The Reconciling Rule of Jesus

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We’re in Colossians. And if you have your Bible, I would encourage you to open up, because we’ll be hitting different verses, but we’re going to go through the passage that TJ read before—Colossians 1:15–23.

We began this series on Colossians last week. We’re calling it Jesus Our Everything. Now, Colossians really paints a picture of Jesus. It highlights the cosmic supremacy of Jesus over everything—over all creation—including your life and your relationships. And so, Colossians is about highlighting Jesus as the cosmic king of the universe.

Last week, we just entered the Colossians church. It’s a series of small communities meeting in homes and different places. Paul has never met them before. He writes—in about 60 A.D.—he writes them a letter, hearing of their faith, hearing how well they are doing, praising them. We looked at that last week—praising them for their love, love for all God’s people, for their hope in Jesus, for their faith and allegiance in Jesus, walking with him. And he prays for them, and that’s how he opens the letter.

In the background, though, Paul is writing—he always has a reason to write—and there is some concern. As they live in Colossae, they live in this city where there are a lot of different ideas and philosophies and gods—sex gods and money gods and war gods—and full ways of seeing the world, ways of living out your life that are against the way of Jesus.

We talked about this though—that the beautiful thing about following Jesus is that Jesus can be followed in every single culture. And there are so many beautiful aspects of every culture that can be brought into worship of Jesus. We see in Revelation, right, that every tribe, tongue, and nation will be worshiping God. And I think we can fairly and beautifully assume that these are speaking and praising Jesus in their own language, with their own art, with their own instruments, with the beauty of their culture and everything that God finds beautiful about them.

So, there are beautiful things about every culture that God loves and are offered in beautiful worship to him. And we shouldn’t make people change. We’re not here to make everyone assimilate to a certain kind of cultural expression of Christianity.

However, the way of Jesus does come into conflict with certain ways of life. There are ways of the kingdom—as Jesus comes on the scene and says, “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent. Believe in the gospel.” The gospel is good news. And then he describes—I love it—the way he starts the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed. The gospel brings blessing.

It’s good news for the poor—the poor in spirit, those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness and justice, the meek who are being pressed and crushed, peacemakers, the merciful, the pure in heart, those who are persecuted.

And so, the kingdom of God comes into a world that does not value the way of love, and he comes in and brings the way of love. And this is good news, but it will require some calibration, right? Because all of us—as Claire shared—all of us, our hearts are drawn away, from our fear, from our trauma, from the confusion, from the voices that come to us from all directions: culture. They draw us away.

Not necessarily to deny Jesus—though that happens—but to be misaligned with Jesus, right? And we begin to see Jesus through our cultural lens and through our cultural assumptions and through our values, and assume, “Well, Jesus sees the world the way I do.”

And so, the Colossians are struggling with this. They’re following Jesus, but Paul wants them to see Jesus for who Jesus is, and make sure they are in alignment with the way of God’s kingdom. Because it is only when we’re in alignment with his way of love that we will experience the peace, justice, flourishing, the renewal, the healing that is ours in Jesus.

So that’s where we’re at. And so we ended last week with this beautiful declaration: God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. That’s your story if you are following Jesus. You have been transferred from a kingdom of darkness, violence, greed, destruction, into a kingdom with a Son—Jesus—who leads us in the way of love and life and hope and healing.

And so the question then becomes: Who is the Son that God loves? Who is this Jesus? And that’s what we’ll talk about today. He starts with this hymn—this hymn that was likely sung throughout the church. Most scholars see this as a poem that was shared throughout the church in Colossae and other places. Paul knows it. And it’s a hymn that exalts Jesus and shows us who Jesus is.

Remember: what we behold is what we become. What we behold is what we become. And so Paul wants us to see Jesus—to behold Jesus—so that we can become like Jesus. And he draws our eyes to the true deal.

