Christ, The Head And Hope Of The Church

Our text this morning is in Colossians chapter 1.

Colossians 1 · chapter mention

And if you've been following along with us from the beginning, my first Sunday here seven weeks ago, this is the book we've been studying together.

This little letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in a place called Colossae.

Even in that day, Colossae was not kind of what it once was, and maybe really wasn't that much to begin with.

It's kind of a small town.

We're kind of a small town, I guess, not as small as we used to be.

I know the big lament in Mount Washington is all those new people that have moved in.

Some of you may not know it, but to some other people, you're the new people that moved in.

They've been here 40 years, you've been here 20 years, and you're a new person, and now you're complaining about the people who just moved in five years ago.

So I guess we we just have to take what they give us, right?

And we're not as small as we used to be, but there are some similarities, I think, between Colossae and Mount Washington, or wherever you live, Bardstown or Taylorsville or Shepherdsville, or even that city to a little bit to the north of us.

We are in Colossians chapter 1, and this morning verses 18 through 22.

Colossians 1 · chapter mention

Follow along with me if you will.

And he, that is Christ, is the head of the body of the church.

He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he is now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.

This is God's word.

Well, in about a week, exactly a week from now, after church, I'll be getting on a plane to fly back to the state of Maine where we served the last 10 years.

And Monday morning I will start leading a mission group of folks from North Carolina there.

This is, as I've told you before, a prior commitment that I had already made and needed to fulfill.

And I'll be back in Maine and I'll have mixed feelings about being back in Maine.

I'll get to see some people that I love, some pastors and their families that I love and serve, help with some churches that I care about deeply.

But it will be painful as well because I will be reminded once again of the spiritual state of places like Maine.

Where somewhere between 3 and 5% of the population, by our best estimate, is saved.

3 to 5% of the population of the state of Maine are Christian.

And I don't know if you've seen any headless churches lately.

But all over Maine, there are churches that I would call headless.

They don't recognize the headship of Christ.

There are churches that don't read the Bible.

There are churches that encourage sinful lifestyles and tell the folks who are part of their congregation that those lifestyles are okay, things that the Bible speaks directly against.

That welcome speakers and leaders of other faiths and don't say, that's not the truth, this is the truth.

They say, no, no, come on, bring your truth.

It's all the same.

They teach about a God that is whatever you want him or her to be.

Your God is what you make of it.

Maybe you're God.

Maybe we're all God.

These are the things that they teach.

If He even exists, if God even exists.

We've got churches that gather together and they don't believe that God exists.

And I'm very hesitant to call them churches.

They meet in buildings that look like churches.

They have steeples that stretch up into the sky.

But I wouldn't even call them churches because they're headless.

They don't recognize the headship of Christ.

And I don't know if you've been around any headless people lately, but it's not really a good healthy state to be in.

Do we have anybody who's in the healthcare?

A nurse?

Doctor?

Work in healthcare?

Anybody?

Nobody?

A couple of you?

Yeah.

I'm just going to ask a silly question.

Cammy, can you live without a head?

Okay.

I thought that was the case, I was pretty sure, but I just wanted to confirm it.

Those churches in Maine and Kentucky and other places that are headless, they would teach that whatever you do is okay.

That whatever you believe is okay.

That your brand of truth is okay, no matter where you came up with it, if you just got it off of Reddit on the internet.

You know, it's okay.

Let me be clear, because that's not the sound bite that I want for this week.

Any of the things that I just said, please don't, you know, say our pastor said that.

No, let me be clear.

It's not okay.

It's not okay.

None of that is okay.

None of that is truth.

In these churches, you might hear that Jesus was good.

You might hear that his teachings are helpful.

You might even hear that he is divine.

But if you don't, you don't hear the full, gospel-soaked, life-saving truth about Christ.

And the reason why is because those churches don't believe like we do, that Christ is the very center of history and the very center of Christianity.

Of course he is.

This is something that we assume, all of us who gather together regularly in this building, of course he is the center, as this sermon series is called.

Christ is all.

He's everything to us.

But all over Maine and places like it, on village greens and white steepled halls, he is relegated to a lesser role when they imply that he is maybe a way, that he's part of the truth, that he's helpful to life.

Instead of what he says about himself, was that he is the way, the truth, the life.

If they talk about him at all.

