All Things in Him: The Supremacy of Christ - Sermon 2nd November 2025

Good morning, Church. Our reading is Colossians 1, verses 15-20.

Colossians 1:15–20

The sun 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.

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.

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.

This is the word of the Lord. Morning, everyone.

Josephine prayed for Hillsong. Well, we do pray for Hillsong,

but not particularly for everything that happened.

But what happened this week is that my son posted a thing on his Instagram.

And sometimes I look at his Instagram and other times I don't.

But this time, Hillsong was packed

to the rafters. I didn't know it was Hillsong. I said, where's this?

He said, Thursday night. and Thursday night was a massive, massive,

massive young adults service that happened at Hills.

But Hillsong didn't organize it. It originally started at St.

Matt's Manly with 20 people, went to St. Faye Sanarrabeen with 50 people.

It went to somewhere on the Northern Beaches up a bit, I think. And that was kind of like.

Christchurch Knives, and that was, I think, about 500 people.

Then it went to St. Paul's Castle Hill, and they packed that out and couldn't

fit anyone else in. So the venue that they had to go to is Hillsong.

And so we're talking about this massive rise of young people,

young adult people, who are rising up in Sydney.

And why do we need to be in prayer for that? Because that's the next generation.

That's the next generation of leaders.

They are going to determine in 30 years' time what our church is going to look like,

and how exciting it is that it's not going to be based on consumerism,

based on anything other than a massive spiritual revival of what God is doing

in their life and in their world.

So be in prayer for all of that because it really matters.

It matters for us. If you think that that just happened out there Thursday night,

that will shape our church in 30 years' time. So be in prayer.

It's going to be a good morning this morning. We start our new mini-series on Colossians.

And maybe it's a mini-series because I leave in a few weeks' time and I could

have extended it out to be more, but it's just going to be a mini-series.

So we need to, first of all, take a look at, a brief look at,

brief, look at the background of the letter.

The Apostle Paul wrote the letter of Colossians. Did I say Corinthians?

Colossians to Colossae, which is a city in Asia. of modern Turkey kind of fits

within that, if you wanted to look at the map and look at where it might've been.

And the Colossian church was founded by a name called Epaphras,

a guy who was a convert under Paul's ministry and in Ephesus,

and he went there to Colossae to plant a church.

Paul had never been there. He writes to a church that he'd never visited before.

So he starts the letter by commenting on what Epaphras told him.

That's all he could gain about the church of Colossae because Epaphras told Paul.

However, even though the church was grounded in good teaching,

He wanted to confirm that good teaching, confirm about what the good things

that were happening and assure them of his support and prayer.

But he also needed to deal with something that they were facing,

challenges that they were facing, because there was some kind of division that

existed over the nature of Jesus.

Now, if you wanted to have a Scrabble word that no one, they'd probably look

up the dictionary and say, is this real? It's called Christology.

It's about the nature and the being of Jesus.

And historians called the division that existed in the Church of Colossae, the Colossian heresy.

Now you might think, oh, this is going a bit too far.

No one really knows exactly what the nature of the issues were,

except we kind of get a bit of a handle of it by what Paul is writing to about.

So what happened was that Paul converted, well, he didn't convert,

God converted Epaphras. He became a Christian.

Epaphras goes and plants the church in Colossae. He writes back,

yeah, it's going unreal. It's going unreal. But we've got a few problems here, Paul.

And Paul, so Paul says, I'm going to write a letter. And he writes back to the

church of Colossae and says, you're going unreal.

Your faith is going well. Epaphras is teaching you well, but there's some divisions

among you and I need to sort this out.

So if we do some reverse engineering of Paul's letter to the Colossians,

we can kind of get a bit of a handle on what the problem was,

what the mess was about the identity of Jesus.

So Paul writes to remind them of who Jesus is, the supremacy of Christ,

and to clarify what that all means.

Basically, the conclusion is going to be that Jesus is God, and he alone is

the answer to life's questions.

So you get it? Seems pretty simple, doesn't it? But nothing is really simple in life.

But we can understand who God is and how he works through this letter in the

Bible, and it makes it clear in the Bible who he is.

Now, with that in mind, we need to turn to the passage today.

And so if you have a Bible, you might like to look that up.

If you also have your QR code, well, then you can see the outline of the message this morning.

