Colossians 1:1-2 –

¹Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, ²To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father.

Introduction

Since becoming the preaching pastor here in 2013, I’ve preached through the last 1/3 of the Gospel of Mark and all the way through 1 John, Titus, 1 Peter, Hosea, Ruth, Genesis, James, John’s Gospel, and Ecclesiastes.

With each book, I’m a little embarrassed to say, I was genuinely caught off guard by the way God used it to work in our church. I never doubted that God gives grace through the preaching of His Word or that careful exposition is usually the most faithful approach to preaching, but I continually underestimated the magnitude of what He would do among us and the consistency with which He would do so.

What I also find interesting is that there were very few times in which He used individual sermons to bring about those changes (at least from what I could tell). Rather, He seemed to do so through the cumulative effect of spending months (and sometimes years) in each book.

For all those reasons, I’m truly excited for the chance to spend another significant chunk of time with you all in another book of the Bible. And with that, welcome to Colossians and the expectation that God will continue to do great things in us, through this most remarkable letter on the preeminence of Jesus Christ!

The big idea of this sermon—which is the big idea of Colossians as a whole—is that the unlimited number of “Christ and” approaches to life are always eternally deadly, while the “Christ over all” approach is the only and certain path to eternal life. The main takeaways are to do everything you can to take in all the messages on Colossians and to begin taking inventory of the “ands” in your life.

Grace, I urge you not to make the same mistakes I’ve made over and over in allowing myself to be underwhelmed by Jesus (even for a moment) and in underestimating the sanctifying power of placing myself under God’s preached Word week after week after week. I think you’ll find, as I’m about to pray, that God means Colossians to be an awesome remedy for both.

The Background

Before I get into the background of Colossians, I want to say a few, brief words about the nature of the Bible by sharing a small portion of my experience with it. And I mean to do so to help you see why understanding the background of Colossians is so important.

When I first came to faith in Christ as a 19-year-old, I’d read a few out-of-context verses from the Bible and I’d heard many more read in different contexts, but I don’t think I’d ever read an entire chapter, much less an entire book. I had a sense that the Bible was from God, but no concept of what that meant. I’m sure I couldn’t have named 90% of the books of the Bible and I don’t know that I knew a single biblical author. The main point that I’m trying to make is that for the first two decades of my life, I had no idea what the Bible was really, in no small measure because I didn’t really care what the Bible really was.

I didn’t recognize any of that until I came to faith in Jesus. Once I did, it all became quickly and painfully clear. Through steady Bible reading on my part, the faithful teaching/preaching/discipleship of others, and the strong desire for understanding that the Spirit put in me, I’ve been growing to know and appreciate what the Bible is, what it teaches, and what that means ever since.

All of that leads to one of the more important things I’ve learned about God’s Word over all the years; namely, that it consists of 66 separate books, all inspired by God and written by men with three critical aims: (1) Accomplishing some specific purpose among its first recipients, (2) Revealing more of God’s ultimate plan for the world, and (3) Equipping all of His people for all time with some of what we need to honor Him.

The ultimate goal of Bible reading/study is the third aim (sufficient help to live as God intends), but the first two are essential means to that end. We can’t know how a passage applies to us today if we don’t know it’s original intent or its place in the larger story. And we can’t know the author’s original intent apart from a humble acknowledgement that every book of the Bible was written in a dramatically different context and culture from what we have today. For instance, Colossians is a letter written nearly 2000 years ago, on another content, in another language, to a very different people, with a very different mindset, before cars, phones, electricity, and internet.

Therefore, if we are to read Colossians (or any other book of the Bible) as we are meant to, we need to understand its background. We’ll being with the author.

The Author: Paul

Who wrote this letter and what do we know about him? Helpfully, the author opens his letter by identifying himself, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.” So, who was Paul?

Of himself he said (in Acts 22:3): “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in [Jerusalem], educated at the feet of Gamaliel [“a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people” (Acts 5:34)] according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God as all of you are this day.

He was a well-educated, zealous Jewish leader and very proud of those things. He elaborated on that idea in some of his other writings. He referred to himself as (Philippians 3:5-6), “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee… as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

In his Jewish zeal and blamelessness, he was adamant about silencing Jesus’ followers, believing them to be heretics. To that end, he wrote of himself, (Philippians 3:6) “as to zeal, a persecutor of the church…”. And (Acts 22:4), “I persecuted [Christians] to the death, binding and delivering to prison both men and women…”

He continued in that until one day, on his way to persecute Christians in a town called Damascus, something entirely unexpected happened: the resurrected Jesus appeared to him.

Describing this experience, Paul said, (Acts 22:6-8)…about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone around me. ⁷And I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ ⁸And I answered, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said to me, ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.’

From there, Paul told of being led to Damascus and what happened next…

(Acts 22:13-16)“And one Ananias… ¹³came to me, and standing by me said to me…¹⁴… ‘The God of our fathers appointed you to know his will, to see [Jesus] and to hear a voice from his mouth; ¹⁵for you will be a witness for him to everyone of what you have seen and heard. ¹⁶And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.’

Though originally an avowed enemy of Jesus and His followers, Paul was miraculously saved by Jesus. More than that, he was (as we just read and as he says at the beginning of Colossians), commissioned by God as an apostle of Jesus to be a missionary to the Gentiles throughout the whole world.

Of this, in another place he wrote (Galatians 1:15-16), “But …[God] set me apart before I was born, and …called me by his grace, [He] was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles…”.

From that point on, Paul faithfully gave himself to this mission, at an unimaginably great cost to himself. In fact, as we’ll see in a bit, Paul wrote Colossians, while imprisoned for obeying God.

Rather than being deterred from his mission by his persecution, Paul only grew in resolve. Far from longing for a comfortable life, his greatest desire was that he might (Philippians 3) “¹⁰ … know [Jesus] and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹that by any means possible [he might] attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Indeed, he did share in Christ’s sufferings as he shared in Christ’s mission. He describes them as consisting of nearly non-stop (2 Corinthians 11:23-28) hard work, imprisonments, near-death beatings, lashings, stoning, shipwrecks, dangers, sleeplessness, hunger and thirst, harsh weather, and stress.

From the time of his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus, the Apostle Paul gave his life to proclaiming the good news that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). Doing so cost him nearly every earthly comfort. Indeed, it is likely that Colossians was written when he was on house arrest in Rome; which would mean that he was near the end of his life.

He went from being among the most educated, ze...