Well, can you open your Bibles to Colossians? Colossians chapter 1. So if you noticed in the bulletin that it said Intro to Colossians now. I know we don't have evening service enough to start a series And that's not what the plan is but the plan is that once a month I'll be preaching on Sunday morning, and I'm gonna be going through Colossians on the the weeks that I preach. And so I thought tonight would be a good time to do an intro to the book of Colossians. Intros can be boring, so I hope it won't be boring. But intros are very helpful because it gives us the context of a book so we can understand where Paul is coming from, who he's speaking to, and we can understand the context of the message. Now Colossians, why Colossians? Why did I pick Colossians? Well, for a number of reasons, but one, I've been reading Colossians and my devotions for a while now and I just keep coming back to Colossians. I just keep coming back to Colossians over and over again. I've been really chewing on Colossians, thinking about Colossians. It's been a great encouragement to my heart, but I also think that Colossians has something to say to us, to our church, and to our situation where the church is today. Not that the word of God has ever been irrelevant, but I just find it to be so relevant to the need of the church. And Paul addresses so many things in the book of Colossians. It's one of my favorite books. It's an encouragement to just study it. Another reason that I pick Colossians is, I don't know if everyone here knows this, but I've been taking some classes in seminary, and the class I'm taking right now is actually going through Colossians. So I've been enjoying that. I'm getting to dig into Colossians even more, and it's been a great encouragement. And they can bring that fruit here to encourage your hearts. So today I just want to look at the first two verses, which have a lot of the introductory greetings, the things that we always just gloss over, right? I mean, if you're like me, we read the letters in the New Testament, and we read the greetings or the final notes, and we just kind of read through those real quick. But they have a lot of important points. In fact, It's like every single word in verses 1 to 2, not that there's any word in scripture that's not important, but it's like each of these have such theological weight, and Paul assumes certain things and just mentions them in passing. And there's so much that we can dig out here that I will try not to keep us too long. So let's say a word of prayer and then we'll dive into the book of Colossians. Father, we thank you for your grace. I thank you so much for my brothers and sisters. Lord, I thank you for the service this morning. I thank you for the time of worship. I thank you for the testimonies that were given of your grace. Thank you for the baptisms, Lord. Thank you for the sermon that was preached. Thank you for the new members you've brought into this body, Lord. We just give you thanks. We thank you now for this time that we can gather together. Lord, we just ask that you would be with us, that you would encourage our hearts, that as we consider the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Colossians, which is not just the words of the Apostle Paul, but is your inspired word breathed out by the Holy Spirit. And we thank you that you have given us your word, that you speak to us by the Spirit through this word, and that it's a living and active word that can cut to the divisions of the soul, can awaken a dead heart to life. And we thank you for your word. Please, we ask that you would encourage our hearts. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. All right, verses one and two. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, and Timothy, our brother, to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae, grace to you and peace from God our Father. So, first question is, who is Paul? Maybe we assume we know who Paul is, but I realize the more I study and read his letters, the more there is to know of this apostle. Well, first of all, as most of you know, his name was his Jewish name was Saul, right? Also known as Saul. And as you read in Acts, you'll encounter Saul, right? Here's this man, this Jewish man who was devout and zealous, who is a persecutor of the church, who is on the road of Damascus, and what happened? Jesus appeared to him, right? Jesus appeared to him and he saw the resurrected Christ. And he was never the same. And if you want to know more about the Apostle Paul, obviously read a lot of, I mean, the majority of the New Testament was written by the Apostle Paul. But there's a great documentary that just came out actually by my professor at Trinity, Constantine Campbell. that you can get on Amazon for $5 for the seven episodes, and it's all about the Apostle Paul. And he does it by traveling the missionary journeys of Paul, so you kind of see all the places that he went. And he really just unpacks the book of Acts, but you can see where Paul was. It's really cool. I commend it to you. It's very interesting. And he's got a great accent. He's Australian, so it's fun to listen to. So Paul was known by Saul. I don't know about you, but sometimes we come up with these misconceptions, and