Notes From Jon

My series on Romans is not over yet, but it has taken a break for Advent.  In the meantime, I was able to deliver two more sermons – including this one covering difficult passages in chapters 9, 10 and 11.  I took these as a chunk because they seem to fit together as one long “tangent” Paul chases – albeit a very important and informative tangent.

As some previous entries, this post is more notes and commentary than sermon – I referred to these notes as I preached, but the final format was much different.

This week, we’re going to cover a little more ground than we have been so far.  At this point, Paul gets into a discussion that certainly has theological value, but is aimed more for his audience in the Roman church.

He gets into a discussion about the place of the Jews in God’s plan.  And he talks about it for three chapters.  This was a difficult topic for the Christians of the early church – they KNEW that their religion had sprung from Judaism.  Jesus himself was a faithful Jew!  And because of this, they knew the history of the promise that God had made to the Jewish people almost as long as they had existed – that he would be their God and they would be his people. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve already posted the audio version of this sermon, and I still think the audio version is the better version.  But in case you had trouble loading it, I’ll post the text here as well.

Intro: Looking Back

Up to this point, things have been pretty grim.  It’s almost a if Paul has been holding back – every now and then, he breaks into a quick doxology or hymn of praise.  But for the most part, Paul has spoken of forces that are beyond our control, and the news is not very hopeful.

• All human beings are without excuse.
• Ignorance is not our problem – we know the truth and we still turn away from it.
• Quantity and Quality of sin are no matter – any sin at all is detestable to God.
• Our only hope is to trust in God.
• In some way, God has made us responsible for our fellow human beings – to share the good news with them.
• We have been set free from the Law – but we are still drawn to it and still sin from time to time.

All these forces are acting on us – Satan, evil, sin, our sinful nature. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just added a new page which can be accessed from the top menu entitled “Audio Sermons.”  I don’t have many recordings of my sermons in digital format, but when I get copies of them I’ll put them on this page.

At the moment, the playlist includes the Romans 8 sermon mentioned in the previous post, and two other sermons delivered at other churches in recent months.

I haven’t made it to the end of Romans yet, but I’m making progress.  And a couple of weeks ago, I tackled one of my favorite passages – Romans chapter 8.  It’s quite a bit to take all in one sermon, but I think I got the gist of it.  I didn’t want to just print the text on the blog – I was really looking for a way to get the audio on here, too (this is one of those times when the delivered sermon was better than the prepared sermon).  So I think I’ve figured out how to do it… we’ll see!