to disagree, we have an email and Spencer will put it in at the end
of the podcast or put it in the show notes or something like that, that you can reach
us at.
And if you have a question or you have something where you're like, Hey, I don't understand
why you said this.
Could you dive a little deeper on that?
We're going to try to answer those as we're going along because it's far from exhaustive
and also it's unscripted.
So it's unlikely that we're going to drill down every piece that needs to be drilled
down.
Yeah.
And we asked that this is unscripted have grace.
If there's something that's like a slip of the tongue and you're like, Oh man, they said
that, that very well could be the process too.
And we might've just missed it.
And I would blame Spencer more because he does the editing.
So you missed it twice.
The slip of the tongues are all going to be on Ben's side of the conversation just so
you know, cause it's, I'm doing mostly editing.
So that's how it's going to work.
Yeah.
What's actually probably going to happen is you're going to go through and like finally
tune everything you say.
So you sound like amazing and then you're going to cut off my points.
We're all started to say something and then just like that.
You're like, exactly.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, that's a couple of our expectations.
Like we, we want to engage with you guys.
We both have full-time jobs.
This is something we're doing on the side.
So if, if you are flooding us with emails, we will get to which ones we can, we'll try
to respond as best we can.
But if you are expecting us to answer all the questions via podcast, we'll probably
do a Q and a couple of Q and a podcast at some point, but we will probably not get to
every question that's submitted.
So with all that being said, why a podcast?
Why an unscripted conversation?
Like why, why would we do it this way as opposed to, I think, you know, there's a lot of benefit
to a lot of people sketching out exactly what they're going to talk about.
And when I say unscripted, it's not like we're coming here with no idea of what we're talking
about.
Well, actually, hold on.
I can't speak for Spencer, but, but we're not coming here with no idea of what we're
talking about.
But the idea is we need to have authentic, real conversations.
And sometimes I think what we're going to see is that the Holy Spirit is going to work
in the middle of that to bring revelation, to bring ideas out that we wouldn't necessarily
catch if we were overprepared.
Yeah.
And the other reason for an unscripted conversation is just honestly, people in the church, how
often are you having Christ centered conversations with fellow believers?
Like is that, are you having Christ centered conversations over the number of political
conversations or over the number of conversations surrounding what you ate, what you did this
week, all of those things?
Like I can tell you of the people I've talked to in the past few years, like a lot of conversations
when I asked them what they did this have done this last week, they will tell me all
the things they did for themselves and very little of the things they did for others or
very little of the ways that they loved others.
And so part of the reason for having this unscripted is so that we can just have a conversation,
be real, be authentic, and let the Holy Spirit move through that.
With that said, Ben and I have sat down, we have talked about what we're going to talk
about, but we're not sitting here with notes in front of us.
So another expectation, something you can expect from us is we will talk about other
people's material.
We're not going to link you to valuable resources that you can check out of great teachers.
Some of them you're not going to like, and that's okay.
You can just not like them and move on.
If you want to write us an email and talk about how this person is a heretic, we've
probably already heard it and we don't care.
We've done our research on these people and we believe that they have a relationship with
God does not mean that we agree with everything and we're really talking about something specific.
What you will not hear from us is you're not going to hear names of people that we disagree
with.
We're not interested in dragging anybody through the mud.
We will push against theological ideas, but we're not going to get push against people
because those are servants of Christ and we have no business judging them.
Ben and I read a lot of different Christian authors ranging from conservative Southern
Baptist to very charismatic more on the liberal side.
We read a wide range of that and part of that is, you know, having a discernment to eat
what it like, eat the meat and spit out the buttons, take what is good and leave what
is not.
There's people who a lot of times with Christian teachers I've heard people just be like, oh,
that person is a straight up heretic and they refer to one thing they said in 20, 30 years
of teaching.
It's like, have you listened to the other 20, 30 years of teaching?
Like they have a lot of good things to say and they might be off on one or two points
or three or four points.