So, the whole theme of Colossians here is that no part of human existence remains untouched by the loving and liberating rule of Jesus.

 feel like this morning, with the way that we prayed for Iran and we are very aware of what’s happening there, that this is the gospel—this is the good news the world needs: that there is no part of the human existence that is not untouched by the loving and liberating rule of Jesus.

This is the news we need as people. We need the liberating and loving and healing and saving rule of Jesus. And so Paul calls our attention to it.

First, he’s going to say that Jesus is the one who is supreme over all creation. He goes cosmic. He goes huge. He goes big. You’re supposed to think as far as you can—to the outermost reaches of the universe, the cosmos. Hear that Jesus is supreme over all of it.

He begins with a crazy description of Jesus. He says: The Son is the image of the invisible God.

Now, this is very important because we have a lot of pictures of what God is like, don’t we? We have a lot of teachings about what God is like. And that leads us into a lot of different ways of life. And so we need to get right who God is. And Jesus shows us.

So in other words, if you want to know what God is like, you don’t look behind Jesus. You look at Jesus. You look at his compassion. You look at his teaching. You look at his authority. You look at his miracles. You look at his relationships. You look at his faithfulness unto death. You look at what he does on the cross, from the cross, as he is pinned down by his enemies: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” You look at Jesus, and that is where God is revealed.

Jesus doesn’t merely represent God. He reveals God. In John, he says, “The Word became flesh.” What God has to say is Jesus. The Word God speaks is Jesus.

And so then Paul says, This Jesus is the firstborn over all creation.

Now this is important—the firstborn over all creation. This can sound like Jesus is part of the creation. Now, we’ll see in context that’s not at all what Paul is saying, because he’ll say Jesus created the world—which we’ll see in a minute.

But what is this firstborn of all creation? Remember, this is written 2,000 years ago in a different language. And so this idea of firstborn means he’s not saying that Jesus was the first thing God made. Firstborn in the ancient world relates to status, not origin.

I’m the oldest child in my family. Congratulations, Jesse. And what this means is, I have status, right? I am the firstborn. I’m the first grandchild in my family. And so that gives me a certain kind of authority.

Now, it’s just the way it is. For some reason, my brothers and sisters really care about what I say and think. And it’s because—even though I may not deserve that authority or that influence in their life—they were born with me already here, right? And they started looking up to me.

So this idea of firstborn is related to status. Now, especially in the ancient world—and some places still today—the firstborn son is a really legitimate way of authority. My friend from Nigeria, John David, who has preached here before, he’s the firstborn of his family. And his father died early on. Now John has to give approval to every marriage. He has to give approval to every financial decision for his family in Nigeria. He’s the firstborn. He’s got the status. He has the authority.

So this means authority, not sequence. This is speaking to the authority—the supremacy—of Jesus over all creation. Over all creation. He stands over creation. He’s the rightful heir. He’s the ruler. He’s the king. He’s the Lord of all creation.

And then we get more context here: For in him—in Jesus—all things were created. He is the creator. All things. And he’s going to go on, right? You can look in your Bibles. All things—things in heaven, things on earth, visible things and invisible things, powers we see, powers we don’t see—Jesus has created all of it.

Everything comes from Jesus. Everything exists through Jesus. And everything is moving toward Jesus.

So right here, Paul says something crazy. This would be really crazy for a Jewish audience—a monotheistic religion, right? And Christianity is a monotheistic religion. We believe in one God, three persons. One God. And so what’s happening here is very significant. He’s saying that Jesus is God. They’re the same person.

Jesus is God. He’s the creator of the world. He spoke the world into existence. Not only did he speak the world into existence, but he is the purpose for which the world was created. He’s on both ends of the spectrum. He is the origin, and he is the destination. He’s the reason why all of us exist.

Why do you exist? To find your home in Jesus. To live for Jesus. To walk and move and have your being in Jesus. So you’re made by Jesus. You’re made for Jesus. You’re made through Jesus.

This is stunning.

And then he says something even more amazing: In him all things hold together.

