Open with me in your Bibles to the book of Colossians. The book of Colossians chapter 1 will be in verses 15 through 20 in just a moment, but we'll start reading in verse 9. Our dear sister Angelusha did pass away this past week. Yesterday was her funeral. But there is one who died before her so that her death was but a passageway into more and more and more life. The story is told that Anne would turn down TV or a good book because she did not have time. At 104, she was too busy praying. Well, today's passage, Colossians 115 through 20, it doesn't sound like a prayer, what we're about to read, but it's actually the second half of a really long sentence that begins in verse nine, which is part of a prayer or a prayer report, we could call it. In here, Paul says, he prays without ceasing. However, is that possible? From where does one get the energy, spiritual vision to pray without ceasing? That is one question that our passage this morning will answer among a few others. We'll read now from verses nine through 20. And so from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you. asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord fully pleasing to him bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might and for all endurance and patience with joy and giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He, his beloved Son, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. And he's before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he's the head of the body, the church. He's the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And through him, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. This passage came up a few times this week. It's a big part of my job to preach, and so the passage for every Sunday just comes up across the week. And this week, as I talked about what I was preaching, I just kept gravitating toward pretty violent imagery. It's like a volcano goes off in Paul's heart on the page, or we're going to get nailed by a meteor this week. These kinds of things just seem to roll off. It's a big passage. It's an intention-getting passage. It's a game-changing passage. We'll have a more life-giving image to work from before too long, so listen up. When a preacher sits down to write an introduction, we consider how to gather and to focus your attention. On the one hand, a preacher reads this passage and says, I am alive. This is why I am in the ministry. There is so much here. And at the same time, I read this passage and say, I am dead. I am quitting the ministry. There is so much here. How does one wield this passage? Paul may have felt the same way sometimes in 2 Corinthians. He says, who is sufficient for these things? A good question. And to imagine these words we've read etched onto parchment under a man named Epaphras' arm on his way to Colossae. An introduction should gather our attention from a thousand things to one thing, and today's passage well does that on its own. Well, how shall we proceed from here? Let's start by taking a step back and looking at the passage as a whole and pondering the big little package that we have in it. We'll spend a good bit of time here before we jump into expounding the passage, like putting on scuba gear before we head down. We need to do some things first. Three immediate observations. This passage is really heavy. It's heavy. It's a dense, dense paragraph. I simply cannot fit bigger thoughts into fewer words, and neither can you. Within these words are contained everything in the universe. All things, all things, all things, Paul has said. Add the weight of every elephant and every star and every fish and everything else, and it's still heavier. heavy. It's also a beautiful passage. It's a poem. It doesn't read like the rest of Paul's letter or a normal letter. It's poetry. We even believe that this was a hymn that Christians would have sung before Paul wrote this letter that he incorporated into his letter. It seems as though the subject matter requires poetry to carry it. It's beautiful, its beauty and its symmetry is revealed. Two mirrored sections. Watch this as you look down. See in verse 15, he is the image. Verse 18, he is the beginning. Back up to verse 16, for by him or literally in him. And then verse 19, for in him. So verses 15 through 17 is a first stanza of the poem, and verses 18 through 20 is a second stanza. But right in the middle, there is a hinge like a chorus. Verses 17 and 18, the last verse of the first stanza, and the first verse of the second stanza, look backward and look forward in the poem. And as with all poetry, it's not really meant to be pulled apart and dissected. The form of poetry itself is its own display case for the beautiful truth it means to hold out. Yet poetry can be preached. The form of words in the Bible, be it a letter or narrative or poetry, are like an artillery shell. And preaching is like the cannon. And the preaching should fit the shell. The shell needs to be fired still, and still needs to land on you. The words are what get fired, and the preaching is the firing of the words at the people each week. Sometimes you get hit with a punch. Sometimes you get presented with a flower. This Sunday, I think you get delivered a flower with a punch, could I say. Punched with a flower. I don't know. It's a poem, but it's big, and it hits you. So it's heavy and it is beautiful. It's also very sharp, very sharp. It makes more than a point. It makes the sharpest point of the whole universe. It's about the most important of important things and don't miss all the firsts. I'm sure you didn't on both sides of the song. The poem, excuse me. Jesus is the firstborn of all creation. And then he's the firstborn from the dead. More on that in a bit. Then look at verse 18. He's the firstborn from the dead. Why? That in everything he might be preeminent. Preeminent in everything. This