So I'm going to just kind of jump in here and let's and just kind of give people an
idea like in this intro episode, like obviously we're just, this is very much more unscripted
than we normally will be because we're just trying to introduce concepts.
We're trying to introduce ourselves.
I, we were having a conversation the other day and you sent me a video of a very famous
pastor and he was making mention about the church and he said, have you ever seen unbelievers
come into your church and the way that you love each other was so compelling that they
said clearly the work of the Holy Spirit is going on here.
They recognize this nature of God and I found that incredibly one convicting, but then the
other part of it was I was like, this is exactly what the church is supposed to be.
Now this, this summer you and I were, and our, our church were working on a summer series
talking about the temple, the festivals and the sacrifices.
But one of the crazy things about the temple is when the temple is actually opened in the
book of Chronicles, fire falls down and people fall on joyful faces.
They look and they say, great is the Lord, his love endures forever.
And in Acts two, God opens a new temple called his people and he puts fire on them.
And it's almost like when you run into people, they should have the same kind of response
that they had in the old Testament that God is good as love endures forever because what
you have is compelling the way that we love.
And, and here's the deal.
It's easy to love people who agree with everything that you say.
And it's really hard to love people who are actively opposed to you.
And yet this is the way of Jesus.
And Jesus is like, Hey, if they ask for your shirt, you give them your coat as well.
They slap you on one cheek.
You turn the other cheek.
And then on top of that, he says, Hey, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute
you.
Jesus says a lot of things in the Sermon on the Mount that are very convicting and very
challenging.
And then the other thing that Jesus says about forgiveness is he's like, Hey, forgive just
as your heavenly father's forgiven you.
And if you don't forgive, your heavenly father won't forgive you.
That's a whole nother topic.
We're not going to get too much into that today.
But the thing is, is that our enemies, it's so easy just to write them off, complain,
be bitter.
And Jesus is like, no, they're my children too.
You need to love them.
You need to forgive them.
Right.
I would say that one of the most defining characteristics of the Christian life, right?
I look at somebody and I say, man, this person loves Jesus.
You know, if you were like, oh, it's because they pray, it's because they read their Bible,
it's because they're always sharing the word.
And those are all really good things.
So please don't hear me say that any of those things are bad.
I want to see how they treat people who disagree with them.
Because that tells me right away whether or not they're following Jesus.
You and I, we have a relationship via text with memes.
That's trying to like encourage each other with memes.
Like that's the way it's done.
We're in the same portion of our life with raising kids.
But one of the videos that you sent me was talking about fruit.
And it says, if you have an orange and you squeeze an orange, what do you get?
Get orange juice.
Right.
Like, obviously you squeeze an orange, you're not going to get apple juice.
Why is it then when I see Christians get squeezed, everything that comes out is in Jesus?
And I was like, man, man, you're speaking my language there.
And here's the thing, I listened to that and I was like, yeah.
And then I thought about how I got angry the other day.
And I can tell you what came out wasn't Jesus.
So I'm not like pretending like, oh, I've got this all together.
What I'm saying is this is who we're called to be.
And it's now our very nature.
Our nature has now been moved to the righteousness of God and we're called to be this and stop
believing the lie of our past selves.
And now that we are the righteousness of God, the power of God is shown through how we serve
and love one another.
A lot of times we want, we want to see the miraculous signs.
We want to see the big wonders.
And I've had people even be like, well, why aren't those happening?
I was like, those are 100% happening.
You just need to look around and see it happening.
But it really comes down to, okay, God's power is shown in how we serve and love one another.
Like Jesus at the height of his authority in John 13, washed his disciples feet, like
took the place of a servant said, I'm going to wash your feet.
Right.
And we just covered this in our church, but like, let's, let's even talk about that a
little bit further.
Okay.
So Jesus has been talking with the religious leaders and they're like, well, by whose authority
are you doing this?
And like, he's like, guys pay attention.
And they're like, we don't know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
This is like this back and forth where they're clearly not paying attention.
And then the Greeks come up and they're wanting to talk to Jesus and something about the Greeks
coming to talk to Jesus.
