Our reading is from Paul's letter to the Colossians. Paul's letter to the Colossians, chapter 1. And we shall read from verse 9 to verse 23. Colossians chapter 1, reading from verse 9 to verse 23. For this reason Since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of His will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live the life worthy of the Lord and may please Him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work. growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to His glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness, and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. All things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behaviour, But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death, to present you holy in his sight, without blemish, and free from accusation. If you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel, this is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant." Amen. Let us pray that God will bless his word to us all. Who are we as a people? What does the Reformed Presbyterian Church stand for? We're looking at that inheritance which we share with the faithful people of God in every true church and throughout all the centuries, and also at those aspects of that inheritance which are more distinctive to ourselves. And in our fifth study today, we see that we are a people who focus our chief attention on Jesus Christ. the Son of God. Who are Reformed Presbyterians? They are people who focus on the Son. Now, you may think that that is stating the extremely obvious. Our name is Christians, a name which we share with all the people of God. We are named after Jesus Christ. That is how we are described and how we are known. Surely it can be taken for granted that the Christ for whom we are named is the focus of our attention. Our very calendar, with its division of time into BC, before Christ, And A.D. in the year of our Lord is a witness to the centrality of Christ. We shouldn't count, by the way, on having that calendar indefinitely. Many of the academic books that I read from America are now dated C.E. instead of A.D. and the Library of Congress in America is moving to using the dating CE or Common Era instead of AD. It's held to be offensive to people of other religions and faiths, and I'm sure we're going to see a movement to do away with AD and to replace it by the letters Common Era. A sad commentary, if you like, on the weakness of Christianity in the West. But certainly we would say, if anything is the focus of our attention, it is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And yet, friends, astonishingly, it is true that Jesus can be forgotten in his own church. Jesus can be overlooked in his own church. That one body on earth which exists to focus on the Son, can forget the Son. The Church can focus its attention on legalistic morality, thinking that we are a body that is set up to teach people to be good. The Church can focus its attention on psychological health, teaching that we exist to help each other with our hurts, our wounds, our complexes, our griefs and our burdens, a self-help society. The church can be regarded as a sort of a comfort cushion, a place where we meet with our friends and we feel secure in a dangerous, lonely world. We can become interested in the Church as a structure for its own sake, an organization to which we are committed and which we want to keep going. In many other ways, subtly, subconsciously, the focus of attention in the Church can move from the Lord Jesus Christ to something else. We could focus on our own identity as a denomination and our whole interest would be in propagating ourselves and maintaining our own cause. And we can surely imagine no greater tragedy than that the Christian Church does not focus on its Lord, God the Son. So we need always to remember that danger and to seek in everything we do to avoid that danger. And we're going to approach it today by looking at some words from Colossians 1, verse 18. Words familiar, I'm sure, to most of you. At the end of the verse, thinking of God's great purpose for his Son, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. So that in everything he might have the supremacy. There is no truth which is more needed today than this, and yet there is no truth which is more neglected. There is no truth which is more simple, and yet there is no truth which is more strongly or deeply misunderstood. The New International Version rightly titles the paragraph, The Supremacy of Christ. We are a people for whom Christ should be supreme. We are a people, we are a church who should be focusing on the Son. Let us see in these words three ways in which Christ, the Son, is supreme. He is first of all supreme in his status. He is supreme in his status. That in all things he might have the supremacy or the preeminence. And the Greek word translated supremacy or preeminence literally means that which holds the first place. Christ is to be the one who holds the first place. That is his status. First. First. The status given to him by God his Father. So he is supreme in his status. He is unique. Jesus Christ is unparalleled. He has no superiors. He has no equals. There is no one else in any field of human endeavor who is to be mentioned in the same breath as the Son of God. He is matchless. He is incomparable. He is beyond all comparison, far above everyone else, far above. Supreme in His status, holding