And before you think, here we go.

Here comes a theology lecture. David can do it. David Ray can do that for you. He's great at theology.

Let me tell you that this passage anchors the foundational truths of Jesus,

and that anchoring will shape your life, your everyday life.

It's not just about theology. It's not the theology so you can write an essay

on Christology, and they say, well, who is Jesus?

And you go, well, Jesus is God. and as we read all the great things that Paul brings out.

No, that anchors our life on how we live as Christians.

So first of all, let's look at verse 15. The Son is the invisible God,

the firstborn over all creation.

He is the creator, the creator of everything.

And everything was made through him and everything was made for him.

Jesus makes the invisible visible. The God who you cannot see, he makes known.

You don't have to guess what God is like. You meet God in his son,

Jesus, who is not merely the faint reflection of who God is. He is God.

Now, let me say, get this wrong and you're in trouble.

If you get this wrong like the Colossians did, it's not just something that

happens in the past. The Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and many others do not

believe that Jesus is the almighty God.

We're talking about Yahweh, the God.

We are Trinity at our core.

In other words, God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit,

all three, all one yet separate.

That's what we believe.

Later in Colossians, we read that all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form in Colossians 2.9.

And that's why when Philip asked Jesus back in John, we read this,

that the Lord, he said, Lord, show us the Father. And Jesus replied, what?

If you've seen the Father, you've seen me.

No, he said, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. That song,

God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit, the three in one persons.

And also that's the Apostles' Creed.

Declaring that we know Jesus, we know God.

So Christ stands in relation to God, the perfect image of God,

the invisible God we see in Jesus.

And he stands in relation to the world, Christ as the creator of everything.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

Now, firstborn also is the firstborn coming from the dead, we read in this passage.

So he's the firstborn over all creation, as in he's the only God that came to

this world in Jesus Christ, but he's also the only one who has ever risen from the dead.

The firstborn who has risen from the dead, as we are going to rise from the

dead, he is given the image of exactly the way things are going to be.

He's not part of creation, but he's supreme over it. The firstborn gets absolutely everything.

It gets the inheritance. He holds the rank over it. He is it.

And if there's any doubt on this, look at verse 16. He makes it very clear. Paul makes it clear.

For in him, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,

whether it comes from throne powers, rulers or authorities.

All things have been created through him and for him.

That's a powerful truth that Jesus

was not created or part of creation as John says the one that always was became

incarnate into this world or came into this world it's hard to get your head

around isn't it because everything that we see we know that there's creation of that.

It's hard to get your head around because at one point, we believe that everything

was created, everything was made, that everything had a beginning that,

as John points out, in the beginning,

not after the beginning, before the beginning, was the Word.

The Word was with God. The Word was God.

Everything that was in this world was made through the Word,

and this Word became flesh.

Who's the flesh? Jesus.

That's the whole Christmas message, isn't it? Emmanuel, God with us.

And humanity has been asking for centuries, how does this all work?

Who made us? Who made me? Why am I here?

And these verses assure you and I that we weren't made by chance,

that your life isn't just random. It didn't just come about.

You didn't just come into being. you were made by Jesus and for Jesus.

And that means your existence has purpose.

That means that you were created not just to go throughout the motions of life,

but you were made for Jesus to know him,

to walk in him, and find your purpose in him, in a world that pressures us to

find meaning and purpose in every other thing but him,

in our career, in our relationships, in our achievements, even in sports, in hobbies.

The truth is that you will find your ultimate purpose in life in Jesus.

Far beyond anything that this world could ever offer, your purpose is found

in him, your life, your breath, every moment you experience all comes from him.

And here's the thing, all comes for him.

So our purpose won't be what I can achieve in life. My purpose won't be what

I can achieve in material things or in my status or in the pleasures of my life.

My purpose will be found in what I am under God, who I am under God.

One thing stands out for me is that this truth will determine who I worship.

My purpose is to worship God, to glorify him, to give him glory.

We worship our Lord and our God, Jesus, and in him and him alone.

And if we get that wrong, we can stand within the Colossian church.

See, if your view of Jesus is not that he is supreme overall,

it's not that he created everything,

it's not that he is the one that guides my purpose in life, and that's the one

to whom we sing and that's the one to whom we dedicate our life to,

we'll do something different.

And the Colossians were tempted to pray and worship angels.