Jesus goes, Oh, my time has come.
Like that, that's profound.
And Spencer, I think you said you've read the Bible for a really long time.
You just saw that and you're like, well, there it is, you know, and yeah.
So, but then the voice from heaven speaks and Jesus is like, yeah, it's for your benefit,
not for mine.
So at this point, then it says when he goes to the, to the, to the Seder dinner, this
Passover dinner, it says Jesus, knowing that everything was in his command, you know, all
of everything is under his command, all heaven, all earth.
It's under his command.
He's at the height of his power.
He does not get any more powerful this side of the grave.
He takes off his cloak, gets down on his knees and takes nasty feet and washes them.
And let's reiterate their feet were nasty.
Like we're talking, they wore sandals, not shoes and walked around in a dusty area and
just got like nasty, crusty feet.
Like nobody wants to touch these bad boys.
Well, and it's not just, not just dirty crusty, but you got to remember their animals is their
main source of moving materials.
Yeah.
So what are you going to end up with on your road?
Oh, yeah.
Thank you.
That was very juvenile.
So this is, this is very, you know, this is like your feet can be pretty nasty and servants
were the ones who did it, but not just servants, like the least of the servants.
Like it's the most humiliating thing that you can come up with to do.
And Jesus says, I'm going to do this for you so that later you understand when you have
the authority, when you have the power, when you have the responsibility to carry the kingdom
with you, wherever you go and see the Holy Spirit change people's lives through the message
of Jesus Christ, you remember that you're supposed to get down on your knees and wash
feet because that's who you are.
Yeah.
I remember when I first experienced the call to be in ministry, faster was super exciting.
He's like, dude, this is awesome.
Let's go get lunch.
I was like, okay, great.
Let's go do this.
So we're, we're eating lunch and he's like, all right, here's the keys to the church.
I was like, awesome.
I was like, what, what do I get to do?
He's like, you get to come in twice a week between 11 PM and 1 AM and clean toilets.
I was like, I'm like, I'm sorry.
I think you misspoke.
I don't think I don't.
That's what you meant by say.
And he's like, no, no, no, no, no.
You get to come in between 11 PM and 1 AM and clean toilets twice a week because if
you're unwilling to do something like this, then maybe you're not called to serve.
So good.
You know, and it's, it's one of these things they're like, oh, I don't want the pastor
to do this because he's, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, man, the pastor, that's who he is.
And more than anything, that's who he's equipping you to be.
He's equipping you to be the person who lowers himself.
Now, I think, I think that we've twisted up what that means.
Lower yourself.
I think we've, we've engaged false humility.
We've engaged, we've engaged people living, living, I'm going to say poverty almost like
they're like, oh, you have to give away everything you have.
No, it means wherever you are, you are intentionally serving those around you.
Whether you are Bill Gates running Microsoft or you are Chandra working at McDonald's,
your job is to serve those around you.
When serving those around us, a complete kid, oh, they had the steamy phone.
We could really miss the point.
Serving those around us, we were serving with no expectation and getting anything in return.
Like, like I'm to avoid my life where I don't make a ton of money, but I'm like, you know
what?
I'm not loaning anybody money.
If they need money and I have excess, I'll give it to them.
And if they decide to give, pay me back, that's great.
But like I'm not, I have no expectation that's going to happen.
When I show up in someone's life, I have no expectation that they're going to return the
favor or show up to my house and help me with something.
Right?
That's not my expectation.
My expectation is that I'm going to serve and be Jesus to whoever is in my life at that
moment in time.
And if I'm not doing that, then we have a problem because if we are truly stepping into
loving God with everything we have, that's naturally going to flow into loving the people
around us.
Right.
Real quick story about that.
I think we've talked about this before, but you dear listeners have not heard this.
And I'm, yes, I said dear listeners because-
I've heard Ben's stories a lot.
Yeah.
You can listen now.
Yeah.
So I was down south in Idaho.
By the way, we live in Alaska.
