First Place in Everything

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. He's not just an important chapter in the story of my life. Jesus is the book in which all the other chapters are written. He's not one on a list of priorities because he is first and because he went first. He's the page on which every other priority that I've ever had in my life is written. Jesus exists in a class all by himself.

Here's my question for you in this season. Does Jesus hold that position in your life? Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vinovich, and we are so glad that you're back with us today as we kick off a new teaching series in the book of Colossians. In this important epistle, Paul makes it clear that Jesus is not just a character in God's story. He's actually the author of the story. He's before all things. He's above all things. He's first in all things. In light of who Jesus is, Pastor J.D.

asks one simple but revolutionary question. Is Jesus just important to you or is he truly first in your life? Let's join Pastor J.D.

Greer for this first message he titled First Place in Everything. We are starting a series today through the book of Colossians called First. First, I chose Colossians because Paul's point in this great short little letter is that it ain't about you and it ain't about me.

It's true. Jesus has done a lot of things for us more than anybody else has ever done for us. But still, even after all he's done for us, it still ain't about us. Colossians chapter one, if you got your Bible and I hope you brought it, that is where we're going to be. Colossians 1 15 through 20 is the passage we'll be looking at today.

We're just going to work our way through this great short little letter. A few things that you ought to know about the letter itself. First, we know that it was written during one of Paul's many imprisonments. Paul spent extensive amounts of time in prison.

Most of his adult life was in prison because he refused to shut up about the fact that Jesus was Lord and about the fact that he had risen from the dead. Second, we know that Paul had never actually met the Colossians. A buddy of his named Epaphras had planted the church in Colossae and Epaphras had shared with Paul a few things about the church that concerned Paul. And so Paul was writing this letter to a group of people he had never met to address the concerns that he had about them.

Thirdly, it's a really straightforward letter. The apostle seems to have two primary concerns in mind. He is concerned, number one, because the believers in Colossae by his judgment seem to have been influenced by the culture around them in a way that has warped their understanding of God. Secondly, he is addressing in this letter their concern about why he is always in prison. Why, they wondered, why if Paul really was the messenger of God? Why was he always in prison? Why wasn't God protecting him?

Why wasn't God delivering him? So Paul is writing this letter to explain to them why he was willing to suffer and to sacrifice for the gospel and why they should be as well. The city of Colossae where the church of Colossians were was a very fascinating place.

It's a prosperous city tucked into a valley in the middle of modern day Turkey. It was part of the Roman empire and so it was heavily influenced by Roman culture. So when it came to religion, Rome, I've explained to you, had basically two rules for religion. Rule number one is you can worship whatever God you want.

We don't care. Worship the spaghetti monster in the sky. Worship Tryon. Worship Jesus.

It doesn't matter to us. The only rule, number two, you worship any God you want. Number two is just don't say your God is the only God. Don't say your God is the best God. Don't say your God is the supreme God.

Because if you say that your God is the best God, then you're probably going to think that you're the best people and you're going to want to rule everybody. You're going to want to be in charge. And clearly we here in Rome, we are the ones that are in charge. So as with many Roman cities of the day, Colossae was filled with literally hundreds of temples and shrines to hundreds and thousands of gods.

And the general mood in the city was, hey, hey, you know what? We've got a lot of options here. Find the God that works for you.

Even better, why don't you put together your own little, little combo from the smorgasbord of gods here we have in Colossae and just find one that works for you and satisfies all of your needs. It's what we now call a build a bear theology, where you assemble the deity that makes you feel the best. Well, you see the culture of Colossae that existed around them, it had infiltrated the church. And so the believers in Jesus there in Colossae had a lot of other rituals that they added to their faith in Jesus to ensure for themselves peace and prosperity. Think of it like a Jesus and mentality. They never outright rejected Jesus.

They just thought that to their faith in Jesus, they would add other rituals, other beliefs, other practices they thought they thought would guarantee for them or supply for them whatever they thought was lacking in Jesus. So here is what Paul says in response to this Jesus and mentality. Colossians one, verse 15. He, Jesus, is the image of the invisible God. He is the firstborn over all creation, for everything was created by him in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him. Now, stop for a minute and just ask yourself, what does that actually mean?

What does that mean? Doesn't it mean that Jesus is God? Because God is the only uncreated thing, right? God's the only uncreated thing. And if Jesus created literally everything that has been created and Jesus was himself created, that would mean that Jesus would have had to have created himself and that would be impossible. So therefore he must be God. You follow the logic of that?

Do I need to slow that down and do that again? The only uncreated thing is God, fair, right? Well, if Jesus created everything that was created and Jesus was himself created, that would mean that Jesus would have had to have created himself and that would be impossible. Therefore Jesus has to be the uncreated God, right?