Would you take a deep breath—as deep as you can? Breathe.

The fact that your lungs move, your heart beats, your brains fire whatever they fire—I’m not a scientist—and I can move and do this, right? That is held together. That is sustained. That is made possible by Jesus—the presence, the life, the reality of who Jesus is. In him all things hold together.

He’s the center. He’s the gravity. He’s the cohesion of all that we see and experience. Your life, your breath, this world, this moment right here—it’s held. It’s held.

And this is the good news. Not that chaos. Not by violence. Not by force. But by a faithful Lord—the ruler and your creator.

So, in him all things hold together. All these descriptions are just broad—God. Jesus is supreme—the cosmic creator, sustainer, and end of the world.

And then Paul is going to get a little bit more granular. He’s going to bring it a little bit more home. He’s going to start talking about the particulars of you and me—of the church.

He says Jesus is not only supreme over all of creation, he’s supreme over new creation—the church—the new thing that God is doing, the renewal.

Paul shifts from creation to new creation. Raise your hand—you’re new creation. You’re a new creation in Christ. Claire just got baptized—a symbol of being dead and being raised to new life. New creation.

Jesus says—Paul says—Jesus is the head of the body, the church. How far do you get without your head? You doing all right without your head?

No, you need your head.

So again, this is the imagery of the body of Christ, of the human family, the new humanity that God has made. And he’s the head. He’s the source. He’s the life. He’s the—without which you don’t move, you don’t go, you don’t live. He is everything.

So the church here—as you look at each other—and the church extends from this place to the buildings around where other believers are gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the United States, all across the world—there are people that are our family, that are the new humanity, the church.

This church is not a club. It’s not an organization. It’s not a spiritual add-on that you go to. It’s not—yeah, it’s not a club.

It’s an embodied continuation of Jesus’ reconciling work in the world. You have been made new by Jesus. Isn’t that awesome? You’ve been made new. And now you are—you spread the newness. You spread the healing. You’ve been healed, and now God says, “Hey, you’re a part of the healing.” You’ve been healed that you might heal. We’re wounded healers.

As we follow the way of Jesus, as we walk in the way of love, love begins to grow. Love begins to extend. The peace, justice, and flourishing of the good news of the gospel—the change that it brings about in every human person, in every human society, and all of creation—is spread through us, the body of Christ, of which he is the head.

Then Paul says, He’s the firstborn from among the dead. Again, that word firstborn—it’s status and authority.

Jesus is the first person—human person—because Jesus is fully God, fully human, right? He goes into death, through death, out the other side. He’s the firstborn from among the dead.

Now, that’s really good news. Because in other places, it says he’s the firstfruits of the resurrection. Where Jesus goes, we go.

We just declared—thank you for the illustration, Claire—when we become a Christian, we become united with Jesus. Again, we’ve done this here, I think, before: This is God, this is you. Let’s put it together. Clasp your hands. You can do it. Where Jesus goes, you go.

Claire went into death because Jesus went into death. She followed Jesus into death, was buried, raised. Jesus—death couldn’t keep Jesus down. We will follow Jesus into eternal life. Resurrection from the dead. Ascension, right? Where we’re at—Jesus—where Jesus goes, we go.

He’s the firstborn. He’s gone ahead of us. He meets us on the other side.

I love this idea that Jesus is our creator. He speaks us into existence. He sustains us. And then—hey—he’s on the other side of death, meeting us there. He never leaves us. He never forsakes us. Nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Right? Nothing.

We begin with him. We continue with him. And we are met on the other side of death by him.

So the resurrection is not just a miracle. It is the launch of God’s new world.

Jesus rose from the dead, and that means the new heavens, the new earth, the new creation, the new world is possible. That means what’s happening in Iran right now is not the end of the story. That every tear cried—it says in Revelation 1—will be wiped away. Every pain will be healed. Every wound will be healed. Every injustice will be made right. Every wrong made right. The reverse of the curse of sin and death—made possible because of the resurrection. New creation. The future.