passage is at the same time about everything in the whole universe. And it is fundamentally about one thing that wraps it all up. Finally, notice the place of the passage. So it's heavy. It is beautiful. It's sharp. Notice its place. Spend a few minutes here. Notice its place in the chapter. Verses 3 through 8, by way of review, are where Paul thanks God that the gospel has come to his readers and that it is growing in them. Strange way to talk, isn't it? That his good news, God's gospel, is growing in his readers and that it is growing, increasing throughout the whole world. He thanks God from his prison floor with this global perspective on God's invisible gospel growing work. Then in verses 9 through 14 from last week, Paul prays that they would be filled up, that they would be filled with the knowledge of God's will in order to live a life fully pleasing to him. that they would be filled with wisdom in order that they might walk in a manner worthy of God. Filled so that they would overflow in thankfulness to God. And this filling begins in his prayer. Watch the progression. Verse 12. He's filling us up with these things. Giving thanks to the Father. And who is that? He unravels it. The Father is the one who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of light. And what has he done? He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And there at the end is the Son. And as if now to zoom in on a star, to find out it is a galaxy, He expounds the Son. Jesus is the last one Paul names in his prayer, but he is not the least one. Jesus is not the last and the least. He is the last but not the least. He is the bottom of the prayer, but not the bottom like a glass. When you get to the bottom, it's all gone, all done. The bottom like a well. like a source of life, water which keeps coming. And this well we've hit is deep, a deep well from which to fill ourselves up." And that's what this passage is doing. He's praying that they would be filled with the knowledge of God and wisdom and understanding so as to walk worthy of God, to be mature, to fully please him. And now he's going to fill them up with that knowledge and wisdom, which is Christ himself. That's the place of the passage in the chapter. Now consider the place of the passage in the book. The book cuts four ways. Some big picture on the shape of the book. In chapter one, Paul holds out Christ and all of his fullness as all that they need for all of life. In chapter 2, he deals with false teaching. There were alternatives and additions to Christ on offer as a way of achieving true spirituality and true life change, supposed true life change. This is what made Paul pick up his pen to write. He's concerned. And in chapter 3, he instructs them in how to live. Lots and lots of commands in chapter 3. Lots of them. for how to live. And then in chapter four he closes with some prayers and logistics and final greetings. But notice how long he takes to get to his commands for Christian living. He spends a whole lot of time on what has been done before he talks about what we should do. Why is that necessary if it's already done? Aren't the urgent things the things that we should Often when we open the Bible, we're looking for the thing to do. Paul here gives us a whole chapter on things that are done, things that are. But the only way that the things that we should do will ever happen on our account at all, for the right reasons, is on the basis of what has been done. Indicatives, we say, come before imperatives. Things that are come before things that ought to be. Identity comes before obedience, and that is found in the turn of any verse in the Bible, New Testament, and it is found in the very structure of a book like Colossians, where what is true comes before what ought to be, and you can't have one without the other. We do not like this. This is why the Colossian church, was under threat of alternative and additions to Christ. And it's why our Christian bookstores are filled with books that deal in how to live the Christian life that go often way, way beyond scripture. We are just hungry for tell me what to do and how to do it and get specific for me. Tell me how long to date or whether I should call it dating or whatever, pick your topic. We want the great body now without the patient diet. We do not come to a microwave in the book of Colossians, though. We come to a well, a deep well. And we live at the well, brothers and sisters, and we live off the well. It is always drinking from Christ before living for Christ. And there is no living for Christ apart from drinking from Christ. Paul doesn't send us back home with a cup from this well. He sends us home with buckets. Buckets. Where is the fuel for praying without ceasing like Paul does? Where is the power for the things that he actually prays for? A fruitful life, a life of thanksgiving, a life of patient endurance with joy in great difficulty, which you know all about. It is here in this poem for the preeminence of Christ. And at this well, we're going to draw up two buckets. So here we're getting to our outline. Two buckets this morning. The first bucket, the life-giving truth about Jesus that indeed he has made all things. He has made all things. Verses 15 through 17. Read it again. He, Christ, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. We human beings were made in the image of God, little reflectors of God himself in the world, his representatives, and where we go, so he goes in a real sense. That's the idea. an extension of his glory wherever humans go, filling the earth with his glory and their presence. Well, Jesus is the true and full exact imprint of God's nature, the true perfect image of God, and that is astonishing. Repeatedly in the Bible story, we're told that God cannot be seen. You cannot see him. John 1 18, no one has ever seen God The only God who is at the Father's