Jesus Over Everything | Colossians 1

Pastor Scott Smith- March 1, 2026

This message begins a new series through the book of Colossians by walking through the first chapter and explaining the context behind Paul’s letter to a young church in the city of Colossae. Roughly 20–30 years after the resurrection of Jesus, the gospel had already spread hundreds of miles through ordinary people who responded to the good news and shared it with others. The Colossian church existed in a culture filled with competing philosophies and beliefs that challenged the truth about Jesus, particularly denying His divinity. In response, Paul writes to clearly proclaim that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God, supreme over all creation, the one through whom everything was made and through whom reconciliation with God is possible.

This message then focuses on what made the Colossian church so impactful: they were known as a faithful people whose lives were shaped by the gospel. Their faith was visible through how they loved one another, encouraged each other, prayed for one another, and lived out the good news in everyday life. The message challenges believers today to adopt that same mindset by making the gospel the most important thing in their lives and allowing it to shape their relationships, priorities, and mission. When believers thank God for each other, encourage one another, pray for one another, and live out their faith publicly, they become a church that is filled with and fueled by the gospel—reaching people and helping others know and follow Jesus.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right, we're starting a new series. It is through the book of Colossians, and we're going to do this one differently. At the onset of every single message, it is four weeks. There are four chapters in the book of Colossians. Beginning of every message in just about 60 seconds, we are going to read the entire chapter of Colossians together. So that by the end of this series, if you come every week or you watch online every week, you can check the box. You have read an entire book of the Bible this year. So we are going to do just that. Every single week, we're going to read the chapter. This one's one. Next week's two, next week's three. Can you guess what week four is? Yeah, you can. Of course. We're going to read that, and then we're going to unpack it together. So if you have your Bible or your phone, go to Colossians chapter one. We'll have it on the screen, and we're going to read through this together. I should make sure that I am clear here. You're going to read it in your head. I will read it out loud. So that doesn't get terribly confusing for everyone. You ready? Here we go. The word of God is going to preach directly to us this morning. Colossians 1, verse 1. This letter is from Paul, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and from our brother Timothy. We are writing to God's holy people in the city of Colossi, who are faithful brothers and sisters in Christ. May God our Father give you grace and peace. We always pray for you, and we give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all of God's people, which come from your confident hope of what God has reserved for you in heaven. You have had this expectation ever since you first heard the truth of the good news. This same good news that came to you is going out all over the world. It is bearing fruit everywhere by changing lives, just as it changed your lives from the day you first heard and understood the truth about God's wonderful grace. You learned about the good news from Epaphras, our beloved co-worker. He is Christ's faithful servant, and he is helping us on your behalf. He has told us about the love for others that the Holy Spirit has given you. So we have not stopped praying for you since we first heard about you. We ask God to give you the complete knowledge of his will and to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding. Then you will live in a way that will always honor and please the Lord, and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while you will grow as you learn to know God better and better. We also pray that you will be strengthened with all his glorious power so you will have all the endurance and patience you need. May you be filled with joy, always thanking the Father. He has enabled you to share in the inheritance that belongs to his people who live in the light. For he has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his dear son, who purchased our freedom and forgave our sins. Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation. For through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. Such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him. He existed before anything else. He holds all creation together. Christ is also the head of the church, which is his body. He is the beginning, supreme over all who rise from the dead. So he is first in everything. For God in his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ's blood on the cross. This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. But you must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it. Don't drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the good news. The good news has been preached all over the world, and I, Paul, have been appointed as God's servant to proclaim it. I am glad when I suffer for you in my body, for I am participating in the sufferings of Christ that continue for his body, the church. God has given me the responsibility of serving his church by proclaiming his entire message to you. This message was kept secret for centuries and generations past, but now it has been revealed to God's people. For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you, Gentiles, too, non-Jewish people. And this is the secret. Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory. So we tell others about Christ, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all the wisdom God has given us. We want to present them to God perfect in their relationship to Christ. That's why I work and struggle so hard, depending on Christ's mighty power that works within me. What is going on in the book of Colossians? It is important for us to understand the backstory. You turn on a movie, and in the first part of the movie, they give you a backstory so you have context. Maybe it's your favorite television show, and you get backstory on the characters, so it helps you understand and engage and catch what's going on a little bit more. It's important for us if we want to get the most out of a book called Colossians, this letter that was written to this group of people in a place called Colossae, not written to us, but for us, because we are going to eavesdrop on this letter and learn from what they learned from. In order for us to best get the most out of it, we need to understand the backstory and what's going on. And so I have a little map I'm going to show you, and we're going to walk through it because it's going to help us gain some context. This book was written by Paul and Timothy, a plurality of authors here. For teaching purposes, we're going to acknowledge Paul's leadership and attribute his lion's share of authorship here because Timothy was his protege and he was training him, but also involved in this letter. And as this letter is written, it was written roughly around 30 years after the resurrection of Jesus. And while that might sound like a long time, context will help us understand the impact the gospel was having at the time. So if you see my map here, in the bottom right corner, if you can look past a microphone stand or music stand or two, down here you can see Jerusalem, Judea, right? So when Jesus was resurrected and he left his disciples this great commission, go and reach people with the gospel, teach them what it means to know and follow Jesus. That happens in the bottom right part of our map. Now, if you go across some water or you go up and to the left, you will eventually find your way, right smack dab in the middle of our screen, to a place called Colossae. Now, that's about seven to eight hundred miles away from that Great Commission conversation. Here's what that means. That means in just about 30 years, and it's actually be a little less, we'll look at in just a moment, the gospel message had spread from this fledgling group of about a couple hundred Jesus followers, oppressed by the very government that ran the area of the world they were in, and confused. There was no ability to just post up a franchise. It wasn't like they could call corporate and say, hey, we'd like to post up another Chick-fil-A in our city, so send us the recipe and the ingredients for the ice cream and the chicken sandwich so we can start selling that. That didn't exist. This was building the plane while flying it for the early Christian church. They had the gospel message and they wanted to take it. They had the good news, as we read in Colossians 1, and they wanted to take it with them everywhere. And in just about 30 years, a little less, it made its way about seven or eight hundred miles away from where it started into a place called Colossae. And the reason we think it started a little bit before that and it took less time is because the church in this place, Colossae, actually was planted by a man who was a part of another church in a place called Ephesus, which is directly to the left of Colossae, right here on our map. Here's why that's important: Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. Ephesians, Colossians, two letters in the New Testament of your Bible written to two different churches in two different places. Here's what happens Paul, the author of this letter, is also the author of the letter to the church in Ephesus. We call it Ephesians. Paul spent a lot of time in Ephesus, as you can see, and he's training the church, teaching the church, and as a result of his gospel ministry there, a man named Epaphras, who we just read in Colossians 1, receives the good news, puts his faith in Jesus, and Epaphras says, I need to go back to my hometown and tell everybody about this good news that I heard. His hometown is Colossae. So the Colossian church, when it receives this letter, is about five or six years old at the time. So realistically, it only took about 20 to 25 years for this gospel message to be taken by this group of Jewish people into these areas, places, and spaces where non-Jewish people lived, heard the gospel, and then took that with them and started more churches and more of a gospel movement. Here's why that matters for us. We are looking at Colossians for two reasons. One, this young church in a place where church wasn't church, and where the background of a Jewish God-fearing religious system did not exist. They didn't have this concept of who God was in these places like Ephesus and Colossae. There is worldly or what you might consider maybe even Hellenistic or paganistic ways of thinking. There were philosophies and practices that did not jive with the Jesus way. Yet somehow this church is thriving there. And we want to study Colossians for two reasons. One, we have more in common with them than you think. It's a young church. They're dealing with things that you and I actually deal with. The second reason that we want to study Colossians is we want to be a church like the church in Colossians. And we're going to unpack both of those reasons this week as we look at Colossians 1. So for context, you've got people in Colossi here who are encountering teachings and opinions that are propagated and celebrated and really kind of spread wide, teachings and opinions that deny the deity of Jesus, that do not honor this truth that Jesus is God. And for us, we might think, well, no, but we know Jesus is God. But I want to give you some things to consider about modern culture here that we experience that actually can relate to the Colossian culture here. How many people have heard somebody say something like this, maybe on a podcast or uh read it somewhere, some some video that you've seen, and it's this. Oh yeah. I am a big fan of Jesus. Really love like Jesus and the stuff that he said and did. It's really cool. I'm just not a big fan of God. Because I mean, God looks one way and Jesus looks another way. How many of us heard that? Oh no, no, I like Jesus. Big fan. He's nice, he's brilliant. Back 25 years ago, they used to come up with these shirts that said, Jesus is my homeboy. And you would see these things. And that's been