Colossians 1:15-20 – July 9, 2023
Col. 1:10 you will grow as you learn to know God better and better
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Jesus: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” C.S. Lewis
Col. 1:15-17 Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation, for through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see—such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him. He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together.
Every single thing was created through Jesus and for Jesus
Be praised for all Your tenderness by these works of Your hands
Sun that rises and rains that fall to bless and bring to life Your land
Look down upon this winter wheat and be glad that You have made
Blue for the sky and the color green that fills these fields with praise
Everything is made for his pleasure and his praise
I was created for Jesus
Jesus holds all creation together
Heb. 1:3 The Son is the gleaming brightness of God’s glory. He is the exact likeness of God’s being. He uses his powerful word to hold all things together.
“There is some strange force that holds everything together. We do not know what to call it, and we do not know how to identify it. It is a kind of cosmic glue that holds things together.”
Jesus is worthy of all praise because of his majesty and power
So, Jesus is the beginning of creation, and the end of creation, and the power who holds creation together, the creator, sustainer and final goal of the world – Barclay
Fear of the Lord
Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name
Raise up in me a holy respect of your majesty, of your power