I have had, for some reason, had this misconception for so long that I was kind of blown away. I was like, no, that can't be right. Digging through the scriptures, trying to figure out. I'm like, oh. So I had this idea that Saul was, you know, Paul, Saul, his name, and then God gave him a new name, Paul. Well, that's true, it happens with Abraham, you know, Abraham becomes Abraham, but when you read Acts, what you see is he's just called Saul, and then As soon as his missionary journeys begin, as soon as he begins his ministry to the Gentiles, as soon as his context is among the Gentiles, Luke says, Saul, also known as Paul, and then he just starts referring to him as Paul through the rest of the letters. And then Paul's writing all his letters to churches, Gentile churches, right? And so he introduces himself as Paul. And as we'll unpack here, he was a Roman citizen, and so in Roman culture, it was made up of so many different people groups that they conquered all over. But if you became a Roman citizen, you would have your ethnic name, you would have your Roman name, and then you'd have your surname. So you'd have three names. And so this was very common. So Paul was his Roman name. It was the name he went by among the Gentiles. Now, he was likely named Saul because his family came from the tribe of Benjamin. Who was from the tribe of Benjamin that's so famous in the Old Testament? Saul, right? So, probably named after the first king of Israel, Saul. He's from the tribe of Benjamin. Some things that you can just discover from history, some of it's hard to dissect what is just tradition, what's true, but we know from scripture and things that can be verified for sure that he was born of an observant Jewish family, so not just a Jewish by name, but a religiously devout Jewish family in the city of Tarsus, which is northwest of Israel, so it's in modern-day Turkey. And, you know, born in the first century, about the time of Jesus. And his family came from Galilee. So it's not known how many generations that he lived in Tarsus, but we do know that his family were tentmakers. That's why Paul was a tentmaker. And that they were evidently prosperous, for one of the facts that to be a citizen of Tarsus, you had to have some money. So they were a well-off family. But more than that, not only was he a citizen of Tarsus, he was also, he had Roman citizenship, and it's believed because there's a man named Jerome who wrote, he did the Latin Fallgate and stuff, but anyways, Jerome, some of the things that he wrote, he has passed on this tradition that Paul's family probably gained Roman citizenship by his father was probably enslaved by a Roman, For whatever reason maybe it was dead or conquering whatever but must have gained favor with this slave owner and was Granted freedom and citizenship and then his father would have registered his son because now he was a citizen Paul as a Roman citizen, so he gained Roman citizenship that way. Another possibility is that his father served in some sort of military capacity and received citizenship, but the Jews weren't so fond of serving in Roman army, so that might not be the fact. But however it worked, he became a Roman citizen, which gave him a lot of rights and privileges. that you see in Acts, right? That he could appeal to the emperor. That means they couldn't flog him. Not that they always followed that, but they weren't supposed to flog a Roman citizen. He didn't have to serve in the military if you were a Roman citizen. You didn't have to do that. Whereas if you were a conquered people, a lot of they could require them to serve. So Paul was the devout Jew, he served, he probably was a part of the Sanhedrin, though that's hard, we don't know, but we do know that he was a Pharisee, that he talks about in Acts about how he spent time, he lived in Jerusalem, and there he was trained, what's the rabbi's name? Gamaliel. He studied with Gamaliel, and Okay, and he was this famous rabbi, and so Paul was well-versed, not only in the Old Testament, but in the traditions, right? In the traditions that have been passed down, and we know from the Gospels, there was lots of traditions that had been added on to the already pretty burdensome, serious Old Testament law, though Deuteronomy does say it's not a burden because they could obey through faith. So Paul was a devout Jew. He wanted to honor God. He studied the scriptures. He would have been steeped in the Old Testament. He would have known it backwards and forwards. He was well-versed. And honestly, even though he's writing to Gentiles, he's quoting the Old Testament all the time. And when he's not quoting it, he's alluding to it all the time. So he knows his Old Testament. And honestly, if we want to get lot out of Paul's letters we have to know our Old Testament because and honestly the New Testament in general because the New Testament is Assuming the Old Testament, right? So we can't just pretend like those books are boring or the prophets. Oh, man I the Psalms and Deuteronomy and Leviticus, I mean the whole Pentateuch, the prophets, especially Isaiah, are so foundational that if you don't have those in your mind you miss so much in the New Testament because so much presumes upon that. Like