Colossians 1:15 - Who Is The Son?

Ordination Service and Upcoming Church Events

It's been a big week, lots of graduations and things like that going on and next week, next Sunday will be a big Sunday for us too because we're going to have an ordination service and Ben Mitchell and John King who was called to preach in this church will be ordained and we have John Abraham coming who was the pastor right before me.

I served under him as his associate pastor. Before him was Olton Phillips who's in heaven now and before him was a person we don't mention anymore but Brother Abraham was wonderful. He was here for two years and we get to meet him next week and he's just the most lovable guy you'll ever meet and so he'll be here and Myron Golden will be here and Brother Paul and me together with those two guys will lay hands on the two new candidates.

We'll also have a questioning session, they have to pass an oral exam which will be happening during Sunday school. The rest of y 'all will be in here and we'll be back in my study and they have to pass an oral exam, Bible exam, doctrinal exam first and then after that if they still pass we'll have an ordination service.

Charlotte will have some special desserts and stuff after our normal, we'll have our normal meal also but then some special desserts after that. All kinds of special stuff going on. Well let's get started here.

Turn in your Bibles to the book of Colossians. Great to have all of you here today. Our church is quite, I like it today, it's just the right people are here. We have visitors, we're so thankful you're here and we will get to visit with you after the service and I hope you can stay for lunch if you don't have other plans, we always have plenty for everybody.

We've been going through the early verses in this book, we're going to go through the book of Colossians verse by verse and what we did the last couple of times, we're just now getting into verse 15 and following the rest of the book.

So much of it talks about this huge theme of the deity of Jesus Christ. What does that mean? Well, that's what we're going to try to start answering today. Have you ever had people say, well he was just a man, Jesus was just a man?

Or maybe he was a good prophet. Even the Islamics will admit he's a good prophet. And oh I saw something, this will interest you Ben and Matt also and also Katie, they, you know Keith Green, when you guys were growing up we played a lot of Keith Green music and he went to heaven in a plane crash, but he was an amazing gospel singer, wrote all of his own songs and played the piano like crazy.

He was like a child genius. I've seen pictures, I've seen videos of him on YouTube when he was a little boy playing in some kind of contest and singing, you know, he was a child genius. He wasn't saved yet at that time though, but he got saved later.

He was a Jewish believer. Anyway, if you ever want to hear some great music, listen, go look it up, Keith Green. And, but I saw someone interview him and they were asking him, why do you believe in Jesus?

Because apparently, I know his wife was a Buddhist for a while and she got born again, but I mean she was a Buddhist for a while and he looked into other things. In fact, I think he looked into just about every religion.

And so this person was interviewing him saying, well why did you, why did you choose Christianity? And he said, well, it's really cool to watch him too, watch him talk. Have you seen that one Ben? Oh, you've seen it.

I didn't know y 'all, y 'all didn't tell me about it. But anyway, it, no, you probably did and I just forgot it already. But anyway, he just says, well, you know, I looked into Buddhism and, and Hinduism and Islam and all of them speak very highly of Jesus.

Some of them call him a, a great prophet. In fact, most of them call him one of the greatest prophets that ever lived. And so then I read the Bible and the Bible also agreed that Jesus Christ was a great prophet.

But then as I continue to read what the apostles and Jesus said of himself, he said, I am the way and the life and the truth and no man comes to the father except by me. So he claimed to be the only one and he claimed to be the son of God.

So that's why I'm a Christian. But it was really cool to watch because it's a really old video. But we're, you know, there are a lot of things people say about Jesus. Even in Christian churches around here, if you ask people to, what do you think about the Trinity?

Man, you, people, jaws just drop, right? Because it's a difficult subject for most Christians and you hear a lot of things about it. You're not sure what's right. And yet the Bible speaks of it in the early church fathers going back to as long ago as 200 A .D.

We're talking about the personages of the Godhead, one God who subsisted in three distinct persons, the father, son, Holy Spirit. They talk about that long time before the Catholic church was formed. Some people say the Catholics invented it.

No, they didn't. It's in their Bible, but it's in our Bible too. So what about Jesus? Who is he? Is he co-equal with God? You'll hear a lot of people will say that he is. A lot of the creeds use that terminology.

If you go back, you know, after the dark ages, just after the dark ages, and even during the dark ages, some of the creeds said that he's co-equal with the father. Is that true? So what do you guys think?