I've walked into churches, whatever we would call them, the white buildings with the white steeples on the village greens.

I've walked into some of those places, set through a service, and we've had interns that did it.

One time I sent all my college interns out to go to churches like that and tell me what they found.

And some of them didn't even talk about Jesus at all.

They didn't read anything from the Bible at all.

Such churches are without a proper head.

And without a head, you're not alive.

They're without Christ.

Without the head, they don't know where they're going.

They don't know what to do.

A headless church that ignores Christ or makes little of him is not a living church any more than we would call a headless body a living person.

The appropriate response to that is grief, sorrow, that we would be sorrowful about those gatherings of people because they've lost their head, they've lost their way.

We can breathe here a moment.

We have not.

That he is the head of the body of Christ, the church.

And this metaphor is a really rich one.

It helps us to understand what our relationship with Christ is like and the incredible depth of meaning that he has for us.

You know, I'm preaching from down here this Sunday.

I had such a good time last week on our family day with the kids in here preaching from down here, and I liked it.

I said, I'm going to do that again.

Some of our kids are not in the building.

We do have some kids still in with us today.

But if the kids were in here, I would ask them, what do our heads contain?

What do our heads have in them?

I guess I could just ask Jacob.

He's right there.

I could ask Alina, but she's asleep, so sleeping in church.

I mean, what are you going to do?

What do our heads contain?

They contain all kinds of things, right?

Christ is all of those things and more.

He's the mind of the church.

He's the mind of the church.

1 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 16 says, Who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?

1 Corinthians 2:16

But we have the mind of Christ.

We wouldn't be able to think the things that we do.

We wouldn't be able to hope the things that we hope.

We wouldn't be able to imagine the things that are to come for us if we didn't have the mind of Christ.

Acts 2 says that in him we live and move and have our being.

Proverbs chapter 2, verse 6 says, For he is our wisdom.

Proverbs 2:6

The Lord gives us his wisdom.

He's the mind of the church.

I need these for my real eyes sometimes, right?

My wife says I don't actually ever wear them.

I just hold them.

I just like to do this with them.

This is my pointer.

Alright?

He's the eyes of the church.

Psalm 146 says the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.

We read in Scripture, He sees us clearly and He sees the path before us, even when we do not.

He opens our eyes to give understanding.

Ephesians 1 says, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of the glorious inheritance in the saints?

What is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believes?

We wouldn't see those things.

We wouldn't know those things if he wasn't the eyes of the church.

He's the ears of the church.

He is both the receiver and the translator of information from God the Father.

He hears our cries when we are breaking.

He intercepts our wordless groans we read in Scripture that He presents them perfectly to the Father.

Even when we don't know what to pray, He intercedes for us.

He cures our spiritual deafness so that the body can clearly hear what He would have us to do, that we can comprehend His word and understand who it is that He's called us to be, that we can obey the life-giving commands of our head.

Mark 4 says, if anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.

And how do we hear?

We don't even hear on our own.

He is the mouth of the church.

Before the church can speak for God, it must be spoken to by God.

Right?

We can't give proclamation until we receive revelation.

And thankfully, God has spoken to us by his word.

In ancient times, God spoke through prophets and dreams and signs, but the New Testament declares that Christ Himself is the ultimate, definitive word that God has spoken to the world and to his church.

Christ doesn't just have a message for us, he is the message for us, the ultimate mouth of God, revealing the Father's heart and character and truth perfectly.

I'll read it to you.

It's in Hebrews 1, great passage of scripture.

It says, Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, who He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the Word.

We could go on and on.

I mean the kids would, right?

The kids would go on and on.

They'd tell us little parts of our, they'd be like, He's the cheek, and I'd be like, I don't know what that means.

I'm not sure I can find that one in Scripture that Jesus is our cheek or something.

I don't know.

I'm sure they'd come up with all kinds of interesting metaphors that we then have to kind of shoehorn into different scriptures, right?

But I got a couple of more.

He's the jaw of the church.

He's our ready defense where we may have a glass jaw.

His is immovable.

On the cross, he took the ultimate knockout blow of God's wrath and judgment against sin, and he died and yet rose again.

He can take anything that's thrown at us, his people.

Any kind of sin or trouble or persecution or health problem that we might be facing will break upon the rocky jaw that is Christ.

