Yeshua wrote something in the dirt. Twice. And Scripture never tells us what.

It’s one of the strangest details anywhere in the Gospels. A woman dragged into the Temple courts, a legal trap with no good exit, a mob holding stones and Bible verses, and the Man they’ve asked to judge her kneels down and starts writing on the ground.

For two thousand years people have guessed at what He wrote. But there’s a verse in Jeremiah that most of us have never connected to this story, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And then there’s an ancient ritual in Numbers 5 involving dust, water, and written words that makes the whole scene even stranger.

You’ve heard the Damascus road story a hundred times. Blinding light, voice from heaven, Saul becomes Paul, the great “conversion”.

Here’s what I’d never noticed until I went looking several years ago: the word conversion never appears. Not in any of the three accounts in Acts. Not in Galatians, where Paul tells it himself. And the name change? It doesn’t happen on the road. It doesn’t happen for years. When it finally shows up, it’s on an island, in front of a Roman official, in half a sentence with no drumroll at all.

In this episode I walk through what Paul actually says about that day, why he borrows his language from two prophets you’d never associate with conversion, and the courtroom scene decades later where he describes himself in a tense that should stop us cold.

Press play. Bring your Bible.

There’s a moment in John 7 that most of us have read a dozen times without ever seeing what was actually happening around it. Yeshua stands up at a festival and makes an offer to anyone who’s thirsty.

What was going on in Jerusalem that week changes everything about how you hear those words. You need the whole picture, and I painted it for you in this week’s episode.

If you’ve ever felt like you keep drinking from things that leave you empty, this one’s for you.

Press play. Then come tell me what you never noticed in this passage before.

You know this story. Ten lepers healed. One comes back. And the lesson, every single time, is gratitude. Be the thankful one.

That lesson isn’t wrong. It just stops early.

Because there’s one word in Luke 17 that nobody mentioned in Sunday school. One word, out of the mouth of Yeshua Himself, that appears exactly once in the entire New Testament.

I’m not telling you the word here. That’s what the episode is for.

Press play. Bring your Bible. And prepare to be a little bit ruined for every gratitude sermon you’ve ever heard on this passage.

There’s one Hebrew word that shows up at the exact moment everything changes for Noah, for Rachel, for Hannah, and for an entire enslaved nation. One word. And a dying man hanging next to Yeshua prayed it with his last breaths.

If you’ve ever wondered whether God has forgotten you, this episode is for you.

Press play. Bring tissues. I mean it about the ti…

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There’s a woman in Mark 5 who has been bleeding for twelve years. Broke, worn out, and cut off from the temple and from being touched by anyone at all. And when she finally makes her move, she does something that looks reckless on paper. She shoves through a crowd and grabs a fistful of a rabbi’s clothes.

Most of us were handed a version of this story where she just grabbed whatever her hand landed on. Poor desperate thing, lucky guess. I’m not so sure about that. I think she knew exactly what she was reaching for, and once you see it, you’re going to have a hard time unseeing it.

This week’s episode is about her. Pour your coffee and come sit with me for this one.

🎧 Listen now.

In this week’s episode, we’re going back to the Jabbok, and we’re bringing the Hebrew with us.

Here’s a taste of what’s inside:

Genesis 32 isn’t a cute perseverance story but a theologically loaded night where Jacob (Yaakov, “heel-grabber”) is left alone at the Jabbok (Yabok) and wrestles a mysterious “man” until dawn, with Hebrew wordplay linking Yaakov, Yabok, and ye’avek (wrestle).

The opponent—described across Scripture as man, angel, and God—dislocates Jacob’s hip, yet Jacob refuses to let go without a blessing and must finally speak his true name. Only then is he renamed Yisrael, because he struggled with God and with men and overcame, embedding struggle into the covenant family’s identity.

Jacob limps at sunrise, and Israel’s later practice of avoiding the hip sinew memorializes the wound. The episode traces this wrestling motif forward to Yeshua’s night of agony in Gethsemane and the enduring reality of blessing and scars together.

