The mission of Spoken Gospel is to equip the church to speak the gospel out of every corner of scripture. Co-hosts and close friends, David Bowden and Seth Stewart, sit down every week to talk through a Bible passage and see how it points us to Jesus.
In the land of Uz, out in Gentile wilderness, a blameless king-priest tends a pocket of paradise—a flourishing household he rules and intercedes for, keeping the snakes out. Then the accuser appears in God's throne room and takes every good gift Job has been given and twists it into an indictment: remove the hedge, and this man will curse God to his face. David and Christine walk through Job's…
Job is not the only ancient book about a righteous man who suffers for no nameable reason. Cultures across Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt wrote about pious sufferers who lamented, searched their lives for a hidden crime, and found nothing—and every one of them eventually traded away either their innocence or their god to make the pain stop. David and Christine open a new series on Job by reading it…
When Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, he isn't just fulfilling a single prediction from Zechariah. He's taking up a promise made to Judah on Jacob's deathbed—a scepter, a roused lion, and a donkey tethered to his brother Joseph's vine—that has been waiting centuries for Israel's two divided kingdoms to become one again. David and Christine trace donkeys and vines from Genesis 49 to a…
Six days before Passover, as all Jerusalem prepares lambs for slaughter, Mary pours out a pound of costly perfume over Jesus' feet at a dinner in the slum of Bethany, and the whole house fills with its fragrance. In this single extravagant act, Jesus is revealed as the Passover lamb, the consecrated priest, the anointed King, and the Bridegroom on his way to the grave. David and Christine walk…
Three times in John 6, Jesus retells the story of the Exodus: he feeds a hungry crowd near Passover, crosses a stormy sea, and declares himself the true bread from heaven that came down to sustain his people. Beneath the miracle of the loaves and fish lies a web of echoes—the manna in the wilderness, the bread of the presence, and the tree of life in Eden. David and Christine walk through this…
Water shows up in nearly every chapter of John's Gospel, and it's almost never simple—sometimes death, sometimes life, sometimes the boundary between them. Having spent the last episode tracing the theme of water through the Old Testament, David and Christine return to John to watch all those waves crash together into one story. They walk through Jesus' baptism, the wedding at Cana, the woman at…
Water flows through nearly every chapter of John's Gospel. From Jesus' baptism to the woman at the well, from healing beside a pool to walking on the sea, John uses water imagery to describe Jesus' ministry. David and Christine dive into the Old Testament to trace the theme of water through the biblical story and how rescue from chaotic depths and provision of life-giving streams are images that…
The Gospel of John is structured around seven signs that build toward an eighth—the resurrection of Jesus. To understand what John means by a "sign," David and Christine walk through the biblical story, tracing where and how signs appear in Scripture. From the heavenly lights of creation to the plagues that fell on Egypt, John shows that Jesus' signs reveal that he is God in the flesh who has come…
John opens his Gospel not with a birth narrative or a genealogy, but with a stunning claim about who Jesus has always been. David and Christine walk through John's prologue and talk about how the Word of God appears as a visible divine person over 100 times in the Old Testament, how the logic of creation itself proves Jesus is uncreated and therefore God, and why the incarnation—God becoming flesh…
John's account of Jesus' life and Gospel has long been noted for its uniqueness compared to the synoptic accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In this episode, David and Christine begin the series on the Gospel of John, exploring who John is as a unique eyewitness, his purpose for writing, and the importance of reading John on his own terms to see Jesus as the God who incarnates and fulfills…
Farewell Seth: What Seven Years in Scripture Taught Us
After nearly seven years of reading through the entire Bible together, Seth Stewart steps away from the Spoken Gospel Podcast to pursue eldership and family ministry full time. In this episode, Seth and David reflect on how seeing Jesus on every page of Scripture changed their understanding of who he is, what it really means to read the Bible faithfully, and why no podcast — including this one —…