Above All: Reconciled Series

Above All: A Study in Colossians

Colossians 1:20-23

Pastor Jefferson M.Williams

Chenoa Baptist Church

05-01-2022

Reconciliation at Chili’s

Our first year of marriage was very difficult. We married at 24 years old. I was 24 going on 15 and Maxine was 24 going on 40. ?

About year in, we ended up in a fight over…going out to eat. This wasn’t just an argument. We weren’t speaking to each other.

Let me explain. I grew up going out to eat or eating fast food at home all the time! I was so sick of eating out. Maxine was an incredible cook and I wanted home cooked meals sitting at our table together. I would say, “If you loved me, you would cook.”

Maxine grew up in a single parent house and eating out was a luxury they just couldn’t afford. If they did go out to a sit down restaurant, it was because someone was paying. She would say, “If you loved me, you would take me out to dinner.”

We were at an impasse. We needed help.

I called a friend who was a marriage counselor and made an appointment. He listened patiently to both of us as we shared our feelings about this situation and then said he thought he had the solution.

He looked at me and smiled and said, “I want to to leave here right now and…take her out to dinner, you doofus!”

And I did. I and still do.

The dictionary defines the word reconcile as the act of restoring friendship or harmony, to settle or resolve.

What did Mark do? He helped to reconcile us. He made peace between two warring factions.

As a counselor, sometimes reconciliation is not possible. We say that the couple has irreconcilable differences. Think Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

I once had two junior high students in my office. They had been screaming at other in the hall of the church and, earlier that day, in the hall of the school. I asked them both if they loved Jesus and they both said they did. So I said, “Then for His sake, stop calling each other names in the halls at school and church.” They agreed. Not five minutes later, they were yelling at each other in the hall.

Abraham Lincoln was once asked how do you defeat an enemy. He famously answered, “You defeat your enemy by making him your friend.”

When Lincoln was assassinated, even those in the south mourned because they knew that he would have treated the southern states with more kindness and grace that Andrew Johnson would.

This morning, we are going to continue our study in Colossians by examining, what Skip Heitzig calls, the “greatest peace treaty ever written.”

Jesus is King

Last week, we studied the “Christ hymn of Colossians.”

“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  (Col 1:15-17)

From these verses, we learned that Jesus is King over Creation. He is the image of the invisible God and He is the creator, authority, sustainer, priority, agent, and aim of creation.

I saw a headline this week on Twitter, “The world was created by aliens in a lab.” This was the conclusion of Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb. We will learn that the mind hostile to God will do anything to avoid giving Him glory.

He is also the King of the Church.

And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. (Col 1:18)

He is the head and the source of the church, His body by virtue of His glorious resurrection.

Let me stop here and recommend a book to you that will help you better understand the beauty and majesty of the Church - Dustin Benge’s new book, “The Loveliest Place: The Beauty and Glory of the Church.”

He begins the book with a quote from Spurgeon:

“Nothing in the world is dearer to God’s heart than His church; therefore, being His, let us also belong to it, that by our prayers, our gifts, and our labors, we may support and strengthen it.”

Paul ends the hymn with the notion that we will pick up in today’s verses - reconciliation.

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Col 1:19-20)

Jesus reveals the Father to us and, by His death on the cross, He reconciled to God.