So, I mean, that's what we're going to be talking about until we finish this book. So then there's a lot more to it than just the surface. You could study the Trinity your whole life, and I challenge you to do it.

Don't ever stop studying it because you think it's a mystery and you can't understand it. Never do that. If it's a mystery and you can't understand it, you got to study it more than other things, than the simpler things.

So you will spend your whole life looking into it. Since I was called to preach at a fairly young age, in my 20s still, studied theology since that point, I have read so many things about the Trinity and read, you know, studied, pulled scriptures out everywhere I can find them about it.

And I have still, you know, can talk about different ideas about it that maybe I didn't think about when I was 30, you see what I mean? So you keep studying, you learn more about God and who he is. And really, that's what this is about, but specifically, who is Jesus Christ?

And we talked about the last couple of times that in the book of Colossians, it's interesting because it's not until about verse 15 when you really started getting into talking about Jesus Christ. But before that, it talks about the Father.

And we mentioned the last couple of Sundays that God does this on purpose because he does everything on purpose. But he knows that we have to understand who God is before we can understand who God's son is.

And so we looked at several things. Even prior to that, we looked at just the names of God like Elohim and Jehovah and what they teach us about God, about the character of God. And then we looked in this book of Colossians starting with about verse 1 and went through and looked at the context leading up to verse 15 of the things that that taught us about God the Father.

And you won't believe, I mean, just in those few verses, here's what we saw. Number one, God is the sovereign God of the universe. He's the one who willed that Rabbi Saul of Tarsus would become the apostle Paul and made that happen.

He is the sovereign God of the universe. Secondly, he is the one who gives his children, us, grace and peace. And he does that together with Christ. There are so many things we can't have on our own. We can only have it with Christ.

That's one of them. We can have grace and peace when we're in Christ, right? Thirdly, he's the one who is to be thanked for our salvation. I'm talking about the Father now. The Father is the one that should be thanked for our salvation.

At least that's what this was teaching in Colossians. Other places in the Bible, you'll see that Jesus should be thanked and the Holy Spirit should be thanked. They all play a role in our salvation, just like they all played a role in the creation of the universe and specifically the earth.

The third thing is, the fourth thing is, we saw he is God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So he is Jesus' Father. This is who God is. One of the things he is, he's Jesus' Father. And then we learned that he is the one who has a plan, one plan, because when you're perfect, you don't make 10 plans, you just have one plan.

But he is the one who planned your life and gave you the one perfect plan for your life. And what you're attempting to do is to step into that plan every day, every step actually, you step into that plan.

And that is not to... By the way, there's nothing in the Bible that talks about the sovereignty of God. Matt mentioned it a little bit up here in his introduction about predestination, some of those things.

There is nothing in the Bible that talks about that without talking about the responsibility of man alongside it. Now there's something you could study your whole life too, because that's a mystery. So how can God be in complete control of every detail of your life and then your will and your choices matter?

But they do. And the Bible teaches your will and your choice matters as much as anything, and you will be held responsible for every decision and choice you make. So how can you tell me it doesn't matter if God's gonna hold you responsible for it?

So it does matter, but in the same verse, it'll talk about how God himself causes us to will and to do his good pleasure. He puts the desire in our heart to serve him and then helps us do it. But then when we do it, we get rewards for it.

You see, so the will of man and the will of God are side by side. In fact, I guess because I was a businessman before I got saved, I like to think of it as a family business. God, the father, and the first part of his family business was then Jesus, his son, and then the next part was us.

And Jesus said, as he sent me, so send I you. And that's when you joined the family business. It's God's business. Everything we do is God's business. None of it is our business. None of it is our money.

None of that. It's all God's. We're stewards of it. And the cool thing is we're better than just stewards. We're children of the king. So it's ours. We inherit all of it. It's not like God divides it up among us.

All of us get all of it. Only God could do that. But that's because he has an infinite amount of everything. Am I digressing a little? Maybe so. I mean, this is a review, and I'm not supposed to do that.

How do I always do that? Because it's also good. Okay, so you got one perfect plan. Next thing is he is the giver of all kinds of wisdom and spiritual understanding. Next thing is he is the one we work for, the one we walk for, and the one that we bear fruit for, and the one we want to please with our lives.

And I'm talking about God the Father still. He is also the one who gives us strength and might according to his glorious power. And that's where the cool thing about the sovereignty of God comes in, is that what we're supposed to do is the best we can do every day with the equipment we have so far, that God's given us so far.

