Christ

A reading from the letter of Paul to the Colossians.

Giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him, and 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, 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.

This is the word of the Lord, you may be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to church this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Was out last week with COVID and super thankful for Kyle stepping in and just, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, what a move, right?

Like here's some notes, go preach on a Saturday night.

Um he was right.

Never answer a call from your pastor on a Saturday night.

Uh that's a huge mistake.

But lesson learned.

He did wonderful, and I was so thankful uh to him for that.

Um that that passage last week is one uh it was actually the reason that I chose to preach through Colossians was that that particular prayer.

It's a prayer, a prayer that I I've probably prayed for you all, for our church, more than any other prayer.

And I was thinking, like that after I woke up from a three-hour nap and was like, I don't think I can preach tomorrow.

Um I would I I had this thought of, oh man, I really wanted to share this prayer with our church.

Then I thought, uh, somebody else can share it.

I'll just keep praying it.

And I think I think that'll be effective.

So uh let's begin and we'll pray this morning, then we'll get into our text for today.

Father, we pray that those of us that are gathered here today, Lord, that we might be filled with the knowledge of your will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, that we might learn to walk in a way that's worthy of you, that's fully pleasing to you, that we might bear fruit in every good work, and that we might increase in our knowledge of you.

Lord, I pray that we would be strengthened according to your glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy, Lord.

Pray that you would attend this time and you would show yourself to us in your word, and that we would come to know you more completely.

Teach us to know you, Lord, the one who sought us.

We praise you.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Today's passage of scripture is one of the highest hymns of praise for who Jesus is, perhaps in the entire uh corpus of the Bible.

It is uh unthinkably high descriptions of who Jesus, who Christ is.

It's as though Paul, in writing this, went to the Proverbs and he went to around Proverbs 8, where there's this beautiful description of wisdom and what wisdom is and how the world was created according to the wisdom of God.

And he took all of those attributes of the wisdom of God, and then he went into the glorious chapters of Isaiah where we hear these descriptions of who God is, and he took these descriptions of who God is and he put them together, and he said, All of these things that apply to God, we can sing as a hymn of praise to Christ.

And he's teaching us who Christ is by pulling all of these things together.

Now, earlier this week, um we as parents, you have these occasional things where you're reflecting on your parenting and you think, oh no, we're doing it up all upside down and backwards.

And we had one of those nights, uh, my wife and I, and it was here were the two triggers.

Um, JT, our little guy, uh he doesn't know how to swim, which means we're terrible parents.

And uh we were like, he need and he can't ride a bike without training wheels.

These are the evidence of it just we're terrible parents.

We've just been phoning it in.

So we had one of those nights where we were talking, and my wife and I went into a sort of a death spiral.

Anyway, got him a new bike this week.

And uh uh it was it's just the right size, and we went to like a play it again sports type of place and got him a new bike.

And uh on Friday morning, uh it took him and was like, yeah, I'm not feeling totally 100%.

Um, but let's get this guy riding without training wheels.

And it was like three pushes.

Uh, and he was riding.

You know, it was amazing.

It's like this, it just clicked.

Uh it had been, this isn't the first time that we've tried.

We had tried with his previous bike, and you know, there'd been a lot of high drama situations, a lot of me trying to describe to him like how to ride a bike.

And so I'm just saying things like balance, you know.

Turn when you lean into your turn, it's the it's just these words, and uh my five-year-old's like, this is not helping.

Like, there's this is not teaching me to learn how to ride a bike.

And then suddenly there's this like eureka moment where his body just kind of figures it out and learns how to ride a bike.

So here's what's weird about learning how to ride a bike.

None of the words that you say about how to ride a bike matter until you already know how to ride a bike.

You know, I can shout at him, balance, balance, and it doesn't mean anything.

And then now that he can ride a bike, he was coming to me and he was saying, isn't it interesting that you lean into the turn and you can lean when you ride a bike?

And now those words, now that he can, now that he knows it in his body, the words, the articulate meaning of what's taking place all of a sudden matters to him and he has learned it.

Now life is like learning how to ride a bike.

Because it's in the same way life presents itself to us as kind of like a problem.

Like when you can't ride a bike and the bike is just sitting there, and you know there's a world of potential in that thing, but I've got to figure out how to conform myself to it.

