Colossians 1:1-8 Thanks

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan.

Good morning, welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Felsick, I'm the lead pastor here. And if you guys out there can find your seats,.

That'd be great.

But thanks for gathering together to hopefully hear from God this morning and to worship him. I hope that's your intention for this next year is as we kind of launch into 2016. I'm grateful that you're here with us and we can get this year started off on the right foot by worshiping God and just contemplating and considering what he has for us in this next year and thinking that through.

And also, just I hope you had some time in the last week to express some gratitude and thanks for what God has done for you in 2015. Some of you maybe are looking back at this last year and kind of thinking, thank you and I'm glad that year is over.

And then some of you are looking back at 2016 and wishing that you could, in 2015 rather, and wishing you could do it over again. But whatever kind of year you had, that one is past and the new one is coming in obviously.

And so, just rejoicing in what God has for us and looking forward to walking closer with him this next year, I hope is your goal. Recast Church started over seven years ago with the goal of reaching out to the community of Matawan with the ultimate purpose of finding more worshipers for his name.

And that's been our goal, our stated purpose. And from those first 30 people that met in a basement in 2009 to where we stand now, we have seen the faithfulness of God on us over the years. It's been a cool process.

We are reaching out to others with the good news of Jesus and that's something that we're all called to do, something that God desires of us. And yet at the end of the day, we recognize that reaching out with the love of Christ is ultimately the work of God, that in the end, that's his work through us that produces the results.

And so, we give the honor and glory to him and thank him for what he has done for us. And as we look at the start of this letter of Paul to the Colossians, that's what we're gonna be going over here at the start of 2016, the theme for this message this morning is thankfulness.

It's gratitude.

God has been pressing on my heart specifically a desire to be more thankful. And if you're anything like me, and I think some of you probably are, you could be more moved quickly to discouragement than thankfulness.

If you're like me, then you can find yourself focusing on negative things rather than positive things. If you're anything like me, you can find yourself actually gravitating towards grumbling and complaining rather than giving thanks.

And I think that almost kind of feels to me sometimes like that's the American way. We have a lot given to us. We have a lot of blessings that we take for granted. And I hear a lot of grumbling and complaining and I hear it from myself as well as others.

And so, it's one thing that God has really pressed on my heart. So in 2016, I'm personally gonna be working with the power of the spirit to try to turn that around in my life and try to express more thanks and more gratitude.

I'm starting early in the morning and kind of thinking through things that I'm thankful for in my time with God and his word and in my time in prayer with him. And I want this next year to be a year of gratitude and a year of thanks.

And I hope that that flows over for all of us, that all of us could look at that as maybe a goal for this year as a church. By God's grace, he has a starting out this year. I had picked Colossians, not because it starts with thanks, but because it's a good book in the New Testament for us to go over.

I haven't preached through it yet. And so, I would love to just tell you that I orchestrate these things with depth, but I kind of have this attitude that, man, I could just throw a dart at any book in the Bible and pick it and we would grow from it, right?

Because it's God's word, it's knowing who he is. And so, I don't feel like I've got a huge master plan for where I'm taking you other than to say, we're gonna mine deep into God's word. And so, Colossians is where we started.

And then we get a chance to look at this text. I'm kind of setting thankfulness as the goal. And then I actually come to realize this past week as I'm studying, preparing for this message, that that's exactly where he's starting us at here in Colossians, is Paul expressing thankfulness for the greatest thing that you and I have ever had offered to us.

And many of us have received it. And it is the thing for which we should give the most thanks. So, let's open our Bibles to Colossians 1, 1 through 8, as we're gonna dig into this start of a new year, start of a new book.

And let's start a journey of thankfulness together. So, Colossians chapter one. If you don't have a Bible, please raise your hand. And Mike's got one back here for you. If you don't have a means to navigate to a Bible on your lap, it might be, I know some of you have a device or whatever.

But, and then you can just take a Bible home with you. There's some sitting on the table back here after we're done or during connection time if you don't wanna raise your hand. But having a Bible on your lap is beneficial as we follow along and you hear the message.

So, Colossians 1, 1 through 8, recast God's first word to us together as a body in 2016. Let's follow along. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God and Timothy our brother, to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae, grace to you and peace from God our Father.

