Listen as Gerald Bray speaks on the topic of person of Christ from Colossians 1:15–23. The following is an uncorrected transcript of the sermon.
Colossians chapter 1 and we’re looking at verses 15 to 23 this morning. In this passage the Apostle Paul starts off with what to us seems fairly normal thing to say, but what the Colossians must have been very struck by because he says that Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God.
Now think about this for a minute. The churches that the Apostle Paul ministered to contain two types of people. There were Jewish people who had become Christians, and then there were Gentiles, people who were not Jews, who had accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ. On these two groups of people, sometimes got along with each other and sometimes didn’t so well. One of the things that the Apostle Paul had to do was to persuade them that they were now one body in Christ, that they were Christians together, and that the Old had passed away and the new had come.
And this verse is a reminder to us of this in a rather curious way, because of course Jewish people knew all about the invisible God. They went around the Mediterranean world of their time, proud of themselves, because they worshipped a God who was the Lord of heaven and earth, and far above anything that the other nations knew about or worshipped. The Gentiles, on the other hand, had images, pictures, statues, and so on, to which they attributed varying degrees of divinity. And they built temples and put them in there and sort of offered sacrifices in front of them and so on. So for the Gentile people who’d become Christians, the idea of an image was perfectly normal. For the Jewish people, it was the invisible God that captured their minds and their attention. And here the Apostle Paul puts them together. He said, “Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God.” In other words, he is the invisible God who has come into the world, become a man, lived a human life, died a human death, risen from the dead again and gone up to heaven, where he pleads for us now, for our salvation.
So the two things are combined. You see, the idea that God is in heaven, God is invisible, God is above and beyond us on the one hand, but also the idea that God is present with us, that God is someone who speaks to us, that God is someone that we can relate to and know and see in our own lives. So these two things come together and the reconciliation, you might say, of Jew and Gentile, is also a reconciliation in this sense of heaven and earth. Jesus came into the world and Paul goes on to talk about this, to show us, first of all, that he is creator, and secondly, that he is the Redeemer. These two things belong together.
As the invisible God, as the one who was in eternity above and beyond all of us, he is the one who made everything that there is. This is what the Scriptures say. Through him everything was made that exists. His power as God is manifested in your existence. Now just think about that for a minute. You would not be here. I would not be here. would be here if it were not for his power. He is the one who has made us. He is the one who in his own mind formed us and then brought us into being. I mean, that in itself is an astonishing thing to imagine that the world and all its diversity, in all its complexity, and all its difficulty is something that was made by him. See, it’s made and governed by him.
Secondly, it’s as he preserves this world. The world, as we know it, is a world which is imperfect. It is a world which has gone wrong. It is a world in which people like you and me have done our best to destroy, to corrupt, and to ruin what we have been given. You see, human beings are not nice people. You know, whatever we touch, one way or another, goes bad sooner or later. You see, it can’t probably be otherwise. The minute you start to do what you see around you to deal with things around you, something or other, even if you produce something good, there will be an element of something bad as well. There’s always some waste left over, you know, something that has not gone totally right. And yet in spite of this, you see, in spite of all the things that have gone wrong in the world, the Creator is the one who has preserved it. He preserves it by his power. So that everything that happens in the world today happens because he permits it to happen, because his power lies behind it. See, if it was his desire, he could simply say, “That’s it, finished gone,” and all of us would suddenly disappear. I mean, he has the power to do this, but he doesn’t use his power in that way. He uses his power to preserve us, to preserve us as a world in spite of ourselves.
And then of course, Paul says, the reason for this is that he owns us. You see, he talks about these dominions and principalities and powers and so on that around all sort of great authorities who think that they have control over your life. That’s what being an authority is. You know, you have governments and you have parliaments and you have different policemen and all sorts of people like this who prance around in fancy uniforms or not, basically telling you what to do. You see, they have an authority over you. But above and beyond them, there is God, the Creator, who owns you. You see, you may think to yourself, “It’s my life, and I’m going to do it with it what I want.” But it’s not your life. You see, you may think that. You may act on that principle. But the only thing you can do with your own life, if you think that way, is ruin it. Whoever thought of it like this, you see, you can’t add to your life in any way. You can shorten it. You can cut it off. And people do. And people have lots of genius ways of shortening their lives. You know, one way or the other. It’s been like that since the beginning of time. You see, so you can make things worse, but you can’t make things better because you are not the owner of yourself. He is the owner of you. He is the creator. And it’s because of this. It’s because he owns you and me that our creator became our redeemer.
