Who do you actually pray for? That question opens this lesson from 1 Timothy 2:1-8, and it sets up a challenge to pray far beyond your usual list.

Teacher Luke Rasor walks through Paul's charge to the church in Ephesus to pray for all people, including kings and those in authority, and shows that Paul gives three specific reasons believers should pray this broadly. God desires all to be saved. Christ died as a sufficient ransom for all. And believers are called to preach the gospel to all people without exception.

Rasor works carefully through some of the passage's trickier phrases, including what it means for God to desire the salvation of people he has not chosen to save, and why Paul specifically calls the men of the church to lead in this kind of prayer. He also addresses what it means to pray with holy hands, without wrath or dissension, tying the health of a church's prayer life directly to its unity and love for one another.

This lesson pushes past private, personal prayer requests toward the harder and more neglected habit of praying for leaders, neighbors, and even people you disagree with, and reminds listeners that the most important thing to pray for anyone is their salvation.

Not all cursing is sin, and not all oaths are forbidden. Lesson 35 continues the study of the third commandment and moves into cursing and swearing.

Teacher Dave Rich distinguishes between sinful cursing, calling for someone's harm out of personal anger or vindictiveness, and the legitimate cursing found in Scripture, including the imprecatory psalms, Paul's warnings against false teachers, and church discipline. Rich shows that a curse becomes sin when it serves personal vengeance rather than God's glory, and that treating words like damn and hell lightly undermines the seriousness of what they actually mean.

Rich then turns to swearing and oath taking, working through Matthew 5 and James 5 to argue that Jesus and James were not forbidding all oaths but the dishonest, manipulative oath taking common among the Pharisees. He traces examples of legitimate oaths from God's own promise to Abraham, Christ's testimony before the high priest, and Paul's letters, then walks through categories of prohibited swearing, including dishonest oaths, oaths to sin, and foolish oaths like Jephthah's vow.

The lesson closes with practical guidance on the vows Christians do take, including wedding vows, baptism, communion, and oaths of office, and the call to take our own words seriously before God.

The third commandment does not just forbid a four letter word substitute. It forbids treating the name of God as empty, meaningless, or vain.

In this lesson, teacher Dave Rich moves the Christian Ethics and Old Testament series into the third commandment, You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain. Rich walks through the Hebrew words behind the command, nasa, meaning to lift up or carry, and shav, meaning an empty or false thing, to show that the prohibition reaches far beyond careless speech alone.

Rich explains why God shifts to the third person in this commandment and what that shift reveals about the weight of his name. Since a name in Scripture represents a person's very being and reputation, to misuse the name of God is to lie about who he is. Rich argues the commandment ultimately prohibits all sin, since every person bears God's image, then narrows the focus to specific violations, including irreverent exclamations, careless profanity, and the substitutes and euphemisms Christians often reach for instead.

This lesson calls listeners to examine their own speech and to consider what it truly means to hallow God's name rather than treat it as something ordinary.

Dave Rich continues his study of the Second Commandment in this lesson, tackling a question every believer eventually faces: if God forbids images of Himself, why does Scripture describe Him as a lion, a lamb, a light, and even a moth?

Rich walks through the Bible's own use of figurative language for God, showing how these pictures teach us about His character without becoming objects of worship themselves. He also examines anthropomorphic language, God's "arm" and His "ear", and what it does and does not mean about God's nature.

From there, Rich turns to the doctrine of the Imago Dei, tracing how mankind's status as God's image bearer was distorted by the Fall, renewed in conversion, and ultimately fulfilled in Christ, "the image of the invisible God."

The lesson closes with a survey of Second Commandment violations across religious history, from Mormon theology and the prosperity gospel to Roman Catholic relics and cargo cults, along with a careful comparison of how C.S. Lewis's Narnia differs from the heretical portrayal of God in The Shack.

This lesson gives listeners a clear framework for thinking rightly about God, guarding against idolatry in both thought and practice, while learning to see Christ as the perfect and only worthy image of God.

The Second Commandment raises questions that don't always yield easy answers—and Lesson 32 of Christian Ethics and the Old Testament leans into that tension honestly. Dave Rich picks up where he left off, first addressing mental images of God, then turning to one of the more genuinely contested questions in Reformed ethics: may Christians use images of Jesus?

