Christ, Supreme Over All

The Sufficiency of Christ in Colossians

Our scripture reading will be the same as this morning. I'll read Colossians chapter 1, verses 1 through 14. So if you turn there in your Bibles when you have that, please stand with us. Colossians 1, 1 through 14, 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 you in peace from God our Father.

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 you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.

Of this you heard before in the word of truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world is bearing fruit and increasing, as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood 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. And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.".

Please be seated.

Confidence in the Sufficiency of Christ Alone

So everything Paul wrote in this book to the Colossians was meant for a purpose, a particular laser-focused purpose, to give them their confidence in what? In the sufficiency of Christ and Christ alone.

And by that increased confidence, by that reminder of the sufficiency of Christ, be able to not just resist the incursions that were alarming Paul, not just resist them, but to recognize them and to know what to resist.

Whatever falsehood was ready to creep in, Jewish customs, Mosaic law, humanistic Greek philosophy, Gnostic mysticism, Stoic asceticism, salvation, sanctification or acceptance by God, whatever they offered that would accomplish what Christ was sent to accomplish, they were to be resisted and rejected.

They were useless because they were humanistic, they were vain, fleshly, they came from the earth, they're products of Babel, impotent because not only does Jesus stand over them, they owe their existence and their continuance to him.

They're to be rejected because, as we've been saying, Christ and Christ alone is sufficient. Christ and Christ alone gives the power to follow his will. Christ and Christ alone has saved you. Christ and Christ alone by his Spirit sanctifies you.

Christ and Christ alone. He's the only means by which God accomplishes his purposes for man and in man. Did you hear that? A very all-inclusive statement that Jesus Christ is the only means that God uses to accomplish his purposes in man and through man.

So Paul's purpose is to drive them, and if need be us, away from these alternatives, away from any means other than faith and the power of God's Spirit. So the driving force behind Paul's prayer that is going to be the subject for this afternoon is their faith and their hope, the faithful and holy ones in Colossae.

And as we said this morning, remember Christian hope is not just a wish, it's a certain, confident, constant assurance that what God has promised, God has done or will do. And the will-do portion of God's promise we know and are assured of because of what?

Because of God's promise that he has already accomplished. So what is left to be done will be done in Christ Jesus, just as what has been done has been done in Christ Jesus. This was their hope. And this hope causes great rejoicing in the Apostle Paul.

And so he prays for them, and the prayer will be the subject this afternoon, and we'll go through it rather quickly as we did even the first two verses this morning, because we could have done another message on those if we had time.

We'll go through this quickly, but understand that as Paul beckons them to look to the purity of the gospel and to put their reliance on Christ and Christ alone, and to be aware of and sensitive to these things that would draw them ever so slightly away from it, he doesn't just tell them, now be better, now do more.

He prays for them. He prays for them constantly. And he gives them the content of the prayer. And remember this is by the will of God, and as we said this morning, what is the will of God? The will of God?

Part of that will of God would be that Paul the Apostle, by the Spirit of God, would hear the Word of God and write it down for them, and it would be translated and protected over the centuries for us.

So it's a prayer they could look at and say, if Paul is praying this for us by the will of God for us, and by the will of God we could say today, 2 ,000 years later, for us as well, then we could look at this prayer, we Colossians, and say, let us pray with Paul for ourselves, for these things that Paul prays for us.

Do you understand that? I know it got a little intricate in the sentence there, but the Colossians could look at these topics of prayer, and as we ought, can say, if Paul, by the will of God, is praying these things for us, let us pray these things for us.

Here's their prayer. So the first part of the prayer in verses three through eight, it reminds them of their surrender to the gospel, the word of truth that they, like the Thessalonians, recognized as God's very Word from the lips of Paul.

And there was fruit that caused the Apostle to rejoice. He says he rejoiced. We always thank God, the Father, since we heard of your faith, with a hope that is laid up for you, and we rejoice in this.