If your Christian religion is Mary and the saints, you'll worship them.

If you're into non-Christian religious gods and gurus, you'll worship them.

If it's New Age and angels and crystals, you'll worship them.

If you're into dark arts, then you'll worship demons. If you're an animist,

you will worship spirits.

If you're an atheist, you'll worship your own mind.

Can you see how important it is if Jesus is creator of all, who he is,

and if he is the Lord and supreme above all, then we worship him and we worship him alone.

He is not number one among many. He's it.

And because that Jesus is able to answer the big questions of life,

the questions that people have been asking from the beginning of time,

questions that your children will ask you, questions that young adults are pondering in their mind,

questions that you are pondering in your mind, if you're not a young adult.

Particularly in times of difficulty, what does it all mean? What is God doing in this world?

The answers are found in Christ and him alone.

But it's not only that Jesus created the world, he holds it all together,

holds everything in order, in its place.

We've all been there, right? Well, we've asked those questions,

who holds this all together? There have been moments in your life when probably

you felt like things are just falling to bits.

There's probably been moments in life where you're totally stressed out,

where your social life is a mess, where your relationships are a mess,

and you're maybe trying to keep all the balls juggling up in the air,

and you're just thinking they're all going to fall.

Maybe things feel like they're crashing down and burning all at once.

Financial pressures are mounting, and you're doing all that you can to keep all things afloat.

And you may even have that feeling that everything is too much.

Probably have experienced that sometime in your life, that everything's just

overwhelming and too much.

But here's the thing, in the middle of the chaos, Colossians 17 talks about

it and brings us into a much needed perspective.

He is before all things happened.

He's before any circumstances of our life that we're experiencing.

He's before any chaos has happened in this world because of sin coming into this world.

And he holds all things together.

The book of Hebrews says that he sustains all things by his powerful word.

The same one who brought everything into being every moment of the day is sustaining it.

He brings both the good and understands the bad in our life and fashions it,

creates it towards his purposes.

Remember, we are made by him, for him.

And Jesus is making all things in life, both good and bad, fit within his purposes.

In other words, when everything feels out of control, Jesus has control.

He holds it all together.

The world, your life, even the Wi-Fi signal in the middle of the endo.

None of these things happen by accident. Jesus is actively keeping them in motion.

It's not just fate. It's not just random chance that your heart is beating,

that you are alive in your world.

He is the one that makes it all function. Common saying today,

and it's very common, unfortunately, is the universe has your back.

Probably heard that before. Or maybe it's all about the vibes.

Well, it's comforting to know that those things don't matter at all,

that Jesus has your back.

He has it all functioning for you. Science can explain the mechanics of how

things work, but the Bible tells us a deeper truth of the why.

Why? For God's glory, for his purposes.

He holds it all together. The tiniest molecule in the whole of the universe, he holds it together.

We forget that and we can get overwhelmed.

We can get stressed out. We can feel like in some ways like we're drowning,

but we need to remember that Jesus is in control.

He is the one that is there. He's not some distant force out there.

He is making everything work just the way he's supposed to.

It's hard to do, isn't it? The temptation is to panic.

So here's a surfing application that you probably won't get unless you surfed, but that's fine.

When you're in places like Indonesia and you have waves that are just enormous

and you only have water that's probably only that deep, so two foot deep,

you learn very quickly, unless you want to get sliced to bits, to starfish.

So when you fall off, you do a belly buster and you get flat,

flat, flat, flat, flat, but you don't hit the roof.

And if you put your feet down and start scrambling, then you get sliced up.

If you put your hands down, you get sliced up. If you do this,

well, then you're going to get all the bottom of your hands sliced.

I got sliced because I forgot about it.

But then there's some breaks in Indonesia that are massively deep, very deep.

So we're talking about probably five foot deep.

That means that when the wave breaks, it swirls down under the water and you

get pushed down to the bottom of it and all of it's swirling on the top of you.

And if you try to crawl your way to the top, you'll just get mashed up in the swirl.

So you're taught, instead of starfishing, just to relax. Don't panic.

Eventually one day, the swirl will go by and you'll feel the release of the

water pushing you down and you'll start to come up to the top and then you can come up to the top.

There's a guy out called Deadmans, which is the other side of Manly,

who I know really well. And he showed me a video of him falling off.