a thing, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Jesus is great. But God, that's different. And there's teachings that deny the deity of Jesus. Colossians 1 is written to teach this group of people, hey, hey, Jesus, Son of God, supreme over everything. I say it in this grammatically incorrect way. Jesus was, was, before was, was. That's what Paul writes to the Colossian church. They were dealing with things that you and I deal with. They were also dealing with things like, hey, no, no, no, as long as you're a good person, everything will work out. And Paul's like, no, no, no, no. You're saved by grace through faith, by the, as we just read, wondrous grace of Jesus Christ displayed for you when Christ's blood was shed and forgiveness of sins was available to you. So while this letter wasn't written to us, it is written for us, and we can learn several things from it. One of those is how to approach each other in what we call the church. One of those is how to understand the value of things that we read in Colossians 1 that are going to sound simple, but are absolutely profound. So we're going to look at how Paul and Timothy addressed the church. Then we're going to look at how the church seemingly addressed each other and how it behaved and what that means for us. Because right in the beginning of this letter, Paul writes, he says, Look, we're writing you God's holy people in the city of Colossae who are, what's that word? Faithful brothers and sisters in Christ. Okay, you remember our friend Epaphras, who's mentioned here, who was at this early church in a place called Ephesus, responds to the gospel, goes home, starts another church in Colossae. We get this letter, Colossians. Now, God's holy people is a description Paul uses every time he writes a letter to these different churches. A third of the New Testament of your Bible are these letters to these churches. And they all of them are referring to God's people, the church, as a holy people. Do you know that only two of the letters refer to the church as faithful? And it happens to be the church in Colossians and the church in Ephesians, where Epaphras was, and then leaves and plants of church. I don't think it is a coincidence because in this letter he calls them faithful because what was known of these churches was what I call the greatest church growth strategy in the history of the world. And it was simply this people were responding to the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ and living it out. That's it. People will travel hundreds, thousands of miles, spend hundreds, thousands of dollars, ministry professionals going to conferences and soliciting resources for how can we grow our church. Okay, well, if you have this type of software, it'll help you grow your church. If you do these kinds of messages, if you host this kind of event, if you post this kind of stuff on social media, if you do A, B, C, and D, then it will grow your church. None of that's bad. You should approach things with wisdom and smart people learn from smarter people. I'm not knocking that, but here's the reality. For 2,000 years, there has been a tried and true, number one, undefeated G-O-A-T, greatest of all time, church growth strategy. And it is very simply this God's people responding to the gospel and living it out. That always works. You know why it always works? Because the message prepared in the life reaches lives. And the church in Colossians was known as being faithful. That word faithful in its original language, it means to carry faith, to be full of with actionable representation. It means your belief is visible. And that is an incredible thing to be known for. And there are two churches who get that description this one and the church in Ephesians. There had to be something there. There had to be somebody leading the way, somebody like an Epaphras, who saw the church in Ephesus, who was also known for being faithful. And he said, that's what church should be. And so he takes it with him and he shares person to person first, and then people to people, and then movement to movement. We start to see it growing here. You see that as the reputation of this church precedes them, their reputation for loving each other well, their reputation for being a beacon of gospel light, their reputation of being faithful to the gospel mandate they were given and desiring to learn. And this is a young church. They dealt with all the things that people deal with today, all of the cultural uh uh attacks and and sensitivities and and proclivities and and all of the stuff, and they were faithful. They were faithful to live out their faith. They put that love of Jesus on display. And not only that, we see how they treated each other, and they're getting that example from the very authors of this letter. Paul and Timothy, I mean, what do they say? We always pray for you, and we give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all of God's people. There are three things that Paul and Timothy do when they write to this church in Colossians. One, they thank God for them. Two, they encourage them. And three, they pray for them. Three things. And they sound simple, but when is the last time you thanked God for the Christians in your life? Really, actually thanked God for the Christians in your life. When's the last time you encouraged someone in your life? See, I think oftentimes we miss ministry opportunities that are right in our face because we don't think they are good enough. We hear things like, well, I my personality isn't this, so I can't serve like this. I know you guys talk about serving all the time, but I can't really do it like that because I'm not good at this, this, this, or this. Every person has the capacity to encourage someone, and the ministry of encouragement is bigger than you realize. It is a ministry gift. You may have heard it actually called a spiritual gift. The big word we use for it is the gift of exhortation. All those syllables simply mean this to encourage someone. Some of us have been on the receiving end of that encouragement, and it changed the trajectory of our lives because it put us in a mindset that said, somebody cares about me. There is better out there. I'm not hopeless. Maybe I should think differently. And