Hebrews 1:1-4 The Superiority of Jesus

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

Well, good morning, and thanks for those announcements, Spencer. If this is your first time tuning in with us to our online service, I'd like to welcome you. My name is Pastor Spencer, and I'm the associate pastor here at Recast.

And I have the opportunity to preach to you today because Pastor Don has been enjoying vacation with his family the last week. So we've been praying for him and hoping that he's had a restful time. I've always kind of found it hard to preach messages just on and off randomly.

And so what I've decided to do is pick a book of the Bible and to begin to work through it each time that I get an opportunity to preach. And what I've decided to do is try and tackle the book of Hebrews.

Because it's such a long book, I probably won't cover every single verse, but my goal is to at least trace the main arguments of the book for you. To get started, I wanted to give you a little background of the book of Hebrews.

The book of Hebrews is unlike any other in the New Testament. Its subject matter is distinctive, and its literary form is confusing. Some scholars believe that Hebrews is a letter or an epistle, but it's strange because it lacks the typical introduction that a letter would have.

Others believe that it's a recorded sermon. I tend to take a hybrid view and believe that it is a written sermon that was delivered and read aloud as a letter. Hebrews is also the book of the Bible that we probably know the least about.

We don't know who wrote it, for example. The discussion often revolves around whether Paul wrote it or not, but there's been a lot of suggestions that have been put forth. People have suggested Apollos or Barnabas or Luke or Silas as potential authors.

Personally, I tend to think that it is not Paul because the grammar and the syntax and the phraseology isn't typical of the way that Paul writes, and I take that position, and I just don't think we know who wrote it.

I think if the Holy Spirit wanted us to know who wrote it, he would have made it a whole lot clearer, so I'm comfortable living with the tension of not knowing. Beyond not knowing who wrote it, we don't know much about the context or why it was written.

We also don't know where it originated from, and we know very little about the original audience. From looking at the contents of the book, we can discern a few things. For example, we know that it is written to a group of Jewish believers, probably Greek-speaking, who resided in Alexandria or Rome.

We know that they were immature, that they had been saved a long time and had very little growth. We know that they had been wavering in their faith and that they were failing to trust God as they once did.

So today, what we're going to do is look at the opening of Hebrews, which is verses one to four, and I say opening because it's not an introduction in the formal sense. If you have a Bible, turn with me to Hebrews chapter one, verses one to four, and we're going to read the word of the Lord together.

God Has Spoken Through His Son

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.

He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature. And he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

Let's pray. Lord, we are thankful that you speak to us today. We are thankful that you have given us your word so that we might know you and so that we might know your will for our lives. This morning, Lord, as we read what you have for us in the book of Hebrews, I pray that we will be sensitive to your spirit, that we will allow him to work in our lives and apply your word to our hearts and to our minds.

Lord, may our actions and our attitudes reflect your worth and your glory. Lord, I pray for these people. Please protect them from anything that I might say that is not true. And Lord, I pray that as we look at your word, you will bless our time together.

Lord, we love you. You are our rock and our redeemer. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. So this morning, we are going to begin tackling the book of Hebrews. In the introduction, I mentioned that the book of Hebrews is odd and that it falls into this kind of very strange genre.

And there's a lot of discussion. Hey, is it an epistle or is it a sermon that's written down or is it some combination of both? And a lot of that discussion revolves around these first four verses that we're gonna look at today.

The opening is unique amongst all the other New Testament books. It does not have a traditional or formal letter opening. And so it can be very hard for us to read these four verses and understand what's going on and what role this opening has in relation to the rest of the book.

And I wanna give you an illustration here to start that I think might help you understand what the author of Hebrews is doing with these opening verses. A number of years ago, when I was doing my graduate work, I had to learn the biblical languages.

And so I had to learn how to read Greek and Hebrew. And typically, seminaries will make students start with Greek because the syntax is far more complicated than Hebrew. And so it takes more courses to understand and get a grasp on the language.

And so much like you would learn any language, we learned it piece by piece, starting with, and you probably guessed it, the alphabet. And we moved from the alphabet to tackle nouns and verbs and conjunctions and prepositions and participles and paraphrastics and tenses and aspect and another goofy piece of Greek called acti and sart.