the first, the chief, the ultimate place. Now that of course is a very lofty claim, and yet it's made over and over again in the New Testament. Our Lord Himself in Matthew 28 says, all authority. in heaven and on earth has been given to me." What a tremendous strength! All authority, not only in the whole of this planet, but in the very heaven of heavens, has been given to me. The disciples, who had known him as a carpenter, referred to him as the Exalted One, the King the prince at God's right hand. The confession of the early church was, Jesus Christ is Lord. And when those Christians were brought before Roman judges or taken into the arena to face the wild beasts or a most cruel death, many of those simple men and women gave their To that credo, that statement, Jesus Christ is Lord. One of the most famous martyrs of the early church was Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. He was put to death after being a Christian for 86 years. Perhaps you remember the story. He was brought before the court a very old man, and was asked to curse Christ. Polycarp said, Eighty and six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my God and my Saviour? And his church then wrote a letter telling of the martyrdom of their chief elder. Let me just quote from this letter. The blessed Polycarp was martyred and gave his life in the proconsulship of Stadius Quadratus, but Jesus Christ being Lord." That was the confession of the Church. Jesus Christ being Lord. So this statement here is a very deep, basic Christian conviction that our Savior is supreme in his status. he holds the first place. Now friends, if we understand this, it makes the most tremendous difference to our lives. And I often like to illustrate it with one of the few scientific facts that I know. In the year 1543, a Polish astronomer called Nicholas Copernicus published a very, very significant book, its Latin title was De Revolutionibus, and in that book Copernicus argued that the earth was not at the centre of the planets, but that in fact the sun was at the centre of the planets. Now the Greeks had known that two thousand years earlier, but it had been forgotten, and all the scientists of the day believed that the earth was at the center of the planets. All the planets went round the earth. Copernicus showed that that was untrue. The sun was the center and all the planets went round the sun. Copernicus said to the world of his day, your center of gravity is wrong. Your center of gravity is wrong. The heart of your system is wrong. You think that the earth is the center, but the earth is not the center. there is another body which is the centre, a glorious body, celestial body, and it is at the heart of everything. Once people understood that, they had to change all their textbooks, they had to rewrite all their theses, the university professors had to draw up new series of lectures, artists had to paint and draw differently, poets had to use different illustrations, the whole of culture and civilisation was changed By this one discovery, you have a wrong center to your system. It's not the earth. It's the sun. Now that's something like what we are doing as Christians. We are going to our fellow man and we are saying to them, you have a wrong center to your system, to your life. Your center is yourself. Everything circles around yourself. Everything gravitates around yourself. You regard yourself as the planet at the heart of your system. But you're wrong. God is at the center. Christ is at the center. And when a human being realizes that, when they realize that they have a wrong center to their personal system, then, like those scholars in the 16th century, Everything has to change. Everything has to change. Here is the true hub of the moral universe, of every life, the center of gravity, which holds everything in orbit, the Son of God, supreme in his status. But then, secondly, he is supreme in himself. Supreme in himself. Paul here slips in an extra little word which doesn't come out in the English, but is present in the Greek. He says that in everything he himself might have the supremacy. He adds the word himself. Our English versions unfortunately don't translate it. He himself might have the supremacy. Now why does he add this word? Well, he's writing to people in Colossae who were muddled about Jesus. They had heard a number of false teachers with strange new ideas about Jesus, and they didn't know what to believe. They were confused in their thinking. There was a new theology. There were new doctrines coming in. Do we believe what the apostles taught us, or do we believe what these new teachers tell us? Was Jesus a true man, or as these new teachers taught, was he just an angelic being? who never really became man, a sort of an angel. What are we to believe about Jesus? Who is Jesus? So Paul says, He Himself. Himself. He's not an imaginary Christ. It's not the Christ of the latest fashion. It is the historic Jesus. The one who really exists. The one who has been revealed. The one whom I am describing to you in these verses. He himself. He and no other. And that is just as important today as it was two thousand years ago. Because people are still as confused about Jesus of Nazareth as they were in Colossae. We have what we could only call a number of Humpty Dumpty theologians. And I'm not talking about the nursery rhyme, I'm talking about Lewis Carroll's book, Alice Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty appears in that book and Carroll says, when I use a word, said Humpty indignantly, it means what I choose it to mean, no more and no less. When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean. And often today when people talk about Christ, that means what they choose it to mean. Not the real Christ, not Christ himself, as Paul says, but an imaginary Christ. The name Christ becomes a symbol for what people admire. but they want what they hope for. Man creates God in his own image. He constructs a God for himself, a saviour for himself. He worships the creation of his own mind. An Ulster Protestant may create a Christ with a bowler hat and a sash. His version of Christ It's one that he feels comfortable with, happy with. A liberal may create a Christ in his own mind who is just oozing a vague benevolence and goodwill. The liberation theologians create a revolutionary Christ. A Christ, a Che Guevara type of figure, who sides with the homeless and the dispossessed, who joins them in overthrowing government. The feminists are producing a Christ in their own image. There have been several services recently at which the person worshipped is Christa, a Christ with a female body. And feminist theologians are now praying to Christa, a female Christ, instead of Jesus of Nazareth. Total confusion. Who is the real Christ? When we say we focus on the Son, who is this person? Paul says, He Himself. The Jesus who was born of a virgin. The Jesus who grew up in Nazareth and worked in a carpenter's shop. The Jesus who was baptized in the River Jordan by John. Jesus who was nailed to a piece of wood at Calvary. Jesus who was raised from the dead, who fed five thousand people, who gave sight to the blind, who stilled the storm. This is the son we focus on. Look what Paul says about him in these verses. He is the image of the invisible God. He is the firstborn over all creation. All things were created by him and for him. He is before all things. In him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the firstborn from among the dead. All fullness is dwelling in him. He is the reconciler of all things. He has made peace through his blood shed on the cross. There is enough there to keep you preaching for five or ten years. There's enough there to keep you thinking to all eternity. This is the Jesus. He himself, this real Christ, the true Christ, the historic Christ, the biblical Christ. All other so-called Christs are fantasy. They don't exist. Humpty dumpty theologians. When I think of Christ," said Humpty Dumpty, he is what I want him to be. No more, no less. That's no Christ. That's just an image, an idol of our own minds with a name attached. He Himself. That's why we need to study the Scriptures. We need to learn our theology and our doctrine. So we need to read about the Son. People say, I'm so excited about Jesus. I want to follow Jesus. That's good. You can't follow Jesus unless you study this book. For you won't know who Jesus is. And nowadays in many circles, Bible study is being downgraded. It's boring. It's irrelevant. We want to worship Jesus. You can't worship Jesus unless you know who He is. Unless you sit down and learn about Him. This book is to tell us about him. How can you divide devotion to the word of Christ from devotion to the person of Christ? You'll end up with a creature of your own imagination. A false Christ. So you'll have a student's Christ, or a young person's Christ, or an old person's Christ, or a black Christ, or a white Christ, a conservative Christ, or a liberal Christ. No. It is good for us to focus on the Son, but let us make sure it is the real Christ, the real Christ we are focusing on, not an idol. Supreme in his status, supreme in himself, and lastly, Paul tells us that the Son is supreme in his scope, in his scope, so that in everything, or in all things, he might have the supremacy. Our Lord Jesus is not supreme in a few things, or in some things, or in many things. He is not even to be supreme in most things. He is to be supreme in all things. is to be supreme in all things. I expect and believe that you all read your Bibles every day. If you don't, you should. Every time you open your Bible, you should be looking for Jesus. You should be looking for Jesus. It's not just a matter of reading so many verses, getting your duty done and your passage read. It's not even just learning things about the Bible, although that's important. It's how can I find Christ here? Even as we read the Old Testament, what does it show us about Christ? The Church Fathers said that from any verse in Scripture, you could take a straight line to Jesus Christ. When you're praying, He's to have the first place. Remembering that that's how you can pray, that's why you can pray. that the only reason God doesn't wipe you out is that you're coming through Jesus. When I'm standing up in this pulpit, I have to remember that. I'm not just here to speak for 30 minutes, to give you a sermon, to explain a passage, but that I have to try to bring Christ to you. I have, as those of you who come into this pulpit will know, I have on a piece of black tape stuck onto this pulpit these words, Sir, we would like to see Jesus. So that every time I stand on this pulpit, these are the first words I see, we would like to see Jesus. And I take it that that is your request to me. That is my task. When we are witnessing to people, when we are witnessing to people, we