I don't think we actually specify that at this point.
We're not going to tell you which city people who know us can tell you, but it's a small
town so you could find us.
So I was down south in Idaho spending time with my sister-in-law and my niece and nephew.
And we went to this restaurant and let's just say that the service was less than adequate.
I feel like that's an appropriate way to say this.
And it came time for the bill and my niece saw how much I tipped.
And she said, Uncle Ben, did you mean to tip that much?
Because the service was really bad.
And I took the opportunity to talk to her about this.
I said, listen, here's a deal.
I went out to eat and I am going and eating from a place and not everybody has to have
this conviction, but I have a conviction is that when somebody comes and they take care
of me, I'm going to overly bless the people around me, which means that their blessing
is not dependent on what they do for me.
It's dependent on how grateful I am for what God gave me.
So when I tip, I always tip a minimum.
I'm not even going to give you a percentage because I think that it's easy to just do
a measuring stick.
I always tip a minimum percentage for people because I want them to understand I'm blessing
you because I've been blessed, not because of what you did for me.
And my niece is like, so why did you do that?
And I said, the thing is when I live with that heart, I actually take on the role of
Jesus.
And it's actually more about me than about the person who served me if I don't tip because
I have forgotten the lesson that I was once the outcast, I was once the lost and I was
forgiven and blessed and I have been infused with the Holy Spirit and now I walk in goodness
and my job is to be a benefit to those around me in all ways, spiritual, material, spiritual
and emotional.
And so when we add to this place of servanthood, we are doing these things for the sake of
the gospel and we're doing these things for the sake of others.
One of the things I love in the Bible is the apostle John.
All throughout the gospel of John, he does not mention himself by name.
He's like, no, I'm the one Jesus loved.
John doesn't do this because this is my belief at least.
John wants people to see Jesus everywhere he goes, not in John.
He's like, okay, I want people to see Jesus everywhere he goes.
And then in first John, he doesn't write his name.
Now some of you can know that by the way, you're going to look at me and you're going
to be like, okay, second and third John, I said, okay, this is a letter from Elder John.
Okay, that does say that 100%.
There's actually some theories on that.
I'm not going to dive into that because this is an intro podcast.
Conspiracy theories in episode one.
But if you want to hear some theories on the authorship of the gospel of John and first,
second and third John, I would love to respond to that one.
That one's a fun one.
But John is trying to make sure Jesus is known.
Right?
Like that's the key point.
He's trying to make sure Jesus is known, not himself.
Right?
And he even makes that statement in the gospel of John.
He says, I wrote all these things down so you know Jesus is who he said he was.
Yeah.
He wants Jesus to be known.
And I can think of people off the top of my head, no problem, who are like, man, I listened
to this pastor.
I listened to this person.
I've read this book by this person.
All those things are great.
And a lot of those authors, they point to Jesus.
But at the same time, they're talking about all these things.
And then you're like, I haven't heard them actually talk about engaging in scripture.
Or right, using a prayer.
It's like, oh yeah, man.
So and so says such a good word.
I was like, great.
What do you read on Tuesday?
There's a great quote from a pastor.
And I've loved it for a very long time, talking about Bible reading and prayer.
And because I think sometimes in the Christian life, we're incredibly discouraged because
we're like, oh man, I read the Bible and I just didn't feel anything like jump off the
page.
And so the pastor was talking.
He's like, I have people come up to me all the time who are like, pastor, I read, but
I can't remember anything that I read.
And he says, I don't remember what I had for breakfast last Tuesday.
Still fed me.
Still nourished me.
Still got me going.
He's like, don't be worried about what you're remembering.
Just engage the text and let it change you.
A lot of times we're like, okay, we need to know scripture.
We need to just know what it says.
All this stuff.
I'm like, yeah, I was like, actually, what the Bible tells us is we need to like have
it written on our hearts.
Like and what that is saying is like, no, we don't need to just know what it says, but
we need to see it like needs to be so evident in our lives that it's so evident in our relationship
with Jesus that it's just apparent.