You know, you get the idea. And to be honest with you, in that first semester, I really struggled to wrap my mind around what we were doing, what we were trying to accomplish, how these different pieces fit together and why they even mattered.

But by the second semester, as we started to add more pieces, I did a little bit better. And then over the next two years, I really started to do very well in Greek. And it was because by that point, I had a big picture of how the various pieces worked together.

And I was able to then understand them better. And so when I got to Hebrew, I did very well right from the get-go because I had a picture, a framework from which to understand how the various pieces of language relate to one another and why they are important.

I knew what the whole looked like and I was able to make sense of the pieces. I later in seminary took a class called Adult Learning Styles. And it helped me to understand why it took me grasping that big picture to understand the smaller parts.

I am what you call a whole-to-parts learner. I need to understand the overarching concept before getting to the details. If I receive the details first, I get confused and I get frustrated because I don't know what to do with them.

But some people aren't like that. They are part-to-whole learners and they need to take in the parts in order to lead them to the whole concept that they are learning. If they get the whole concept first, they are left feeling frustrated because the concept seems kind of arbitrary and just out there.

You know, I'm convinced that my Greek professor was a parts-to-whole guy and that's why I struggled to follow him. And I tell you all of that because often written literature is part-to-whole. And so when we're reading and we come across whole-to-part, it throws us off.

And I think, and I'm gonna try to show you this morning that in these first four verses of the book of Hebrews, the author is presenting us with the whole first. He is presenting us with the overarching theme of Hebrews.

And there's no buildup to this main idea here. He hits it right off the bat and that's why I think there's no formal introduction. He does not want to take away at all from the main idea of the book. Now, at this point, you're probably saying to yourself, okay, well, Pastor Spencer, what's the main idea?

Well, I'm gonna get there, but we're gonna go through part-to-whole learning to get there and so I'm gonna leave you hanging for a little while. But that being said, there is a purpose presented in these verses that I want you to grasp.

And as we look at this, you'll notice that the main idea of the first sentence is that God has spoken through Jesus. God has spoken through Jesus. And this is super important, especially given the original audience.

Remember, they were likely Jews who lived in Alexandria and Rome. And we know that they were immature, they were wavering in their faith, they were failing to trust God. And they were probably behaving like that because they were listening to voices other than Christ's.

They were listening to the law, which the book of Hebrews describes as the message spoken through angels. They were listening to Joshua, they were listening to Aaron and to Moses, and they were in danger of neglecting the message of Jesus.

And that's true for us as well, right? We tend to listen to messages other than Jesus and neglect the message that he has brought. We listen to our sin nature and we do what feels good even when Jesus says that it's not glorifying to God.

We listen to our friends and allow ourselves to give in to peer pressure. We listen to Satan and believe lies about ourselves. We listen to messages from culture and the media and allow them to inform our worldview, rather than letting the word of God inform our worldview.

And the source of the messages that we receive is indeed different from that of the audience of the book of Hebrews. But the problem is still the same. We tend to listen to other messages and neglect the message brought by Christ.

I think the purpose of the author in this opening is to convince the audience to listen to Christ, to not neglect what they have learned about him, to not forsake him and return to what is more comfortable.

And as we work through this text, I think you'll see that the author achieves this purpose and ultimately reveals to us the main idea of the book of Hebrews. So let's dig in here and see how he does it.

Turn with me again to Hebrews chapter one. I just wanna refresh our memories about what we are looking at this morning. So Hebrews chapter one, verses one through four again. Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.

But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things through whom he also created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.

After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. Immediately, we are going to see the main idea of this section, and that is that God has spoken.

And what the author's going to do here is contrast God's older form of communication with a newer form of communication. I think the easiest way for us to understand this is to use a chart, and this will really help you visual learners.

The chart should pop up on your screen here, but you'll notice there are four parallel contrasts here, and they relate to the eras, the recipients, the agents, and the ways in which God has spoken. Let's look here at eras first.

