Koinonia Ministries

Sit, walk, and stand in Wisdom incarnate even when the waves (paradoxes) of life threaten to drown you.

What kind of hands do you think God has?

Audio issue cut file short. If you find Solomon’s conclusions hit a little to close to home in describing how you think about the world, Ecclesiastes is calling you to wake up and realize you’ve been in the prostitute’s house before it’s too late.

When you abandon looking at things from God's point of view (a revelational epistemology), life will lose all its transcendent meaning. Thus, Ecclesiastes confronts the downward drift of our eyes that trust our own sense of goodness more than God's.

When you really investigate life, you will find it does suck in countless ways, but don't miss God's many earthly joys He gives you as a gift pointing to ultimate good in Him.

Josh Sneed

Please, I beg you, stop trying to go at it alone. You're home now, it's all going to be okay.

How sure are you really that God is a God of war for the oppressed?

Though God has ordered the universe coherently, humans still tend to miss the moment. But wisdom from above teaches us how to seek the right things and stand in awe of the One Shepherd.

Meaning is not found through wisdom or work—yet these are also a key part of God’s good gifts.

Seeking meaning through pleasure is fruitless, yet so too is seeking pleasure and happiness without meaning.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

Life is Confusing: The first ~5-10 minutes of this recording are missing due to a technical issue. The written notes from the first portion of the lesson are included below:Intro:-       Tonight, being journey into OT, into Ecclesiastes, part of the wisdom literature. Meant to teach us how to live well in this world.o   But this world, this life is confusing as heck. -    Your young adult years are a keypivot point in life—somewhere between the hopeful ideals of youth and quittingon dreams. o   Finding ideal spouse, enjoying satisfying work, being healthy, having good community, knowing spiritual gifts, leaving poverty cycles behind, and therefore, finallybeing happy inside. o   Instead found: singleness/marital struggles, dead end work that slowly kills you, losing your health, feeling alone, wondering if you have any purpose in life or church, still struggling to make ends meet, continuing as sad. -       My question to you: do youthink that that gets better naturally as you get older?o   Ecc. 12: NO! The dark days are ahead, no pleasure in them.o   Desire to avoid being crochety, cynical old people—but do you think they wanted tobecome that? Most do. o  Why think that is? Think of someone who is older upbeat, full of life/purpose—describe and why different?

Be a true Israelite—and take back what’s rightfully ours.

You have divine life in your veins, bringing the calmness of Christ’s light and life to those drowning in darkness and death.

My history with the Gospel that took our shared history of sin and replaced it with His history of righteousness can be their and our future of hope together.

From Josh Sneed

Train your mind in light of the resurrection to think clearly and act decisively so that you can stand confident on judgment day.

In days that seem brutally human, there is no circumstance beyond God’s plan, and He will see you to the right destination.

God loves to use apparent catastrophic defeats to accomplish the greater victory demonstrating His power.

The Word of God—written, preached, taught, seen, tasted—is sufficient for all matters of faith and practice.

By Caleb Crockett

The resurrection grounds meaning at the intersection of transcendence and immanence.

Due to discussion style of this lesson, audio may be challenging to discern occasionally in the middle portion of the recording. However, a monologue style opens and concludes this lesson.

Flourishing are you in the eschatological judgment if you hear and do the teachings of Jesus that call for whole person, authentic righteousness.

Flourish by letting go of things held in sinful anger and seek the restoration of relationships.Flourish by killing every lustful thought that turns humans into objects for self-gratification.Flourishing by being faithful and forgiving in your marriages!

Flourish by bearing witness to the New Covenant, even in persecution, as you will gain fellow God-glorifiers. Flourish by seeking the glory of the Father instead of trying to get glory for yourself. Flourish by having boundaries guided by God’s will revealed in His law.Flourish by allowing those rules to become so part of your heart that you don’t think of them as rules anymore.

Flourishing are those who forgive and restore even in the face of the most painful debts because they are showing that they have and will receive forgiveness and mercy from God. Flourishing are those who have congruency between internal and external righteousness because they will be ever expanding in their eternal delight of the triune God. Flourishing are those willing to seek peace in relationships and mediate peace for others because they are like their peace-seeking, relationship-restoring God. Flourishing are you whenever you receive hate for saying and doing the right things because all is and will be set right in God’s Kingdom. Flourishing are you when you are slandered because you’ve done rightly in being associated with Jesus. Be happy, because while you might lose everything here, you will receive everything in heaven and have taken up the mantle of the righteous ones before you.

Flourishing are those who know that they are spiritually destitute, for only from this beginning point can one receive everything in the Kingdom. Flourishing are those that feel and mourn the weight of your own sinfulness and the brokenness of the world because God will comfort you by changing you and setting all things right. Flourishing are those that act humbly and not seeking the power struggle of self-exaltation because God will give the earth to those who did not exalt themselves. Flourishing are those that yearn for being a whole person living in accord with God’s way because He will grant what He commands.

The beginning of the flourishing life—the door of the Kingdom even—is for those that confidently, humbly acknowledge their radical spiritual bankruptcy.

The Apostle’s Creed is a faithful summary of the Biblical data regarding where Christ was between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Concluding his humiliation and beginning His exaltation, Christ descended to the realm of the dead (consciously, as both God and man) to declare victory against demonic forces and for His church.

God is directing our lives and missions. He takes us to surprising and new places, and there we find that households can shake empires.