And he was under the water for 45 seconds.

Try holding your breath with this swirl that's pushing you and pushing you and

pushing you. I said, you must have thought you're going to drown.

He goes, yeah. He goes, what are you doing? He sort of just relaxed.

I would have panicked. I panic. I think I'm under the water.

I've only been under the water for five seconds. And I think I've been under the water for 30.

How much does our life just push us down and push us down and push us down?

And we think to ourselves that it's our job to crawl to the surface, to crawl to the surface.

And we scramble up and there's all this pressure that's pushing us down.

And God's saying, relax, knowing that I created you and I sustain you and I'm

going to be with you every step of the way. Just relax.

And we need to learn that. It's a learned thing.

And there'll be times where we

try to scramble at the top and we find ourselves caught up in the swirl.

And there'll be other times where we actually learn that lesson.

And maybe we need to, like my friends tell me all the time, just relax.

A friend of mine, I was sitting there, I watched him come off a wave just recently.

And that was over in Indra, a place called HTs.

And I'm going, is he going to come up? He's going to come up?

And his board was what's called coffin, which means that the board,

he's down the bottom and his board's straight up because his leg ropes held.

And I'm going, he's under, and he popped up and he looked over to me because

I was on the boat and he looked over to me and we were so close and he said,

that was a long time. And then just paddled back out again.

We need to relearn to relax. And even if we sit there and say,

that was a long time, that's okay too.

He holds everything in motion.

Jesus created and holds all things together.

And then we have the next truth, which is number three, that Jesus is supreme over all things.

So he created everything, holds all things together. He's supreme over all things.

And that's one of the most powerful things that we ever can learn.

And Paul teaches us that in Colossians, that...

Jesus isn't just a figurehead or a nice religious idea that we follow on Sundays.

He's not just the head of the church or like some leader of a group.

He is the supreme ruler of everything, every part of creation.

Hebrews tells us that all things were placed under his feet.

All things he was given supreme authority over all, over every institution,

over every leader. and yes, he is supreme over you and me.

Now, if you had any doubts about that, Paul includes a fairly comprehensive

list. I think it covers everything in the universe, everything that's seen or

unseen, everything that's spiritual or not spiritual.

He brings everything, any kind of names, every aspect that you could ever think about under him.

We might give people roles. We might have a role within our family.

You might be CEO of a business. you might be the.

Founder of a company, you might be a politician, a president,

a prime minister, you might be a local minister.

But what's more important than any one of those roles is that Jesus is not in a hierarchical table.

It's not like, well, okay, you have CEOs, they have more control over Jesus

and Jesus fits somewhere in there.

There's no hierarchical table with Jesus.

He's it. everybody else, even if you're in a role of authority, sits underneath Jesus.

Us as a church, we sit underneath Jesus.

We have a council. They sit underneath Jesus.

And you being part of the congregation, sit underneath the superiority and authority of Jesus.

Look at verse 18. He is the head of the body, the church.

Head of the church is the beginning and the firstborn of monks dead so that

everything, in everything, he might have supremacy.

Does that mean for us? It means that Jesus just isn't in charge of the church

or some spiritual realm.

He's in charge of absolutely everything. All of creation, governments,

business, schools, sports, teams, families, everything fall under his authority.

Everything, whether it's visible or invisible, whether it's spiritual or not,

I think everything is always spiritual, but that's kind of what we get there.

It's all held together by him under his authority.

Now, if we get personal, we need to ask the question, and it's a hard question

to ask of yourself and be honest in your answer.

Do we live like Jesus is actually supreme of our lives?

As the song goes, I am who you say I am.

My life, my identity is who Jesus says I am, not me.

But that's often not how things play out, that Jesus is Lord.

Remember I quoted a verse last week in Romans 10.9, if you confess that Jesus is Lord.

Have supremacy over your life as he should, and if you believe that God raised

him from the dead, you'll be saved.

But if we're honest, we often let other things take first place.

We let our jobs take priority. If we get consumed by our pursuits of success,

we let our relationships or pleasure,

doing things or not doing things or if not the external things,

sometimes we have our internal thoughts that I'm boss, I make the rules,

I'm who I say I am.

And many things, and sometimes even other people, take over who is Lord of our

life. For example, if I think...