It says God spoke in the past, and he spoke in these last days. The phrase in these last days is one that's used throughout the Old Testament, and it refers to the arrival of the end times when the words of the prophets will be fulfilled.

Next, we have the recipients. God spoke to our forefathers, and that's a reference not to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, but rather to all the people of the nation of Israel, and it's contrasted with to us, obviously referring to the author and his audience.

It's presumably referencing anyone living after the death of Christ. Next, we have the agents, or that is the mode through which God speaks. In the past, he spoke through the prophets, but in these last days, he has spoken by his son.

So Jesus is presented here as the final revelation of God. And then finally, he contrasts the way in which God has spoken. In the past, he spoke at many times and in many ways. That's a unique set of phrases.

The word translated at many times literally means in many parts. And what I think the author is doing is suggesting that God's previous communication was really very piecemeal and fragmentary. It wasn't delivered all at once.

And not only did it not all come at once, but it came in many forms, in many ways. And you remember this, right? God appeared as an angel to Abraham, for example, but then he spoke to Moses out of a burning bush.

He spoke through his commands. He spoke through stories. He spoke through mighty acts. He spoke through dreams and visions. He spoke to Elijah through a still, small voice. And he appeared and spoke to people, sometimes directly in a veiled form.

Theologians call those theophanies. But all of those different ways of communication are contrasted here, and this is implied in the text, that in these last days, he has spoken in one way through his son.

And there's a purpose for these contrasts. As the author contrasts Jesus with the prophets, who were mediators of divine revelation, what he is doing is demonstrating to this Jewish audience that Jesus is worth listening to.

And he's worth listening to because he is not just bringing a part of a message, he himself is the final revelation of God. Essentially, what the author is doing is saying, hey, I know that you guys read and you respect and you obey the revelation of God in the prophets.

Well, Jesus, he's better. He is the revelation of God. God spoke not only through his words, but through his actions and so his message is one worth listening to. And as I mentioned earlier, I think that this reveals the purpose of these first four verses.

The purpose of the author in the opening here is to convince the audience to listen to Christ. Then I think in order to make that case, the author goes on and he puts forth seven affirmations in verses two to four, which describe the attributes of the son of God as God's final revelation.

So let's begin here. We're gonna look at these seven affirmations and unfold who Christ is and why he is worth listening to. The first of these affirmations is in the middle of verse two. The verse says, in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, now here's the affirmation, whom he appointed the heir of all things.

Jesus is worth listening to because he is the heir of all things. This is alluding to Psalm chapter two, verse eight, where it says, and it's speaking of God's son, I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession.

The Jews would have understood an heir to be someone who was invested with everything. It was someone who had full authority over that which he owned. And so to describe Jesus as the heir of not just the nations or the ends of the earth, but of all things is to say that he has ultimate ownership and authority over everything that exists.

And this is very closely related to the next affirmation. He has authority over everything that exists because, as the next affirmation tells us, Christ is the creator. Look with me at the end of verse two.

Through whom he also created the world. You see, all of creation has always belonged to the son and it was through him that it all came into being. And so his authority extends not only to all things that have existed, but to all things that will exist.

In the next chapter of Hebrews, it tells us that even the world to come is subject to Christ. And it's in that world that Romans 8, verse 17 tells us that we will be joint heirs with Christ. And so there's great encouragement for us in this truth that Jesus owns everything.

You know, many of us right now, we're feeling kind of beat down. We're feeling despair. We are discouraged by the events that are going on around us right now. You know, but what do we do when we see that COVID, for example, has wiped out 30 or 40 of our life savings?

What do we do? We listen to Jesus. We remind ourselves that we are co-heirs with the one who is the heir of all things and he promises that he will supply all our needs. And so I choose to trust in Christ, the one who has told me he will meet my needs rather than in my bank account that the world is taking away from me.

You know, the next affirmation here really has two ideas that are complementary. And so I'm gonna begin to treat them together as one unit. Read with me at the beginning of verse three here. It says, he is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.