I learned this from Otis, by the way. Whatever God has built in you today, you're just at the right place where you're supposed to be because you're in God's will today, but you're responsible to do the best you can do with it right now, and then you're responsible to grow tomorrow and be better.

That's our job. The other job we have is to always be thinking about what we're thinking about. Because your new man has to control your old man. Your old man is the brain. It's just an organ like your heart or anything else.

It's a part of your flesh. And it's full of bad stuff and good stuff. And Jesus said, look, you know, a fountain should not have bitter water and sweet water coming out of the same fountain. You remember that?

But we do, don't we? But did you know that your new man doesn't? Your new man only has good water coming out. So what's the job of a Christian? To walk in the new man as much as possible throughout the day, which means a moment-to-moment willing of yourself, willing to be in control of your flesh and let your new man be in control because when you are, you won't sin and you will serve.

Isn't that cool? So that's your whole job. Your job is to do the best you can do today with the equipment you have to grow tomorrow and to think about what you're thinking about and stay in control of that mind so that it controls your body so that you serve God.

Because when you're spirit-filled, that means your spirit and Jesus and the Holy Spirit become one spirit inside your brain somewhere or your body, I don't know where it is, but it's in you. At that point, you will serve God.

Isn't that cool? So that's it. Well, anyway, what we're seeing here is it's God who gives us the strength to do that. In Colossians 1 .11, it says, strengthened with all might according to God's glorious power.

We're talking about God the Father's glorious power unto all patience, longsuffering, and joyfulness. So God is the one who gives us the strength and it's his power that works through us in his family business on this earth.

It is not us, and that's why when we get to heaven, we will, if we do get rewards, we'll throw our crowns at his feet because we'll know I wouldn't have done any of this without Christ. I couldn't have done any of it without Christ.

In fact, without him, I can do nothing. And we'll know that vividly there. We need to be reminded of it here. So all of these things are things that the Father does. The next one is he is the one who gives us patience and longsuffering and joy.

And he's also the one who makes us fit to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints. He makes you fit to be part of the church. You didn't make yourself fit. God the Father made you fit by working in you with his glorious power.

He is the one who delivered us from the power of darkness, translated us into the kingdom of his dear son. And right there is where it starts talking about Jesus. So from now on, the next few Sundays, that's where we'll be.

Now next Sunday will be different because Brother Myron will be preaching. But when I get back, we will pick up here and continue with this. So who is Jesus? That is the question that is answered in the next few verses.

It really kind of starts a little bit of it in the first 13 or 14 verses, but really starts in verse 15. So one thing that we saw from the past few verses while it was talking about the Father is that it says that the Father delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of his dear son.

So that starts talking about Jesus now. And what it tells us, the very first thing it tells us about who he is, is Jesus Christ is the king of God's kingdom. The king, not a king. He's the king of God's kingdom.

And at the same time, he is God's dear son. Both of those are stated in verse 13. So there's a couple of things. I just put it as one thing, but really he is the king of God's kingdom. And at the same time, he's God's dear son.

So he is the child king, so to speak, who grows up and is going to be the king on the throne for a thousand years in the millennial kingdom. And then the Bible teaches there's age and age and age with an infinite number of ages after that.

You say, I hadn't seen that. Well, you know, you got to look for it, but it's there. And so he will be the king throughout all those ages until they're over. And then it says, God will be all in all. Now that goes well beyond the scope of this sermon or even a lifetime of study, right?

But for now, we're just looking at, he is God's king over God's kingdom. Now it's interesting here where it calls him that God the father translated us into the kingdom of his dear son. What kingdom did he pull us out?

In other words, translated English is an old English word. It's kind of interesting because obviously if you translate English to Spanish, what happens? Well, you're really saying the same things, but it sounds totally different, doesn't it?

And so you're changing it, you're changing it. And that's the aspect of the word is picking up on is that there is a change from the lostness that you had when you were a lost sheep to when you're a saved sheep.

And God the father is what makes that happen. And I want you all to notice, I mean, you're gonna hear things in most Southern Baptist churches is very sad, but now today in most Southern Baptist churches and other Baptist churches, Pentecostal churches, Methodists, you can name them, the main denominations are now teaching a man-centered religion for Christianity, that man does everything.

And if you ask, well, did God choose who he would save? Well, that's a difficult subject. I don't wanna talk about that. Why not? The Bible talks about it. It says he predestinated who would be saved.

