Can you trust your heart? Can you trust your mind? It's really important to know what this means. Sometimes you will hear Christians trying to convince you that your heart and your mind can't be trusted. They will use these two verses in a bad way without understanding what they mean to trick you into thinking badly about yourself. I will show you that the real meaning is the opposite of what most people say. In fact, these verses actually encourage you to use your heart and mind together to trust in God. God gave us the ability to think for ourselves. God gave us a conscience so that we know what is good and what is evil. When we use heart and mind together, we can do what God wants us to do. 

Jeremiah 17:9-10 "The human mind is more deceitful than anything else. It is incurably bad. Who can understand it?
I, the Lord, probe into people’s minds. I examine people’s hearts. I deal with each person according to how he has behaved. I give them what they deserve based on what they have done."

Proverbs 3:5 
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding.

In this serious episode, I tell you about the most heartbreaking messages I receive from young people when ask me if they have committed the unforgivable sin. They worry they are doomed to hell because of blasphemy. I always wonder if it was a pastor or a Sunday school teacher who filled them with this fear. In this episode, I tell you why you don’t need to fear it. Blasphemy is a very aggressive and special kind of sin that few of us, and no teenager, can commit. Also, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was something very special that Jesus spoke about in Matthew 12:31-32 and Mark 3:28-30. If you are worried about this, it is really important to understand what it means and how people use this fear to scare and control you. This is important knowledge to have. The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) is a story of unconditional love, repentance, and forgiveness. This is super useful for understanding the character of God. 



The unforgivable sin, or "unpardonable sin," in the Gospels is 
blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, specifically described in Matthew 12:31-32, Mark 3:28-30, and Luke 12:10. It involves willfully and persistently attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to Satan, as the Pharisees did when accusing Jesus of using demonic power, indicating a hard-hearted, final rejection of Christ's salvific work.

Thomas was one of the most impressive apostles for a number of reasons. Sometimes people feel bad about him because he told Jesus that needed to put his hands on Jesus’s wounds to believe Jesus had risen. But Thomas shows up 3 times in the Gospel of John. He also inspired the Gospel of Thomas which many people thought should have been in the Bible. The “doubting” was really more about being practical and smart than about unbelief. In this episode I explain why we should look up to Thomas. Also why many people really admire him even today. 

John 11:8 The disciples replied, “Rabbi, the Jewish opposition wants to stone you, but you want to go back?” 16 Then Thomas (the one called Didymus) said to the other disciples, “Let us go too so that we may die with Jesus.”

John
14 “Don’t be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me. 2 My Father’s house has room to spare. If that weren’t the case, would I have told you that I’m going to prepare a place for you? 3 When I go to prepare a place for you, I will return and take you to be with me so that where I am you will be too. 4 You know the way to the place I’m going.”

5 Thomas asked, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

6 Jesus answered, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you have really known me, you will also know the Father. From now on you know him and have seen him.”

John 20
24 Thomas, the one called Didymus,[a] one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!”

But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe.”

26 After eight days his disciples were again in a house and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus entered and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!”

28 Thomas responded to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!”

29 Jesus replied, “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.”

Daniel is such a fun book. It has the men with funny names thrown into the fiery furnace. They are saved without even the slightest burn and with angels appearing in the fire with them. It has Daniel thrown into the Lion's Den by the King in a fit of rage. Then the lion's mouth is shut. These miraculous stories are amazing. A follower of mine said, "why don't you talk about Daniel's dreams in Chapter 7?" So I will tell you about this amazing dream because it connects the two parts of Daniel: the first part with these amazing stories and the second part with all these crazy images, just like Revelation. Dreams are such a big part of the Bible. Daniel was the last book of the Old Testament written between 167 and 165 BC. That is confusing, because our Bible's put Malachi last, but they did this to link the Old Testament with the New Testament. Even though Daniel was written about things that happened 400 years before, it's story telling tells us so much about the people living just before Jesus. If you could take your Bible apart and put it back together, you should put Daniel last. I explain how this timeline is so interesting and how it helps to make this weird dream make sense.