Two phrases there, and I wanna look at them each individually. First, it says that the sun is the radiance of God's glory. This is a unique phrase. It's not used anywhere else in the New Testament. Most of us are familiar with the term radiant or radiate in relation to the sun and its beams.

And so I wanna use the sun as an analogy to describe how Jesus relates to God. And there's a lot that we could probably make this analogy say, but there's two things that I think are significant that I wanna point out to you about this phrase, especially as they relate to the sun and its beams.

First, those two things cannot be separated, right? You cannot have the sun without beams of light, and you cannot have beams of light without the sun. Secondly, while they are separate, they are not essentially different, right?

The sun has beams, the beams are part of the sun. They're essentially the same. And in the same way, Jesus and God are co-eternal. You cannot separate them, and yet they are unique persons who share the same essence.

And to elaborate on that idea, to put a little more meat on that bone, the author of Hebrews goes on, and he says that the sun is the exact imprint of God's nature. Some translations say that he is the exact representation of God's nature.

Once again, this is another phrase that's used only here in the New Testament, and it's a word that was used to, of a mark or an impression that was placed on an object, especially coins in that day, and it came to signify the whole of something else.

You might think of an icon. If you pull out your phone and you look at it, you're gonna see tons of icons for various apps, right? And those icons are pictures that are representative of the whole app.

You can look at that icon and recognize it for what it is, an entire app with unique qualities and functionality. And so when we think about that and we speak of Jesus as being the radiance and the glory, the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his nature, what we are saying is that he is the embodiment of God.

That is that he reflects and reveals God to us. John 14, nine says, whoever has seen me has seen the Father. And similarly, John 1, verse 18 says, no one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father has made him known.

One of the reasons that Jesus came to this earth and lived as a human being was so that he could fully reveal the Father to mankind. As the exact imprint of God's nature, he showed us what God is like.

He made the invisible visible. He revealed to us what the glory of God looks like. Previously, we could not look upon God, right? He is the image of God to man. So that idea is our third affirmation this morning.

Jesus is worth listening to because he is God. And that affirmation is followed in the same breath by the fourth affirmation, which says that Jesus upholds the universe by the word of his power. Jesus upholds the universe by the word of his power.

I'm gonna summarize that concept for you and say that Jesus is the sustainer. Without him, nothing would exist. The universe would literally fall apart. Job says, if it were his intention and he withdrew his spirit and breath, all humanity would perish and together mankind would return to the dust.

Do you realize that the power and the authority demonstrated in that passage? If he withdrew his spirit, all mankind would perish. You and I are alive only because Jesus sustains our lives. Without Jesus, electrons don't circle, gravity doesn't hold things to the ground, planets don't orbit, cells don't reproduce, the sun doesn't shine, rain doesn't fall from the clouds, your heart doesn't beat, the universe falls apart without Jesus.

And if Jesus has such profound implications for the universe, what makes us think that we can do life without him? What makes us think that we don't have to listen to him? Do you see the implications of this for your life?

You and I are utterly and totally dependent upon Jesus. He sustains us, but more than that, he has given us his word so that we might live lives that are glorifying to him. And that ought to be our ultimate purpose.

But all too often, we don't listen to him. We think we know better than him and we do things our way and we listen to influences other than Christ. We listen to our friends and the media and the culture and as a result, things begin to fall apart.

We've all been there, right? I've been there, you've been there, but what do you do? What do you do if you are sitting here and you realize that some aspect of your life is falling apart? Really, this is not a complicated thing.

We listen to the sustainer through his word. The word of Christ has the power to change and transform every aspect of your life. If you listen to it and obey it, your thinking will change, your attitude will change, your actions will change, and your desires will change by the power of Christ in you.

This is not an exercise in self-discipline. It is an exercise in submitting yourself to the word and letting the spirit fill you. For example, if you're sitting here and you know that your marriage is on the rocks, what could you do?

You could commit to listening to Christ about marriage. Open your Bible, see what that looks like. Husbands, I'll give you a clue here. It means that you love your wives more than yourself and wives, it means respecting your husbands.

Or maybe you're just a wrecking ball in relationships. Everywhere you go, you just cause carnage with people that you run into. What do you do about that? Well, you listen to what the word of Christ says about interacting with people.