And so there's a bunch of people shouting at you, like, well, you you balance and uh get some momentum, you lean into your turns and you turn into, and sometimes to get a turn started, you've got to kind of go in the opposite direction and then go in this direction.

People are saying all those things to you, but they don't, they're meaningless.

That those words are not helpful.

It's in the participation with it, in the experience of it, even the embodied experience of it that we learn how to move forward.

And so there's this kind of simultaneous discovery with learning how to ride a bike.

And that's that's what the word eureka is, right?

We say we say eureka for a discovery, but we we kind of mean two things.

Like you picture the scientist in her lab and she's doing what scientists do, you know, beakers and flames and things.

And uh they're trying to figure out a problem.

She's she's wondering to herself, how am I going to piece this together?

And she's trying to figure out this problem.

And then all of a sudden, the idea comes to her and she says, Eureka.

Now, I want you to notice that's two things happening at once.

It's she's having an idea, so that's her having an idea, but she's also making a discovery.

So which is it?

Where did it where did it come from?

Did it come from outside of her?

It's a discovery, or did it come from inside of her?

It's an idea.

Well, it's it's both.

And it's simultaneously both.

Like learning how to ride a bike.

Learning how to ride a bike is at once, it's this uh idea, this conformity of your body to something, and then it's almost like you receive the ability.

Because how did JT, that's my son's name, how did he learn?

He he didn't sit and say, okay, now there's this, you know, centrivital force or whatever of the wheels that if I get them moving, then they'll turn.

And then it wasn't that he listed out these premises and then conclusion, I'm balancing on a bike with forward momentum.

That's not how he learned.

He he it was more like a eureka.

Like there was a discovery that at the same time found him.

There's a simultaneous finding.

The way to ride a bike finds him at the same moment that he finds it.

Eureka.

Eureka is actually a Greek word.

Uh and it's the uh perfect tense.

This is your I'm learning Greek.

You guys get to benefit as a church finally.

That uh uh i it it it conjugates to eureka when it's in the perfect tense, which means something that takes place in the past, but is having an immediate effect on the present.

That's what eureka means.

Today in Paul's passage, he has this unthinkable eureka moment.

That is, equal parts something that finds him, and that when it is found by him, he finds it.

And his eureka, the eureka of his whole life, is that Christ is the answer.

Now that's a bumper sticker.

Christ is the answer.

But here's Paul's thesis for the Colossians and my thesis for you this morning.

Christ is the answer.

And we're gonna flesh out what that could possibly mean.

But Christ himself really is the answer.

Christ is the answer, and he's a eureka in the sense that we discover him in his finding of us.

That's how we know him.

There's a eureka moment.

And we reflect back and say, who found who here?

Who rescued who?

That's an actual bumper sticker.

And not relevant.

That's not the point I'm making.

But there's this simultaneity of discovery, where how we find Jesus is in the recognition of him having found us.

That's the way true knowing always works.

Now, we begin to see how it is that we come to know Jesus and him knowing us first in recognizing that it is Christ who has qualified us.

And by being in Christ, we are qualified to know God.

And then secondly, we'll see, okay, in Christ, well, who is this Christ that we're talking about?

And we'll see that he is first our creator.

And then secondly, he is our re-creator.

And in understanding him in all of these categories that he presents to himself, to us, you will recognize that Christ is the answer.

It is not just like some pithy bumper sticker.

But this is this is the re-centering of your life.

All right.

So let's jump in and look at where Paul begins to express this eureka that Christ is the answer.

And he begins in an overflow of gratitude.

Now, don't you see how that makes sense?

If our discovery of Christ is simultaneous or or a response to the discovery God's own seeking of us, then our recognition of the knowledge of who Christ is would be in thankfulness.

And that's precisely where we are.

Paul moves out of this prayer for the Colossians, and it actually kind of stays within the prayer, and he's praying for them to be thankful.

And then Paul himself starts pouring forth his own gratitude towards Christ.

In Colossians 1, verse 12, it says this: giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

Colossians 1:12

So this is the first cause of praise that God the Father has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

Qualified, to be qualified.

It's a passive description of what happens to us.

You don't qualify yourself.