Think about this for a minute. You see, I’ve been teaching for many years in Alabama, which is not a fate I would wish on anyone, but nevertheless, it is– and of course, one of the things, as you know down there, is that there’s a legacy of slavery back in the past. And this causes a lot of problems, of course, dealing with one thing and another. But one of the things people don’t often realize about slavery is that slavery was actually in some ways better for the slaves than what came afterwards. Because when the slaves were liberated, I mean that sounds like a good idea. They were emancipated, they were let go. The next question is, let go for what? You see, they were just left there to make their own way in life. And of course they had no resources, they had no money, no land, nothing like that. And so, of course, their situation after they were liberated was in many ways worse than before. Now, I’m not advocating slavery, you know, or anything like that. Please don’t misunderstand me. But what I was saying is that people who owned slaves, you see, for better or for worse, however bad it was, it was in the interest of the slave owner to take care of the slave because that was an investment. You see, that was his property. Now we don’t have slaves anymore and we can be very thankful for that. But we have other things. We have things like cars, you know, and people take care of their cars. Is it in your interest to take care of your car? You have a house. It’s in your interest to take care of your house. You aren’t going to sit there and watch it fall down. Why not? Because it’s yours. Because what’s yours you want to take care of, you want to get the most out of. You see, you want to look after because you realize that it’s an investment. It’s something that you’ve given yourself to and it’s because you own it, you are going to look after it. It’s a very basic principle.
Now if God owns us, you see this is where I’m going with this, God owns us. God, it is in God’s interest to look after us, to take care of us because we are His. So what is He going to do with Paul? Well, He owns us. We are not what He wants us to be. You know, where the sort of the ruin, if you like, you know, that He’s bought this sort of old house that needs to be completely renovated and rebuilt, something like that. And he’s got to get down and start doing it. He’s got to get to work on us. Well, how are you going to do this? There are ways and ways of doing it.
And again, I have to take an experience from Alabama because this happened out. This is actually true what happened. The building that I teach in, work in, used to be student dormitories. And then they renovate it, you see, and they thought, “Well, we’ll renovate on the cheap.” They’re Christians, you see, so they will renovate on the cheap. Now, really, I mean, this is true. And so what they did was they took out the insides as much as possible, but they left the sort of shell of the building. You see like that. And then they rebuilt inside. So we had this lovely new building with all the sort of modern technological things and everything else. Okay. But of course we were in it about two weeks and the hurricanes came and what happened, well of course the roof leaked because the roof was from the old building. You see that was part of the shell that they had left. And so all these newfangled things that we had in the building were completely ruined because what a false were coming through the ceiling like this. We’re also sitting there and thinking, “God had the last laugh after all.” You see, because you think you’re saving money this way, you see, they were trying to do it on the cheap, do it the quick way, and you end up in the end. I wouldn’t say it was a worse situation than the beginning, but something which in a way was just as bad, you see, it had to be dealt with. Of course, what do they do? They take the roof off and put a new roof on Oh, no, that’s too expensive. So what they do is they patch up a little bit here and patch up a little bit there. And of course, you know exactly what happened. The next time it rained, the water came through somewhere else. And this was 1995. And in 2009, I can say to you, it’s still happening. There’s still discovering parts of the roof that haven’t actually been properly prepared. it’s still coming down.
Now, is this what God has done with you and me in our lives? No. You see, and we can be very grateful for this. You see, God in redeeming us did not simply start with who we are and patch up a little bit here and alter a little bit there, you know, changing the the the form and so on so that it was kind of modernized look good without dealing with the fundamental structural problem and the fundamental structural problem with you and me is that we have been cut off from our relationship with God because we are sinful human beings to be sinful is not the same thing as committing sins.
You see, you’re very careful here, because some people commit big sins, and some people commit little sins, and some people don’t really commit any sins because they don’t do anything. They just sit around. So I mean, how can you say they’re sinning? You hardly know that they’re alive half the time. You know, and all right, I’m not saying that’s your brother, but you know, or your sister, but you know what I mean. You see these people around and you do wonder what’s going on. Now, sinfulness is deeper than actual sins. It’s not so much what you do. It’s who you are in relationship with God. And if you are cut off from God, it doesn’t matter what you do. You can do something good, you can do something bad, you can do something big, you can do something small. It’s all tainted with sinfulness. You can’t do a whole lot of good things, hoping that you’re going to get closer to God. Because you’re going to find out the structure, you see, the building in which you live, your body is fundamentally unsound. and sin is going to creep back in somehow, however much you do to put it right. It won’t work that way. The only way to deal with this, as I keep telling my colleagues, is tear the whole thing down and start again. Just get rid of it completely and start all over again. And this, of course, is what the Redeemer came to do.