We always thank God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel, which has come to you as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

Just as you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant, he is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the spirit. Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning.

Thank you, Father. You have given us so many good things. We are blessed beyond our worth. We are blessed beyond what we deserve. And Father, I know that many are going through hard times and there are difficulties and there are struggles and some have had a good week, some have had a bad week and all different kinds of things swirling around us and some are just really hopeful for 2016 that it's better than last year and some are wishing for a year just like last year.

We come at this whole thing from different perspectives and yet you brought us together in a body and we have fellow believers around us to encourage us and strengthen us and guide us in the right direction.

We have a scripture available to us that is a revelation from you. We have salvation available to us through your son, Jesus Christ. We have the opportunity to sing songs to you corporately together and to have fellowship with one another and to have friendship and to do life together.

Father, we thank you for all of these things. I thank you for the servants and the ministers who have helped make this Sunday morning even work for those who set up chairs and those who have made coffee and those who have went and picked up donuts for us and those who are working with the kids this morning.

And Father, just so many aspects that go into this that we are thankful for. So Father, please move in our hearts to start off this year from the right perspective with thankfulness and gratefulness and no matter what difficulty I find in going through in my life, there's still always something to be grateful for and so Father, I pray that you would help us to focus on those things.

Not just to be an optimist in ignorance but to be an optimist because we are informed by the hope that we have through your son, Jesus Christ and it's in his name that we pray, amen. Amen. You can go ahead and be seated and I just wanna say thanks to the worship team for leading us this morning and especially I just also wanted to just add to Dave's thanks to Lee for the years that she has served the church.

And not all of you necessarily know this but I mean, they're gonna be going as missionaries so they're not just taken off but that's part of that whole process of saying goodbye and all of that and so that's a tough thing and at the same time, a joy to see what God is doing in their family.

Encourage you to get comfortable. Remember, if you need to get up at any time and stretch out in the back if the seat that you're sitting in gets uncomfortable or you need more coffee, juice or donuts, get up at any time during the message and take advantage of that.

The restrooms are out in the hallway, take a right and men's are upstairs, women's downstairs so if you need those at all, that's where they're at. And then keep your Bibles open to Colossians 1, one through eight, that's the text that we're gonna be digging into and running through here this morning.

And in our text this morning, the Apostle Paul is gonna demonstrate for us thankfulness for the things that matter the most. And as I walk through one super long tangled run-on sentence from Paul, it's interesting to note and those of you who don't know Greek, you're just gonna have to trust me on this that Paul loves compound sentences, he loves complex sentences, he puts things, it's almost like I picture as I've gotten to know Paul through studying him and I feel like I kind of get to know him, I feel like he's a guy who's got a little bit of ADD, like he distracts himself in the middle of a sentence and then begins to like talk about something else and then like sometimes, any of you in here know what I'm talking about, like you go down rabbit trails from time to time or you know somebody who goes down rabbit trails from time to time, that's like Paul, only he does it in one big, you know, like excited and he's just talking and he's talking fast.

And he's just going through it.

And it's like all one big sentence and that's our text this morning, one sentence in Greek grammar, I mean that's, I mean like that sounds like a hard one to kind of analyze, sounds kind of hard to like, remember in school when you had to underline the subject and the verb, it was work for me this week to find the main subject and the main verb to what we're going through here, so it's one long run-on sentence but I hope that all of us, by the end of studying this sentence from Paul that is very deep and rich and theologically significant, that we draw some degree closer to gratitude and thankfulness in our hearts because we've encountered this.

I hope that we're moved one step closer to trust in the gospel as our hope and I hope that we're moved closer to a passion for spreading that good news that is the gospel to others around us here at the start of our year.

So the structure of our text is thankfulness, it is gratitude but the content of that thanks is the power of the gospel to change our world. The power of the gospel to change the world is a thing that is moving Paul to thankfulness here in our text.

Colossians 1, one through eight is an extremely optimistic text that shows that Paul is encouraged by what he hears about those in the city of Colossae. That's why the letter is called Colossians. It's a letter from Paul to those who live in that city.

But before we jump in to the introduction of the actual text itself and look at that introduction, it's important for us to understand, I think, some of the historical context of what's going on behind the scenes as we enter into this letter.

