The Heart Behind our Fall Colossians Preaching Series
My wife Savannah and I will celebrate 11 years of marriage on October 4th.
In those 11 years, we’ve moved twice, lived in 2 different states, planted a church, had 3 children, and worked at least 4 different jobs collectively. The warp and woof of daily life has brought with it tons of seasonal stressors and all sorts of urgent projects, people, and needs that vie for our minds’ attention and our hearts’ affection.
With everything that comes at us, it’s been essential to find times and places to reconnect with each other, remember who we are and why we fell in love with each other in the first place. And then from that remembered reconnection to turn our eyes outward to consider how best we can live and steward our days in the season to come.
Our faith in Jesus is like a marriage.
When we first come to Christ, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with feelings of love for our Savior who (as Paul writes in Colossians) has just “rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the Kingdom of the Son He loves.”
Given our first experience of God’s love for us in Jesus, and our fresh experience of Jesus’s rescue in our lives, it’s easy for us to passionately affirm that ALL of our hope is in Jesus and that all of our lives are built exclusively on the foundation of Christ and Christ alone.
But then tragedy strikes.
A loved one unexpectedly dies. A marriage ends. A friend betrays us. We lose our job. We contract a chronic illness. A child is stillborn. The world is wracked in war. Horrific acts of violence fill up the news headlines.
We feel we live in a world where people are figuratively and literally at each others’ throats. We try to pray and it’s hard to tell if God is listening. We start to wonder how secure that foundation of Christ really is. Maybe we need Jesus PLUS something else… or maybe something else entirely. Our hearts drift. We begin to shift our ultimate trust to something material, secular, or human.
And when this drift of love and shift of hope happens, we in our lives of faith need intentional spaces to reconnect with Jesus and remember why it was we started following Him in the first place.
Over the next 8 Sundays, we will study the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Colossians is a powerfully encouraging letter. It has a lot to say about our identity as Christ followers and what it looks like to live a life built exclusively on Jesus.
But Colossians’ main focus is Jesus Himself! The letter is ALL about Christ and showing Christ’s centrality to and sufficiency in all things.
It is also a letter that celebrates the Gospel. Not as ideas or information or a tract, but as NEWS. Good news about the glory of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Paul wrote this letter to the Colossian Christians to encourage them and remind them of the most important stuff in the life of faith.
And to us, Colossians is an opportunity to reconnect with Jesus, to remember the Gospel, and to rejoice again in all the reasons we started loving and following Jesus in the first place.
Whether you’ve been a Christian for decades or whether you’re exploring what Christianity is for the first time, I invite you to join us for this 8-week journey as we rediscover Jesus and rebuild our lives together on Christ and Christ alone.
Fr. William