side, He has made Him known. In Jesus Christ, God the Father, God is made known in the person of His Son. And here we have yourself, ourselves, the mystery of what we call the Trinity. If you're new to church, and the Bible, and Christianity, you may recognize the term Trinity. It is not from the Bible. The term is not. It is a term to capture all that the Bible teaches about the nature of God, or at least God as one and three. God as one. We have the Father, the Son, and the Spirit who are worshiped, yet God is one. Jesus forgives sins, a prerogative that belongs only to God, and yet God is one. Jesus' enemies understood this perfectly, and Jesus accepted worship and did not deny the claim to deity. Even in extremely explicit fashion, took on the very name of God himself, I am. God is seen in the Son. In John 14, Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, he says, you would have known my Father also. From now on, you do know him and have seen him. And Philip said to him, Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us. And Jesus said to him, I have been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the father. How can you say, show us the father? Do you not believe that I am in the father and the father's in me? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the father who dwells in me does his works. Believe in me that I am in the father and the father is in me, or else believe on the count of the works themselves. And this is why the book of Hebrews begins, long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days, he's spoken to us by his son, in whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he also created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature. There is uncompromising oneness in God, and yet somehow mysteriously, beautifully, clearly, complementary, and coordinating threeness. God the Father and the Spirit, the same in essence, distinct in their function in creation and in redemption. And we dare not try to get our minds entirely around this except to confess what we see on the page. Jesus says, believe in me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. When it says that Jesus is the firstborn of creation, that does not mean he was the first one created. Let's get that out of the way. as if he were not himself God. No one denied that Jesus was God in his own day, but for centuries after they denied he was human. That was the problem. Clearly he was God. The problem was he was not human, they would suggest. Firstborn, it's not a language we use often. It does entail a temporal sense to it, but it does not always. Firstborn, the first one born, for example, was the prominent one in an ancient family, the one who received the inheritance. But it was also for that same reason the way of referring to the one who was most prominent. For example, of Israel, God says in Exodus, you shall say to Pharaoh, thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son. In Jeremiah 31.9, for I am the father to Israel and Ephraim is my firstborn. And of David, the scripture says in Psalm 89, and I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. Israel was God's prized possession, but she was not the first of nations. And David was God's firstborn son, but he was the youngest among his brothers. He was the prominent one, though. Jesus is the firstborn. He's the chief, the prominent one, the preeminent one. And this portrait of Jesus is not one where he is even first in some kind of line of similar competing characters. He is, as Paul will say in chapter 2, how else do you say it? All in all, Christ is all, and all in all, he is apart from his creation, and therefore the firstborn. Not one thing that everything else is behind, but one thing from which everything else gets its meaning. He was not created, verse 16, for by him all things were created. He was the agent of creation, the means of creation. And all things means all things. He made ice caps to desert scapes and every texture in between. He positioned mountaintops just so and carved out the ocean bottoms and crafted every layer and texture in between. And then there's the little stuff. My daughter brought home recently a small cup full of dirt. And that is all that I see. But there is a seed in that dirt cup. And apparently it will grow. We've been really bad at growing plants in our house. But apparently it will grow. I think she can do it. There's a seed in there with a code. And that seed will grow through a number of stages. And it will conduct photosynthesis. The sun hanging in the sky as it does will shine its light and this plant will convert that light and it will grow. I read some equation on the internet about how it works. None of you but maybe two or three will know whether this is right or not. But it makes my point. Six CO2 carbon dioxide plus six H2O water add light and you get six H12O6 sugar and six O2 oxygen. Christ wrote that code. And we figured it out, but Christ was there first, and he wrote it. And grasshoppers I've been seeing around, that my wife stepped on in our garage work yesterday, with their lever system and tendons and flexor muscles that allow them to jump, jump. This one not fast enough. And the much less charming, the much less charming, but no less magnificent fly with its incredible compound eyes with thousands of visual receptors for thousands of images that make a giant picture of the world around them, which is why they're so jumpy. They're so good at detecting the finest movements. They can jump. They're gone. All these things were created through him. Everything in heaven, And on earth, he wrote the code. What a thing to say about a homeless troublemaker the Romans crucified 30 years earlier. Wow. And he's not done. That's just the visible stuff that I've listed off. He gives us his own list of invisible things. Thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities. There