When Jesus, the Son of God, came into the world, He came to live our life, to die by becoming sin for you and me, to take the burden of your sin and my sin on himself, to die for us. In other words, to die, to put an end to the sinfulness of the life that we live. And in coming back from the dead, to show that this is what the new life in him is all about. You see, that we are united with him in his resurrection life. in the life that has put to death the sin which bothers us, the sin which destroys us, the sin to which we are subject in our everyday life, and united us to himself, given us, as we read earlier in the Scriptures, given us the righteousness of God, given us something you see which enables us to stand in the presence of God, something which we don’t have in ourselves, but which has been given to us by Him. This is what the Redeemer does.
Now the first thing, of course, in order to make this work. How does it work in your life? The first thing is you have to be united to Him. You have to be joined with Him. You can only be joined with Him if you believe in Him. If you trust Him, can’t, doesn’t work otherwise, you see. Because here we are talking about we being put in the right relationship with God. And it’s only when you are fitted in into the body of Christ, in the right way, that the power of God can get to work in your life, that the power of God can flow into your life. The Apostle Paul tells us this, you see in Romans, he talks about the tree, and he says, “You have been grafted into the tree. You’re like branches which have been taken from somewhere else, and you’ve been put into the tree, and it’s only when you’re grafted into the tree that the sap of the tree.” You see, the life of the tree starts flowing into the branch. See, it won’t happen otherwise. So the first thing, you see, the first thing that the Redeemer does is preach to us, tell us. You see, that we must believe in Him, we must be united with Him, we must be joined with Him in order to experience, in order to know in our lives the power of His redemption.
Secondly, of course, He has reconciled us to God because the branch of the tree which is grafted in, rather like a sort of body part, I suppose it’s been transplanted. It’s not guaranteed that this is going to take. You see it, but you can do the transplant. You can do the grafting of a tree and some, but you’ve got to wait to see whether it’s going to work. You see? So the reconciliation, you see, really only occurs, really only start working. When the blood starts flowing into the transplanted part, into you and me. You see, he has reconciled us by his blood. But only when this starts to work in your life. You see, are you really, truly, genuinely part of the body? But he has the power to do this. You see, this is part of his healing power. He can put us into that body of Christ, and that’s what he wants to do and what he does. And then perhaps, perhaps greatest of all in a way, he presents us to God, Paul says, holy and blameless.
Now I think that’s the hardest thing of all, because just look at yourself. I mean I look at myself, holy, blameless before God. How can this be? You see, how can I be changed from the being that I am. You see, into the person that God wants me to be only, of course, by His power at work in my life. You see, God can make of me. God can make of you something that you could never make of yourself. God can make of you something that you are not in yourself. You can’t do it because you aren’t like that to begin with. You may want to be, you may try very hard and so on, but it’s not going to work. You see, it won’t work unless and until he gets to work in you. It is his power. It is the power of the Creator who is the Redeemer, who owns you. who is working in you to make that power real and effective in your life. And what does it mean? It means making you like him, making you like him, making you holy, making you blameless in his sight. And this has absolutely nothing to do with you, has who you are, or what you are like. Because by yourself you are nothing.
You can’t make any claim to God saying God, you know, you’ve got to do this because I’m such a good person or whatever. You can’t do that. You see, it is because God has chosen to work this way in you and God can do this. God has the power to do this because you belong to Him. And then finally, what does the the Apostle Paul say, “How does this work out for us in our lives?” That’s what Jesus has done.
How does it affect us in everyday life? And he concludes this little passage by saying, “First of all, continue in faith. Continue in faith. If you have been grafted into the tree, if you have been transplanted into his body, then you’ve got to stay there. You’ve got to keep drawing on that relationship and recognize what the nature of that relationship is. He is the source of your life. You cannot have access to that unless you continue in faith, unless you continue in trust. If you say to yourself, “Well, I’m going to go back to my previous life for a while.” I’m going to detach myself from the tree for a bit just to see what’s really going on here or something, you will die because you will die because you will be cut off from the source of your life. Continuing in faith is continuing in life. You may say, “Oh, I would never do that.” But don’t be so sure that you wouldn’t.