He has constant hope for this, and remember, this is hope and rejoicing for a church that he never visited, or at least we have no record of him visiting. Epaphras appears to be the emissary between them and Paul, not that Paul was unwilling.

To go there.

He just, we have no record he ever did. And it was probably Epaphras who came and said, Paul, there's some things that are dangerous that might be coming in. And so preemptively, we get this letter to the Colossians and this prayer to them.

The first part reminding them of this gospel that they heard as the word of truth. By the will of God, they heard the gospel that saved them. And the fruit. They had fruit. It was bearing fruit. He says it's bearing fruit in the whole world.

As indeed in the whole world, he says, it is bearing fruit and increasing. Of course, he doesn't mean the entire planet at this point. He doesn't mean southern Australia or northern South America. He means the known world at the time, the Greco-Roman world, where the gospel is, as it were, exploding and having fruit and showing forth the goodness of God and the work he does in people.

So there's fruit that they had. There's two aspects to the fruit that we should have, is there not? There's an inner part and an outer part. There's the inner part that is faith. There's an outer part, which is the exhibit of faith, the works that we do because of our faith.

So the inner part, their faith. Now remember that faith is something that's foreign to your nature. Faith is like a virus to us when we're in a save, does it not? We have nothing to do with it. We don't want it.

We don't ask for it. It's not there when you're born and you exercise your faith and come to Christ. It's something, brethren, you didn't have before you believed in Jesus Christ. And if you don't believe in Jesus Christ, you have no faith to exercise.

God must give you this faith. And he knew that they had faith. They're faithful brothers in Christ. They stayed true to Christ in the light of the resistance against them. So the inner part, this faith, something that we didn't have, something we didn't desire, but those in Christ Jesus, what do we do?

We look at our faith and we say, this is more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold, to quote the Bible. It's that pearl of great price, that treasure in a field, that wonderful gift that's worth more than all we have or ever will have.

Do you have faith to believe in Jesus Christ? Now of all the gifts of God, I would call this first. Because without faith, you cannot believe in God. Without faith, you would not even believe that you're gifted by God.

First Corinthians 12 would be something that would make no sense to you, except by faith you could look at something like that. I say, well, I serve God, I serve Christ because He gifted me to be the foot, or the hand, or the eyes, or the ears, because God has gifted each of you personally to serve the.

Church.

And this is by faith that we believe this. This faith that blossomed into love for the saints in Colossae. The inner work of God brought forth these outer deeds of love, this agape. And agape is a love that serves, for God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

That's agape love. Not just an emotional attachment to something, but a love that does something about that which it sees. Well, the Colossians did something with and about their faith. We don't know exactly what it was, any more than we know exactly what this heresy, what this problem was that was coming in.

We don't know quite how to define it. We know the results of it would be to draw them away from Christ and His sufficiency. We don't know exactly what the heresy or what the problem was, what was the error that was being taught, even if it wasn't quite heresy.

Nor do we know exactly the works that they did, but Paul says that their love for the saints is something that is known, something that is seen, something that is visible. Their faith, this inner work, this invisible work of God in your soul that brings you to Christ brings forth fruit.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and we exhibit this in deeds that show forth the love, joy, peace, and the rest of it, as I believe the Colossians did, this inner work, this invisible work showing forth invisibility.

They showed their faith by their works, their acts of love made visible by the invisible work of God in their soul. You can say you have faith and you can say you believe the gospel, but to paraphrase the apostle John, let's just say if you don't love your brother whom you see, how can you claim to love God whom you can't see?

You see, I say by faith, I believe in God. Praise God.

That's good.

Where are your works? Well, I don't have works, I just believe.

Sorry.

Go back to square one. Do not pass go. You have to go to jail and think about this for a while if we're on a monopoly board. No, faith does something. Faith brings forth something. Faith in God brings forth service, not to please God anymore because God is pleased because of our faith, period.