This is a letter, we're reading somebody else's mail. Do you realize that when you read these New Testament letters, you're reading somebody's mail and a letter that was sent from one person to another but that teaches us significantly, that's revealed by the Holy Spirit to Paul and is nourishment for our souls, has the power to transform us from hearing because it reveals God himself to us.

And it's important for us to understand that historical context of what's going on there so that we can kind of get a feel for why is he writing? Who's he writing to? What's their relationship like? And some of that stuff ends up helping us to interpret it and understand it better.

And so as of the writing of this letter, it's important, I think, for us to understand that Paul has never been to Colossae. I didn't, you know, as I was studying and as I was studying this history, I kind of was like, how many of you might just assume that Paul started the church in Colossae?

Like, you've been around the church long enough to know that he was a missionary, he traveled, he started churches. Did he start this church? Was he the planter of the church in Colossae? He's never even been there.

He has not gone there. And so he's writing to a people that he's never met this letter and he started a church in a city called Ephesus, which is a few hundred miles away. It's a distance away from the city of Colossae.

But he started this church in Ephesus and one of the people who came to faith in Christ in Ephesus ended up moving. He was a dude named Epaphras and Epaphras came to faith in Christ under Paul and Epaphras then got a job transfer or whatever.

I don't know why he moved. He moved from Ephesus to Colossae and brought with him the good news of Jesus Christ. And through Epaphras, leading others to faith in Christ in another city that Paul's never been at, the work was multiplied and a church was started there that Paul hasn't visited as of the writing of this letter.

And so now Epaphras has communicated with Paul what's going on and now this letter back from Paul to the church in Colossae is the result of that interaction between Epaphras and his mentor, leader, his spiritual father, if you will, Paul.

So in verses one and two, we find Paul's regular introduction. And these can be easy to overlook. If you're reading through the Bible in a year or you read through this letter, you can find, okay, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, Timothy, okay, move on.

You can almost skip that in your mind and just move on. But Paul is a guy who never wastes words. He deeply puts theological principles and concepts even in his introduction and the way that he talks.

He doesn't waste words. And here he genuinely is introducing himself to a gathering of Christians he's never met. And so he is gonna use his words with significance. Paul was an apostle, he says, and opens up by introducing himself.

I'm an apostle by the will of God. He has been set apart by God himself for the purpose of bringing the message of the gospel to the Gentiles. Some of you maybe remember his Acts 9 experience where he had encountered on the road to Damascus, Christ himself, and he had been commissioned by the risen Christ himself to go and proclaim the good news to the Gentiles, the non-Jewish people of the world.

And so he has taken that mantle on, but not taken it himself. He's been given that by God himself. And so he says, by the will of God, I am now an apostle. And I'd like you to take a moment and consider what are you going into this next year?

What are you by the will of God? Talking to you. What are you by the will of God? What position, what role, what God-ordained circumstances define your life right now at the entrance to this new year?

Are you an engineer by the will of God? Are you a teacher by the will of God? Are you a father by the will of God? But an American by the will of God? All different kinds of roles and all different kinds of functions and all different kinds of things that might define your life to some degree or other.

Certainly, none of those titles will probably be the sum total of your role. But what are you by the will of God? I'm convinced that part of Paul's motivation and understanding was recognition that his calling was a calling from God.

And I believe that God gives us roles. And understanding those roles is a powerful starting point for our gratitude, for our thankfulness to him. It's a powerful spot of start in saying, God, you have placed me here.

And so I can thank you for the roles that you've given me and the position that you've put me in and the opportunities that I have day in and day out. Not always easy, right? Not always a delight and a joy at every moment, but a thankfulness to God for the places that he's put us and the influence he's given to us.

So when you consider Paul, who is, according to scholars, imprisoned while he's writing this. He's writing this from a house arrest in Rome at the time that this was written. So he's under arrest in a house.

He's probably assigned to a guard who has to follow him around. And some would even, under house arrest, would be chained to a Roman guard during this time. And that Roman guard did, how many of you think he heard the gospel a few times?

When he's chained to Paul and then they would take a shift and he would get to go eat lunch and then another guy gets chained. And Paul had a revolving circle of people to share the gospel with all throughout his day.