00:00 Midnight River Fight

01:21 Jacob’s Messy Backstory

03:31 Alone at the Jabbok

04:30 Hebrew Wordplay Revealed

06:38 Who Is the Stranger

09:25 Blessing Demanded

10:33 What Is Your Name

12:31 Renamed Israel Forever

15:13 Sunrise Limp and Memory

17:02 From Jabbok to Jesus

19:30 Closing and Subscribe

You are so tired, and not the kind of tired a good night’s sleep fixes. This week’s episode goes all the way back to Genesis to unpack something we’ve mostly learned as a rule instead of what it actually is, a gift built into the architecture of the week itself before a single commandment existed.

We trace Sabbath from creation through the Exodus comman…

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I’m revisiting Exodus 3 in this one, and I want to argue something that took me a while to see clearly myself. When Moses asks God’s name at the burning bush, God doesn’t answer with a title. He answers with a verb. Ehyeh, “to be,” not a label He could carve into stone but something still in motion, revealing Himself through action, presence, and ongoing faithfulness.

I walk through why ehyeh can legitimately mean both “I Am” and “I Will Be,” and I connect that self-description straight back to God’s earlier promise to Moses, “I will be with you,” using that exact same Hebrew form.

I also lay out the grammatical link between ehyeh and the covenant name YHVH, Israel’s way of saying “He is” or “He will be,” and why God’s name was never meant to be known by pronunciation alone. It’s known through His deeds, all through the Exodus and the rest of the Old Testament.

Then I follow this thread straight into John’s Gospel, into Jesus’ own “I am” language, especially that moment in John 8 that got stones picked up. Because I don’t think Scripture is handing us information to collect. I think it’s inviting us to actually know Him.

In this episode we’re exploring the baptism of Yeshua from all three Synoptic Gospels, and what we find is not a warm opening scene before the real ministry starts. It’s a coronation. A covenant moment. A Trinitarian earthquake dressed up in muddy river water.

We cover what ritual immersion actually meant in first-century Jewish life, why the Jordan River was already carrying centuries of covenant memory before Yeshua ever stepped into it, what John’s hesitation in Matthew 3:14 tells us about who Yeshua is, and what the voice from heaven was actually quoting when it spoke over him.

She lost an argument with her sister, won an argument with God, and has been crying in the Bible for about three thousand years.

In this teaching, we trace Rachel's story from the well where Jacob first sees her, through the wedding night switch that costs her everything, into a piece of rabbinic tradition where her sacrificial love becomes the very arg…

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Most people skip Leviticus. And honestly? I understand. It’s dense, it’s ancient, and nobody’s Sunday school teacher ever made the burnt offering sound like the thing that would change how you read the New Testament.

But here’s what I need you to know before you hit play: the sacrificial system wasn’t God being demanding. It was God being deliberate. Every single offering He commanded Israel to bring was a word in a language He was building across centuries. Five offerings. Five words. And by the time this episode ends, you’re going to see something at the cross you’ve never seen before.

We’re walking through all five Levitical offerings in today’s episode: the olah, the minchah, the shelamim, the chatat, and the asham. We’re looking at what each one meant, what it communicated, and why God built the whole system before He did what He did in the first century.

And then we get to Isaiah 53, and the prophet drops a single word that should make every student of Leviticus stop cold.

If you’ve ever felt like the Old Testament is just the warm-up act, this episode is going to fix that.

How to Add Your Private Feed to a Podcast App

Log into Substack and go to your account settings. Look for the Podcast section and you’ll find a private RSS link that belongs specifically to your account. Copy that link.

Then open your podcast app of choice and look for an option to add a show by URL or add an RSS feed. Paste your link and you’re done. Eve…

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Thirty-eight chapters. That’s how long Job waited for God to say something.

And when God finally spoke from the whirlwind, He didn’t answer a single one of Job’s questions. No explanation for the suffering. No apology for the silence. No theological breakdown of why any of it happened.

Instead, God asked Job about the morning stars. And the sea. And the snow. And the bear and her cubs.

Most people read that as a rebuke. Today I want to make the case that it was something else entirely.

In this episode we’re digging into Job 38 and the speech God delivers from the whirlwind, and we’re looking at what it actually tells us about who God is. Because the point of the whirlwind speech was never to put Job in his place. It was to show Job something he couldn’t see from inside his suffering: that the God who sets boundaries for the sea and counts the clouds had never once looked away.