Rich walks through the relevant biblical and theological foundations, establishing what is beyond dispute—images of any kind may not be worshiped—before working through six arguments commonly raised against pictures of Jesus in artistic or instructional contexts. He engages each argument carefully, drawing on Calvin, Packer, Frame, Grudem, Douma, and others, neither dismissing the concerns nor accepting every conclusion. The key turning point is the Incarnation itself: the biblical rationale for prohibiting images of God rested on the fact that Israel saw no form at Horeb. Jesus, as the depictable God who took on genuine human flesh, changes that calculus.

Rich distinguishes between portraits designed for devotion—which he views with serious caution—and historically grounded artistic or instructional depictions, which he finds less clearly prohibited. He closes by reading Matthew 4 and Revelation 1 aloud and asking whether the mental images those texts inevitably produce are themselves a problem—and what that means for the broader question.

What's actually prohibited in "you shall not make for yourself an idol"? Dave Rich works through the Second Commandment verse by verse, and the answer is more precise than most people assume.

Lesson 31 in this verse-by-verse study examines Exodus 20:4-6, comparing it carefully against its restatement in Deuteronomy 5. Rich breaks down the Hebrew terms behind "idol" and "likeness," then makes a case from the tabernacle's own furnishings (the lampstand, the cherubim) that images of created things were never the problem. The real prohibition, he argues, is worship and service directed at an image, whether of a false god or of Yahweh himself.

From there, Rich traces the pattern through Aaron's golden calf, Jeroboam's calves at Bethel and Dan, and the worship of an ephod during the judges, before tackling the harder question of why Israel specifically couldn't picture God the Father. His answer rests on a simple historical fact: at Sinai, they saw no form. He also takes on what "visiting the iniquity of the fathers" really means, clearing up a phrase many readers misunderstand.

This lecture sets up next week's harder question: what about images of Jesus?

Charles Spurgeon hated controversy. He spent nearly forty years fighting it anyway.

In this second installment on the life and legacy of the "Prince of Preachers," Phil Johnson, executive director of Grace to You, traces Spurgeon's place in what he calls the Truth War: the long, reluctant fight against error that defined Spurgeon's ministry far more than most modern admirers realize.

Johnson walks through Spurgeon's battles one by one, from the baptismal regeneration controversy to his outspoken stand against American slavery, through the Rivulet hymnal dispute, and into the Downgrade Controversy that consumed his final years and ultimately cost him his denomination. Along the way, he exposes a strange irony: many who praise Spurgeon today stand against nearly everything he actually preached.

Drawing on Spurgeon's own words, Ian Murray's The Forgotten Spurgeon, and even a German theologian's begrudging tribute, Johnson shows why Spurgeon's example as a defender of doctrine may matter more for the church now than his example as a preacher.

This episode challenges listeners to ask whether they truly stand where Spurgeon stood, or simply admire him from a safe historical distance.

What does the whole Bible teach about which acts, attitudes, and attributes receive God's approval? In Lesson 30, Dave Rich shifts the class into Normative Ethics — the search for answers — and announces the organizing framework for the rest of the series: the Ten Commandments.

Dave opens with a survey of biblical ethics summaries, from Ecclesiastes 12 and Micah 6:8 to the Golden Rule and Paul's charge to do all things to the glory of God. These summaries, he shows, are consistent with one another — and consistent with the Decalogue, which offers exactly the right level of detail to cover virtually everything the Bible addresses in ethics.

The lesson centers on the prologue and First Commandment of Exodus 20. God's self-identification — "I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt" — is not mere historical background. It is the ground of all obligation. Rescue precedes command. Grace motivates obedience. Israel's redemption from slavery is a type of the Christian's redemption from sin, death, and the devil — which means the rationale of the prologue applies fully to every believer today.

The First Commandment, Dave argues, is not merely one commandment among ten. It includes all the rest. Every sin is, at its core, an act of disloyalty to God — a manufactured idol placed before Him. The commandment still confronts us. The names of ancient gods may have faded, but the human heart, as Calvin observed, remains a perpetual forge of idols.