This is a special episode where Sam Somesan delivers a lecture at Taylor University on the topic of informative speech preparation and sermon construction.

Welcome to the party :)

The church defends the free Gospel by faith alone (with no law) and no idolatry.

The dynamic dependence required by faith can be frightening, but freedom is worth the fright of rest.

The church is an institution composed of members. Those members play an active, essential, vital role as priests who guard the church against heretical doctrinal and practice. Members are collectively authorized to stamp and un-stamp their approval on “who” true Christians are. Thus, members carry a gravely important responsibility that must be exercised with wisdom and caution, but it must be exercised nonetheless. Institutions, membership, and church discipline must all be seen as flowing from, not antithetical to, love.

No matter the highs and lows, Paul and Barnabas successfully completed their first missionary journey by resting in Christ and His calling—not on the praise of men. They didn’t think of themselves as entirely different or better. They were messengers who told the news of Jesus come what may. They were then faithful people who returned to encourage the disciples to remain faithful in the fight.

Jesus, by the hands of Paul and Barnabas, conquers and sets free an island territory bound under the Satanic spell of syncretistic false religion.

Using the exodus motif from Israel and Jesus, Luke prepares the reader for a new phase in the life of the Church. Persecution, sluggish faith, and the powers of the world are easily overcome by God. Jesus continues to use the unlikely and unimportant as models for watchful faithfulness as He works to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Following in the positive wake of Peter’s defense, the church becomes surprisingly multiethnic in Antioch. Jerusalem sends an encouraging man by the name of Barnabas to help the ministry; as the ministry grows, Barnabas recruits his old friend Paul for further assistance. In a surprising twist, famine strikes the Jerusalem church, and it is Antioch which comes to the aid of Jerusalem. These surprises and hardship prove that the church moves forward as one with the same generosity it has had since the beginning.

Josh Sneed covers the Gentile Pentecost of Acts 10.

In prelude to the Gentile Pentecost, Peter heals Aeneas and raises Tabitha. These episodes continue to stretch Peter’s understanding and involvement in the gentile mission. Luke is likely contrasting these individuals with characters from Virgil’s Aeneid to highlight that the expansion of the kingdom of God brings life in contrast to the destructive expansion of the worldly kingdom of Rome.”

Paul comes to life and exits exile as the church affirms Paul’s conversion and is baptized. Paul immediately begins acting on the calling that the Lord has given him by ministering to both Jew and Gentile audiences, proclaiming Christ to them. A few years later, Paul engages with the Apostolic headquarters in Jerusalem largely thanks to Barnabas’ affirmation of Paul. Paul escapes death threats once again, this time heading for his hometown of Tarsus.

Saul, later called Paul, begins as one who opposes the church but is transformed on the Damascus Road. In a story of ironic spiritual reversals, the heavenly light of Christ shows Paul that he remains in personal spiritual exile while the church of many nations has found the way out of exile. In a parallel text, Paul receives his commission to act as a mini-Isaianic servant who is a light to the Gentile nations.

In this lesson, we review chapters 1-8 of Acts as we return to our study of the book. Main points from this lesson are: Jesus reigns. The restoration of all things has begun. The true temple is spreading across the world in the Gospel.

These two lessons aimed to assist parents in grasping what the self is in order to more clearly aid their child in understanding who they are. We discussed that there are matters essential to our identity with uniquely essential parts of our identity given to us in union with Christ. Beyond the essential matters of identity, there remain “accidental” portions of our identity which require careful instruction from parents to children. Despite the transient nature of these accidental qualities, our essential qualities as Christian, human persons should be brought to bear on these matters. Because of this, every quality about our persons (and every introspective identity thought) should ultimately have its terminus on God, increasing His beauty in our minds and decreasing our prideful self-absorption and idolatry.

This lesson provides a biblical basis for a discussion of "identity" which prepares for part 2, application of identity questions to parenting.

This lesson discussed the Scriptural directives regarding how parents are to transmit the story of God to their children. Some “best practices” on how to accomplish this were offered regarding education generally and spiritual education according to cognition, affection, and volition. Within the topic of spiritual education, the what, who, when/where, and why of discipline were addressed as parents represent the loving chastisement of God our Father. These best practices were considered together in the culminating activities of familial and corporate worship. Lastly, because Scripture sets the provocation of children in direct contrast with raising them to love the Lord, fourteen “worst practices” of provocation were educed for consideration.

The idyllic end of the story is an absolutely essential hope in the parent-child relationship. This ideal is not merely some ethereal, fairy-tale ending; rather, Jesus incarnates and embodies the ideal. At His first coming, He inaugurated the restoration of all things which is first seen in the new nature of Christians. Like all humans, children must participate in the ideal. This is only possible by the Father’s election, the Son’s accomplishment, and the Spirit’s application of redemption. Often through parental evangelism, God frequently and graciously imparts faith to the hearts of children which transforms their cognitive, affective, and volitional heart functions. As more and more hearts are redeemed, the sin issues both within and without of a child begin to disappear as righteousness prevails. Ultimately, these redeemed hearts congregate into a spiritual family called the church. By virtue of Jesus’ person and work, the creation mandate is fulfilled in the church which allows all individuals to participate in parent-child relationships despite physical calling. Parents, both physical and spiritual, thus participate in the sanctification of the redeemed hearts found in their children.