You see, you see this all the time when people go to hospital and they come out and they give it the doctor sort of gives them a prescription or something and they’re told they have to take these pills or they have to do this or that or the other. And there’s a certain type of person who is always tempted to say, “Oh well, that’s what the doctor says, but I’m going to stop taking my medicine. I’m going to stop doing this.” And of course they think because everything’s been going fine, they’ve been taking the medicine and everything’s fine, they’re really okay. don’t need to keep on with this. And very often, as you know, they do this kind of thing. And whatever the problem was comes back to hit them again. And they realized they find out the hard way that the doctor who said they had to do this and do that wasn’t kidding, you know, wasn’t sort of playing around with them, wasn’t trying to take money away from them or anything like that. He was telling them the way to live. What they had to do, if they wanted to survive.
And this is our life as Christians. We are called to continue in faith by being connected to the body from which we draw our life. You see, don’t fool yourself into thinking. That because the branch that you are in the tree has lots of nice flowers and leaves on it, that you can go it alone, that you don’t have to do this, that you can cut yourself off. yourself off and those flowers and leaves will disappear overnight. You see, and you will be in a worse state than you were before. So continue in faith.
And then he says, “Don’t lose hope.” Now again, this is extremely important. You see, don’t lose hope. Hope is something that guides us as Christians. We walk by faith, but we walk by faith towards the hope which has been held out for us. And what is that hope? That hope is that you and I will live forever in heaven with Jesus Christ. That’s where we are going. Now some of us will take longer to get there than others and that’s fine. But in the eyes of God, you know, a day is as a thousand years, it’s no different to him. You see, you may think it’s a long time that you’ve got to wait, but in his eyes it’s nothing. And we need to be careful here because the way that the apostle puts it, he says, “Don’t lose hope.” You see, it’s easy to think that you’re going on, you’re living this life, you’re doing all the right thing, everything else, and you’re fine, but nothing seems to happen. Nothing seems to change. And you can get weary with well-doing, as it says in the Bible. You know, you can just get tired of this kind of thing and how much more do I have to do this, not much longer do I have to go. And we all go through these periods. I mean, everybody has times, you know, when you just get exhausted and when you need to relax and rest and so on. And it’s at times like that that we have to sort of draw ourselves back and we have to say, well, what’s the bigger picture? What’s the bigger picture? And the The bigger picture is that I have been called by God to live with Him in eternity. Now I may be taken through the valley of the shadow of death on the way to get there, but I fear no evil, says the Psalmist, because God is with me, guiding me and directing me until I reach the goal. We need to bear that in mind because you may be put through all kinds of trials. You may have all kinds of things that you have to suffer in this life on your way to get there. But the goal is always in sight. So don’t lose hope.
And finally, as he pointed out in his own life, that I am called to preach the gospel. I am called to preach to others that Christ has died for them. He doesn’t use the word love in this particular passage, but that’s basically what preaching the gospel is. Preaching the gospel is an act of love. It is the supreme act of love because it is sharing with others the answer to the problem in our lives. There is no greater love that you can show to another person than this. You see, than to tell them how to find eternal life. Because again, we are looking in the long term. I’m not saying you don’t do little things to help people out here and now.
But where are we going? What are we doing? What is the purpose of our life on earth? The purpose of our life is that we should be redeemed to live in heaven in eternity with our Creator, the image of the invisible God. And therefore to proclaim that message, to preach that message, to share that message with others is the supreme act of love that exists in our lives. It was to do this that the sun came into the world. He came not just to give us good teaching, not just to heal people, to perform miracles, but he came to die. He came to die so that you and I could live with him forever. See, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. That’s the heart of the message. That’s the heart of what the Apostle Paul is saying in this picture image that he draws here in Colossians. That’s what it means for Jesus to be the image of the invisible God. Love, The love of God at work in your life and in my life.
Let’s pray together, shall we?
Our Father has come into your presence this morning. We are, as always, aware that you have made us, that you own everything that we have and everything that we are. And Lord, I pray this morning that you would lead us more deeply into your life, that you would give us a deeper sense of your presence in our lives, and that in all that we do, that you would help us to continue in faith, not to lose hope, and to show your love, the love which led your son to his death on the cross, to all whom he meet. That together with them, we might come in due time into the fullness of that hope which you have set up before us, that we might glorify and praise and honor you around your throne in heaven. For Jesus’ name, sake we ask it. Amen.