You follow that? That's what Paul is saying there. In no uncertain terms, Jesus is God. In fact, scholars point out that the text of Colossians one is very similar to what we find in Genesis one, because Paul is trying to show you that the creator work at force in Genesis one, when God said, let there be light, that word, that voice that was speaking was Jesus himself. That word firstborn there in that first verse there, that sometimes throws people off because you're like firstborn, that sounds like the first thing that God created was Jesus. But that's not what the word firstborn means there. They think of it like Charis is my firstborn. That means that she is the first human that Veronica and I created. In 2002, she did not exist.

In 2003, she did. And they think, well, Jesus was the first thing God created. But firstborn in Greek, it can mean a couple of different things.

And one of the things it can mean is position. In fact, the Greek word that we translate firstborn is where we get our word prototype. What Paul was saying is that Jesus is the prototype of creation. He is the template on which all of creation was made.

And he is the purpose for which the creation itself exists. In a few verses, Paul is gonna say that Jesus is also the firstborn of the dead. Now, if you know your Bible, you're like, wait a minute, was Jesus the first one that was resurrected from the dead? No, Lazarus was resurrected from the dead. Lots of other people were resurrected from the dead in the Old Testament. So why would you say Jesus is the firstborn of the dead? Well, it's because he's the prototype of us who are raised from the dead. All of us who are raised from the dead are going to follow in the pattern of Jesus. He is the prototype of creation. He's the prototype of the resurrection. Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, a lot of other people in our society teach that Jesus was a great man. He was a great moral teacher, maybe even a great prophet. But they react strongly, sometimes violently, when you say that Jesus is God. You wanna know why?

Here's why. Because there is something inherently threatening about Jesus being divine. If Jesus was a created being, even if he was a super strong, super wise being, then you could look at him as a dispenser of good moral advice that you can just put alongside the other great religious leaders. And you can try to take from him some things that are valuable to your life, and you can put together this smorgasbord of a religious package that works for you. But if Jesus is God, if Jesus is the creator of everything and the purpose for which they were created, then the rules are altogether different. That means that he is the center of everything, and everything else is measured by him. Listen to me. According to Paul, you were created by Jesus for Jesus.

You don't let that sink in for a minute. My kids and I were discussing this the other night in our family devotions, because we were going through this passage. Then I asked him, I was like, were you created by mom and dad? Were you created for mom and dad? Is it mom and dad's purposes that are the most important thing in your life? Were you created for a job? Was I created for the summit church? No, I was created by Jesus for Jesus, which means my primary purpose is to know him, to discover his will, and then to live it out.

And what that also means is that I will never actually be satisfied regardless of how successful or how prosperous I am in any area of my life until I am in right relationship with him and discovering and living out his will. Because see, he is before all things. He's before all things, including this lot. He's before all things, and by him, all things hold together. You know, last year I read this book that explained that many physicists are still baffled, still confused as to how the nucleus of the atom holds together.

Now, let me be very clear. I am not a physicist. I am certainly not a nuclear physicist, but this book explained, it's a really smart book written for people of mediocre intelligence like me. And it explained that the nucleus of the atom holds what? Neutrons and protons, right?

Neutrons have no charge, protons have a positive charge. And when you put positively charged things together, they should drive themselves apart. Like when you put two positive magnets together, it drives them apart. And so literally the nucleus of every atom should be driving itself apart and unraveling creation. But there is something, they say, something we don't quite know what it is that holds the positive charges together and holds them together. And we don't know what to call it. So the only name they have for it is the stronger force.

That's what they call it. The stronger force that holds it together. Now, let me be very clear. I am not trying to say to you, I'm not trying to say to you that it is the naked hand of God that holds the atom together. I've seen some physicists speculate that, but I'm not saying that. Maybe God has built into the quarks or the gluons or the electrons or whatever else is in there. Maybe he's built in some natural force that overcomes the electromagnetic forces.

And one day we'll figure that out. But my point is, is that some incredibly strong force holds literally the nucleus of every atom together, even when it looks to us like the nucleus should fly apart. In the same way, Paul says, God holds all of history and he holds your life together, keeping it from unraveling. He sustains creation.

He holds it together, keeping natural forces from destroying everything. He is also, Paul says, the head of the body, the head of the church. He's the beginning. He's the first born from the dead.

There it is. So that he might, here's your phrase, come to have the first place in, say church, everything, everything. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him. Everything, the fullness of God, everything that God was, Jesus was. The fullness dwell in him and through him, through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, that was shed on the cross.

Here is my short summation of Paul's logic in these five verses. First, Jesus is first. He's the creator of everything, the template on which they are made and the one for whom they were made. The point is that Jesus is not one of many beautiful things that God created.

He's the creating force and purpose behind them all. Secondly, Paul says, Jesus went first. Jesus is first. Jesus went first. Now this God, Paul says, pursued a relationship with us. When we weren't looking for him, when we had betrayed him and rejected him, he chased us to a bloody cross where he voluntarily was humiliated and tortured for us. In any other story, how would this have happened? I mean, God who created everything with a word, Paul says, literally could have wiped the slate clean and spoke it all back into existence and been none the poorer for it. That God, after we had humiliated and spurned and rejected him, instead of doing that, that God chose to enter into history and redeem us even at the cost of his humiliation and his pain and his death. That is Paul's like, I don't understand that.

