Colossians 1:15-20 –
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 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. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 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. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and 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 beliefs that we deserve to live beyond our means. We believe we deserve to eat out at certain places or a certain number of times. We believe we deserve certain types of vacations or toys or square feet in our houses or on our properties. We create innumerable hard things for ourselves by believing we are owed things we aren’t.
To continue on with marriage and parenting, marriages are hard often because husbands look at trash on the internet and are frustrated by their unmet expectation that their wives would imitate what they see. Wives are often frustrated because their husbands don’t lead them as they’ve told them to. And both spouses are often frustrated because the other doesn’t provide the level of happiness they think they deserve. Parenting is often hard because we expect our kids to be (as Tripp says) self-parenting and to serve our idol of quiet along with us, but they aren’t and don’t and so these false expectations weigh heavily on us. - Finally (the flip of the previous point), hard things are hard because they force upon us things we don’t believe we deserve.
Work is often hard because we are made to come into the office on the weekend (or, increasingly, at all). It’s hard because we’re made to work on a project with people of lesser competence or character and we don’t believe we deserve that. It’s hard because we are made to take a pay cut when the economy stalls and that goes against our expectations.
Our in-laws put on us cultural expectations that are different from what we grew up with and our siblings put on us the need to listen to certain kinds of annoying music and both make life hard for us because they force upon us something we don’t think we deserve.
I remember how frustrated my roommate was with me in college because I put on him the expectation that the TV would go off in our bedroom before 2am. He didn’t deserve that kind of shackle in his estimation and so it was hard for him.
Marriages are often hard because we don’t think we deserve to have our sins confronted or our individual aspirations hindered. And parenting is often hard because we don’t believe we deserve to be talked to in certain ways or woken up at certain times.
What Are Our Options for Dealing with Hard Things?
So if those are the avenues sin takes to make things hard, what are our options for dealing with them? There really are, I believe, only two options. When hard things happen to us, we will either seek to change our circumstances or the story we believe about them.
- Change our circumstances.
The vast, vast majority of the ways we try to deal with hard things fall under this category. If we don’t like being lonely, we try to find a friend group or a spouse. If life is hard because of the absence of a good father, we look to a coach or youth pastor or someone else to fill the void. If hardship comes through sickness or injury, we go to the doctor hoping to be made better. If someone we love is given to drunkenness, we try to get them into a treatment program. If our parents won’t buy us the clothes we want, we might look for a job. If we can’t afford the vacation we want, we might just wait another year.
Again, I invite you to make your way back down your mental list of your trials. I imagine that whatever they are, you’ve done every moral (and maybe more) thing you can think of to try to change it.
That’s not all bad, of course. Indeed, it’s often right. Within God’s design, we should usually pray for and seek relief from hardship for ourselves and others. It would have been right for the Colossians to pray that their persecutors and the false teachers among them would trust in Jesus and stop their harassment. It would have been right for them to share the gospel and reason with them. It would have been right to see if there was any legal protection available to them.
And yet, as you know, not every attempt to change our circumstances is right. And on top of that, we are often powerless to change them anyway. For instance, putting a vacation we don’t have the money for on the credit card might provide a temporary reprieve from the hardship caused by not being able to go, but it is not a God-honoring way to change our circumstances and will only make things harder in the long run. Committing adultery is not a God-honoring way to deal with a breakdown in marital intimacy or a lack of love and respect and will make things far worse eventually.
And again, it is often the case that after exhausting every God-honoring potential remedy to change our circumstances, our circumstances don’t change, which means the hardship continues (we still have cancer even though we did everything the Dr. said, our spouse is still unfaithful even though we applied the gospel to our own lives as much as we knew how, we can’t find a better job even though we looked and looked, etc.).
Grace, it is critical for us to grasp the simple fact that if changing our circumstances is the only option for us to find relief from hardship, we’re in big trouble. The entire NT basically assumes that Jesus’ followers will suffer hardship and not be able to do much of anything about it. It seems from Paul’s letter to the Colossians that he assumed as much for them. There’s next to nothing in the letter concerning how they might get out from the persecution and heresy.
