Why Jesus Is Supreme - Part B

If he is the pre-existing one, the creator of everything in the world, and also the sustainer of everything he made, if he is the originator of the church, then what place should he have in our lives?

First place. What place does Jesus have in your life? Today on Connect with Skip Heitzel, listen as Skip shares why it's so vital you understand and live out the truth that Jesus is supreme and deserving of first place in every aspect of your life. But first, we want to tell you about a special resource that's designed to help you find answers in scripture to the question, what is God's will for my life? We want to tell you about a powerful resource that will help you understand and follow God's will. It's Pastor Skip's eight message package, Discovering God's Will. You have the Spirit of God living in you and he will guide you, he says, with his eye. And do you realize God is more interested in guiding you than you are in being guided?

So as soon as you say, Lord, I want to take and be ruled by your peace and rooted in scripture and I want to honor your name, he's right there to direct your steps. Skip Heitzel's Discovering God's Will package includes message titles such as Guardrails to Knowing God's Will and Navigating Another Year as part of eight full length teachings by Skip. We'll send you this powerful resource as thanks for your gift to expand Connect with Skip Heitzel to reach more people in major US cities. So request your resource when you give and start to make your life count for God's kingdom. Just call 800-922-1888 or visit connectwithskip.com slash offer.

That's connectwithskip.com slash offer. Okay, we're in Colossians one today as Skip gets started. In this section, Paul mentions creation and that Jesus is the originator of that creation, all of creation in its enormity. Sometimes we think, you know, we're big and we're important and it's all about us and it really helps from time to time if you just get really into yourself and self-absorb for you to just, especially at night, walk outside and look up.

You don't even need a telescope, just look up and just kind of realize where you are and what you're looking at. Now that's big. That's big. Any of you remember the Dr. Seuss book Horton Hears a Who? So Horton Hears a Who.

Horton Hears a Who was a book put out by Dr. Seuss in 1954 and then made into a movie in 2008. The premise is Horton the elephant has this little flower and on the flower is a speck of dust and one day on the speck of dust he hears a tiny little voice yelling out to him and he discovers that on a speck of dust is a whole civilization that didn't even know that there's another being looking over and superintending this. That's us on the speck of dust. So we think our world is big. We live on the earth which is 96 million miles, 93 million miles away from the sun. The sun is pretty massive. It is 109 times the diameter of the earth and the sun, if you hollowed it out, if you could do that, could hold 1.39 million earths inside of it. That's pretty big. But then there's another star a little bit bigger than that. It's not even the biggest one called Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. It can hold 600 trillion earths inside of it and 446,000 suns inside of it. That's just two stars in our little galaxy of about a hundred or a hundred thousand million stars.

And then beyond that, the Hubble telescope has discovered that you have to count hundreds of billions of other galaxies, hundreds of billions of other galaxies. They were all created, all things created by Jesus. I don't know where you stand on creation. I don't know if you want to argue about when it happened and how it happened.

Go ahead and do that. But we can all agree that the originator of it all was the Lord Jesus Christ. He created all things. Now, I've discovered that people turn off to the gospel often right here when you mention creation. Because for most people living today, schooled in the secular society, they don't know schooled in the secular society. The idea of Darwinian evolution is a done deal. It's fact. It's science to them.

And so we are taught that in school. I am a creationist. I grew up in California public schools being taught evolution.

I did my own research. I came to believe pretty early on in my Christian walk that that isn't what it's cracked up to be. There's so many holes in the theory of evolution. It's still a theory. And I am a creationist. What's more, I believe that the earth was created by Jesus Christ in six literal days. So I just want to throw that out there.

What do you mean? I mean six literal days, not 60 million years, but in six literal days. That's what I believe. In fact, I don't even believe that it was like hard work on those six days. I think he kind of had it all done before breakfast with his feet up, kicking back like, that was fun.

Tomorrow would be even better. I mean, it was that easy. He just spoke it into existence. Now, I've also discovered that many of the greatest scientific minds, biologists, biochemists, researchers, have raised objections when it comes to evolution.

Let me throw up something on the screen here from Michael Denton, who is a molecular biologist from Australia, who said, and I quote, G'day, mate. No, he didn't say that. Well, he probably did, but not here. He said, evolutionary theory is still, as it was in Darwin's time, a highly speculative hypothesis, entirely without direct factual support, as some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe. What Denton shows, and many have shown this, is that Charles Darwin himself knew that he had a problem. The problem was in the fossil record. And he believed that in the study of paleontology, the fossil record, eventually, he didn't have the evidence when he proposed what he proposed, but he believed eventually enough time would pass that would vindicate him. And what has happened is, as time has passed, it hasn't vindicated him.