Pastor Matt mentioned this morning, Ephesians 6, he's got in his mind Isaiah, right? But if we don't know that, we miss it, because he doesn't say he's quoting Isaiah, right? So we know that Paul is a devout Jew. He was a devout Jew who became a Messianic Jew, right, who follows Jesus. Now look, he identifies himself as an apostle of Christ Jesus. So this Paul, who was a devout Jew, who encounters Jesus on the road to Damascus, a persecutor of the church, someone who hated Christians, who saw what he saw as a threat, the threat of Christianity, that it would undo Judaism as he knew it. who wanted to crush it, destroy it, who Jesus appears to, you know, in his other letters, he's an apostle by the grace of God, called to be an apostle, he says. He knows that his calling from God is all of grace, because he was a persecutor of Christ's church. What did Jesus say to him when he appeared to him? He said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? Do you realize how much that must have struck Paul? We'll get into this in Colossians because it's such a big part of Colossians about the fact that Christians are in Christ. So by persecuting the church, he was persecuting Jesus. But he was transformed. He encountered the risen Christ and he was never the same, right? And God called him for a special purpose. And he called him to be the apostle to the Gentiles. Now, what is an apostle? That's another question we have to ask. Well, what we know of apostleship mostly comes from Paul's letters. He speaks about it the most than anywhere else in the New Testament. That makes sense. He has the most books in the New Testament. But he didn't come up with the idea, right? He uses the term the most, but he didn't come up with it. Now Paul uses this term apostle in two different ways. He can use it in a technical way and a non-technical way. So what I mean by that is he can use it in a way that refers to the office of apostle and he can use the word in a way that just refers to someone as a messenger. Context is key in determining this. The non-technical usage, you can see in Philippians 2.25, it says, I have thought it necessary to send you Epaphroditus, my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier, and your messenger, which is the same word for apostle, and minister to my need. So when the word apostle is used in this way, it just means a messenger or delegate who's been commissioned by the church to represent it somewhere. So they can send someone as a messenger on a particular task somewhere. But when Paul uses it the majority of the time, he's using it in this technical sense of this office of an apostle. This is that he was referring to someone who is commissioned and sent by Christ himself. Someone who Christ has commissioned to be a witness to his resurrection. And so, you'll see in the use of apostle, he'll speak of it in various places, particularly in Corinthians, but in some other spots, that an apostle is someone who saw the risen Christ. Now, Paul considered himself the least of the apostles. One, because he was a persecutor of the church, he says, but also because he was the last of the apostles. He was the last to become an apostle, right? The other apostles had saw the risen Christ before he ascended. Paul saw Christ after he had already been ascended, but he appears to him on the road to Damascus. And so Paul is the last to have seen with his eyes the risen Christ. In 1 Corinthians 15, if you wanna turn there, in verse three, we get a little bit of insight about apostleship, what an apostle is. says this, for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. So this is the gospel, this is what apostles are commissioned with. and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me was not in vain. So we see from this passage that this office of apostles, one, assume that someone saw the resurrected Christ, and we also see that it's both a rather large group, but it's also a defined group, right? It's not a limitless group. It includes the twelve, Jesus' twelve, so they have special status, his twelve, And it included of the 500 who Jesus had revealed himself to. It included James, the brother of Jesus, so the son of Mary and Joseph, James. It included him. And then it says all the apostles. there's this group of apostles that are witnesses to the resurrected Christ. And Paul understands himself. He says, so he says all the apostles, so that tells us that it's a group, a defined group. Also that he says he is the last of all, that he is last of all an apostle. So he is the last to have received this apostleship. So, not only did an apostle, one of the things we find in the New Testament, that an apostle isn't just someone who saw the resurrected Christ, but it's someone who had this commission, and therefore had a special authority in the church, who bore authority to preach the gospel, to pass on the truth of who Jesus was, and to be a foundation for the church. If you look in Ephesians 2 and verse 19, I'll let you turn there. It says, You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone." So he says here that the church is built on the foundation of the prophets the apostles and the prophets. And so the apostles held a special place in establishing