He's the face of the church, for it's he that others will see in us long after we individuals are gone to be with him face to face, the church will remain.

And he will be visible, recognizable down through the ages until he returns and all see him in his fullness.

But beyond this great metaphor, and I think those are really helpful to us, beyond this metaphor, there's another meaning of this for us, because this word head also means Lord, leader, ruler, king.

Christ is our head.

Christ is our Lord.

He's our leader, he's our ruler, he's our king.

The New Testament writers teach that Jesus Christ is the only head of his church.

They tie that claim to the fact of Jesus' exaltation and his resurrection, ascension, and sitting at the right hand of the Father.

Let me be clear of this because there are churches around us that are confused about this.

The early church fathers aren't the head of the church.

They're not.

Apostle Paul, not the head of the church.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, not the head of the church.

Moses, not the head of the church.

Only one, Scripture declares, is the head of the church, and that's Jesus.

Having raised Jesus from the dead, the Father seated his son at his right hand and put all things, according to Ephesians 1, put all things under Jesus' feet and gave Jesus as head over all things to the church.

It doesn't get any plainer than that.

That's what Ephesians 1 tells us.

And that's what we see here in Colossians 1.

Before the risen Jesus commissioned his disciples, he told them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Matthew chapter 28, the beginning of what we call the Great Commission.

Matthew 28 · chapter mention

And Jesus was given this authority by God the Father at His exaltation.

Now, what does it mean that Jesus is the only head or leader or Lord of the church?

It means that he rules over his church by his word and by his spirit.

He's placed the Bible in the hands of the church through the apostles and the writers.

The Bible tells us what Christ would have us believe and how Christ would have us to live.

Jesus has also sent his spirit to indwell believers.

It's the Spirit's delight and commitment to equip believers, to walk in the paths that Christ has set for them in his word.

And then this isn't just a New Testament teaching.

We can look back to Isaiah 59 and lots of other places in the Old Testament and see the consistency of that teaching.

A particular provision of King Jesus to the church in his word is the church's government.

That he tells us how the church should be led by under-shepherds, human leaders.

But they're not the head of the church.

I'm not the head of the church.

I'm not even the head of this church.

Paul tells us that the ascended Jesus has supplied the church with pastors and teachers so the church might grow to maturity.

Christ has supplied the church with elders who, whether vocational or not, shepherd the church.

That's their job.

Both Acts and the letters of the New Testament help us to see how Jesus would have his elders govern the church.

Christ has provided his church a system of discipline that is you uniquely heard, uniquely heard.

By the way, if you have a problem with someone, you know what you're supposed to do with that person?

You're supposed to go to that person.

Don't go to anybody else first.

You go to that person first.

You don't go share a prayer request with somebody else about the problem that you have with that person.

That's called gossip.

You don't do that.

You go to that person, you try to make it right.

If you can't make it right, then you take one other person with you.

That's what the Bible tells us.

You take one other person with you, and you go to that person and you try to make it right.

If you can't make it right, then you bring it up before the church.

Now, whether that's before the entire congregation, that seems a little bit awkward, but I would say bring it, bring it to your elders.

We'll talk about it with you.

If you need to take it further than that, we'll bring it in front of the whole church.

We'll get this situation righted between two people that God loves and that are supposed to love each other, right?

That's the way it's supposed to happen.

God gave us that.

He taught us how to do this.

This is the system of governance that our head has set up for us and the system of how we're supposed to interact with one another, that He has given us this discipline, so that we can live as the people of God under the headship of Christ.

Why is the headship of Jesus Christ over his church important for the life of the church?

As Christians, it's both our duty and delight to live under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Since the church is the place where Christ's lordship is on unique display in the world, we are to be part of a local church.

Some of you this morning, you came to church for the first time ever.

Some of you have come back to church and you've been away for a while.

I don't think I need to remind you, you're here so you know God calls his people to be part of his church.

And yet today in America, according to Barner Research, there are more Christians, people who say, I'm a follower of Christ, who aren't a part of any church than there are Christians who are part of a church.

God's called you, if you are his people, to be part of the church.

And the local church is an expression of the church, that we're to gather together with other believers in the place that we live.

Well, I said that a church without Christ is not a living church any more than a person without a head is a living person, but the opposite is also true.