Hey Founders!

First, can I just say, you are the ones who showed up early and I don’t take that lightly. This one’s for you.

I wanted to let you know that your weekly audio teachings are now being published as proper podcast episodes in a private feed just for Founders. And before you feel any kind of pressure about that, let me be clear about something. …

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You know this story. Man gets robbed and beaten, two religious leaders walk past him, a Samaritan stops to help. Be a helper, lesson over.

Except that’s barely scratching the surface of what’s actually happening here.

In this episode I’m digging into why the lawyer’s question was a loophole in disguise, what made the Samaritan such a shocking choice for the hero of this story, and why Yeshua refused to answer the question He was actually asked. This one will change how you read one of the most familiar parables in the whole Bible.

If this episode opened something up for you, take fifteen seconds and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It’s how other people find this show, and I read every single one. And if you found it helpful, share it with a friend who could use a fresh look at a story they thought they already knew.

You’ve heard this verse your whole life. “I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.” But somewhere along the way, fulfill got quietly swapped out for finish off, like Jesus showed up and closed the book on the Old Testament for good.

That is not what the Greek actually says.

In this episode I’m breaking down the two Greek words at the center of Matthew 5:17, the second-century heretic whose ideas are still floating around our pulpits today, and why this changes how you read your entire Old Testament. Not just this one verse. The whole thing.

🎧 Hit play. Grab your coffee first.

And… this week, ‘What Your Sunday School Never Told You’ is also going to be a Podcast series. So you will get two different teachings on it each week!

If this episode stirred something in you, share it with a friend who has ever felt like the Old Testament was just background noise for the “real” story. And I would LOVE it if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It will help others find the message!

And if it left you wanting to go slower and deeper into the Word, I’ve got you! Paid subscribers get access to live Bible studies, extended studies, devotionals, theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of women who want depth without pressure or performance. If you’re ready to step further into the Word, you’re welcome inside.

👉🏻 Join The Vault.

If a paid subscription isn’t feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip here. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕

There is a version of the Christian message being preached to millions of people every week that has quietly replaced the actual gospel with something far more marketable. It promises financial breakthrough, physical healing, restored relationships, and a life of favor and blessing, usually in exchange for a seed offering and a positive confession. It uses real Bible verses. It has real stages and real production budgets. And Paul has a word for what it is: a counterfeit gospel.

This episode defines that term carefully, because not everything that’s theologically thin rises to that level. But when blessing becomes the center and Yeshua becomes merely the means to get it, we’ve crossed a line.

When grace is treated as something you can purchase with a financial gift to a teacher’s ministry, we’ve crossed a line. And when people in real pain are handed a formula instead of a Savior and told that their suffering is evidence of weak faith rather than evidence that they live in a real world, we’ve crossed a line.

Because the Bible doesn’t promise you comfort. It promises you God.

There’s a word Yeshua used in John 15 that most of us blow right past. It’s the Greek word katharos and in the Jewish world he was operating in, it wasn’t just a feeling. It was a legal status. A priestly declaration. Something you couldn’t pronounce over yourself.

And the night before his crucifixion, knowing exactly what the next twelve hours would look like, he looked at his disciples and said it anyway.

You are already clean.

This episode sits in John 15:3, pulls in the purification language of the Hebrew Bible, and asks the question so many of us need to answer honestly: are we actually living like the verdict is in? Or are we still performing for a clipboard God who we secretly believe hasn’t decided yet?

The Hebrew word behind "holy" is kadosh and it doesn't mean morally perfect. It means other. In this episode we go back to the Hebrew, walk through Isaiah's throne room, unpack the theology built into the Temple's architecture, and land on what God actually says the set-apart life looks like in Leviticus 19.

If you've been exhausted by a version of holiness that felt like a checklist you could never finish, this one is for you.

If this episode stirred something in you, share it with a friend who might need it too.

And if it left you wanting to go slower and deeper into the Word, I’ve got you!

Paid subscribers get access to live Bible studies, extended studies, devotionals. theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of women who want depth without pressure or performance.

If you’re ready to step further into the Word, you’re welcome inside.

👉🏻 Join The Vault

If a paid subscription isn’t feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip here. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