It said he chose who would be saved. He elected who would be saved. It said he knew who would be saved before the foundation of the world. So how can you debate that? And I'll tell you what, 250 years ago, it was not debated.

90 or 95 of all Baptists believed that. Today, only three or four or 5 believe it. So you gotta be careful what you hear. And let me just ask you to do this. The same thing I ask you to do here. When you hear a preacher or anyone who claims to be a Bible teacher to teach something, you go home and you take your Bible and you hold up what he said against it.

You have to, because preachers say all kinds of things, especially in the last time Jesus said there'll be many false prophets. You've gotta do it. So now I want you to think about this. My Bible says in Colossians chapter one and your Bible says in Colossians chapter one that God delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us or placed us into the kingdom of his son.

You did not do it. Your choice did not do it. You cannot present a gospel, but we've all heard it in church growing up. I did too. And I used to preach this way when I was 20 something until I could study the Bible enough to know it wasn't right.

And then I apologized for it and quit doing it. God died, Jesus died and presented this gift. All you gotta do to decide your eternal destiny is reach out and grab it. You gotta make the decision to reach out and say, I'll take it.

Well, if that's true, then you determined that you would save yourself. That's a work. That's called works salvation. The Bible says you are not saved by works, but by grace. So it doesn't fit any of the rest of scripture.

So it's not true. What happens is God calls you. That's how you get saved. The Holy Spirit comes. I was in my car driving when it happened to me. He came into my car. I don't know how fast I was going.

Charlotte could estimate that for you probably. So could Maddie, if she were here. But anyway, she doesn't tell her parents, but anyway, I bet she does. But sometimes my foot gets a little heavy, but he came into my car and was not offended by that.

He might've been. But he came in my car and he awakened me. And he allowed me to see who Jesus Christ was for the first time. And I knew about him my whole life. Grew up with Christian parents and grandparents, but I saw who he was.

I was a hungry sheep. He was the shepherd. He had the food and the Holy Spirit said, so what will you do with that? And he made Jesus irresistible to me at that moment. He had not been irresistible because the day before I didn't get saved.

Why not? Because I didn't want him. Five minutes before I didn't get saved, why not? I didn't want him. I was fine with me being God of my own life. And that's where every human is born into and raised and feels that way.

I determined my future. And now the gospel says, well, here, let me help you determine your future. Decide to reach out and take the gift. Accept Jesus. Now, there's nowhere in the Bible where it says, accept Jesus and you'll be saved.

Nowhere. You know, I was challenged with that because I used to think it said that. I used to say, well, you got to accept Jesus. Doesn't say that anywhere. In John 1 12, it says, receive him, but receive doesn't mean the same as accept.

It really doesn't. Accept puts the decision in your mind and heart. Like you'll either take it or not. Receive means it's right there and you just, there it is, and they just put it in your arms. You receive it, right?

You know, like a receiver in football. You know, there's the ball. Yeah, okay. So the point is, always come back to the Bible. What the theologians say may or may not be right, but the Bible's always right.

And right here, very clearly, God the Father has the control of who it is and when it is and how it is that a person is brought from the power of darkness and delivered by him. It's in the passive in the Greek, which means someone bigger than you did it to you, delivered by him and then put into, out from something, which is Satan's domain, into the kingdom of his son.

And Jesus is the king of your life at that point. I remember praying, I was a businessman, so I prayed this way. I said, Lord, I've always known about you, but now, and the reason I could say now is because the Holy Spirit had just awakened me in that car.

I didn't know that at the time. I had to study scripture to know that's what happened. I could sense it. In fact, I went home and told Charlotte, something happened to me in that car, but I didn't know who did it and how it worked exactly.

But what happened was the Holy Spirit woke me up and I said, now, I've always known about you, Jesus, but now, for the first time in my life, I want you to be my boss instead of me being my boss. Now, that's business terminology.

It's not even the right way to say it, but it's how I said it, and saying it was merely a result of the fact he had saved me. It did not save me that I said that, because if it did, then you're all lost because you probably didn't say it that way, right?

How many of you said, Jesus, I want you to be my boss instead of me being my boss? All right, then you couldn't be saved if that's what saved me, all right? So it's not what saved me. It was the salvation that had happened two or three seconds before that when the Holy Spirit awakened me and I saw Jesus for the first time that caused me to want to pray that prayer, which was then not the cause of my salvation.

It was an effect of it, and everything else I did, such as being baptized, wanting to do good work, start to study the Bible, all of those were effects. None of it caused my salvation. So who caused it?

