TRC Chattanooga Podcast

Christ is the image of the invisible God. No one has ever seen the Father, but we have seen Christ. And if you have seen Christ, you have seen the Father. So it is fitting for us, on the last Sunday of the church year, to consider the lordship of our Savior Jesus Christ. Today is Christ the King Sunday. How does St. Paul help us to understand what that means? Listen as Elder Wes Keene exhorts the congregation at TRC Chattanooga, ba...

Through poor theology, misuse, disuse, and modernism’s warm embrace of rationalism, the church is at risk of missing the full value of her sacraments. Rather than letting the church get robbed blind, we need to embrace the plain words of Christ written right in the New Testament, and truly believe them. In this lesson, we follow the scriptural warrant for the Eucharist, as well as the many misunderstandings that have arisen over th...

The second letter to the Thessalonians was written on account of a fake letter having been received by the congregation claiming to be from Paul himself. But in spite of this confusion, the Apostle Paul sends his own letter and offers them his confidence that they will not depart from the teachings and commands that he had already delivered to them. In our day today, technology and artificial intelligence are creating believable, t...

The Lord's Supper, also known as Communion and the Eucharist in Christian tradition, is the sacramental meal of the New Covenant. In today's TRC Sunday School class, we consider the Old Testament meals and how these divine and sacred events that came before the New Covenant prefigured and gave a foretaste of the good things to come in Christ and the Lord's Supper. Listen as Elder Glenn Jones leads a study of Communion in the Old Te...

We have heard the ditches analogy: that we want to avoid behavior that causes us to fall off into one ditch or another, and stay in the center ground. There are indeed situations where this is a great way to explain how to find the moral answer. But not every moral question is a ditch. When it comes to following God’s laws, we are highly imperfect. But far from calling us to be moderate centrists about his commandment...

Most understand Psalm 32 to be about David’s contrition after his affair and resulting treachery with Bathsheba. In it, David says that he acknowledged his sin before the Lord and did not cover it. But that wasn’t always true. David, did for a time attempt to keep silent about it, and that had devastating effects for him. Keeping a sin secret is futile. The Lord is not mocked. But when we come to him and confess our s...

On the occasion of Reformation Sunday, Elder Glenn Jones preaches to the congregation about the tale of two men, Martin Luther and John Tetzel, asking the congregation, based on Luke 18:9-14, which of them went home justified. Jesus' teaching on God's mercy is so clear in Scripture, it is hard for anyone reading Luke's Gospel to deny that one is justified purely by God's mercy in Jesus Christ alone. Listen as Elder Glenn Jones prea...

The Church is always to be reformed, whenever corruption and false teaching creeps in. The well known Latin phrase, Semper Reformanda, is a way of summarizing this teaching we find in Jude's epistle. TRC Chattanooga is both a reformation and a catholic congregation, knowing that all Christians throughout history share in the faith once for all delivered to the saints and that they must also stridently defend it when false teaching ...

Paul tells Timothy that he must continue in the things which he had learned, and he tells him why. But we must understand the importance of the teachings of our own youth. It is critical that we not deviate from what our parents and ministers taught us about the Christian faith. Because there are many forces upon the Christian urging them to form new and strange beliefs. Listen as Elder Wes Keene exhorts the congregation at TRC Cha...

Paul wrote his second letter to Timothy at the end of Paul's life. Rather than the problem being about Paul, this letter was about the problem of Paul no longer being in this world and the reality that Timothy would face in appointing younger leaders to succeed in the faithful teaching of the Gospel message Paul had preached. We in the American churches today face a similar demand as the older generation passes on from this world. ...

Paul warns Timothy to charge the congregation not to quarrel about the meaning of words because it ultimately leads to the ruin of the hearers. In Paul's day, the dispute was over the meaning of the Resurrection, but in our day the dispute is over the meaning of the created world and such terms as man and woman, the meaning of marriage, and much more. How should we apply this directive for us 'not to quarrel' and how has it been mi...

When the apostles ask Jesus to increase their faith, he doesn’t really address their request directly. Instead, he tells them what one of the effects of having even slightly more faith would be. But then he explains the relationship between a slave and the slave master. As we labor for God in his kingdom, we see ourselves in the slave in this account. How is it that faith is increased? And is this a good request to ma...

We all face temptations with anger. We see others appearing to get away with wickedness, and we naturally get upset about it. But David warns us that we must restrain that anger, and keep it in check. In the end, if we do not, it leads to evil. Even when we have righteous anger about evil that we see, we can still succumb to a state of perpetual wrath. Listen to Elder Wes Keene deliver this week’s exhortation at TRC C...

In Luke 16:19-31 we have the account of the rich man and Lazarus. The plot twist comes in the middle, when Luke reveals to us that the rich man knew who Abraham was. He was raised in the faith. But something happened. He forgot the faith he was raised in. While he had known Abraham, he forgot about the paths Abraham walked. There is something instructional in this for us, beyond the reminder to love our neighbor. If we forget our b...