vocational channels archives

“The Great Commission” (Matthew 28:16-20) is the central driving mission for God’s people. But here is a question to consider: How does this commission that churches have for people relate to the mission that God has for every aspect of life? Before we know what our mission is, we must first know what God’s mission is.

Christopher J. H. Wright (PhD, Cambridge) is the Global Ambassador of the Langham Partnership, strengthening leaders in churches around the world. He was chair of the Lausanne Theology Working Group and the chief architect of The Cape Town Commitment from the Third Lausanne Congress of 2010. He has written many books including commentaries on Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel. Two incredibly influential books have been The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (IVP Academic) and The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Zondervan Academic).

His latest book is The Great Story and the Great Commission: Participating in the Biblical Drama of Mission (Baker Academic, 2023).

Author of “On Getting Out of Bed.”

Many Christians must deal with some sort of mental or emotional suffering. While life is a good creation from a loving God, in a fallen and broken world, normal human life can be really difficult. While we have made tremendous advancements in therapy and psychiatry, the burden of living still comes down to the mundane choices that we each must make each moment, starting with the daily choice to get out of bed.

Our guest on this episode is Dr. O. Alan Noble, the author of On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living (InterVarsity Press, 2023). This is a book in which Alan sits with us and puts words to our experiences of mental or emotional suffering.

What does it mean to be human? We live in an age of many voices trying to shape our understanding of who we are and what we are supposed to do.

Our guest on this episode is Dr. Carmen Joy Imes (PhD, Wheaton). She is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Biola University and the author of Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters (InterVarsity Press, 2023).

Our identity is rooted in Genesis 1, where humanity is created in God’s image. Imago Dei is our human identity, made to represent God in his very good creation. And what we do in our vocations flows directly from who we are as the Imago Dei.

For many American Christians, the presumptive next big event in redemptive history will be the Rapture. Many believers have been influenced by the fictional stories of the Left Behind novels and movies which depict military conflict in Israel, the Rapture in which all true believers are taken to Heaven, and the great tribulation in which those who are left behind must endure seven years of war and suffering.

In this episode of the podcast, we explore the key theological ideas of a theological system called Dispensationalism, which was the predominant default theology of American Christianity for most of the 20th Century.

Our guest is Daniel G. Hummel, Ph.D., (American History, University of Wisconsin-Madison), the author of the new book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans Press, 2023). 

This episode of the Reintegrate Podcast is a little different in that we live-streamed it in conjunction with the Logos Daily Circle. Our guest is Jason Stone, the founder of the Logos Daily Circle.

This is the first of what we are hoping will be a new joint venture between Reintegrate and Logos Daily to feature our guests to the huge community in the Logos Daily Circle.

TIME STAMPS
What we discuss in this episode:
0:00 Getting to know Bob, David, and Jason
8:30 What is Logos Daily Circle?
13:42 What is Reintegrate?
18:52 How should “online community” (like Logos Daily) be different than “social media?”
25:22 What is “calling,” and how can we reintegrate our vocations with God’s mission?
35:30 What is the connection between callings and the kingdom of God?
41:09 Does what we do in our work in a fallen and temporary world really matter?
52:40 How can pastors better equip people to be missional in and through their vocations?

We all are fascinated with the End Times. What is our final destiny? This is eschatology. If we were to take a random survey of Christians in North America, we would hear something like this: Our destiny is heaven. When we die, we go off to our home with Jesus, worshiping God for all eternity in an otherworldly existence. We will finally shed this earthly life and live as God wants us to live, with Jesus and away from this earthly life. Most pastors preach that the earth is not our home, that what God has for us is to live forever in another place, Heaven, and that Earth will be no more.

Our guest on this episode is J. Richard Middleton. In his book, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Baker Academic, 2014), he makes the case that the Bible teaches that the ultimate hope for the believer is not an otherworldly heaven. Instead, it is full-bodied participation in a new heaven and a new earth, brought into fullness through the coming of God’s kingdom. Dr. J. Richard Middleton (Ph.D. (Free University of Amsterdam) is Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis at Northeastern Seminary.

Our guest is Christian philosopher and apologist Paul Copan, author of Is God a Vindictive Bully?: Reconciling Portrayals of God in the Old and New Testaments (Baker, 2022), winner of the Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit in the category of Apologetics and Evangelism.

Dr. Copan takes on some of the most difficult Old Testament challenges and places them in their larger historical and theological contexts. He explores the kindness, patience, and compassion of God in the Old Testament and shows how Jesus in the New Testament reveals both God’s divine kindness and also God’s divine severity. The God of the Old Testament is definitely fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, but it turns out to be the same God.

You’re not supposed to “let God take control” of your life and work. You’re not supposed to “hear God’s voice in your heart.” And, you’re not supposed to be guided by God’s Holy Spirit by inner feelings of peace, intuitions, or impressions.

These are three things believers have recently come to believe as being essential to being Christian. But according to our guest Phillip Cary, they are not found in the Bible and actually will cause harm – psychologically, morally, and spiritually. Phillip Cary is a Professor of Philosophy and the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Eastern University. Brazos Press has just released the expanded second edition of his best-selling book, Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do.

Dr. Michael F. Bird is an Australian biblical scholar and Anglican priest who writes about the history of early Christianity, theology, and contemporary issues. He is Academic Dean and a lecturer at Ridley College in Melbourne.

He is the author of 30 books, including The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2014), Evangelical Theology,(2nd edition published by Zondervan in 2020), The New Testament in its World (with N.T. Wright) (Zondervan, 2019), and his latest, Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew about the Bible (Zondervan, 2021).

The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said these words in a speech he gave when he opened a new university:

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

Jessica Joustra and Robert Joustra are the editors of a new book titled Calvinism for a Secular Age: A Twenty-First-Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures (IVP, 2022). It’s a book that features contemporary Christian theologians, historians, scientists, and artists applying to today the concepts Kuyper introduced to America in 1898 in his famous Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. These lectures, reflecting on the role of the Christian faith in a variety of social spheres, emphasized that our Christian faith addresses every aspect of life. This book seeks to bring those concepts into the 21st Century.

Truth be told, most Christians, even many pastors, don’t really have a firm understanding of what heaven is. 

• Where is the final destiny of the believer?
• What will we be there and what will we do there? 

In this episode of the Reintegrate Podcast, we invite an expert to share his insights. Dr. Michael Wittmer is Professor of Systematic & Historical Theology and the Director of the Center for Christian Worldview at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary at Cornerstone University. He is the author of lots of articles and several books, including books that deal with the topic on this episode of the podcast: Anticipating Heaven (Our Daily Bread Publishing, 2019). Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God (Zondervan, 2009), and he just served as the editor of Four Views on Heaven (in the Counterpoints series, Zondervan, 2022).

What is God actually redeeming in us? What does it mean to be human? What is our mission in the world? Christians should seek the answers to these big questions. But we may lack the theological tools to answer. Our vision of the purpose of God and of us humans can be myopic because we haven’t steeped our minds in the truths about humanity found in the first chapter of Genesis, where it is revealed that we are created in the image of God. 

Dr. J. Richard Middleton (Ph.D. Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) is the author of The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (from Brazos Press, 2005).

He is Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis at Northeastern Seminary. His most recent book is titled Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Baker Academic, 2021). Previous books include A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Baker Academic, 2014). He is also the co-author (with Brian Walsh) of The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview (IVP Academic, 1984) and Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (IVP Academic/SPCK, 1995).