We just sang: All shall be well. It has broken into the present. We are people from the future. A healed people from the future. Healing that God is bringing. And we’re at work in the world, empowered by His Spirit.

So then, this is a lot of stuff to get through in one sermon. Okay, you can take each one of these phrases and just spend a few months—or hours—or however long just reflecting on it, studying it.

But here—verse 19: For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him. Not partially. Not temporarily. Fully.

If you’ve seen Jesus, you see God. If you want to know what God is like, you look at what Jesus was like.

And because of this—because Jesus is all of these things: the Creator, the Sustainer, the firstborn from the dead, firstborn of all creation—this is what he can do. And this is our hope. This is the good news.

He can reconcile to himself all things, making peace through his blood on the cross.

Now it’s interesting—after all this exalted language, the cosmic supremacy of Jesus, the power and might as creator, defeats death, holds us together—that the same person would be described as one crucified. That the means by which he heals, the means by which he gets his way, is through submission to death, through suffering and service.

This God did not count equality with God a thing to be held on to, but he let go. And he took on the form of a human being—a servant—even to the point of death. Death even on a cross. Shameful.

This is how Jesus heals the world. The cross.

The cross is not God losing control. He wasn’t caught off guard. It’s God taking responsibility.

The violence of the world absorbed by the love of God. And there’s no amount of violence, there’s no amount of betrayal, there’s no amount of dysfunction that can’t be absorbed by the love of God on that cross—and put back, resurrected into healing, into new life, into wholeness.

So reconciliation of all things does not ignore brokenness. It goes through brokenness. That’s what Jesus did, right? He goes through it. This God is supreme. God enters our story—our humanity, our suffering, our pain. It’s a God who bleeds. He suffers. And this is our healing. He goes through it.

I was listening to a podcast called The Trinity Forum, and there was this lecture being given by this guy named Michael Gerson. He was a speechwriter for a couple of presidents—one was the first, I think the second Bush, predominantly. And he has done a lot of work around the world for advocacy and suffering.

And he was sharing the story of this nun—her name is Sister Placid. And she was working in Uganda with survivors of the LRA Army—the Lord’s Resistance Army. These did horrible things that I won’t mention here because it’s too traumatic. It’s just horrible. I mean, taking kids, forcing them to be soldiers after they’ve taken their parents, doing horrific things. Tons of trauma.

Also, an AIDS epidemic going through. So, tons of children orphaned. Tons of children traumatized.

And one thing Sister Placid would do was help build a little memory box for each child—of their parents and of their life—to hold for them, to remember their parents.

And what Michael said at first—he said, on the surface, it can seem like all of this, like life is—this is what he said:

People walk on the earth, then become the earth, and all that is left of a life can be collected in a shoebox.

That’s what it can feel like.

But then he said—Sister Placid has faith. And the faith of the institution she served contended that this is not true: that no life is too minor to matter, that desperate prayers are heard and heeded, that even quiet, unnoticed death disturbs the cosmos. That memory boxes filled by children hold relics of eternity. And that maybe we are not tortured by our hopes, but we are led by them—through all the unfair suffering of this life, and then beyond it.

When I heard that, I thought: That’s Colossians. That’s Jesus.

That this cosmic Jesus—supreme over all creation—has not left us alone. He has entered our story. Even suffered with us. And this makes our hopes not torture, as in unattainable reality, but we can be led by them into a new world that God makes possible.

This is what it means when we say—and what we believe—is that Jesus reconciles all things in heaven and on earth and under the earth. He is reconciling, restoring, healing, renewing all things: our relationship with God, our relationship with one another, our relationships with creation. This is what God is at work doing. This is our hope.

He’s not just dealing with our souls. He’s not just calling us to get better doctrine. He’s leading us to remember forgotten lives, unmarked graves, shoebox memories. That’s what he’s doing.