And so that's where he's writing this from. And how many of you think in those circumstances, being in prison, that he might have some grounds to complain about his God-given role in life? He's been imprisoned.

He's currently under house arrest. And all because of his role as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ to the Gentiles. He has, by this point in his life, by the writing of this, he has been beaten multiple times because he's an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ.

He's been shipwrecked because he's an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. He's been pelted with rocks and left for dead because he is an apostle of Jesus Christ. He's been scoffed, mocked, ridiculed, laughed at, pushed to the margins of society as somebody who is ignorant and unlearned.

And yet we find in the start of this text the absence of complaint, the absence of grumbling, but instead we see from Paul nothing but a cheery disposition and optimism that I would like to define my life.

I would like this to be a definition of my life. Whatever 2016 holds for me, I would love for it to be said of me that I'm a thankful and grateful individual. And I hope the same is true for you as well, that you long for that, that you hunger for that.

Paul mentions his credentials and he moves on quickly. And I think the way that he mentions his credentials is important for us. He says, I'm an apostle by the will of God. He is not exerting his power in this calling.

To be an apostle was not a calling to power and authority, but a calling to weakness, a calling to service, a calling to a life of sacrifice that we see here. Some people see, okay, he's constantly throwing his weight around.

He calls himself an apostle. I'm an apostle. Well, often he also referred to himself as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. Sometimes even taking it a step further and using the Greek word for slave. I'm a slave to Christ.

And so he understood, he's not here, I'm putting his foot down and saying, I'm an apostle. Listen to me, heed me, pay attention to me. Instead he's saying that comes with some suffering, that comes with some sacrifice.

But Paul's not alone in his house arrest. And we see that here in the text and other places in scripture indicate that he had people around him who would help him and assist him. Timothy was with him and likely served as a secretary in the writing of this letter.

You see that right away in verse one. Timothy and Timothy, our brother, who was with him. And by the time we get down to the last verse of this letter a few weeks from now, Paul makes it a point to say that he is writing the final greeting with his own hand implying that someone else was writing the rest of this for him.

Somebody else has the pen in their hand as he's dictating it to them. And that would be his friend Timothy who was with Paul during this house arrest. So Timothy is assisting in the writing of this. But Paul picks up the pen from Timothy at the end and writes the final salutation in his own hand.

But in verse two, Paul identifies that the intended recipient of this letter are saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae. His target audience, it's important as we go through the letter, his target audience, who he wants listening to this, is believers.

Those who are followers of Jesus Christ. This is not a primarily evangelistic letter. It's not primarily to bring people into the kingdom. It is primarily for the purpose of believers to strengthen those who are there in Christ.

Those who are set apart to God, that is saints. That's what that word means. Set apart ones, those who are sanctified, those who are set apart, holy unto the Lord. I've used this illustration before that one of my professors used for the word holy.

A lot of times we have all kinds of notions about what that might mean. But sanctified or holy, two synonyms. Ultimately are kinda like, this professor was telling me that his mom had a set of scissors that she called her sanctified scissors.

They were set apart for a specific purpose. He was not supposed to cut open boxes with them. They were her cloth scissors and he would get in trouble if he used her sanctified scissors for anything other than the purpose for which they were set apart.

They were made holy. They were for a specific purpose. And that's what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

That's the picture.

Set apart for holy purposes. Set apart for glorious purposes. Set apart to proclaim the glory and supremacy of Jesus Christ. So therefore, we take it a step further and say, well we jump straight to the holiness means being righteous or only ever doing what is right.

Well that's an element of holiness. That's an element of being sanctified, for sure. That should be the outcome of being set apart for God is that set apart unto righteous deeds, not set apart unto evil.

Just like you wouldn't use, his mom didn't want him to use those scissors to dull them and to do things that were gonna damage them. So that's the idea of this word saints. And he also identifies them, not just as saints, but identifies them in another way, calling them dependable or faithful brothers in Christ.

Two ways of saying the same thing. And just in this title, brothers, there's a deep and a rich meaning that we might miss if we don't understand the context. Remember that Paul was a Jew among Jews, trained up in the school of Gamaliel.