Moses lost his temper and broke the first set of tablets. So God told him to do it all over again. The first set of tablets was made and written by God. The second set was made and written by Moses at God's direction. Why do it again? It is such an interesting story about anger and pleading and forgiveness. God and Moses worked together. In this episode, I tell you the amazing behind the cooperation of God and Moses. God is God, Moses was God's servant, but they had to find another way to work with the people.

Exodus 32:14
14 And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

Exodus 34:1
34 The Lord said to Moses, “Cut two tablets of stone like the former ones, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets, which you broke.

Exodus 34:28
28 He was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.

There is only one story about Jesus as a boy in the whole Bible. It is very interesting. It tells us a lot about how we know what parts of the Bible are real and what parts are just stories. In this episode, I tell you all the background of Jesus as a 12 year old boy in the temple. He is speaking to the old rabbis and they are super impressed with how smart he is. When you have a story like this, you must always ask whether it make sense in the culture and why the author of the book wrote about it. I explain how the authors of the bible were inspired and how you can know what their purpose was.

Ruth is an amazing character in the Bible. She is an strong woman. She is loyal and she is full of love for her mother in law, Naomi. Many people are amazed that we have this story about a woman, because we think Bible times were only about men and that women had no power. That is partly true. I explain how Ruth got into the risky position of being a foreign widow in ancient Israel. Naomi didn't want to ruin Ruth's chances to find a new husband in her home country. But Ruth insisted to stay with her, but in the most famous verse Ruth insists that she will stay with Naomi. And then she will try to become Boaz's wife. I also explain that while this story is beautiful by itself, it had a very important message. The people of Israel discriminated against the people of Moab, the country where Ruth was from. She was very bold to stay in Israel where she would not be accepted. It was through the kindness of Boaz that she got to stay. And then she would become the great grandmother of King David, the most important king of Israel, and then many generations later the ancestor of Jesus. It is a good lesson for loving the foreigner and to trust in God. 


Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to abandon you, to turn back from following after you. Wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. 17 Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord do this to me and more so if even death separates me from you.” 18 When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped speaking to her about it.

Revelation is the craziest book of the Bible. Many people fear it. Some people hate it. It’s much better to understand it and enjoy the crazy ride. In this episode, I show a way to enjoy it without the fear of the hate. It’s all about how to use the book. Most people use it like a secret decoder ring of the future. But most of Christian history people didn’t think this. This is both a fun and a serious episode. Revelation is a fun rollercoaster ride that teaches what God thinks about empire and power at the same time. It can be uplifting and it is used for a lot of harm. I hope you will see it for what it is instead of what people use it for. 

In this episode, we explore one of the weirdest and most fun books in the Old Testament. Most kids are told about how Jonah was swallowed by a big fish for three days and then vomited back on the beach. That is a fun image, but it is not what the book is really about. Instead it is about bullies and how God loves everyone, even them. Jonah is just a drama queen. He hates the bullies in Ninevah so much that he willing to go to the ends of the earth to not follow God's command. Instead, Jonah becomes a bully himself. The story is so absurd, but the fact of God's love is so much deeper than our own prejudices and hatred is the real story.

Sometime in your life, you give up on just believing what your parents told you. You discover God or not for yourself. Usually in your teens, you start taking it seriously. Some teens really want to get involved in faith and other don't. I started this podcast to help you discover the Bible for yourself. I am fascinated with the Bible. Some stories are terrible. Some stories are comforting. Most stories are just weird. In this episode, I introduce myself "Real Bible Rob" and why I think a fresh new way to look at faith can help you to be fascinated with the stories like I am. The most important thing to know is that a lot of people teach the Bible in a fearful way. This almost always comes from people who don't know what the Bible really says. They think the Bible is magical and frightening, especially if you disagree with it or you don't believe everything it says. Instead, smart people know that's not the way it works. I hope I can help you see this in a fresh new way. To show you how this works, I tell you about the story about Jesus healing the Blind Man. Even if you've heard it before, it's much more fun that most people realize. I also recommend the best Study Bible for teens to own.