But God’s Word tells us that there’s another, more important and more effective way to deal with the hard things in our lives. One of the essential aspects of Christian maturity isn’t learning how to change our circumstances, but how to change our story. - Change our story.
I’ve mentioned this a number of times before, but it really is one of the most important realizations any of us can make. It’s worth repeating, repeatedly. We all live out of a story. By God’s design, we can’t not.
All four of the reasons I shared earlier, concerning why hard things are hard, are rooted in a story. Of this, one of the Tripp brothers said something to the effect of “We’re never upset by our circumstances. We’re upset by our interpretation of them.”
In other words, we all believe things about who we are, what our place in the world is, what is right/wrong, what we deserve, what success/failure mean, whether or not there is a god, whether or not there is any kind of ultimate justice/punishment/reward, etc. What we believe about those things determines our response to everything we encounter.
For instance, consider the story of a person who believes it’s someone else’s responsibility to provide them with their basic needs—food, clothing, and shelter. When that’s the story they’re living out of and they are forced to go without those things, they interpret their hunger and homelessness as someone else’s fault. They believe they are right to be filled with a sense of indignation, blaming, and victimhood. They might rant online or march angerly into their local government center, demanding “what they’re owed.”
On the other hand, consider someone else who also lacks the basics, but instead believes it’s no one’s responsibility but their own to provide for themselves.
One of the most powerful versions of this I’ve come across was from a scene in the Russell Crowe movie, Cinderella Man. The very short version is this: Russell Crowe plays the boxer, James Braddock. He breaks his hand during a match just as the Great Depression starts. He’s forced to give up boxing and attempt to find a manual labor job. That proves exceedingly difficult though with fierce competition for every job and the inability to use one of his hands. Nevertheless, he keeps at it with rugged determination. He finds a job and works at it at great physical cost to himself (even going without food so his wife and kids can eat). Despite his best efforts, though, he eventually comes to the point that he just can’t provide what his family needs.
The most moving scene in the whole movie comes when he has to humble himself to the point of taking government welfare. It’s crushing to him. He feels like a failure. Eventually, he gets back to boxing, wins the title and a bunch of money, and goes back to the welfare office to pay back the money he’d taken.
In both cases, the circumstances are the same—a person is impoverished to the point of lacking even the most basic human needs. The difference—and it’s a profound one—is the story each person believes about their circumstances. In the case of the first, the person believes themselves to be the victim of someone else’s failure. In the case of the second, the person believes themselves to be a failure for having to depend on anyone but themselves. Both situations are hard, of course, but the first person feels the hardship in a much more profound and overwhelming way, not because of their circumstances, but because of their story.
Grace, whether we know it or not, that’s the case for every single thing we encounter in life. It’s not about our circumstances nearly as much as it is about the story we believe about them. It’s not about our circumstances nearly as much as it is about the story we believe about them. It’s not about our circumstances nearly as much as it is about the story we believe about them.
That’s Paul’s main point in Colossians. Again, he says almost nothing about how the Colossians might change their circumstances—about how they might escape persecution or crush the heretics and false teachers. Instead, he focuses on telling them a better story to live out of; a story that is gooder, beautifuler, and truer than the one they currently believed. And then, as we’ll see later in the letter, he told them more about what it means to live in light of that story regardless of whether or not their circumstances change.
And the heart of his story is the great reality that gaining fellowship with God through Jesus, is a treasure of infinitely greater value than any price they might pay for trusting in Him. It is a story that no circumstance, no matter how difficult, can compare with the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus. It is a story that includes promise after promise after promise that God is working good in every trial for those hoping in Jesus and that one day, for all who are faithful, our story will be one of only perfect circumstances, eternally. It is a story that doesn’t erase hardship, but it does overwhelm it. And it is a story we can trust because it centers on the work and person of Jesus.
And that leads to the final question of how Jesus relates to our hardships. Or, more specifically, who is Jesus and what has He done to shape in relation to our circumstances and story? And that gets us back to our passage.