You see what he says about forgiving others, about loving others, about demonstrating compassion, about being kind and gentle. And if you listen to Christ, if you let his word dwell in you richly, you will be filled with the spirit.

And I think you'll see very quickly that it is through the word that Jesus sustains not only the world, but his people as well. And so this fourth affirmation is important because it's suggesting that Jesus is worth listening to because it is him alone who can sustain us.

At this point, the author has really put forth some just absolutely amazing attributes about Christ. He has affirmed to us that he is the heir of all things, that he is God, and that he is the creator and the sustainer of the world, and now he shifts.

And he talks about the son's redemptive work. Look with me at the end of verse three where we see this next affirmation. It says, after making purification for sins. I wanna explain this phrase briefly to you, and then I'm gonna summarize it.

Remember, the audience of the book of Hebrews was primarily Hellenistic Jews. That means that they were Greek-speaking Jewish people. And being Jewish, they had an education and a background in the Old Testament sacrificial system.

A lot of Hebrews relies on information given in the book of Leviticus. And so if you don't know much about the book of Leviticus, dig in as we start and go through this and understand how the sacrificial system worked.

They regarded sin as defilement. It was something that needed to be purged or cleansed through a sacrifice. And so in order to connect with his audience throughout the book of Hebrews, really, the author is speaking of the death of Christ as a sacrifice for us.

And here he uses the word purification because it's a word that they would have understood. It means to make clean or purify. And so when it's used in relation to sin, it means to cleanse people of their sin.

And in this context, what he's doing is not just narrowly talking about cleansing people, but he's really using it as a reference to the entire saving act of Jesus. And that's important because we are all sinners, right?

Meaning that we fall short of the glory of God. We are not holy, we are defiled, and so we needed to be saved. We needed a sacrifice to purify us from our sins. And that saving act was really Christ sacrificing himself.

As God in human flesh, he lived a perfect life, free from sin and its defilement. He then was hung on a cross where his blood was shed and he died and was buried. But three days later, he rose from the dead, conquering death, paying the penalty for our sins, and rising to live evermore.

And in that death, he died as a perfect sacrifice. It was that perfect life and that shed blood that purified us from our sin. It removed the barrier between God and mankind and provides for us the forgiveness of sins.

If you're listening to this message and you are not sure whether your sins are forgiven, the Bible tells us in the book of Romans that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

That means that your sins will be forgiven and you will be redeemed from the bondage and the defilement of sin. And that is a glorious thing that has only possible because Jesus provided purification of our sins.

And so if we were to summarize all of that, Jesus' saving act in the purification of sins, I think we could say that Jesus is the Redeemer. Jesus is the Redeemer, and because he is the Redeemer, he is worth listening to.

The sixth affirmation then is in the last part of verse three. I wanna pick up where we were before so that we're kind of reading a complete sentence here. He says, after making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

Now, majesty is, of course, a title for God. So this is a clear reference to Psalm 110, verse one, which says, the Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. There are a few things I wanna point out to you about this phrase.

First, notice that upon his sacrifice and his subsequent ascension to the right hand of the Father Jesus sits down. This is significant because it's different from the Old Testament priests. They could never sit down because the sacrifices that they gave of animals were temporary.

They were only sufficient for a certain time, and then they had to be redone. Christ, though, could sit because his work was finished. His perfect sacrifice for sins was sufficient and complete to cover all sins that have committed and will be committed.

Second, I want you to notice where Christ was seated. He was seated at the right hand of the Father. And to be seated at someone's right hand is to be in a position of special honor and favor and privilege and power.

And when we speak of Christ being seated at God's right hand, what that means is that he has unparalleled honor. He has unparalleled authority because he is sharing the Father's throne. Revelation chapter three, verse 21 says, and this is Jesus himself speaking, I also conquered and sat down with my Father, get this, on his throne.

So if we put both of those pieces together, I think what we see here in this affirmation is Christ being presented as the ascended king. He is the ascended king. And then we come to the seventh and the last affirmation in verse four.