Actually, the evidence is against him. This is from David Ropp, the curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. He said, and I quote, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much.

We have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. Which begs the question, if that is true, why aren't they telling us that? If that is true, why do so many smart people believe in it? Well, one of the reasons, I think, is because they think you have to believe in it to be smart.

And if you doubt evolution, you then have to be open to the alternative, which is creationism, and that means accountability to whoever did it. And so I really, truly believe that there is, in the scientific community, I think a lot of them are guilty of Romans 1, suppressing the truth of God in unrighteousness. So Paul is saying, here's Jesus, ladies and gentlemen. He reveals God the Father perfectly, perfect image of God the Father.

You want to know what God's like? Look at Jesus. Oh, and by the way, Jesus Himself is the Creator. John 1 even says that He created all things, as Paul does here. Third reason, Jesus is supreme. He is the sustainer of the universe. Look at verse 17. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

Okay, let's take the first part. He's before all things. That means He's eternal.

That means He pre-existed. So go back as far as you want to go back. Go back 6,000 years. That's when some of you believe the earth was made, or 10,000 years. Others may think, no, I think it's a few million. Others will say, oh, no, it's 14 billion.

And the number of changes. Go back as far as you want and put your peg down, and Jesus will come out of eternity to meet you there. Because He pre-existed. He is eternal. Jesus is the only person who ever lived before He was born.

I just want you to think about that for a moment. Jesus was the only person who ever lived before He was born. Remember He's talking to the Pharisees, and they're arguing with Him, and Jesus is just sort of like not backing down. And so Jesus said, Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad. And they said, Abraham, you're not even 50 years old, and you've seen Abraham? Remember what Jesus said? Before Abraham was, I am.

Before Abraham was, I am. And you know what they did? They picked up stones to kill him, because they thought that's blasphemy.

You know what? It was blasphemy if he wasn't telling the truth. If he wasn't telling the truth, if he didn't pre-exist, then he should be stoned. Paul said he did pre-exist. He is before all things. Before Abraham was, I am. When John writes, and John was with Jesus three and a half years, in 1 John, he said, The one who existed from the beginning is the one that we have heard and seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled the word of life. He said in the gospel, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word.

That's the literal rendering. So never was there nothing, but once there was only one, and that was Jesus, and He began it all. He started it all. The universe had a beginning. It will have an ending.

You know, for years, decades ago, and then centuries, the prevailing cosmology was called the steady-state theory, the steady-state theory, also called uniformitarianism, and that is that they believed the universe was equal to God. The universe was eternal. It didn't have a beginning. It will never have an end. It's just going on and on and on. Well, we know that's not true, and there's so much evidence that says that's not true.

So here's an example. Our sun. The radiation that comes from the sun that benefits the earth is produced by loss.

Radiation is produced by the loss. That is, the sun loses part of its mass every single second. So every second, one, two, three, I don't know if I'm being accurate, four, five. Every second, the sun loses 4,200,000 tons of mass.

Every second. It's losing it, losing it, losing it. It recovers 1,200th of it.

So it doesn't recover much of it. What that means is, one day, the sun is going to burn out. Lights out. No more sun.

That's going to happen one day. Just like I mentioned Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse today is about a third of its brightness that are already making predictions when we're going to see its demise. So the sun one day is going to burn out. If the sun will have an ending, it must mean the sun had a beginning.

So it's not the steady state theory. There was a point in time when everything began, and at that point in time, Jesus Christ existed and was before all things, and He set it into motion. Now, let me get to the heart of this verse. So He is before all things as the Creator, and in Him, all things consist.

Better translation. All things cohere, stick together. All things are held together. So think of how big the universe is and the Milky Way galaxy and the constellations and the billions and hundreds of billions of other galaxies, and Jesus is perfectly choreographing everything.

And He's holding it all together. Jesus created the universe. He took chaos, unformed mass, and made cosmos, an ordered system, and then He holds it together. Now, one thing we know about all matter is that matter is made up of rapidly moving particles of opposite charges, right? We learned that early on in science. Rapidly moving particles of opposite charges. Karl Darrow, who was a physicist at Bell Laboratory, speaking of the physical nature of the atom, said this, you grasp what this implies? It implies that all the mass of nuclei have no right to be alive at all.

Indeed, they should have never been created, and if created, they should have blown up instantly. Yet, here they all are. Now, get this, some inflexible inhibition is holding them relentlessly together. The nature of the inhibition is also a secret, one thus far reserved by nature for herself. I know the secret. It's no secret to us. We know who's holding it all together.

