Colossians 1:15-20 –

¹⁵He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. ¹⁶For 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. ¹⁷And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. ¹⁹For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Introduction

Since the first sermon on Colossians, I’ve tried to explain that the central message of this letter and the primary solution to the Colossian Christians’ problems is “Jesus and nothing”. That idea comes from passages like what we find in chapter 3:11 where Paul declares of Jesus that He “is all and in all.” Jesus is the aim and answer!

The questions, of course, are: What does that mean and how is it so? What does it mean that Jesus was sufficient to overcome every challenge of the Colossian Christians? In what ways is Jesus all and in all and what does that have to do with their hardships? And remember, Paul was writing to Christians, so his point wasn’t mainly tied to their conversion.

As you know by now, the two main problems the Colossians were facing were persecution and false teaching. They were constantly pressured (at best) and severely mistreated (at worst) for their faith in Jesus. Likewise, in the midst of trying to figure out how to live in a manner worthy of God, they were being constantly bombarded with wrong answers to that question. At best, they were given bad ideas by well-intentioned people. And at worst, they were being inundated with doctrines antithetical to the gospel by the enemies of God.

And again, Paul’s first and main answer to all of that was Jesus. “Jesus and nothing” was more than enough for them, Paul argued. But again, how was that the case? What does that mean?

Before we get to the answer, I invite you to think about that for a minute. Make a quick mental list of the biggest real-life problems you have right now. Now try to honestly answer the questions of whether or not Jesus is enough for those things and what would it even mean for Him to be. In other words, before we get to Paul’s explanation, let’s first make sure to take it out of the past and out of the abstract and into our real lives and our own problems.

Loneliness
A failing or failed marriage
Kids who are won’t listen or are constantly in conflict
Trouble having kids
In-law troubles or family conflict
Some significant health struggle for yourself or someone you love
A difficult work environment or trouble finding a job
Money problems
Lasting hurt or discouragement from a past experience
Anxiety or depression
A secret or nagging sin that’s crushing you
Uncertainty about the future

Again, is it easy for you to see how Jesus is the answer to all of that? Do you know what it means? Do you know how it’s possible? Can you see how the fact that Jesus is all and in all is enough?

To help you see how that is the case, I want to answer three questions for you this morning: (1) Why are hard things hard? (2) What are our options for dealing with hard things? (3) How does Jesus relate to our hard things?

As I do, you’ll see the big idea of the sermon: Living out of the right story is the only way to honor God in times of hardship. And right at the center of the right story is the preeminence of Jesus Christ. The main takeaway is to make sure Jesus is central to your story and that you’re seeing everything else in light of that.

To be clear, this passage does not answer the first two questions for us. It only answers the third. However, Paul’s answer to the third question assumes the first two questions. And so, with that, why are hard things hard?

Why Are Hard Things Hard?

This might sound like a silly question. Admittedly, on some level it is. But until we can come to grips with the answer to this question, hard things will always be even harder than they need to be.

Ultimately, hard things are hard because of sin. No sin, no hardship.

But to zoom in just a bit more, there are four main ways that sin makes things hard. Test my answers against the mental list you made earlier. Ask yourself whether or not the hardships you’re enduring fit into one of these explanations.

Hard things are hard because they involve the absence of something we were made to have.

Why is loneliness hard, for instance? Because God is communal in His very nature (within the Trinity) and part of what it means to bear His image is to be communal in our nature. When we are literally alone or relationally alone, we are not experiencing something essential to our personhood. And whenever that’s the case, it’s inevitably hard.

The same thing is true in the way of fatherhood. As we saw back in v.2, because God is our Father, part of being made in the image of God is to have a kind of father hunger. We all have a God-infused longing for someone to look to for origin, provision, protection, direction, wisdom, identity, stability, love, and affirmation—things that our earthly fathers are uniquely given to provide or provide in unique ways. For that reason, when our earthly fathers are absent or characterized by withholding those things from us, our lives are always hard since we were made to receive those things from our dads.

Marriages are often hard because of the withholding of the love and respect God made marriage for. Parenting is often hard because we withhold the discipline and heart-shepherding God designed our kids to have.

In the case of the Colossians, God’s design is that all people would be free to live “peaceful, quiet, godly, and dignified lives” (1 Timothy 2:2). A good chunk of their hardship was due to the absence of that within their community.

Another way to say this same thing is that we will experience hardship whenever some aspect of God’s design for our lives is missing from our lives.
The second reason that hard things are hard is because they involve the presence of something we were not made to have. This is the other side of the coin of the first reason.

Cancer is one of the clearest physical examples of this principle. My neighbor is dealing with all kinds of hard things—dizziness, confusion, memory issues, sight issues, etc.—because he has an inoperable tumor in his head. His life is much harder because there’s something in his body that it wasn’t designed to include.

The same thing is true on both a physical and spiritual level with drunkenness/substance abuse, pornography, and greed (and sins of commission in general). When we add those things to our lives, our lives are inevitably hard because we were not made to have those things in our lives. They are like, but worse than, cancer in that way. They make everything harder in our whole being—body and soul.

To use the same two examples again, marriages are hard in this way with the addition of an adulterous relationship or a critical spirit that they were not designed to include. And parenting is hard in this way because of the addition of disordered things like abuse or comparison.

Again, for the Colossians, they were suffering because they were in the presence of things they were absolutely not made to be in the presence of—persecution and heresy.

To summarize these first two points in the simplest way I know how, consider a car engine. You quickly run into significant problems if you either take out one of its parts or add an extra part to it. It was designed to work in a certain way and, therefore, it just won’t run as it should (and maybe not at all) if it has too few or too many parts.
Hard things are hard because they deny us something we believe we are owed.

The first two reasons hard things are hard have to do with stuff that really should or shouldn’t be in our lives (according to God). The final two are different. Although we usually imagine they are, they’re not about ought or oughtn’t, but about wrong expectations—things we want rather than things we’re made for.

For example, I remember my teenage years being hard because I was sure I was owed brand name clothing. I was regularly incensed that my parents didn’t want to pay for me to get the Jordans and Girbauds I felt I deserved. Even though I believed otherwise, I didn’t need them or deserve them and so my hardship was self-inflicted. Certain aspects of my life were hard, but only because I believed I was owed me something that I really wasn’t.

Likewise, the hardships that come from money problems are often tied to mistaken ...

Jesus is Preeminent in Everything