Right.
Hopefully you understand that reading the word of God leads you to relationship with
God so that as you walk and engage this world, you're able to hear the voice of God in everything
that you're doing.
It's the benchmark by which we put every word we hear.
So what is this podcast?
It's a place where we talk about how do we love each other well?
How do we actually live that love well?
How do we let it encapsulate all who we are?
And then the second is how do we understand the Bible in a proper context?
And we're going to not do this as well as other people do.
Like when we talk about context and learning, like there's resources that we have dialed
in and we're using that we're going to share all over the place.
Like we are by far not authoritative, but what we are going to do is have real conversations
about real things and what it means to actually be a believer who follows Jesus in context.
We want to engage the text, how it was written, where it was written, when it was written,
who it was written to, all of that.
We want to know location of where things were happening.
We want to know all of that.
In our first few episodes following this, we're going to be diving into the creation
story in the first part of Genesis and just talking about some of the things that are
potentially misunderstood there and some of the things that are just spot on as well.
And one of the things that we should throw out there is just that we're coming at this
from a conversational standpoint.
If you're going to come and be like, okay, how are you guys equipped to talk about this?
Ben and I have both been in pastoral roles at churches and a number of different places.
We've studied this stuff, all of these things.
At the same time, we are not the ultimate authority.
We're probably going to say some stuff that you're like, that's not right.
And if you think that, let us know in love, please let us know.
And we will see about addressing that.
And we'll come out and say it is like if we realize that, hey, something we said was incorrect
or something we've come up with new understanding, new revelation.
In other words, like maybe there's a scholar who shed some light on something we didn't
understand.
I'm perfectly willing to come back and say, hey, I think I misinterpreted this in context
of the Bible.
But what I always want to do is I want to always shape my theology and my faith by what
Jesus tells me I have to shape it by, which is love God and love other people.
So everything is going to be shaped by that.
So if you're looking for somebody who's just going to talk to you about how to be a Melitogrysian,
this is not the podcast for you.
We're going to be talking about how do we love people well?
How do we understand the Bible in its context?
How do we reframe some of the things that maybe we've, for lack of a better term, Americanized
rather than contextualized?
And that's not to say anything.
I love being in America, but the Bible wasn't written to us.
It was written for us.
So my hope when you listen is you're going to feel like you're part of a conversation.
You're going to feel like you get some tidbits that you can walk away with and maybe go study.
You're going to feel like it gives you an idea that you're not walking this path alone,
that there are other people who are looking to say, how do we follow the Jesus of the
Bible a little bit better?
How do we engage this world so that the kingdom is really among us?
How do we show the Holy Spirit through our actions, through our heart that actually changes
things?
Because it's not our actions, it's the Holy Spirit working through us and we got to be
good conduits.
Yeah, and so that's really the heart and the hope here is we want to engage the text where
it's at and we want to and then take that and just see it poured out in our community
through the Holy Spirit and the work of Christ in our lives.
And we don't want that just for our community.
We want that for the communities of whoever is listening to this.
So I think we're going to have an email address that's going to be available at the bottom
in the show notes.
Yes.
So there will be an email address that we will as we do have some social media accounts
too and as we do more episodes, we'll be posting some stuff like that, eventually helping to
get some video reels and stuff like that up too.
We're really hoping that we don't break cameras when people like video us.
Yeah.
You are a couple of ugly dudes, let me tell you.
Yeah.
Our wives could have done so much better and yet by the grace of God.
So thanks for listening.
I'm Ben.
I'm Spether.
And this has been a non-scripted conversation.
Thank you so much for listening today.
We hope you enjoyed this podcast and we hope that you got something out of it.
If you have any questions, please contact us at loveandcontexts.gmail.com.
You can also follow us on Instagram and message us through there.
Instagram is loveandcontext.
Again, loveandcontexts.gmail.com or Instagram are the two ways to get ahold of us if you
would like.
Thank you once again.
We really appreciate you being here.
God bless.