The church with Christ as the head is alive no matter their struggles, no matter what they're going through, no matter the hurt that they're going through, the size that they are, how many people they've lost over the last few years, or whether they're not as big as the church down the street, or whether they're singing old hymns and they've got a pipe organ or something and everybody's wearing three-piece suits, or whether they're all knocking around in the jeans and the pastor has a flannel shirt and a lip ring.

I mean, I'm not going to do that, don't worry.

But there are pastors out there who have that stuff.

They look a little silly, maybe, but you know, they do have some of that stuff, right?

But if Christ is the head, that church is alive.

It's a church, if Christ is the head.

Regardless of what it looks like or whether or not it's our flavor.

And so as we just really quickly walk through this passage together in the next couple of minutes, I just want to give you some in him, okay?

So if you're taking notes, in him, this is true.

In him, in Christ, our head, we are revived.

We're given life.

To have a head is to have life, to have no head is to not have life.

That's as much medical knowledge as I have.

But in Christ, we are revived.

He is our head.

And he is also our hope.

And that's what the rest of this passage we read this morning deals with.

He is our hope.

Why?

Why is our head also our hope?

Because he's the beginning.

That's what it says in the passage there.

He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead.

Right?

You see it there?

Looking at verse 18.

Head of the body of the church, he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead.

Did you know that you were dead?

There's a lot of talk about being dead this morning, but what with people losing their heads and all, right?

Did you know that you were dead, though?

That's what scripture says that we're spiritually dead, that we humanity collectively were dead, that before you were born you were dead.

Now I'm talking in the spiritual sense here, okay?

I'm not talking some of you are experts at these things, and you say, well, technically that's not how it works, and the embryo comes together and all that, right?

But I'm talking spiritually speaking, we as a people, we as humanity, we're dead in our sin.

Hardly seems fair, does it, to some of you?

Yet we're all sinners, we've all fallen short of God's glory.

This is the consequence of original sin, of Adam's sin, Adam and Eve in the gardens, consequence of their sin, and all of our sins yet to come.

Ephesians 2 says, You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us.

Even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you have been saved and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life.

Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who believes in, who lives and believes in me shall never die.

He asked his friend Martha one time, he said, Do you believe this?

And Martha's answer was, Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.

And he's coming alright, and has come and lived and died and rose again and ascended to the Father.

And so I would ask you this morning, do you believe this?

Because Jesus is the one who gives us life, spiritual life, in this world and the next.

Do you believe and know that you were dead in your sin?

Do you believe that?

And that through his death on the cross and resurrection from the grave, that Christ made you alive in him.

Do you believe this?

I don't want to assume that you believe this because you've been going to church for a long time.

Do you, as an individual, believe this to be true?

I hope that you do.

And if you do, then rejoice in him.

As the song said that we sang at the beginning of the service.

In him, not in your knowledge or your goodness or your traditions or in what you've done or seen, but in him, for he is the one, the only one, who gives us life.

He's our hope.

Not abstract concepts of faith, not grace, not works of Bible reading or church attendance or giving or wearing a cross or doing the right thing or loving well.

He is our hope.

Sometimes we put too much emphasis on the abstract ideas of faith and grace and those kind of things.

Like it, if I could just have more grace, like we could give grace to each other, like we'd have a pocket full of it, and it'd be a little powder, and you could just, you know, I don't know, put it in your mouth or something, or a stick of gum, and you could just chew it and get more grace.

Those are words that we use to understand what Christ has done for us, but let's be clear that our hope is in him.

It's in a person.

It's in a person.

And only one.

He doesn't just point to the way, he is the way.

He doesn't just speak the truth.

He is the truth.

He does not just give life, he is the life.

Again, I am the way, the truth, and the life, he said.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

But the opposite is true as well.

Those who do come to him come to the Father.

Right?

And have access to God our Father.

Why would he do this for us?

Look at verse 18.

Why would he do this for us?

That in everything he might be preeminent.

It's not a word we use very often, right?

He might be preeminent.

He might be supreme.

Right?

As we see on the screen there, the soul-satisfying supremacy of Jesus.

It's not that Jesus is an egomaniac, it's that this is the right way for the universe.

He is supreme.

Therefore, he wants to be acknowledged as supreme.

Anything else would be a lie.