He was a man who was very learned in and steeped in Jewish tradition and one who even went around persecuting Christians. He would've been one who would've thought it unclean to eat with Gentiles before he encountered Jesus Christ.

And here, to a Gentile church, he uses what word for them?

Brothers.

Brothers, this is a beautiful thing. It isn't a big deal to us, but it's huge when you understand that the way that Paul was raised and what his Jewish background implied for his view of Gentiles and the way that that was turned around when the gospel took seed in Paul's heart.

The Jews had nothing to do with Gentiles, so when he calls them brothers, Paul is demonstrating the power of the gospel to break down cultural walls and cultural barriers. At the foot of the cross, we all can become brothers and sisters in Christ.

We are all saints together who are in with Jesus. We become family. And so Paul has a familial relationship with those he has never met because of the common ground of the gospel. Have you ever had that happen?

You're on vacation, over a weekend, you get an opportunity, you're traveling to another city, you get an opportunity to visit another church. Some of you ever get that? Get a chance to visit another church, you're away with family or whatever?

And have you ever had that experience where it just feels like there's a common bond? You can experience that common bond with other believers because you see, wait a minute, we're singing. I've had that happen in a cross-cultural context where I'm like, we are worshiping the same God.

I mean, we are all in with Jesus and I'm in the Dominican Republic or I'm in Germany or I'm in England or I'm in North Africa and we're singing to God Almighty and our hearts are united together in this beautiful thing called the kingdom of God.

And it's a glorious reality. And Paul says, I've never, I've never even, he's writing to someone he's never even met. He's writing to a church he's never been to and he's like, brothers, faithful brothers, I hear the report and it's a glorious thing.

Paul offers grace and peace to these saints in Colossae. From God our Father, he says. Paul used every opportunity to remind his listeners of the good news and here, even in this greeting, he does so, his greeting of grace and peace is a reminder that it all starts with God's unearned favor towards us.

Grace to you. And it results in the proper restoration of all things. Shalom or peace to you. Paul kind of invented this greeting in Greek. The Greeks would greet one another with the word greeting or kyrein and he changes it to kharis which kind of starts the same way.

So he starts with grace and peace and the Jews would greet one another with shalom. And so he combines those two for his audience and uses both the Greek and the Jewish greeting saying grace and peace.

The love and unmerited favor of God towards you and the restoration of the way that things should be to you. Beautiful picture of the gospel. But in case you feel like we're just wandering around, let me organize the rest of the message for you.

Some of you are kind of going, I'm trying to take notes here and this isn't making any sense and we're just kind of walking through. But you could get kind of lost but verses one through two are introductory, just kind of him identifying who he is, identifying the audience.

But verses three through eight have some more significant structure to them. Since this whole text is, like I said, one huge run on sentence in Greek, it helps us to identify the main subject and verb and we find it at the start of verse three.

Finally, when we get down to verse three, we know what we're talking about. And he says this, this is the core of the message this morning. We, that's the subject of this whole long sentence, we always thank the verb God.

We always thank God is the heart of this message. And so thankfulness forms the structure. So in verses three and five, three through five rather, Paul is thankful for the local impact of the gospel. Three through five, if you're taking notes, Paul is thankful for the local impact of the gospel.

Verse six, Paul is thankful for the global spread of the gospel. So first it's thankful for the local impact. Second, thankful for the global spread of the gospel. And in verses seven through eight, Paul is thankful for the specific minister of the gospel.

So first, Paul is grateful for the local impact of the gospel. The reason Paul wrote verses one, chapter one, one through eight, is to express thanks. That's very clear from the verb that is the main verb of the sentence.

He's overjoyed and wants to express it to the small church in a remote and far off area that's a ways away from him. And he's gonna have some corrections later for them. He's gonna have some advice for them later in the letter.

But he starts off gushing his thankfulness, his gratefulness to God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, for them. He says, you encourage me. You give me cause to say thank you, God. Now how many of you would like to be the source of thankfulness for someone?

Would you like somebody to be thankful for you? Okay, you can go ahead and raise your hand. You'd be glad that somebody, you want people to be thankful for you. I think that that's a reasonable response.

And let me just say that Paul's prayer is honestly my thoughts and prayers over you this past week. After writing this sermon out this week, I sat down and went through names and just spent time thanking God for each one of you here at our church, each one of you that calls this your home.