But our initial cause for thanksgiving is that we have been qualified to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

Now, what does that mean?

Share in the inheritance.

If you consider the way that an old household would have laid itself out, you'd see that when you are participating with your family's work, you're going out to work the farm that you live on, that you know that you will inherit one day, then you're working on, in a sense, something that already belongs to you.

This is the very way that we participate in the kingdom of heaven.

And this is the way that the promise was given to those in to the Israelites in the Old Testament, like we how we've been spending all this time for the past several years in Genesis looking at the promises given to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

They are promises for an inheritance, something that belongs to the Lord, that the Lord has promised to give them.

For them, it was a promise of the land of Canaan, and that they as a people would multiply to be able to inhabit and take part in the ownership and the dominion of the land of Canaan.

But Paul is taking that same language that you are heirs, and he's taking it out of the plane of just a particular plot of land, and he's saying you're the inheritance of the saints in light.

Like there's this there's this glory that's beyond imagination that we can participate in now as heirs and that will be ours one day.

And he's saying, so how are we qualified to share in this?

This is kingdom language.

This is Paul speaking like Jesus does about the kingdom of heaven.

And so we see how these promises lay themselves out throughout Scripture.

We see promises to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

We see the promises in the Exodus, we see the promises to David, who's promised he'll have an everlasting throne.

And then we remember the story continues on, and none of the promises are lived up to.

Because by the sin of the people, they never fully take the promised land.

When they inhabit it, they never fully embody their call to be a true priesthood.

The kings become decrepit and awful, and they end up exiled out of the land.

And so during this time of exile, the Israelites are looking back and they said, Well, we were promised the land, and now we don't have the land.

We were promised a priesthood, and now we don't have the temple.

We were promised a king, and now the throne, we were promised an everlasting throne, and now the throne is empty.

It looks like our sin has defeated the promises of God.

And this is what the major prophets are all about.

This is they're just a wrestling, an internal wrestling of Israel, wondering back and forth, what do the promises of God mean when they were supposed to be unshakable because they're God's promises, and yet they seem to have been conquered by our sin.

So what does this mean now?

And then, like sprouting this incredible mystery from nowhere, we get these further promises and further descriptions of the kingdom in Jeremiah and in Ezekiel.

And we see God promise a new covenant, a new covenant in which our very hearts would be changed, so that we would be able to live as though sin had not tainted us, so that the law that we couldn't conform ourselves to, our very hearts would be changed, so that the law was written on them.

Our sins would be forgiven and covered.

And that's where Paul's praise continues on as he describes us being qualified.

It says in verses 13 and 14, He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

So what is it that we're praising Christ for?

It's that He delivered us from this domain of darkness.

What is the domain of darkness?

You can't ride a bike, and you're staring at a bike.

It doesn't matter what anyone says to you.

They can teach you all, they can give you a textbook with all of the physics of why that bike will stand up, even though it doesn't seem to make any sense that it would.

And it doesn't matter what they tell you.

You are living in the domain of darkness.

This is what it means for us when we're outside of Christ.

We are in a domain, another kingdom.

The kingdom who is ruled by Satan, who is a deceiver.

So we are captured by these lies.

And then in our own sin we participate in his lies.

So that each of the ways that we try and bring ourselves into conformity with the world, the ways that we try and bring ourselves into conformity with the bike so that it would work, they're all these upside-down and backwards ways.

We'll pedal with our hands and steer with our feet, sort of things.

Instead of placing God at the top of the hierarchy of our lives, we'll place ourselves and our own satisfaction at the top of the hierarchy of our lives, and then we'll expect and discern that our lives will still work out and they'll go well, but we're not conformed to the pattern of the way that the world is.

We don't know it.

Life is like being surrounded by darkness.

We're in a domain of darkness ruled by our own wicked desires.

And because of that, we have no real knowledge of the world.

We have been transferred from that domain of darkness to the kingdom of his beloved son.

And what do we have there?

We have redemption, the forgiveness of sins, all of the ways in which our disordered desires have violated the laws of the laws of God have been forgiven by what Christ has done.

And so we are brought into a new pattern of living with this simultaneous discovery.

Because of what Christ has done, we have been qualified.

And listen to the language.

It says, In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Paul is so precise with his prepositions.

Those things where anything a squirrel can do to a tree.