If God said, I am anything less, or I want you to see me as anything less than the soul-satisfying supreme ruler of the universe, if he said, You can see me as anything less than that, you want to, that would be a lie.

God would be lying about himself.

He says, No, I want you to know the truth.

And the truth is that Christ is supreme.

He is all.

And so he's doing this in order that he might be preeminent, in order that we might see who he really is.

And seeing who he really is, that we might rejoice.

It's his to do this.

He's the only one who can.

Right?

The only one who can save us.

He's the hope, he's the only hope.

Just as the only head of his church, so he is the only hope of his church.

And he deserves to receive all the honor and the glory for it.

You can't give it to him.

God doesn't have a glory meter somewhere in heaven.

And as we sing, the louder we sing, it goes up.

Did any of you see what was the Christmas movie?

Is it Elf where Santa's sleigh runs on the thing?

Yeah, that's just a story, okay?

That's not real.

Did any of you think it was real?

Let's talk after the service if you thought Elf was real.

Okay.

Will Farrell doesn't live at the North Pole, okay?

I don't think.

Alright?

But that's not the way this works.

We can't give God glory.

God is glorious.

What we can do is we can recognize it.

We can see that.

Right?

The gospel is not a microscope to make Jesus' glory look bigger in our eyes.

The gospel is a telescope that we would be able to see clearly something that is far beyond anything we could even imagine.

His glory doesn't increase or decrease.

It was all his from the beginning.

He did it because it was his to do, and in doing it, he showed us his glory.

And here's another in him.

In him, God is radiant.

Radiant.

That means he glows.

That means we see the glory of God.

Right?

We get a sense of the glory of God.

There are worship songs that as I'm listening to them and the way that the words come together, I get a picture of the glory of God that I've never seen before.

In our prayer time this morning, some of the words of one of the men who was praying with us, just the word, the way he put those words together, I heard, saw, recognized the glory of God in a way that I hadn't seen it before.

God wants us to see him as he is.

He wants our eyes to be filled with the transcendent beauty of who he is in the same way that I delighted a little bit.

This morning as I was walking in, and the flowers, I don't know, what's that flower?

What's the one that's in bloom that's so nice and it's kind of speckled on the leaves, and it's just, I don't know, it's beautiful.

There you go.

Delight in that.

God wants us, in so much of a bigger scale.

God wants us to delight in the beauty of who he is, and so in the gospel, he is seen as radiant.

We praise him for it.

We worship him as he deserves worship from all of creation.

In him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

Verse 19.

All the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

In him, God is revealed.

God is not just radiant, we see the glory of God.

We see God revealed.

We see not only the radiance of his glory, the beauty of God, but we see his power, his love, his divine attributes and character through the person of Jesus Christ.

Hard to imagine what God, who is unseen, is like.

Much easier to understand the nature of God, the character of God, by reading in the Gospels the story of this man, Jesus, who is fully God and fully man, and fullness of God in the flesh.

Well, the last word this morning, the last R word this morning, those of you that are following along, you know I like to alliterate, so things start with the first word, do that a lot.

Last one this morning is the word reconciled, and it's in the passage in verse 20.

This is what it says.

Verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Well, the word reconciled is most famous for meaning restoring a relationship, like two friends making up.

It's also used, though, in contexts where something's been changed or altered or adjusted, so it matches up with a new reality or a new standard.

Let me give you a couple of examples here.

But first let me say this.

In normal life, if two parties are estranged with one another, they usually both have to change a little bit to meet in the middle.

But between humanity and God, God didn't change.

He changed our status and our hearts through Jesus to bring us into alignment with his perfect holiness.

The way that we use the word reconciled today can be helpful to see all that Christ has done for us.

For example, we talk of reconciling the books in one account.

Anyone an accountant?

Or have been an accountant?

Or reconciling your checkbooks.

You've heard that used that way.

Some of you who still have a checkbook, some of you don't even know what a checkbook is.

Young people.

But we might think of it this way: God's holy standard requires perfection, but our record was full of debt, sin.

And on the cross, this massive accounting adjustment happened.

Our debt was transferred to Jesus.

His perfect righteousness was credited to us.

Our status was completely changed so we could match God's righteous standard.

And we'll read about that when we get to Colossians chapter 2.

Colossians 2 · chapter mention

Here's another example.

In tech, I'm in dangerous territory for me here.

In tech, you upgrade your operating system, right?