a foundation for the church along with the office of prophet. Now it's not referring to the books of the prophets, it's referring to New Testament prophets who received word from God. They would, just like the Old Testament prophets, would receive words from God for the church, for the building up of the church. And these were foundational offices upon which the church was built with Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone. And so these apostles, those who had been given this special office, had an authority. And so Paul begins his letters with making the point that he is an apostle. So he has the authority to write what he is saying. And that he, because he doesn't just give the indicatives of the gospel, right? He doesn't just speak the gospel. He also corrects in his letters, right? He also gives the imperatives of the gospel. He speaks as one with authority because he knows he has this authority from Christ. Another passage that we could refer to is 1 Corinthians 12, 27 and 28. particularly verse 28, and it says, And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. So obviously Paul is dealing with here the gift of tongues and correcting some mishandling of that gift in the Corinthian church, but he makes it clear here that the office of apostle has first place in the offices of the church. Notice, back to Colossians 1, that he says he is an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. As we already said, he knows that his apostleship is all of grace. He didn't deserve to be an apostle, right? He knew that he was an apostle because it was the will of God, that God set him apart for this office, that God called him to it, and his life was a testimony to that. When we read Acts, we see just how zealous he was. He at one time was zealous for Judaism, for the law, for the traditions, But now he was zealous for the gospel of Jesus Christ. He was zealous to preach to all the Gentiles, and so he put himself at great risk. If you watch that documentary I mentioned, you see the great danger he put himself in, because some of those places to travel to in the first century, it's not like today. It was dangerous to do what he did. He was shipwrecked on, he says, on multiple occasions, not just the time we read about on his way to Rome, right? He put himself in great danger to preach the gospel because he was an apostle by the will of God, an apostle of Christ Jesus. He was commissioned by Christ. He was given this office by Christ. Now, none of us here are apostles, but we can still glean from this that each of us have been called by God, right? Each of us were in darkness. Each of us were going our own way, and Christ revealed himself to us through the gospel. And it's by the will of God that each of you are here. And so we ought to have this same mindset, to be zealous for the gospel of Jesus Christ. to preach Christ to all peoples, to, to preach to our coworkers, to tell them of Christ, because we know that this, this world's not our home. We were going our own way, but we were set apart for the gospel of Jesus Christ for his kingdom. How could we not want to preach Christ? It's by the will of God. each of you are here. It's by the will of God that Paul was an apostle, that he could preach Christ without fear. I don't want to say too much about Timothy here, but why is Timothy mentioned? Well, a couple of reasons. He's introducing him as part of the authorship of this letter, right? Some think that maybe Timothy wrote this down under Paul's guidance and dictation. Could be, because some of the Greek's a little bit different than some of Paul's other letters. Or it is because they were familiar with Timothy at this church, and Timothy's one of Paul's co-workers who was with him, and so he wants to mention that this letter is coming from the heart of Timothy, too. Whatever it means, we know that Paul and Timothy had a special relationship, right? That Timothy was a son in the faith to Paul, and that Paul loved Timothy. We have two of those great letters that he wrote to Timothy to encourage that young pastor's heart. And so this letter comes from Paul and Timothy. And then verse 2, "...to those in Colossae, the saints and faithful brothers in Christ." So Paul is writing here to believers, right? He's writing to those whom he calls the saints and faithful brothers in Christ. And these two words are so theologically loaded, it's way too much to unpack tonight. But first of all, he refers to them as he does in many of his letters as he writes to churches as saints, as we translate saints. You could more literally translate it, the holy ones. It's an adjective that's being used of them, calling them the holy ones in Christ. And this presumes some knowledge of the Old Testament, right? It presumes that we understand that Israel in Exodus 19 was called, well, I'll read it to you. In the Old Testament, holiness occurs a lot. Holiness is an important theme through Scripture. If we want to understand God, if we want to understand His ways, we have to understand holiness. God is holy, right? And holiness has to do, one, with being separate, from being distinct, from being unlike anything else. And so you see this throughout the Old Testament when these, you know, the