God is pleased because you're in Christ Jesus, period. But your faith has to bring something forth in us or in you. You don't say you have faith and believe the gospel and have not fruit consistent with the gospel, not necessarily the fruit that you want to produce, the fruit that God has produced in you, the fruit that God by his will has ordained for you.

Is your faith a cause for anybody's rejoicing, even for your own? Because what Paul rejoices in here, and the reason Paul can write this confident letter is because he had heard from probably Epaphras and very likely others of the service that they did, not to please God.

God's pleased with you because of Christ. But because God is pleased, we do these things. The second half of the prayer verses 9 through 14 is really just two sentences. It's 9 through 12 and then 13 and 14.

Now sentence number one has Paul praying for increase, for increased knowledge of God's will, that's verse 9, leading to ever-growing fruit from lives that are pleasing to him, that's verse 10. Can I read those again for you?

And so from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.

Okay?

So he continues to pray, and what is he praying for specifically here? Knowledge of his will, spiritual wisdom and understanding, it's by the spirit that God gives us, it's by the conversion we have, bringing us to him, the new heart that the spirit gives you that brings you to Christ in the first place, by all these means of grace that you're filled with the knowledge of his will and spiritual wisdom.

The wisdom the psalmist says makes you wiser than all your teachers because it comes from God's word, makes you in a sense smarter than all your classmates and perhaps the brightest bulb in your family because it's God's word, not because you or I are about anything, not because we're worth anything, because when we speak God's word, when we read it and we say it accurately, when we live it out, then that is spiritual wisdom and that's showing understanding.

In verse 10, this ever-growing fruit that comes from lives pleasing to him, I need to halt here for just a moment, and this is my particular soapbox, but hear again what he says, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work.

It's the spiritual wisdom, it's the knowledge of God's will by looking to God's word that gives us the spiritual wisdom and knowledge of his will, and then in verse 10 he speaks of doing God's will. Now we're reformed, and as reformed people we have a proper pessimism about man, do we.

Not?

And a proper optimism about Christ, and the more we understand our sin and how pessimistic we should be of ourselves, the greater we see as Christ. So I'm not going to give you a new paradigm here, but I do want to tell you this, we are responsible to live lives that please God.

You sinner, you broken man, you angry woman, me prideful preacher, all these things, we're all sinful in one way or another, and yet can live lives pleasing to God as we are filled with spiritual wisdom, which is knowledge of his word, which is study of his word, and putting it into practice.

If you read 1 and 2 Thessalonians, I'm not going to quote any of these, I want you to read those, that's your homework. Look for the phrase, fully pleasing to God as you are doing. Not because they were worth anything, not because they had any ability, because they relied fully upon the spirit of God.

And when God looks, he sees them doing the work of Christ, because of Christ, through Christ's spirit, and that's pleasing to him. Not perfection in ourselves, that will never happen, but Paul prays that they would walk with this spiritual wisdom, with this understanding that they have, to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, and fully pleasing to him.

Increase knowledge of God, leading to ever-growing fruit. It's like Romans 12, 2, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing, that is by doing, by doing, by living, by producing fruit, by testing, you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And that's what strengthens us to continue to grow more and more fruitful. It's like a tree that's being pruned, and as it's pruned, it grows more fruit, and the more fruit it grows, the good arborist prunes it more, and then it grows more fruit and sweeter fruit, and that's the end of my agricultural and arborist metaphor, because I can get out of my expertise very quickly.

But it's the doing that strengthens us to continue to grow more and more fruitful. It's the knowledge of God's will, and the doing of it by faith, and saying this will is good, and God will make good of it, and I need to step out and do it, and grow more fruit, and that strengthens us, and we get pruned, and grow more fruit.

Thanking God the Father, who by his foreordained will chose you to be in his Son, has qualified you to share in the inheritance of Christ's kingdom. That's verse 12. What a beautiful prayer. What a wonderful way to go into the actual instruction of this book, that here's what I need you to do, but before I tell you what to do, here's where you're on the right track, and here's where I pray for that track to continue to grow and to lift you closer and closer to Christ.