How Does Jesus Relate to Our Hard Things?
There’s a lot more to be said on this, and Paul will say more as we move along, but for now, we are simply going to consider what Jesus did and who He is in relation to the trouble the Colossians were in and the trouble we’re in (loneliness, marriage problems, kid problems, trouble having kids, family conflict, health struggles, a difficult work environment, money problems, lasting hurt, anxiety or depression, secret or nagging sins, uncertainty about the future). No one else did what He did and no one else is who He is.
What Jesus Did
We considered what He did last week. His life, death, and resurrection were the means by which we were qualified to share in the inheritance of the saints in light, delivered from the domain of darkness, transferred into His kingdom, redeemed, and forgiven (12-14). Paul concludes the next section, the section on who He is, our section for today, with a reminder of what He did: Made peace by the blood of His cross.
Because of what Jesus did, He is enough. Because of what He did, He is preeminent, He is supreme. Because of what He did, “Jesus and” anything is absurd. Because of what He did, we can trust Him through every trial. Because of what He did, the Colossians had everything they needed to endure the persecution and false teaching they were being bombarded with.
Who Jesus Is
But it was not only because of what Jesus did. He did what He did because He is who He is. That’s the emphasis of this most remarkable passage. In it, we find fourteen unparallel descriptions of who Jesus is—fourteen aspects of the preeminence and supremacy of Jesus. These things get right to the heart of why Jesus is enough and Jesus and anything is nuts.
We’re going to spend some time each week for the next several weeks unpacking the individual descriptions of Jesus’ nature. But the main point I want you to see right now is that it is because of who Jesus is that the Colossians could be filled with hope and peace and rest and joy even if their circumstances only got worse and worse and worse. Likewise, I want us all to see that it is because of who Jesus is that He is enough for every real-life problem that we mentally marked down earlier, serious as they may be.
It is because of the things we read in this passage (and passages like it) that Paul is right to say that Jesus is all and in all and it is right for us to see that Jesus and anything is of the devil.
- He is the image of the invisible God (15).
- He is the firstborn of all creation (15).
- He is the creator of all created things—physical and spiritual, in heaven and earth, substance and orientation, authority and relationships (16).
- He is the one through whom all created things were created (16).
- He is the one for whom all created things were created (16).
- He is before all things (17).
- He is the one who holds all things together (17).
- He is the head of the Church (18).
- He is the beginning (18).
- He is the firstborn from the dead (18).
- He is the one in whom all the fullness of God is pleased to dwell (19).
- He is the one through whom everything that has been and will be reconciled to God is reconciled to God—physical and spiritual (20).
- He is the one by whose blood there is peace (20).
- And, in all of this we see that He is preeminent in everything (18).
Why does Paul include this paragraph at this point in the letter? He does so primarily because he knows that if the Colossians have anything else at the center of their story, they’re lost. He does so because he knows that while their circumstances are largely out of their control, the story they believe is not. He knows that their story will have far more to do with their ability to navigate the persecution and heresy than anything else.
Grace, the same is true for you and I today as much as it was for the Colossians then. Our circumstances are different. Our hardships are different. But the most important aspects of our lives are not—the inability to affect our circumstances and a story that overwhelms them is available to us.
Why are the hard things in your life hard? Above all, it’s because something other than the preeminence of Jesus is at the center of your story. How do you navigate the hard things in your life in such a way that allows you to count them as “all joy” as James says (1:2)? You do so by making sure that who Jesus is and what He did is primary interpretive lens through which you see your hardships. Hard things will still be hard, but of an entirely different way. Instead of being overwhelming and crushing, they will seem to be light momentary afflictions, preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Corinthians 4:17) because of the eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison that is Jesus Christ.
Conclusion
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—who He is and what He’s done. The main takeaway is to make sure Jesus is central to your story and everything else is seen in light of that.
One aspect of that is doing what we’re about to do in taking part in the Lord’s Supper.