are power structures in the world. And there are invisible power structures in the invisible world, apparently. And this may refer both to the visible and invisible power structures of the world. It doesn't matter because he is actually over all of them. This passage excludes nothing from Christ's creative work. Jesus is over it all. But he is more than the origin of all things. They were created by him, and they were created, it says, for him. He is their origin, and he is their end, their goal. Use an illustration of a home. A home has a design, and is a builder, and is a purpose. I have a friend who builds things. And I recently said, how did you build that? He's got a whole structure on the back of his property. And he said, I don't know. I just started started looking and starting cutting things and sort of thinking in my head about what I wanted it to be. Oh, my. The design was in his head and that thing came out. Jesus is the architect. Jesus is the builder. And he's the owner. He builds for himself. He is the final answer to every why question. In leadership world, mission vision stuff, you keep asking the why question, why, why, why, why, and you get down to some stuff you need to be able to articulate. It's good for the church to do this. It's good for us to do this with our lives. Jesus is ultimately the answer to every why question all the way down about anything anyone ever comes to you for or any question you ever ask. He makes sense of it all. He's the creator of it all. He's the climax and the goal of it all. But that's not all. He is also the coherence of it all. He makes it all make sense together. Verse 17, a summary now. I was reading a book on grammar this week and came across an obscure rule. Not the kind you don't know and break, but the kind you keep and didn't even know it. Let me just read for you this passage from this book. Word order is surprisingly strict in English. John Ronald Rule Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a green great dragon. He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely could not have a green great dragon and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years. The reason for Tolkien's mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order. Opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose, then noun. Who knew that? Did anyone know that in this room? All right. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, but if you mess with that word order in the slightest, you'll sound like a maniac. It's the odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. There are rules that explain how things fit together. even if you'd never know them unless you were told. There are rules for grammar, yes, even in the English language, some. And we operate by them whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. They are the context for all of our conversation and meaning. And there are rules for physics, which everything moves and operates whether we know it or not. And there are rules for sound. You may not know music theory and still enjoy music. But you won't understand how it works or be able to create great music unless you understand something of music theory. There are rules under the pretty things and the strong things we hear and enjoy. And there is a rule under the fabric of the universe that makes sense of all the rules. The rule that holds it together, that makes it all work. The rule that explains why a mother loves her baby. That explains why the moon eclipses the sun exactly how it does and when it does. And more than governing the physical universe, it's a rule that governs the moral universe. It explains why humans have a conscience. Why we ponder our existence and our death and our pain. And that rule is none other than Jesus Christ himself, the son who made it all, and in whom all things hold together. More than a principle or an equation, but a person, he is our coherence. This is incredible, and it is also not enough. It is not enough Maybe you've been here wondering, if this house is a house fit for Jesus, then who is Jesus anyway? Who would create such a dilapidated, self-destructive home? It's booby-trapped, and the ceiling falls in. And the water gets in, and the planet tears itself up with hurricanes, and the people on the planet tear themselves apart, home to home and nation to nation. Is Jesus behind the mess? Is Jesus behind the chaos? Is he a bad homeowner? Low building and living standards. And all of this frustration or difficulty or tension in your mind, if you've got it, is very perceptive, and it's commendable, and it is okay here. Is this just a pretty poem and maybe that's all. Thankfully the poem is not done. We always finish the story and we want to finish the poem. Jesus made all things and we need more than to know that. So a second bucket that we're going to pull up from this well that is this passage. A second bucket from the well of Christ. He makes all things, and second, he makes all things right. He makes them all right. Verses 18 through 20. Let's read that again. And he is the head of the body, the church. He's the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. The first part began, he's the image of the invisible God. The second part begins, he is the head of the body, the church. The first part started with Jesus's relationship to God as the image of God. And the second part begins with Jesus's relationship to the church as its head. So in part one, it was about the whole universe, and is part two then about part of that universe, the church? No. Part two of this poem is about the whole new universe of which the church is the start and the heart. In part one, Jesus created all things, and in part two, he reconciles all things to himself. Or we could say part one of the poem was about the creation and part two is about