To Encourage You

Colossians 1:16-18 “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. And 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.”

One of the greatest evidences of man’s antagonism to God is revealed as one considers the words of the verses above. In these verses we are told that Jesus Christ is the preeminent One “in everything.” By “everything” God means everything.  Then to clarify He points to three things: the creation, the church, and the resurrection. 

The Bible is very clear that Jesus created everything.  Everything that exists, visible and invisible, things on earth and things in heaven, all people, all animals, all plants, water, mountains, stars, the moon, and everything else that exists, He made. And “in Him all things hold together.” In other words, the only reason any one of us continues to breathe, and the only reason anything else that was created is still here, is because He enables it to be so. Yet man, in his hatred of God, has gone so far to say that there is no God, that everything got here on its own somehow.  As Carl Sagan was famous for saying “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”  Such a foolish statement from one, who, like all the rest of us, received his very breath from the God he denied. 

Then there is the church.  Jesus is the head of the church. He’s the head of my church and He’s the head of your church.  He has made clear to us what the church is, what it’s role is, and how it is to function. So, is that true of your church? How much prayer goes into the decisions your church makes? How much effort is being made to “preach the gospel to every creature” which is foremost among those things Jesus commanded the church to be about?  My wife was raised in a church where she never heard the gospel.  She never knew what it meant to be born again. Her church never preached such things. What about your church?  How close to the functioning of the church as laid out in 1 and 2 Timothy true of your church and mine?  Does it matter to you and the leadership of your church.?  Of course, it should matter more than anything. 

And then there is the resurrection.  Jesus is preeminent in the here and now, although men and women often don’t treat Him as such.  In fact, the natural man is inclined to treat his own interests as superior to God’s, and to be self-centered, selfish, and wanting to always be first.  But in the resurrection, all people, all angels, all creation will give Jesus the allegiance He so rightfully deserves.  He was the first to rise from the dead to die no more, and He lives forever.  As we are told in Philippians 2 “though he (i.e., Jesus) was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” 

May God help us to give Jesus first place in every aspect of our lives, acknowledging and serving Him as the preeminent One, rather than to be self-centered striving always to be first ourselves, and in every aspect of the church, which is to be representing His body here on earth.  The Bible assures us that there is a resurrection of both the believer and the unbeliever coming.  Jesus has warned us that “an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28-29).  What that resurrection will look like for each one of us will be determined by whether or not Jesus, who is indeed the preeminent One, has been treated as such by us before then.