How much time and energy I give to my career or schoolwork or pleasure in life,

I can pretty much figure out who is Lord of my life.

Sometimes we spend more time in chasing after the promotion or grade than we

do thinking about our relationship with Jesus.

Or maybe we let the options of life and the decisions that we make dictate how

we live instead of letting Jesus define our worth and our purpose for him.

But ultimately, here's the truth. Jesus doesn't deserve a spot on the hierarchical table of our life.

He deserves the absolute seat of honor for everything that we do.

He's just not another option or a backup plan.

He is the one who created us, holding all things together and he is the only

one who deserves our full devotion in life and our full allegiance in life.

Not your career, not your social stats, not your own personal plan.

He deserves first place in everything. And when we get that right,

our life shifts, our perception changes, and we start to understand our place and purpose in life.

The thing, the last point, that will bring you peace.

No longer are you trying to strive and serve yourself and strive in a world

to try to find your place and try to find your identity amongst the mess,

but rather, as Colossians 9 and 20,

for God was pleased to have the

fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile all things to himself,

whether things on earth or things in heaven by making peace through his blood on the cross.

Jesus brings peace and life starts when we have peace with God.

And he enabled that peace with God to happen through the cross.

Through dying for us on the cross, we no longer are enemies,

but rather we are reconciled.

Reconciled is just not making, saying I'm sorry.

Reconciled is bringing things back to the place where it should be.

And the place where it should be is that Jesus is the top. We are under him.

He has authority and we find our purpose and pleasure in him.

Of course, we were created for him.

Colossians 1.22 as we finish.

But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present

you holy in his sight, without blemish and without accusation.

We're made whole. We stand before God as Christian people.

If you have accepted Jesus as your Savior, you have peace with him.

As you bring him as Lord, you have peace in your struggle with him.

So we stand before him completely blameless and free from accusation,

and that is the power of the gospel.

Jesus just doesn't forgive our sins. He transforms our identity and he makes all things new.

So the reality is this. There isn't a single area of your life that isn't affected

by the supremacy of Christ.

Your job, your family, your time, your relationships, they all belong to him. They all are under him.

So what you and I need to ask ourselves is whether or not we have made Jesus

first in our life. Are there any areas of our life where we're still holding

back and trying to control?

Maybe it's that control of our career. Maybe it's control of your finances.

Maybe it's control of your pleasure.

The good news is no matter how far though, we have wandered away and we will

wander away and we will find that difficult.

And there will be times where we put ourselves first or other people first or

the things of this life first. We haven't wandered away so far that we have

broken that relationship with Jesus.

We can come back to him. We can hold out our hand to him and grab his because

he is the answer to those questions.

And he offers us peace as a creator, as a sustainer, as the redeemer and the restorer.

He is the reason we're here and the reason why we should give our life to him only.

So here's my prayer for you and for me that we let him be first,

that we let him hold together all things in our life and we stop struggling

through the turbulence to reach the top, but we allow him to lift us up out of drowning,

so that we can be in peace with him.

Something that the Holy Spirit is starting and working within you,

the one who is empowering you toward change, the one who brings us peace that

passes all understanding of why that peace should ever exist in a world that's so chaotic.

Well, the reason why is because Jesus is all, in all, above all,

and you are created for him.

So when you are in him, which I think Chris is going to talk about in chapter

3, when you are in him, we find life in all that it should be. Let's pray.

Paul starts off by correcting this heresy that was going on about your identity

and being God and being the one who is over everything,

the one that has absolute authority, the one who's not one on a hierarchical

scale, but rather you are it.

And he corrects that, not from a theological perspective, because the Colossians

are living out a life for you.

And get that wrong and things get messed up. So I pray, Lord,

that we don't get it wrong.

And I pray, Lord, that if we do, and maybe when we do through our world,

that your Holy Spirit will remind us over and over again that you hold all things

together, that you are over all and that we have been created for you. So when our identity.

Struggle to find our identity in this world that we look to you and say,

you are telling us that we are a child of God.

We are loved by you. We are saved by you. We are restored by you.

We are sustained by you. We are transformed by you.

How awesome that is. So we give you thanks and praise that on the cross,

you enabled us to have a relationship with you.

So in that relationship we can have that conversation and your Holy Spirit can

talk to us and begin to transform our life.

We pray this in your name. Amen.