But know this. While Paul saw the fruit, it doesn't come easy. Fruit production is hard work. It demands that you abide as a branch to the vine. Jesus said, I am the true vine. You are the branches.

Abide in me.

Your sustenance is from Christ. Your ability is from Christ. Your sufficiency is from Christ. Anything you do that is pleasing to God is because of Christ, and from Christ, and because we're in Christ, and can I say it enough?

It's all because of Jesus Christ and none other, and yet we are responsible to do the hard work of going out and producing that fruit and showing it forth. How do you produce fruit? By the doing, by the growing, and when you grow, you learn confidence.

You say, look what God did in me when I, by faith and in confidence in Him, stepped outside of my comfort zone and did and fill in the blank. I did something. I testified to Christ. I stayed true to a principle.

When staying untrue might have gained me more funds in my checking account. Whatever the case is, I stepped out and served in the church, and I saw God make good from it, and as He made good from it, I grew more fruit.

That by testing, I saw that His will is good and acceptable and perfect, and the more I did it, the more I grew confident that His will is good and acceptable and perfect, and He works things in me that are good and acceptable and perfect.

Not me being good, not me being acceptable, not me being perfect, but He working through me does His perfect will through imperfect people like you and me. And understand that if He did not work through imperfect people, there'd be nobody on earth for Him to work through in all history.

So we have to do that hard work. We have to go out and show forth the fruit that we have and trust God to continue it to grow. You see, faith is not a static thing. Paul speaks to the Colossians about a faith that is growing, a faith that is ever increasing.

I would argue that that faith grows and increases because every time they stepped out and showed forth the fruit and produced more fruit and gave out more fruit, and however you want to work that out, the more they did, the more confident they were that it was God working through them for His God works in you and through you to will and to work for His good pleasure.

So what grows? What increases as you go out and do God's will, His perfect and acceptable will? Your confidence. Your confidence in God by the testing, by the doing, by the obeying, and by that seeing that God's will is perfect and acceptable.

Dear ones, you have to go out and do it. You have to open your mouth at a time when it's uncomfortable. You have to obey when it's to your hurt. As the psalmist says, the righteous man keeps his word even to his own hurt.

Do you ever feel like your faith is small, stagnant? Here's a few simple questions. I mean, am I more like Jesus than when I was first saved? Do I know more about Him and am I more like Him? Not just knowing, but by doing, have I become more like Jesus Christ, reaching out towards that prize of the upper calling of God in Him?

You can ask, what steps have I taken in the last year? What personal, definite, active steps have I taken? What sin have I finally conquered? What sin still molests me? In that vein, are you growing fruit?

Ask yourself this. Am I finally done ignoring them? Am I finally done ignoring those sins that keep coming up again and again? Am I finally done making excuses for them? And I now am determined by faith, by application of the means of grace that God has given us.

Brothers and sisters, you can go to and discuss pastors who love you and will help you. Am I growing any fruit? Ask yourself this. What sins still keep coming up again and again? And am I finally done ignoring them?

I've talked many times about quitting smoking. I tried switching cigarette brands. They said that'll work. I tried low nicotine cigarettes. That didn't work. I tried cold turkey. That didn't work. I finally just got tired of smoking.

I finally got tired of my lungs and my throat hurting every morning. I got tired of my fingernails being yellow. I finally just got tired of it. And then I quit a long time ago. Haven't had a puff since.

I'll stop bragging. But it's like that with sin. Are you producing fruit? Are you growing in the Lord?

Ask yourself this.

What sin has kept coming up? And I'm just now so tired of it. I can't stand it anymore. And I'm going to do something about it by prayer, by faith, by application of the means of grace, by coming to church, by sitting under his word, by confessing to brothers and sisters.

Confess your sins to one another. Coming to your pastors for help.

That's fruit.

Ask yourself, do I really love the saints? How have I stepped forward to serve them?

Not just in my mind.