want to tell them about Jesus the Savior. Not just about becoming good living, not just about being respectable, not just coming into part of our group, or starting a different lifestyle, or believing certain things. All those are important, but the purpose of all these things is to bring them to know Jesus. To know Jesus. We use the phrase personal witnessing. And I like to think of that in three ways. It's personal in three ways. The person I'm speaking to is a real person. Not just a thing, not just a number, not a scalp that I'm trying to take, but a real, valuable, individual person. And secondly, I'm a person. Not just a Christian box loaded with texts. But I am a person with my own experience of God and of Christ. And I have to speak as a human being. You heard about the man who said, one of my brothers has gone into the ministry, the other has remained a human being. Very often as Christians we are like that. We are persons. Speaking to persons. But then thirdly, we are speaking about a person. And sometimes that doesn't come over in our witness. He must have the supremacy. He is to have the supremacy in our homes, in our work, in our leisure, in our spending of our money, in our friendships. What would Jesus want me to do? The Lord Jesus Christ is not a domestic pet whom we have tamed. He is not a household convenience that we can switch on and off whenever we need him and then pack him away in a cupboard in the kitchen. He is a mighty, awesome, sometimes a frightening Lord, a disturbing figure, a person whom we do not yet know fully, a person who wants to change us and make us into different people, a person who has plans for us that we may not realize. Don't let's make Christ small, or cozy, or too comfortable, or ever feel that we control Him. Don't let's think that He may not have surprises for us, that He may not have things to teach us from the Bible that we never thought of before, that He may not come to our church and say, I want you to make changes in your congregational life that you never even imagined, perhaps that are very unwelcome. He must be supreme. But we would say also that the truth applies even more widely. It is our desire to see Christ given the supreme place in every part of life, in education, in our universities and colleges and schools, in the business world, in the world of culture, in the world of politics and the nation, that Christ should be recognized as King. Some people say, That's impractical. I like the statement of G.K. Chesterton. Christianity, he said, has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. There's a lot of truth in that. One day, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord. It's not impractical. Supreme in its scope. And of course that scope begins today with you and me in our own hearts. So that in everything, in everything, he might have supremacy. Friend, is there something in your life at this moment over which he doesn't have supremacy? something, some sin, some habit, some attitude, some relationship, some failure, something that you are holding back. God's purpose is that he should be supreme in all things. And I must begin with myself, just as you must also. This is the focus of our church, this is who we are, who we should be rather, focusing on God the Son, supreme in His status, supreme in Himself, supreme in His scope. So let us think about these things and let us pray and seek God's guidance that, beginning in our hearts and then spreading out in ever-widening circles, it may be more and more true that in everything the real, the living Lord Jesus may have the supremacy. Amen. Let us buy him prayer. Heavenly Father, we acknowledge that we have much to learn. We think of the dying thief who knew so very little, and yet Jesus was supreme. We know that there are many, many fellow Christians who have much to teach us. Lord, open our minds and hearts that even where we may not agree totally We may yet be challenged, but we may not be too blind to see real devotion to Jesus Christ and to be stimulated by that to a greater devotion ourselves. Father, we have many, many privileges, much truth, much teaching It is our most earnest prayer that all this may lead us to Christ and not veil him from us. And we pray, O God, for any today who may be conscious in these quiet moments of some particular thing that needs to be surrendered to Christ's rule. Lord, if that is a description of us, Help us with Thomas to say, My Lord and my God. In his name we pray. Amen. Our closing praise is from the Lord's Psalter, Psalm 72c. Let us sing this psalm joyfully, triumphantly. as we give to our Lord, God's Son, the chief place. The psalm begins with blessing, fruitfulness, and then moves on to the name that endures forever. We sing this whole portion to God's praise. I'll build a home around it, you pray, Like that old home where fruits are fed, You like the city that I've made. She's a white rose, go and extend. She's a white rose, go and extend. Long as earth on his name shall last, it shall endure through ages old, and men shall give him his rest. Let God the nation shall embolden, Let God the nation shall embolden, Others, when we are called at home, Shall hope unfold, O Israel, For your free and wond'rous land. His feet in glory far excel, His feet in glory far excel. And let there be his glorious name, for as the ages shall endure, for all the ages. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.