then others of us are doing that in someone's life. Don't miss those ministry opportunities. Paul and Timothy take that because they know everybody needs some encouragement. It is a simple ministry exercise, but it is profoundly impactful in the life of a person. Those of us within earshot of my voice who have been on the receiving end of it, we know that. But do you thank God for the Christian brothers and sisters in your life? Do you encourage the Christian brothers and sisters in your life? And do you pray for the Christian brothers and sisters in your life? Do you actually consider them? Because we're going to see something here that is the purpose of this entire book of Colossians, this entire letter. And what we're going to see is in line with that church growth strategy. And really, what it is is it is so simple. But it will change your life. It will change the lives around you. And it will change the life of the movement we call the church. If we have the same mindset as the church in Colossians, Paul writes in verse 15, he says, Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. Now we hear that, and maybe you're like me, and you think, oh, okay, I'm thinking magic, visible, invisible, okay, cool. But what he means there, the word, is the same word used to describe the imprint of a figure on a coin. In Hebrews, we read that Jesus is the imprint of God's nature. The reason that is used is because the people receiving this letter would have understood that. So raise your hand if you've ever met Abraham Lincoln. Oh, of course, because he's been dead for a long time, and none of us were alive when he was alive, right? But raise your hand if you think you know what Abraham Lincoln looked like. Why? Because you've seen him on a form of American currency. Think that when you read visible image of invisible God. Paul and Timothy knew that everybody receiving the letter would have said, Oh, oh, okay. So God, who we can't see, you're saying that Jesus was the visible image of the invisible God. It allows them to connect real faith and followship of Jesus so that they understood that. But notice something really important here. He says that he is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything that was created and is what? Supreme over all creation. For through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made all things we can see, all things we can't see. He existed before anything else. He holds all creation together. He is the head of the church, which is his body. He is the beginning, he is first in everything, pleased for God to reconcile everything to himself. What does that mean here? It means this the church in Colossians was filled with and fueled by the gospel of Jesus Christ. The good news that they were once enemies, separated by their sin. But because of God's wonderful grace and the love of Jesus on display, the good news of the gospel, their lives were forever changed. Why do we want to be a church like the church in Colossians? Because we want to be a church filled with and fueled by the gospel. That's what takes this message across the world. It's what took the message into their lives daily. They responded to the work of the gospel. And the gospel fills and fuels everyone here, starting with the person, Paul. It changed his life, so he devoted his life. Timothy, Epaphras, other church planting ministry leaders who would lead movements of the gospel. It was working in their life. And then it worked through the church because the church was known for its faithfulness to the gospel. How we can treat one another as a church, we can take cues from Paul, Timothy, Epaphras, and the Colossian church. That we thank God for each other, we encourage each other and we pray for each other. How we respond to the gospel. How we live as a movement, a group of believers, we can take cues from the church in Colossians to be known as faithful to the ministry of Jesus Christ, to be faithful, that our love for people would be so visible that it would point them to Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of sins that he offers through the wonderful grace of God. I wrote this prayer down this week, and before I read it to you, I'm going to ask you a very challenging question, and it's going to sound sharp, but I hope you hear it in love. Is the gospel the most important thing in your life? Because I know we want to say, oh yeah, yeah, of course, it's the most important thing in my life, but actually is it? Or is work the most important thing in your life? Well, yeah, but I got to do this and be this person because I got to get this promotion. And if I if I get this much status at work, I'll be enough. And they can't really get by without me because I'm I'm too important. And so, yeah, look, I know that my spiritual growth is important. I know investing in my family and their spiritual growth is important. And I I know I should be making a life, but I'm I'm really focused on making a living because I really want to endeavor to do this. And before you know it, the gospel is not the most important thing in your life. Uh your professional pursuits are the most important thing in your life. Uh maybe for some of us it's, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. The gospel is the most important thing in my life, except when I want my kids to be involved in every single extracurricular on planet Earth possible. And uh I'm at their their sporting events because they play 18 different sports. They're even on the chess team and the lacrosse team and the wrestling team and the badminton team and every other team that they can sign up for. And they're on it. And when I'm at their games, the gospel all of a sudden no longer becomes the most important thing in my life because the ref makes a bad call and I remove my sunrise merch before I address the referee. Is the gospel really the most important thing in your life? Is the gospel the most important thing in your life in your marriage? When you see your spouse, it's the gospel working in you and through you. As you approach your kids, it's the gospel leading you. Is the gospel the most important thing in your life when you're in traffic? For those of you with a sunrise church bumper sticker on your car, I really hope it