the new creation. As scripture will tell us, Jesus will melt it all down and make it all new. And this is what is meant by he is the beginning and the firstborn from the dead. That Jesus is the firstborn from the dead means that he is the first one to pass through death and beat it. And having beaten death, he has opened a way to a whole new life for all of those who follow him through it in faith. He has made our greatest enemy our friend, and he has taken the sting out of death and gave us by death a passageway through it to life." Now, it may be that you have always thought in terms of time now and eternity later, or life now, heaven later. That's not terribly wrong. But it's not complete. It's not exactly how the Bible presents the matter. And this book of Colossians will help us with this greatly as we progress. We get a hint of it here. We have the creation and we have the new creation. The new creation comes with the arrival of the Messiah. We see through the whole Old Testament, as it promises a new creation, it arrives with the Messiah. And when Jesus arrives, he brings his kingdom and the new creation dawns. In the sending of the Spirit to create the church, the new creation dawns in a people. And one day in the future, the new creation will be complete in a place, a whole new creation. But that future new creation has already broken into the world now as we sit here. And who are the people of the new creation? The church. A word that means assembly. A word used at the time for civic gatherings or a gathering of a mob around a purpose. An assembly. A gathering of people. And the church is God's new creation assembly in the present. A gathering of the people that belong to the new age here. And that's what this is. That's what we're doing right now. We do not meet merely to be encouraged or to have a center to our lives. We meet to remember and to say to one another and to believe more firmly that we belong to another world. We belong to the new creation. And we will forget it if we don't meet, but for seven days apart. And in that world, all will be right. And that all is about more than people, you might have noticed. We've been talking about us, the people of the new creation, but the passage talks about more than us. Through him, it says, he will reconcile to himself all things, all things. That doesn't mean every person will be redeemed, it means that everything will be made right in the end. There won't be any trouble astir in the end, or hurricanes to take out regions. An old age won't be a way to die, it will be the way we live. And it will be amazing. And how will Jesus do it? We can run from hurricanes, but we can't make them go away. Try as we may, we cannot get people to stop killing people on small or large scales. Try as we may. We cannot find peace on our own, try as we may. However, will Jesus make this reconciliation and peace for people and peace to a whole new creation possible? How will he do it? Friends, let us never forget. Let us never forget. And we've got to keep saying it. It's why he's writing it to Christians. Let's never forget that he does it through the blood of his cross. And why did he need blood and a cross to accomplish this? It all goes back to sin and death and judgment. Jesus does not offer the problem a band-aid. He doesn't snip the weed at the surface of the earth to make it go away for a time. He pulls it out by the root. He goes after it. where it starts. He goes after the reason for death itself, our sin and our guilt. That is how creation got corrupt in the first place. Humans fell into sin and God put a curse on the world. But when God redeems humanity, he will then redeem the whole world. And how does his cross do this? Through Jesus's death, through his blood, he takes away the guilt of sinners, so that now nothing stands between us and God, and we can be reconciled to him. And taking away our guilt, he takes away death's sting, and we'll pass through death, but not to judgment, but into joy forever with him. One day, in a whole new creation, Jesus, the firstborn from the dead, we follow him into this new world. And so before we are a people who does anything, which we will get to in force in chapter three, we're a people who believe some things deeply. So Heritage Bible Church, hear this, my friends, be the people who believe that we are but creatures. Be the people who believe the firstborn of creation is also the firstborn from the dead for a new creation. Be the people who believe that Jesus Christ did this by his blood. Be the people who believe that this is enough, that no other person or program is needed for our entry into the new creation. And be the people who believe that Jesus is preeminent in all things, and the people whose code of conduct follows first from the code of the new creation itself. And be the people who drink to the full from two buckets from one deep well of Jesus Christ, the creator and the reconciler of all things. And be the people who believe that Jesus holds all things together, and so he can hold us together. our lives and our church, our little outpost, our little new creation post in this world for this time. Let's pray. Father, we give great praise to your great son, your beloved son. God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, who came for our redemption and our forgiveness, and by his defeat of death, has removed from us the fear of death because he has taken our guilt. And more than clearing our account, we have in him a great promise of one incredible, incredible new creation to come. in which we participate even right now. And so as we meet this Sunday and every Sunday to hear his word and to sing his praises and to pray to you through him, make us to know who we are. And knowing who we are from this great book of Colossians, help us to live as those who belong to Christ. In his name we pray, amen.