Is that how you guys were taught those?

That's how I was taught what a preposition is.

It can be on a screen, a tree, it can be by a tree.

Say by whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He could have, but that's not what he says.

He says, in whom.

He's describing to us this way in which we're relating to Christ.

He's saying you are in Christ.

So here's another way to say it.

We can put it in our modern language.

Your identity has become Christ's identity.

So that means that all of the promises that were meant for Israel that they didn't fulfill are yours, and Christ has fulfilled them.

Who is this Christ that we are in?

How do we understand this Christ whom we are in?

This is what this hymn of praise that overflows out of Paul becomes.

Understanding Christ as the creator and then as our re-creator.

Listen to who this Christ is that we are in.

He begins in 15 through 16.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

Okay, this language is so so outrageous.

We we just need to slow down and try and settle in here.

He is the image of the invisible God.

Okay.

Invisible.

What does that mean?

Image.

What does that mean?

Right.

So Paul is doing this thing where he's like, here's two, let's begin with a wonderful contradiction.

I'm just going to, I can only describe this, I can only describe Christ to you paradoxically.

And so I'm going to give you these two things, and then when you try and hold them together, if you get it, they will snap you up to a new level of consideration.

This is the way that understanding Christ is.

Okay, I need a new category.

The firstborn of creation.

He's the firstborn of creation.

Okay, wait a minute.

So he is creation.

But he's he's prior to it in this other sense.

That's a helpful noise.

We see in this pattern.

Alright, come on, get a muffler.

We see all right, let's let's just keep let's just keep going into this.

So he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

Why?

Why do we say this firstborn of all creation?

Well, in verses 16 and 17, for by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

And he is before all things.

And in him all things hold together.

Do you see what I mean when I'm saying Christ is the answer?

Let's just walk walk through these a bit.

For by him all things were created.

Okay, all things.

Can we put some that's good enough.

He could have stopped there, because that covers everything.

But let's look, what do we mean?

In heaven and on earth.

So those things which are heavenly and glorious, and those things which come up from the dirt.

We could think about this in like a thousand different layers.

We could say it's both the ideas and they're actualizing.

Things that are visible and invisible, things that are visible like fingernails, and things that are invisible, like love.

These were all created by him.

And then we can look at, okay, all of the powers in the world.

And the world is made up of so many powers: thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities.

Let's talk about these at every level we can imagine.

The angelic powers that are guiding the rise and decline of nations, the political powers that guide the rise and decline of nations, the economic powers that guide the rise and decline.

And then at every level of authority that we might think of beyond that, from the household to the tribe to the village, to the town, to the city, to the state, to the nation, all of those authorities are his.

He is the one who is over all of those.

All things were created through him and for him.

Okay, so all things were created through Christ, which means that by what does that mean?

Through him, he's the means of existence.

And he's the purpose of existence.

They are for him.

And he is before all things.

So he's the purpose, what all things are heading to, and he's before all things.

He's the first things.

And in him all things hold together.

So the so the the eternal past, the eternal future, this present moment, these are all of for, through, to Christ.

Jesus.

Now what is the absurdity of this?

Christ Jesus became a man.

When we say Christ is the answer, let's step back.

Let's consider this in a different way.

This is one of those things where if you aim right at it, you miss it, but if you kind of come in through a back door, you can see it.

Life, as we've talked about, presents itself to us in questions.

And you know this because you wake up in the morning and you're like, I'm hungry.

That's a question.

Your body says, hungry.

And then you think, okay, fridge or cupboard.

Fridge tastes better, more work.

Cupboard tastes worse, quicker.

And so you go to the cupboard and you grab like a RX bar.

We have those in our house sometimes.

Never satisfying.

Always efficient.

And as you answer those questions, these questions, that life just you just wake up and you're just surrounded by questions.

Isn't that weird?

That that's the way life presents itself to us in questions and answers.

Now, if we scale these up, you might consider later in the day, oh man, I'm hungry again.

That's a ripoff.

I already ate.

And then it sparks another question.

Will I ever be satisfied?

And then you can see these questions could scale up into these just existential behemoths.

Will I ever be satisfied?

Am I just going to be eating again and again?

Is there any hope in the world?

Is there any hope for a person like me?

