Bismarck Community Church Sermon Podcast · Jim Ellis

Who Is a Really Good Person? | Colossians: Joy In the Mystery (Mar 1, 2026)

·39 min·3 clips

Pastor Jim reluctantly reads Paul's instructions for wives to submit and husbands to love, admitting he'd rather skip this difficult text.

The room starts loose. The host jokes through the greetings, brings back the cowboy hat conversation from last week, and uses that memory to return to the image of putting something on. Love is the frame, but not in a soft-focus way. He keeps coming back to agape, the self-giving, laying-your-life-down love that Colossians has already put above everything else. Then the passage gets awkward. He says so. He even admits he wished someone else had to preach this part. That helps, because the sermon does not skate past words like wives, submit, or bondservants as if nobody in the room might tense up. He slows down and keeps the household code inside the full movement of Colossians, not as a loose rule sheet dropped into church life. Context matters. Paul is speaking into a Roman world shaped by paterfamilias, where a Roman citizen man held household power. The letter lands within earshot of Roman men with power, women, children, and bondservants. That changes the pressure in the room. The sermon keeps asking whether power can be remade by love that gives itself away. Nobody gets to keep the text at a distance. The host brings it back to the week ahead, asking what God is saying and nudging people to read Colossians for themselves. The ending stays communal: a prayer that the church would carry God's love into the world, then a sending with Christ in them and with them. Even the benediction leaves a little grin in it: go in peace, love and serve the Lord, and have some fun too.

As heard by us

A careful Colossians sermon that makes agape the lens for power, home, and daily life.

The episode places Colossians in the ordinary friction of home, power, and responsibility, and it keeps agape in view as the lens that changes how the passage lands.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want Colossians to feel less abstract and more tied to real household life, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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