Younger people that pay attention to this stuff, you upgrade your operating system.

Old data or software has to be completely restructured to fit a bit brand new system.

Tech guys nod at me if I'm getting this right.

Am I getting this right?

Left in the old format, it's incompatible, right?

Some of you have computers that are so old they won't run anything.

Right?

And you keep them around as paperweights.

So here's what that means.

Because of sin, human nature became fundamentally incompatible with a holy God.

We couldn't just be patched up.

We needed a complete system change.

And by dying on the cross and rising again, Jesus didn't just forgive our past.

He completely changed us to a new format by making us an entirely new creation.

Paul explains this in 2 Corinthians.

He says, if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation.

He's a new creation.

The old has passed away.

Behold, the new has come.

All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself.

Here's one more way that we use that word reconciled.

We use it in law, in the court system.

Now picture this.

Picture a judge and his own precious daughter comes before his bench and has committed a terrible crime.

Now, how would we reconcile a judge who must punish a criminal by law in order to be righteous, but who deeply loves the criminal and wants to spare them from the ultimate punishment?

The conflict seems impossible to solve without breaking the law or abandoning love.

So here's what it means for us: God is perfectly just, he must punish sin, and perfectly loving, in that he wants to save sinners.

The cross is where these two seemingly conflicting things are perfectly reconciled.

God didn't change his law and he didn't stop loving us.

Instead, Jesus took the punishment the law required, satisfying God's justice and demonstrating his ultimate love at the same time.

The conflict was entirely resolved and we were reconciled to him.

Last, the way we usually use the word reconciled, to reconcile yourself to someone means your internal attitude changes from hostility or resistance to peace and acceptance.

Here's how it relates.

Before the cross, the Bible describes us not just as mathematically incorrect or broken, but as active enemies of God in our minds and actions.

We were hostile to Him.

Through the cross, Jesus didn't just change God's disposition toward us, he changed our hearts, breaking our hostility, turning us into loved children who are at total peace with him.

And that's what we see here in Colossians 1, 21 and 22.

Let's read it together.

And you who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he is now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.

Reconciled in the Greek means changed or exchanged, and we are both of those things.

Christ is our hope because he was the only one who could substitute himself for us and die in our place for our sin.

He exchanged himself for us.

He exchanged himself for us and died in our place, so we could be changed to become children of God, so that our relationship with God might change and we might call him Father and enjoy him forever.

That we who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, as it says here, we who were rebellious against God and repulsive to God and revile by God because of our sin, because he is good, we were evil, but now he has reconciled us in his body of flesh by his death in order to present us holy and blameless and above reproach before him.

He has changed us, he has remade us, he has redeemed us, and we are reborn, born again to a new life in Christ.

Well, that's a lot, isn't it?

It's a lot.

A lot of doctrine.

You can see why I'm kind of going two, three, four verses at a time.

And not preaching four sermons, one on each chapter.

We'd leave a lot of stuff out, wouldn't we?

Even at that, this is long this morning, and some of you are fading away a little bit.

So let me just say this as we close.

We are redeemed and reborn and remade.

He didn't just clean us up or put a bit of spit and polish on us or disguise our ugliness.

He remade us.

He declared us good and holy and beautiful in Christ, and so we are.

So you are.

And yes, we still sin.

But he helps us in this.

He convicts us and guides us and shapes us until the day when we are restored to him fully, face to face.

And we end this exile, and we will see him.

Why has he done this?

He's done this before the Father's glory and because of his love for you.

And so, beloved ones, embrace your belovedness and own it.

Be glad in it.

Christ is our head and he is our hope.

Pray for places, for churches, where they don't know that that is true.

Where they don't acknowledge that that is true.

And let's worship God.

Pray with me.

Father God, I thank you for these truths.

I thank you that we see these truths throughout your word, that we know they are true because of the conviction of your Holy Spirit.

I thank you for Christ, our head and our hope.

I pray, God, that you would protect our church, that you would always be our head, that none of us, including me, would seek to usurp that role.

God, that we would be humble underneath your headship.

That we would be people who are not complaining about the state of the world around us, though we are aware of it, agree it, and pray for them.

But that we are people who are fundamentally just glad.

Just glad in you.

That you lead us and that you give us hope in yourself.

We love you, we worship you.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.