Why am I always choosing the wrong things to eat?

And you can, of course, apply that all over your life.

And then you get to why am I even eating?

What's the purpose?

What's the purpose of existence?

What upholds existence?

Is anyone in control?

Is this from anything?

Is this headed towards anything?

Can the answers to these questions even be known?

Am I the type of thing that could even know the answers to questions like this?

And then you could imagine what type of content would satisfy the answers to any of those questions?

What would the answer to any of those questions?

What is the meaning of life?

Is there truth?

Is there a purpose to any of this?

You know, this is the existential breakdown of a protein bar that we all have to face.

Well, we can imagine a couple of ways.

A couple of ways that we might imagine that the answers to these questions might present themselves.

Maybe you're more mathematically oriented, and you stuck with these questions in terms of like a physics problem.

And so you're working through the answers.

Okay, there are some fundamental laws of existence that if we're able to describe mathematically and repeatably, then we'll be able to know what the answers to the meaning of life and the structures that a polled existence are.

So maybe it's a it's theoretical in that sense.

That could be what the content of the answers to these questions are like.

And so somebody would present it to you.

You know, what uh we'll we'll see who's a sci-fi fan.

What is the meaning of life?

Yeah, exactly.

It's not particularly satisfying.

So maybe it's not like that.

Maybe it's not so purely theoretical.

Maybe it's something like wisdom or a proverb, like a sentence or a phrase that could be written down, perhaps a paragraph even.

And if we wrestle enough, then we'll be able to articulate it and we we'll be able to say to one another what the meaning of life is, what the purpose of existence is.

We'll be able to put it into words.

Say, here's what the meaning of life is, here's what the purpose is.

Or maybe it's not so direct in our ability to articulate it.

Maybe we have to kind of circle around it a bit in order to get a shape or an impression.

And so it's not something that we would just directly say the meaning of life is blank.

Maybe it's something that we would we would need like poetry or music to describe.

And maybe maybe it really was the Grateful Dead.

Like if we just stuck around, they finally would have found the sound and we would have heard it and been like, that's it.

We found the sound.

This was this is where the meaning is.

Maybe that's the way it could work.

Or perhaps it's completely inarticulate or sort of beyond sensory.

Maybe it's like in the secular world, it's like a psychedelic experience.

And so it's something that's just experiential.

Or in the church world, we'd say maybe it's just like a liturgical experience.

You bring your bodies through these particular patterns, and then you develop this internal sense of meaning for what truth is, what what reality is, what the meaning of life really is.

Do you see all of the possible answers to these questions?

What we would imagine the content of them being?

And then do you see that the great eureka of Paul's life is that Christ is the answer.

Do you see the category shift in this?

The answer is a man, a person.

The answer to these questions is a person, Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

This is the outrageous claim of Christianity.

And it shifts the whole way we would go about knowing and trying to understand the answers to these questions that would plague us otherwise.

And becoming a Christian is this eureka where you see that the one who found me was a man, a person like me who made himself me, and then you found him when he found you.

And that was meaning.

That's the eureka moment.

Consider how this shifts our questions.

What is the, we would get the most brilliant minds, you know, that we could find, and we'd say, what is the meaning of life?

What is truth?

What is justice?

What is our hope?

What is the purpose of existence?

And then Jesus walks in and he says, it's not a what?

It's a who.

Do you sense?

I know that there's probably not a lot of grasping going on in the room right now.

But I hope there's a lot of smelling.

Like this is different.

This is different.

The way that we've tried to approach these things, what I'm hoping for us is a type of conversion that says truth is a person.

And so how do we know it?

We know it like we know a person.

And so we've got to shift the way that our whole minds and experiences, and the way that we think of where truth really is as a Christian, part of that shift is saying truth is a person.

And I know him because he showed himself to me.

Leslie Nubigan says this, but there is another kind of knowing, which in many languages is designated by a different word, unfortunately, not our own.

It is the kind of knowing that we seek in our relations with other people.

In this kind of knowing, we are not in full control.

We may ask questions, but we must also answer the questions put by the other.

We can only come to know others in the measure in which they are willing to share.

The resulting knowledge is not simply our own achievement, it is also the gift of others.

How do we know what meaning is?

How do we know what hope is, what our purpose is?