If you've filled out a connection card, you've got a thanks by name to God. I am grateful for you. And some of it quite specifically, thanking God for how he's designed you and how he's put you together, how he's brought you here.

And even if you're here visiting this morning, maybe this is your first time here, you've only been here a couple times and you've never filled out a connection card, I obviously don't know your name, but I still thanked God for you.

I still said thanks God for those that you're gonna bring to us this week that we haven't met and that we don't know. But you see, according to verse four, Paul's been informed by Epaphras that the church in Colossae has faith in Christ Jesus and love for all the saints.

This is the first reason he is thankful. He has heard that the gospel has taken root in community. And I've seen the gospel take root in community. Paul's excited that the church in Colossae is growing in faith and community, and he hasn't had the opportunity to see that with his own eyes yet.

But we who are here at Recast, who have been around for a while, have had the opportunity to behold the gospel moving into a community. It's been a glorious and a beautiful thing. We've experienced the growth in faith in Jesus Christ.

We've experienced and participated in the love toward all the saints here at Recast. We've seen the power of hope to transform us from self-centeredness to lives of love and faith and giving over to others.

Paul has heard that the impact of the gospel in Colossae flowed in this direction here in our text. They recognize that their hope is laid up for them in Christ in heaven. They have a hope laid up in heaven.

And that hope has brought them to faith in Christ and love toward each other. And that's the direction of life transformation. Sometimes we get this turned around. But that's what I've had a front row seat here at Recast for seven years.

Rather than programming people to act in a certain way, to follow a handbook of ethics and give you guys a list of rules of do's and don'ts, we proclaim the truth that hope is found in Jesus. And I hope you've heard that clearly over the years.

I hope that's been the message that you've been hearing from up here. Not a list of rules, not a list of regulations, not a if you do this, then you're in, and if you don't do this, then you're out, and all of this kind of stuff.

But instead, hope is found in Jesus. And if you haven't heard that clearly from me, let me just say it now, hope is found in Jesus Christ. And that's the message I have to bring. And if it means that I sound like a bell that just keeps clanking out the same note time and time again, I hope that it breaks into your reality in a very real and life transforming way that the only hope that you and I have is Jesus Christ.

Our hope is not our ability to make him happy. Our hope is not found in our ability to please him and make him take attention of us because we've done really great things for him. Our hope is found solely in the cross of Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for us, his righteousness, and his great and deep grace towards us and his son Jesus Christ.

That is our only hope. And God, what I've seen, God has led us deeper into a life of walking by faith and deeper into a love for all of the saints that I've observed here over the years of Recast Church.

There is a way that as a church we could do this that I believe could interfere with the process. We can clearly spell out all of the rules. We can clearly draw up a bylaws, a bylaw full of like a handbook of rules and regulations of what is, what doesn't, doesn't constitute good Christian behavior and we could walk through all of that and encourage all of you to take a copy and read it over the next week and obey all the laws and rules.

Or we can keep proclaiming that hope that leads to faith and love and then in turn celebrate what God is doing among us. Not what I'm doing among us, not what our rule book is doing among us, but what God is doing among us.

Paul, Paul throughout this text is ecstatic because he hears that the gospel is working.

The gospel works.

It is accomplishing what it sets out to do and it is transforming lives. He doesn't, he doesn't say Epaphras is changing lives or I'm changing lives, he says the good news and he's thankful for what the good news is doing.

And when God works this way among us, Paul's ecstatic and I am too. And we can only thank God for that kind of transformation because only he can do that kind of transformation. In order for it to occur, in order for lives to be changed like this, the gospel has to arrive in a community and at the end of verse five and the beginning of verse six, Paul reminds them that all of this change has come about through the word of truth arriving to them.

The gospel that came to them and it came through a guy, did come through a guy named Epaphras. So in the middle of verse six, we find the second detail of Paul's thankfulness. He's not only thankful for the local impact of the gospel, but secondly, he's also thankful for the global spread of the gospel.

He wants them to be aware that what is happening in their little community is not an isolated event. What's happening here in Matawan is not an isolated event and we're kind of like on, we're not on the cutting edge of church planting here, folks.