And so, he concludes here by reminding us of who we are—reminding the Colossians who they are—and us, who we are:

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds.

Once you went along with the destructive patterns and habits of the world. Once you allowed your trauma to define your existence, and you lived out of your woundedness and wounded others. You contributed to the pain and suffering of the world. You were separate. In your mind, you believed God wasn’t there for you. And you were an enemy to God, and you were an enemy to other people.

But—but now—he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body.

Again, there goes the physical body. Through death—there’s the suffering—he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death.

Why? To present you holy in his sight, without blemish, and free from accusation.

This isn’t just forgiveness from your guilt—though it is that, and we need it. But it’s a healing of your whole person. It’s forgiveness for the wrongs you’ve done. It’s also healing for the wrongs done to you. It’s being made holy and whole. Whole—being made whole again.

We’ve been ripped apart in so many different ways, through so many different disappointments and failures and sins we’ve committed, sins committed against each other—we’ve just been ripped.

Holiness is to be made whole again. Brought into wholeness with our Creator, and with one another, and with creation.

See, grace—when we talk about the grace of God—sometimes it’s very transactional. It’s like, “I forgive you for doing what you do. I give you what you don’t deserve.” And it’s like, “Take it, loser. Take this gift you don’t deserve.”

No. Grace is actually very relational. Grace doesn’t exist apart from relationship.

When I extend grace to you, I’m saying, Despite what you did to me, I will be in relationship with you. And that’s what God is saying. That’s the gift of grace. It’s the gift of relationship. It’s saying, I’m going to be with you. I’m going to be with you. I’m going to be for you until something better.

And so, grace is this idea that he will present us holy in his sight, without blemish, free from accusation. You can be with me no matter what, God is saying. You are welcome at my table because of what Jesus has done.

And so here’s an invitation. It ends with an invitation to remain steadfast. He says, If—this kind of jars us a little bit, especially if we come from certain faith traditions—it jars us a little bit because he says all these magnificent things: “Here’s your salvation.” And then he says, If you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.

Now, I just—again—what’s the gospel? The gospel is everything we’ve just talked about. The gospel is the supremacy of Jesus over the cosmos. It’s the primacy over the church—the fact that he is reconciling wounded humanity, making them whole, reconnecting them to God, to one another, to creation. It is Jesus as Lord, making all things new.

And this is the hope and healing that our hearts long for and ache for. And this is the gospel: that every part of your life and every part of the world is not untouched by the loving, liberating rule of Jesus.

And that includes your home. It includes your marriage. It includes your children. It includes your workplace. It includes your schooling. It includes your highs and your lows, your successes and your failures. It includes everything.

Everything is touched by the loving, liberating rule of Jesus.

And so when Paul says, If you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel, this is not a threat. It’s an invitation. It’s to say, Keep your eyes focused on the real thing—the Lord of life that brings life and healing and hope.

Paul’s saying, Don’t downgrade Jesus. Don’t shrink his supremacy. Don’t drift back to lesser stories—the story of anything else, the story that advertisers give you, the story that your country or nation gives you, the story that your success gives you, the story that love gives you—a romantic kind of false love, right?

Keep your eyes on Jesus. And when we keep Jesus supreme and we keep him Lord of all, we realize and we remember that:

• Your suffering is not final.
• Your failures do not define you.
• Your obedience to Jesus is not wasted.
• Your commitment to follow in the way of love will not go without reward.

So we stay steadfast in Jesus. We stay steadfast in Jesus.

We don’t just admire Jesus, but we remain in him. Our allegiance is in him. We live life as if Jesus really is Lord of creation, Lord of resurrection, Lord of your life.

We resist the subtle pull to add to him, to supplement him, to move beyond him.

And we do this because—if Sister Placid is right, if the gospel is right—that no life disappears unnoticed, no suffering is wasted, no death is final, because no part of the human existence remains untouched by the loving, liberating rule of Jesus.