God the Father, so far, right? That's what we see in the text. So who said it? God. And who did it? God. So God delivered us from the power of darkness and then placed us into the kingdom of his son, and his son is the king of that kingdom.

So he's our king, but we're also his brothers. So it's not just that he's a king. It's not just that we're servants. We're also partakers of his inheritance with him. We're all children of the king. So there we see that this is what God did.

God the Father did this, but what it brings into play now is he starts talking about this kingdom, and he calls Jesus the king of it and calls him his dear son. So now we know that's who Jesus is. It's one of the things we know.

He is the king of the universe. He has handed this right and this power by his father who created everything that is, and what you'll find out as you study this book, you're gonna find out that Jesus actually is the creative arm of God.

Actually, technically, Jesus created everything physical, including time, and he did that on behalf of the father because he's in the father's business, family business, and God showed him here's everything's gonna be.

Now you go do it, and he did it, and they're working together, and the Holy Spirit played part in it too if you read Genesis 1, chapter 1, chapter of Genesis. So here we see him set up as God's dear son, who is the king.

Now, let's look at this for a moment. Let's look at his phrase, his dear son at the end of verse 13, and I don't know if you're used to studying the Bible that closely where you stop and you say, okay, well, there's the point, let's move on.

If I preached that way, we would be done in 20 minutes. Now, where it says he is his dear son, which is one little bitty phrase at the end of this powerful verse. I mean, what we should focus on is God delivered us from the power of Satan and translated us or put us into Jesus's kingdom.

Yes, we would focus on that, wouldn't we? That is the big part of this verse, but do you think God put this phrase here for a purpose, the kingdom of his dear son? Is that important? Well, if you wanna know Jesus and you wanna know who he is, you gotta look at all the words and the phrases, and this is kind of beautiful, I think, because right in verse 13 at the end, where it says that he puts us into the kingdom of his dear son.

In the Greek, it's a little more, should I say, intimate than that, because what the Greek really says, the word dear, if you look it up in the Greek, would not be translated dear in English. Maybe in 1611, it would have been, I don't know, but I'll tell you what the Greek word is, agape.

And what do you think that means? That means the highest form of love that only God can do and those who live with God in them can do it. It's a love that's unconditional. He loves us no matter what we do to him.

He loves us because his love does not depend on what we do. It depends on his heart. That's agape love. And that first word for his dear son is agape, not dear. Dear or precious, it doesn't mean that.

It means agape. It means his loved son, his loved with an infinite love son. And then the word son is wios, which means a son or child, but it's interesting because it has a little article in front of it.

Ho in Greek means thee. So if you really translate it as it's written, it would be who has delivered us from the power of darkness and then translated us into the kingdom of the loved, the son. Both of them have thee in front of it.

Thee means not a, you know, not a loved son, not a loved and not a son, but the loved one and the son. And there is no other like that one. You understand? So even in that little phrase, you see the deity of Jesus Christ.

You see that he is the only begotten son. There is no other agape, the agape, the son in the world or in the universe, only Jesus. You gotta see those things. They're very important, but you gotta dig to find these things.

So Jesus is the king of his kingdom and he is the loved and the son of God. And we'll stop there for today and we'll pick it up there weekend after next, but go ahead through Colossians, get ahead of me if you want to.

It's a beautiful book. It's a powerful book. Every book that I preach through, while I'm doing it, I'm thinking if I was on a desert island and didn't have a Bible and somebody tore one up and threw it out of an airplane, I'd be fine with the book of Colossians.

True, it's true about this book. All right, let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, we thank you so much for your word. We thank you that it is infallible. We thank you that what you say is true, no matter how people interpret it.

We thank you that it must be interpreted with proper rules and you've given us those rules. And we thank you that it's clear when those rules prevail. And we thank you that even the difficult passages that are not as clear, your Holy Spirit can help them understand them over time because usually you've put other places in the Bible that talk about that subject.

And we just thank you for this book. We would be totally in darkness without it. We couldn't know one thing about your character, about you or who you are, or who your son is or who the Holy Spirit is without this book.

Thank you for inspiring it, breathing it, putting it into this world and preserving it to the last generation. Lord, we ask you to be with us in our time of fellowship. Now bless the meal in Jesus' name.

Amen. You are dismissed. We'll have the meal together here in about 10 minutes. Let's do that right now. Okay. Amen.