I know I'm supposed to. What do I do? You learn by doing. Even when we don't feel like it. You learn by doing. Constantly we're told, do this. God says, test me in this and see if I don't rain down from heaven such blessings you can't keep in your lap.

And it's like that in Romans 12 too that I read. That you may discern what is the will of God. Good and acceptable and perfect. You learn by doing. The old Jewish proverb is, if you want to be good, do good things.

There's some wisdom to that. It's a little bit humanistic. But if you want to become confident in the will of God, do what he says. Don't just understand it.

Do it.

Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes. In other words, your word of God. Psalm 119, this is about the law of God. Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes and I will keep it to the end. It was teach me so I can do what I'm taught.

He says, I will keep your law continually and I shall walk in a wide place. Keeping the law means doing it. There's many, many more we could go to. Paul's rejoicing was not over their intellectual grasp of the ungraspable, but rather it was because they lived out what they trusted to be from God.

Christ Preeminent Over All Creation

And the hymn goes on. The prayer goes on, I should say. That Jesus is not only sufficient, but he reigns supreme. We're going to go through this very quickly. In the next part of the prayer, the key word is all.

An all-encompassing, all-inclusive all. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created. He is your creator. He is your maker. He is the one who created all things.

Firstborn over all creation. Firstborn doesn't mean created at one point, as some cults will take that to mean. Firstborn just means supreme. It means over all. The physical, in heaven and on earth. Visible and invisible.

What's the invisible?

The thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. Dr. Moose says all of God's creative work took place in terms of or in reference to Christ. Everything God has done is in terms of or reference to Jesus Christ.

He's eternal.

He is before all things. Before, as in the beginning, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Obviously, if he made all things, he was before all things. But he wasn't created in order to make things.

That's a heresy.

He always was. He's a sustainer. In him all things hold together. And he is the head, this is verse 18, of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything, again, the same word as all in the previous verses, in everything he might be preeminent.

Preeminent because he's the head of the church. It increases our evaluation of who and what we are as his church, and he's preeminent by way of resurrection. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

All that God is, Jesus is. All that God is, Jesus has always eternally been. God's fullness is resonant in Christ. It's not continuous in that it requires no action on Jesus' or God's part to sustain it.

It simply is. All the fullness of God means that there's nothing of God that's not also of Christ. This is the one being prayed for, the Colossians. As it says in 1 Corinthians,. Yet for us there is one God, the Father, for whom are all things and for whom we exist.

One Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. I'm sorry, that was repetitive. I wrote it down there wrong. And finally, reconciler. To reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross.

So Christ is Lord over all. Oh, you mean he's Lord of? And the answer is yes, he's Lord of that.

All means all.

Whatever it is, our resurrected Lord Jesus, sitting enthroned at the Father's right hand, the hand of strength, the hand of power, the hand of sufficiency, the supreme Lord Jesus, he is Lord over all.

Firstborn over creation, not created but first, before what was made, in the beginning with God, and the Word is and shall ever be God. He is supreme, he is eternal, he is sufficient. Well, I've gone too long for the afternoon.

So in a bit of a clumsy place, I'm going to leave it with that. And Lord willing, next week we'll pick up some of the rest of this. This really must come to an end. Paul's prayer for them, and I would say his prayer for us, your pastor's prayer for you, is learn confidence in God by the doing of it.

As he tells the Colossians, I know your faith because of what you're doing, and may it grow and increase all the more. If you're one who is timid, it's hard, but step out and trust that God has done this work in you.

And that by the doing, he will grow more fruit in you, and as he does that, you will grow more confident that he will grow more fruit. And you get into this wonderful, beautiful cycle where you are more and more confident in God, more and more bearing fruit, and doing more and more of his good and perfect will.

Amen.

Heavenly Father, I do thank you again for this day, for the confidence that we have in Christ, and for the work that you've done in us through and because of him. I pray that that work will continue, and we all grow more and more into Christ's image, and live lives pleasing to you.

In Jesus' name, amen.