is. Otherwise, that's one way to witness to people. If they drive like that and they need Jesus, man, I guess we all need Jesus. Is the gospel the most important thing in your life? Because if it is, it will show up in your life. And here's where I say something kind of harsh, but I say it in love. And it's a challenge for all of us. If we claim to be a Christian, but we don't live like it, we may want to reassess that claim. And ask ourselves: is the gospel the most important thing in our lives? I have a prayer I actually wrote down, and I'm just gonna read it to you verbatim. And it's a prayer through this series for our church. Because the Colossian church experienced Thanksgiving, encouragement, prayer, and impact. They experienced these things as a church. We are experiencing some of these things as a church. Stories of life change through foster care, stories of open doors to share the gospel on school campuses, stories of reaching families through uh uh hospitality and love that we show to parents, stories of people sharing the gospel at work with their coworkers and just bugging them about it until they just say, I get it, man. Finally, leave me alone. If I'll come to church with you if you leave me alone. We're hearing stories like that. And God is moving, and we desire to be known as faithful because the gospel is the most important thing in our lives. We help people know and follow Jesus because we believe Jesus changes everything, and that should impact everything we do as a person, as a people, and as a church. Everything that we do. And so I wrote this prayer down that I'll read to you. As I share with you what my heart is for our church in this series, we desire to be a church like the one in Colossians, because this was a church that experienced thanksgiving, encouragement, prayer, and impact. It was a church known for taking the gospel with them into every area of their lives. It is a church started by people responding to the gospel and a church that grew because people responded to the gospel. People cared for each other. People gave sacrificially to help move the mission forward. People shared their faith with others. This was a church that embodied the mission of helping people know and follow Jesus in such a way that other churches, other cities, and other people were impacted by their faithfulness. I pray that God blesses our church with that kind of reputation. And that will happen the more we embrace the mission together and the more we grow in our faith together. I want to give you a phrase. It is reach out. Why do we say reach out? Reaching out for most people we assume as churches is start from the out and draw in. And that's the strategy that we typically think about. Well, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta reach out. So we gotta start out and then come in. But if if reaching out doesn't start from where you reach, it's not reaching out, it's just out. Are you tracking? It means we're just hoping that the people in our lives want to jump in to what God is doing here and hear the gospel because we think they're just going to. No, no, no. It's reach out because it comes from a starting point. That starting point of reaching out is this the faith of the Christian. How do we experience what the Colossian church experienced? How can we be a church like Colossians? It's when we reach out. How do we reach out? We grow in our faith. And we grow in our faith together. And the gospel becomes the most important thing in our lives. And so the gospel is what's seen in our lives. We will continue as a movement to do things, to host ask a counselor events, to support foster care families. Why? We are reaching out with the light of the gospel through the love God gives us to give away to people. So, how will you reach out person to person, people to people, workplaces, families, spaces, interactions, relationships? How will you reach out? Will you reach out from a place of thanksgiving, encouragement, and prayer? Because if we do, we will be a person of impact, a people of impact and a church of impact who holds the gospel as the most important thing in our lives and helps people know and follow Jesus. As we, just like the church in Colossians, continue to grow in our faith together. I'm gonna close this in prayer, and at the end of the message, I'm gonna put up a list, and it is some suggestions of ways we can pray for each other. I'm gonna do this because you may want to write them down or take a photo and encourage you this week to thank God for the Christians in your life, to pray for the people in your life, and to encourage people in your life so that you can reach out with the gospel in your own life. And so after the service, we'll have that on screen if you want to take a photo with it and get practical and tactical with some of that this week. And next week, we're gonna do Colossians chapter two. I hope that you will bring somebody with you for that. Let's pray. God, thank you again for another day for the opportunity we get to worship you, the opportunity we get to gather. I pray as always that your word is what's heard because your word is what changes lives, and that what we have learned here doesn't get left here, but that we indeed are filled with and fueled by the work of the good news of your Son Jesus Christ in our lives, so that we would live it out. Make us a people of thanksgiving, encouragement, and prayer, so that you would make us a people of impact in our own personal lives, in our collective lives, and in our efforts as your church, desiring to reach out with the gospel and help more know and follow your son Jesus. It's it is in your name we pray. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

Thank you so much for joining us today at Sunrise Church. We hope this message encouraged you and blessed you. If one of the ways that you choose to worship with us here at Sunrise is by giving online, there's a link right here that you can follow and take you to that payment point. Everything that you donate helps not only go towards reaching people in the greater city area, but also all around the world. If you want to get further connected with person online, you can email this email right here and under my email. Thank you so much for donating.