He is before all things, and in Him all things cohere are held together. So what happens if one day He decides to do this? What happens? It's over. It lights out. It's over.

Curtains at that moment. Everything implodes, and one day He will. One day we'll all collapse. 2 Peter 2 verse 3, the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. Both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. If you want to know when that's going to happen, read the end of the book of Revelation, where He says, I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away.

The created order, the created universe, gets uncreated by the Creator, who is Jesus Christ. He holds it all together, and one day He'll let it all go. And when He does, and not until it's over, but until then, it's together. Now, if He does this with Betelgeuse and the sun and galaxies, hundreds of billions of galaxies, if He does that, if He holds it all together, don't you think He can hold you together?

I mean, really? I get you have a problem. I understand that cancer is pretty big, or that stroke is pretty hefty, but this is God we're dealing with here. He holds all things together, and He has promised to hold your life together. So, you know, we like to say to people and if they're kind of losing it, we say, hold yourself together. Better yet, let Him hold you together.

Let Him hold your life together, and He will. He is the sustainer of the universe. So, He's the revealer of the Father, the creator of the world, the sustainer of the universe. Number four, He is the director of the church. Verse 18, He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things, He should have the preeminence. All in favor of Jesus being the head of the church? Yeah, we didn't even need to vote for that.

We didn't even have to have a board meeting for that. He's the head. It means He's the source. Just like in the human body, the head controls the breathing, the moving, the feeling, the eating.

Every part is controlled by the head. He is the head. It says the beginning. It means the originator. He's the beginning, the originator. In other words, the church was His idea. It's not like Jesus said, well, I'm the Messiah and now I'm leaving. And then they got together and said, gosh, what should we do now?

I don't know. Let's organize it. We'll call it a church. Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

So He came up with the idea and He's doing a pretty good job of building His church around the world. Then it says, let's just kind of quickly finish this up, there's that word again, the firstborn from the dead. And this is why firstborn doesn't mean the very first, doesn't mean the very first, because there were other people that rose from the dead before Jesus rose from the dead. Lazarus rose from the dead before Jesus did. The boy of the widow of Nain got raised from the dead before Jesus did. In the Old Testament, three people got raised from the dead way before Jesus did. But it says He is the firstborn.

There's that word again, prototokos, first in supremacy, or the most important one to ever rise from the dead. You know why He's the most important one to rise from the dead? Because only His death and resurrection gives life. Only His death and resurrection gives salvation. All those other people got raised and died again.

There was no efficacy at all in their death and resurrection. So He is the firstborn over all creation. He is the firstborn from the dead. So He's the director of the church and then finally in verse 19, He is the possessor of the fullness. It pleased the Father that in Him all fullness should dwell. This is the icing on the cake.

This is the icing on the cake. The icing on the cake is that God the Father Himself said, I want Jesus my Son to have preeminence. In Him it pleases me that all fullness should dwell.

Fullness was a buzzword. Paul used it on purpose because the Gnostics used it all the time. Pleroma means they believed that God gave small doses of truth to different people and small doses of God was sort of divided up in these various emanations so that Jesus was a good start. He's the halfway house to God, but we'll show you how to have fullness, real fullness by our little rules and regulations. Paul is saying don't need your rules and regulations. Jesus Christ according to the pleasure of God the Father has all fullness dwelling in Him. So this is Paul's intentional slap down of these false teachers.

Look at the last part of verse 18. Let's just close with this thought, church, that on all things He may have the preeminence. Doesn't this make perfect sense? If He is the incarnate one, if He is God in human flesh, if as a person He perfectly reveals the Father, if He is the pre-existing One, the Creator of everything in the world and also the sustainer of everything He made, if He is the originator of the church, then what place should He have in our lives? First place, supreme. First place in our families, first place in our marriages, first place in our friendships, first place in our time management, first place on our vacations, first place in our vocations, first place in our intellectual pursuits, first place in our athletic activities, first place in what we watch on television, first place in what music we listen to, first place when no one's looking. First place.

Well, so this makes sense. He should have preeminence. Let Him have first place, always only Jesus. That concludes Skip Heitzig's message from the series Always Only Jesus. Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskipp.com. Right now, listen as Skip shares how you can connect more people around the world with the life-changing truth of scripture. As Christians, we have a calling, and that is to win souls for Jesus, even as we await our glorious future with Him in heaven. And so our goal is to come alongside friends like you to encourage you to keep sharing Christ with others as long as you have the chance to do so.

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