tabernacle, the various instruments of the tabernacle and the temple, they're called holy because they're set apart for special use. And here we see that Israel was set apart for special purpose. They were set apart to God. Not only is Israel further this way, but specifically you find, as you read in the Pentateuch in Leviticus, a particular calling not only to the people's holiness, but also to the priesthood, that they were holy to the Lord, and that they were to live in a holy service to God. Each of us, in the new covenant, we understand the priesthood of all believers, right? That the office of priest, which Christ is the high priest, and we share in his priesthood, meaning we have this fellowship with God, we serve before God. And the priests were to be holy, right? They were to be set apart. What is so significant about this term, the saints, is that he says this is a reality, right? That you are the holy ones. So, if you are in Christ, you are holy. If you're in Christ, you have been set apart. If you're in Christ, you belong to him. You are gods. You belong to him. And so you are holy. And so then when we encounter in scripture the commands to be holy, we have to understand as believers this concept of the already but not yet, right? That we already are holy, therefore, be holy. Therefore, live holy. Do not live in the darkness from where you came out. Live as light. You are the holy ones. It's not just the saints in Colossae, right? The saints at Living Hope Bible Church. You are the holy ones here in Roselle. The holy ones. Those set apart in Jesus. Another important concept is the temple, right? And there was a what? The holy of holies. Where the presence of God was, right? You are the temple. This church, not this building, you are the dwelling place of God. You are his temple. He dwells here in our midst, in our hearts, so we are his holy ones. Therefore, we must be holy. not only does he call them the holy ones, he also calls them the faithful brothers. This word brother is a familial term, a familial term, right? It's a family term. It means that we are members of the same family, that God is our father, Jesus is our elder brother, and we are brothers and sisters. We are family, as we like to say around here, right? This is our forever family. We share in this household. We're a part of the household of God. This is our home. Paul in Ephesians refers to the church as the household of God. as well as in Timothy, he says that you may know how one ought to behave himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. So we are family. Praise the Lord. I'm thankful that you're my family. There are many that I share the same bloodline with, but they don't know the Lord. We only have a short time of being family. And those, that blood, it doesn't, we don't have the same values, right? We don't have the same, we don't have the Holy Spirit. We don't share in that together. But you, you, you are my family. Look at each other. We are family. Brothers and sisters. With the most gracious and loving Heavenly Father. Who cares for each of us. And then notice two things here, that Paul refers to these saints as having two locations, and the same is true of us. He says, one, I know in the ESV it says, at Colossae, it's an easier way of saying it. In Greek it's the same preposition, and so we could say, to those in Colossae. So their physical location is the city of Colossae. So, for introductory purposes to the book, what is, what was Colossae? What was this place? You know, this is so far removed from us, you know, we're a couple thousand years from then. Well, one commentator has said this, Colossae was the least important church to which any epistle of St. Paul was addressed. It's true. It had lost prominence by the time Paul wrote this letter. It was not an important city. And in fact, Paul had never even been to this church because Paul's ministry, he was very strategic. He specifically went to minister and plant churches in major cities. And with the purpose of that spreading all around. So where did he have his ministry that was close to Klose? Ephesus. He spent a lot of time in Ephesus, and from there the gospel went out. And this is how a church was planted in Colossae, because a man named Epaphras, who became a believer under the preaching of Paul in Ephesus, was from Colossae. And so he went back home, and he told them of Jesus, and a church was planted. And so Paul's ministry spread. And since this is a church of Gentiles, he was the apostle of the Gentiles, he writes to them. And as you learn through the book of Colossians, you see that it seems that Epaphras had been with Paul and reported some things that he was concerned about that was going on in Colossae He was concerned for the believers there, and so Paul writes to give them some warning, to give them encouragement. There's something called the Colossian heresy, which we'll get to on Sunday mornings when we get through the book, but there are some teachings that were dangerous. And a lot of this Colossian heresy has to do with the fact that the city of Colossae was a trade city. So it was very prominent at one point because it was a major city that was an intersect of four roads, roads going north and south.