We know because Christ has given us himself as the gift.

He's given himself to us so that we can know him.

That's why all of the knowledge of the meaning of life has to pour out from gratitude to Christ, the one who sought you.

This is the basis of the world that we live in.

And so our our world of darkness that tries to explain anything outside of Christ, the category mistakes that they're making are so absurd that they're it's impossible to make sense of the world that way.

Because our meaning has shown himself to us in a who, in a person.

And so, how do we relate to the truth?

We don't relate to it objectively, like we're gathering a bunch of facts and data and then drawing conclusions from them impersonally.

No, we relate to it like a friend.

And so, what is our conformity to truth?

Why is it that the way that we're in Christ is by faith?

Because faith is the way that you relate to a person.

You experience a person by their faithfulness to you and your faithfulness to them.

You extend trust and you walk together, and then you know each other.

This is what discipleship is.

We're plumbing the depths of existence by getting to know who Christ is.

And we know him because he gave himself to us as a gift.

And that's the way all knowing is.

All knowing of anything.

Because it's a gift and a discovery.

So we need to see that our darkness that we're trapped in is not like a lack of skill or a lack of looking under the right rock to find the answers to these brutal questions.

It's more like a divorce.

It's more like we could have known the one who is the answer.

And we betrayed him.

Well, what is our hope?

Our hope is that he would reconcile himself to us.

Oh man, don't you see?

Isn't this just is it isn't this the cry of your heart?

Like, doesn't I know that it's strange because our minds have been trained to not think this way and to not think of the fundamentals of reality as personal.

But doesn't it make so much intuitive sense to you that the answers to these questions would be a person?

Because what else can you know?

In Christ, God, our Father, got that.

And it was his good pleasure to make us know him.

So what did he do?

He took on flesh.

So that this one who is the firstborn of all creation, the text continues, and he is the head of the body, the church.

He is the beginning, not just the firstborn from creation, the firstborn from the dead.

What does that mean?

It means he entered our death so that we might be raised with him into new life.

That's how we're qualified.

He qualifies us that in everything, it's funny how he doesn't say in everything he might be preeminent at the description of creation.

He says in everything he might be preeminent at his description of redemption.

Isn't that amazing?

Now, why is that amazing?

Great question.

Because that means he's saying, I'm going to be preeminent over these rebellious sinners, in rescuing us to him.

He gathers everything to himself, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

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

Verse twenty.

And through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

This is the reconciliation of the divorce.

This is Christ united himself to us so that we could know him.

And here's the crazy thing Christ is the answer.

This is the Eureka moment.

This is the conversion.

This is what it means to have your heart transformed by who Christ is.

Imagine if it had said Christ has the answer.

Think how different that is.

Christ has the answer.

Okay, what's the answer?

It's 42.

Or you've got to come on tour with me for a year because you'll know it when you feel it.

Or Christ has the answer.

Here, read this paragraph.

It's transcendent and incredible, and you'll finally get the answer then.

No, he is the answer.

And how does he reveal?

How do we know him or learn him?

Is it by our dogged pursuit?

No, it's by his dogged pursuit.

He is the one who qualifies us, who found us, who clothed himself as a man so that we might know him, so that he could die on our behalf.

And so our knowing God, our understanding who Christ is, is always a pouring forth of gratitude for what he has done for us and how he continues to reveal himself to us.

This is the Christian life.

This is the absurdity of the eureka moment of what the Christian life is.

Christ is the answer.

This man who was born and lived in the same world that we live in now and then was crucified, he was the center of the world, the center of existence, upholding, before, to, from, through, anything a squirrel can do to a tree.

That is Christ the man.

So how do you know him?

How does your life become transformed by him?

Well, it's not by learning principles, it's by knowing him.

And he has spoken to us in his word.

He has given us his spirit so that we might know him.

He has given us lives full of complex problems where we can obey him and know him.

We can become people who this is, don't you understand?

Why would the center of our faith be faith, hope, and love?

Why would that be the center of existence?

Because that's the way you relate to a person.

By faith, you trust him.

You you you know how hard that is?

You ever tried to trust a person?

But isn't that the most human thing you can do?

I want you to be thrilled by this recognition.

I I want the phrase Christ is the answer to have meaning to you.