But I want to back up again and read the entire sentence together so that it makes sense to us. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

Though he's been doing it subtly throughout the last few verses, this is the first time in the book of Hebrews that the author explicitly draws attention to the preeminence of Christ by using the word superior.

And he's going to go on and use the word superior or some translations say better, 13 times throughout the book of Hebrews in order to contrast Christ in his new order with that which went before him.

And here in the final affirmation, the exhortation of Christ is marking him out as superior to the angels. And that superiority is underscored by the name which he has been given. Now, there's some debate amongst scholars about which name or title is being referenced here.

Some believe that it's the messianic title son as it is used in verse five to refer to the promises of the Davidic covenant. Others believe that it's the title Lord, which is used in verse 10. But either way, I think the end is the same.

That's accomplished. Jesus is presented as the preeminent exalted son who deserves worship. But we're still left with the question, why does he mention angels here? That seems kind of random, right? Couldn't he have demonstrated the superiority of Christ by comparing him to someone or to something else?

Sure he could have. But I think the author is doing something very creative here. He's bringing his argument full circle by using angels as an example. Remember, this section of verses opened up by comparing the son with the prophets who were mediators of divine revelation that the Jews actually respected and listened to.

And now he concludes by declaring the son to be superior to angels who were the supreme messengers of the Old Testament. The word angelos in Greek literally means messenger. And the Jews believed that the law was spoken through angels.

Hebrews chapter two, verse two tells us that. And as those who really delivered the Torah then to the people of God, the angels were held in great regard and the Jewish people listened to their messages.

So you think about all that, I think the author's argument then is essentially this. Hey, I know that you guys listen to God as he speaks to the prophets. I know that you listen to God as he speaks through the angels.

Now I want you to listen as God has given his final revelation through his son, Jesus, who is superior to both the prophets and the angels. That's the reason the author gives as to why the audience should listen to Jesus.

They should listen because he is God's final revelation. He is the preeminent messenger. And that's a glorious thing. And so we have seven affirmations here in these first four verses that describe who Jesus is.

And each of them in a unique way highlights the greatness of Christ. But when we look at them together as a whole, we see that Jesus is superior to everything and everyone, right? He is the heir of all things.

He is the creator. He is the sustainer. He is God. He is the redeemer. He is the ascended king. And he is God's final revelation. I think you could summarize all seven of those by simply saying that Jesus is supreme.

Jesus is supreme. That's what the author wants us to take away from these verses. That's the theme of the book of Hebrews, the superiority of Christ. Throughout this book, we're gonna see that Jesus is better than any Old Testament person.

He's better than any Old Testament ritual, than any Old Testament sacrifice. He's superior to angels. He's superior to Moses. He's superior to Joshua. He's superior to the priesthood. And he is superior to the old covenant.

And because he is superior to everyone and everything, he is worth listening to. Now, for most of us, our tendency is probably not to emphasize angels or Old Testament practices and neglect Christ because of it.

But we are prone to wander, are we not? We are prone to letting the world influence our thoughts. We are prone to giving into temptation. We are prone to put devotions and prayer and study on the back burner when life gets busy.

And there are consequences for that, just as there were for the Hebrews. But for these Hebrews, the consequences were immaturity, failure to trust God, a lack of endurance, a lack of assurance, and a need for God's divine chastisement.

We don't want that, right? So what do we do? I think the application and the takeaway from this text is really quite simple. We need to recognize who Christ is. We need to behold his glory, recognize his worth, treasure him, and then listen to him by letting his word dwell in us richly, because he is supreme over all things.

Let's pray. Lord, we love you. This text has brought us just such a marvelous and magnificent picture of who you are. Lord, these are a lot of deep truths, but I firmly believe that it is when we grasp a picture of your glory and we begin to treasure you for who you are, that we really see the need to listen to you.

And so, Lord, I pray that our hearts are convicted this morning that your spirit works in our lives to help us have the conviction to listen to you, to let your word dwell in us richly. Lord, it's such an encouragement to know that when we do that, as the book of Colossians tells us, that when we let the word dwell in us richly, we are filled with your spirit.