Author: Jonathan Homesley

Yesterday I had the opportunity to preach to our church from Colossians 2. As I introduced the topic of the sermon I also gave our church some context for Paul’s letter. Specifically, I wanted them to understand Paul’s mission strategy of reaching the cities like Rome and Colossae. The following is an excerpt from my sermon:

Paul’s fellow minister, a man named Epaphras, had taken a mission trip to the city of Colossae. The city

…

My post, Aquinas and Culture, drew not a few readers. If you haven’t read it, I basically argued that the epistemology of Immanuel Kant created a division between the sacred and the secular that the evangelical church is still reeling from. I was asked by a fellow student if I would ever give a rather philosophical explanation of this topic to a church. The following was my response. Keep in mind that this was …

Here is my sermon from August, 31 2014. It’s entitled The Kingdom of Fullness and the text is John 6.

…

Using the hermeneutical spiral, evangelicals have been seeking to avoid either extreme on a spectrum described by Richard Lints in his book The Fabric of Theology. At one end of his spectrum is a cultural fundamentalism that believes we can read the Bible and express its theology in culture-free, universal terms; at the other end is a cultural relativism that holds “that the Scripture can have no other meaning than that which is permitted by

…

Last Sunday our church gathered and remembered the Lord’s death by observing Communion. Over the past few years I have seen a trend towards making Communion as efficient and quick as possible. We have songs to sing, and sermons to preach and Communion eats up valuable time. Communion is rigid and inflexible; completely the opposite of our modern and mobile church goer. Communion is solemn, and sitting quietly makes the people in our busy culture …

Churches should be contextualized, I agree. But the gospel always challenges context. There must be a healthy balance between embracing and exploding context. A church should never be a church for only one kind of person. The gospel isn’t anti-culture, but neither does it enthrone any single culture. The gospel transforms culture.

It is one thing to begin a church with members from a single culture, but if that church never preaches a gospel that …

Last night I taught at my church’s monthly Equip event. It’s an event that we use to study the Bible and train ourselves for ministry. This means that any topic we teach on has result in training for the ministry. When I was tasked with teaching about the doctrine of the trinity I realized that I had placed that doctrine in the “Good to know, but I can’t do much with it” category.

Shame on …

We have made a bad habit of rushing through the introductions to the epistles. If all of the scriptures are profitable to us, then even the introductions can teach us about God, how he is working, and how we should respond. Take Colossians 1.3 for example:

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you,

Paul always thanked God when he prayed for the Colossians. Don’t rush past …