Because how else can you face the the problem of life?

The constant questions that it's throwing at you.

This world of disappointments.

If that if Christ is the answer doesn't have meaning, it doesn't have content, if there's not, if that's not a person who you can draw close to, you need to have a person that you can draw close to who is ultimate in meaning.

Christ is the answer.

Christ is the answer.

All right, there's probably a lot of loose ends that need to be tied up.

Approaching a text like this, I feel like I there's something here that I can just barely smell and I can't grasp, and it's bigger than me.

And I want us to begin seeing it together.

I want that phrase, Christ is the answer to mean to mean something to you.

Jesus Himself.

Just consider whatever whatever question you could consider.

He's the answer.

Come to him.

He seeks you.

Okay.

Are there any questions?

Some groups use verse 15 as proof that Jesus is a created being.

How should we respond to this when they come to our front door?

Do they?

That's kind of cool.

I wish people I wish I had more like evangelists or whatever come to my front door.

Um Christ as a the Trinity is the Trinity is a very strange thing.

Uh if it means three in one.

Now we have this other doctrine in Christianity, which is that God is simple.

And simple means he has no parts or passions.

Everything, another phrase that might help is uh everything that is in God is God.

So God presents himself to us and gives us these ways to relate to him by presenting himself to us in our own language.

So when he says, love comes forth from me, we know that love is kind of like a way that we experience God.

And so and we can use love truthfully to describe something that is in him.

But another way that it could be said accurately is God is God, because everything that is in him is him.

And then we have the then he teaches us to talk about himself as three persons.

And persons are incomiserable.

You can't make two people uh one person.

They're these incomiserable things.

But that's why we have the doctrine of the Trinity, which is their three in oneness.

How do you answer them?

I mean, the the doctrine of the Trinity is not something I can give to them and say, hey, this is utterly reasonable.

You could you kind of have to be found by it and recognize that this is this is the only possible thing that makes sense of the type of world that we live in.

Because if at the heart of the world was absolute unity with no diversity, then there'd be no help, hope of a loving relationship that didn't just collapse into itself.

That's like the Hindu picture of existence.

That we are all particles in our disparateness, the diversity is the problem.

So we resolve that problem by collapsing into an absolute unity.

We dissolve into one ocean.

So that's great, you get unity, but there's no diversity.

So there's no actual personhood in that.

Or we dissolve it the other way, which is there's only diversity at the heart.

And this is more of a scientific perspective.

There's a collapse into absolute meaninglessness and chaos.

We get an image of the universe that's just drifting further and further apart at a faster and faster rate until there will be complete chaos and discord that amounts to nothing meaningful.

So that's one way if you put diversity at the center.

But Christianity, by a stroke of miracle and by the incarnation, says there is unity and diversity at the center of existence.

And so that means that we maintain our personhood while experiencing uh actual relationship.

And don't you see that that's what a healthy relationship is?

That's what love is.

That's what love is.

This is why love is the basis of existence.

It's because when I love someone, I don't try and dissolve them into me.

I love them as themselves so that I uphold their own identity.

Do you see that?

You see, an unhealthy relationship is the scientific perspective, which would lead to the dissolution and you just dissolve and you're distanced from one another.

And the other unhealthy relationship is like the Hindu perspective, where you just become enmeshed and dissolved into this one terrible, codependent, disgusting mess.

You can tell which one I've had more experience with.

But then the opposite is love.

You are yourself and you're upheld.

And you uphold the other.

I'd say something like that if they came to my door.

I'm missed a week of preaching.

Let's take communion and pray.

Paul wrote, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Our Lord revealed himself to us as a gift by giving himself to us so that we might be redeemed by him.

We can know him like we know a person, because he unites himself to us.

Let's participate in that with our communion today.

Holy Father, we pray that you would attend this time, that you would give a you would blow apart our minds and help us to gaze upon the mystery of who you are.

You have made yourself so utterly knowable to a person like us, to persons like us, because you made yourself a person.

You united us to yourself relationally, by uniting all things to you, by making peace by the blood of your cross.

Lord, let us celebrate your blood this morning.

You did not have to do that.

You do not need us.

Lord, we need you and we praise you for your love towards us.

Might we know you in our gratitude to you.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.