He is first and then he went first. When I was 19 years old, I took a class by a guy named Charles Ryrie. Now that name may not mean a lot to some of you, but he was like the most famous theologian in the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote all kinds of theology books that I still have in my library. In fact, the most famous study Bible of the 80s and 90s was the Ryrie Study Bible. Some of you still have that Bible. By the way, in Christian author world, when you get your name on a Bible, that's varsity, okay?

So he had the most popular study Bible. When I took this class from him, he was older than dirt. I mean, he was like, I felt like he was 190 years old or something like that. And he sat up there real, I mean, just, I mean, it was like, I was like, this might be his last class. And so I'm sitting there, I mean, really, you know, and so I'm sitting there and, and he gets to this part, he's going through the Gospel of Matthew and he comes to this part where Jesus begins to go toward the cross. And all of a sudden he just sort of locks up and you could look up there and I could see his throat.

You could see his throat kind of like, you know, kind of buckled up. And then you see these tears start coming out of his eyes. And I remember this theologian who, as far as I was concerned, had heard Jesus utter the words of the great commission. You know, he, this theologian looks out at us and he just says, God dying for man, who could possibly understand this?

And then he just moved on and went on to the next thing. And here I'm at the most incredible theological mind of our generation that is just looking at this saying, who could understand this? Jesus is first. Then Jesus went first and he pursued us. Paul says, therefore we should put Jesus first in our lives. That kind of God can never be one on a list of gods. He can never be one on a list of priorities in your life. Jesus sought me when a stranger wandering from the fold of God.

He to rescue me from danger, interpose his precious blood. That means that he's not just an important chapter in the story of my life. Jesus is the book in which all the other chapters are written. He's not one on a list of priorities because he is first and because he went first.

He's the page on which every other priority that I've ever had in my life is written. Jesus exists in a class all by himself. In fact, later in the first century, actually toward the beginning of the second century, there's a famous story about one of the Roman emperors that had decided that the Christians had gotten so numerous, there were so many of them, no use trying to stamp them out anymore.

So he tried to make peace. And he said, okay, I'll let you Christians exist and whatever, but we're going to put a statue of Jesus in the Pantheon. Now you know the Pantheon was that thing in Rome where they had statues to all the Greek gods and all the Roman gods. And so you got to imagine there's first Christians, right?

They're a rag tag group of, you know, they got no money, started in the backwoods Israel by a bunch of fishermen with no education. Now the Roman emperor knows who they are. And the Roman emperor is inviting them to put a statue of Jesus in the Pantheon. How do you think they reacted? You think like, whoa, are you kidding me? Man, look at us.

Look how far we've come. One of our guys in Congress, one of our guys up there in the Pantheon. Now the story goes that they sent a letter back to the emperor and said, you will not put a statue of Jesus in the Pantheon. If you do put a statue of Jesus in the Pantheon, we will tear it down.

And if you put it back up, we will tear it down again. And as long as there are any of us still alive, there will never be a statue of Jesus in the Pantheon because right on the top of the Pantheon is a little symbol that says Caesar is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And that position is the one that is occupied by Jesus. He will never be one of your many gods. Jesus is above all of them. He is the source of all of them. He is not one among many.

He is the only one. Now what Paul is trying to say is that what is true in their theology, what is true in their theology should also be true in their lives. That he might be, that he might come to have the first place in, say it church, everything. He got to have the first place in everything. Jesus is not somebody that you just put on a list of priorities. He's not somebody that's just important to you. He is the list himself. He is everything.

He's in a class all by himself. I think about this sometimes analogous to how I think about my wife. I've never gone to my wife and said, hey, sweetheart, just want you to know on my list of women, you're really important. You're number one on my list of women. Now someone showed down at the office, she's number two and this other person, she's number three. Of course not. My wife would tear that list up and say, I ain't going to be on no list.

I'm either the only one on this list or I'm not going to be there at all. Well, see, if that's true in my relationship with my wife, how much more so with Jesus, the son of God, who is my creator and the reason for whom I was created. He's why I exist. You were created by him and for him. That means he can never merely be an important commitment in your life.

He's got to be first. Some translations say preeminent. I love the word preeminent. It's an old fashioned word, King James version.

That's how I memorize the verse. It means he's the foundation. He's the center. He's the point. He's the trajectory. He's all of it.

Here's my question for you in this season. Does Jesus hold that position in your life or is he simply one of your many priorities? In other words, is Jesus important to you or is he first? I know he's important to you. That's why you're here.

That's why you come to church. I know he is important to you. Is he important to you or is Jesus first?

16 years ago at this church, there was a group of people, 300 of us that said, Jesus, that his mission is going to be first. It's not just important to us. It's not just important to us. It's going to be first and best in our lives. And like I said, that was expressed in two primary ways. We'll do whatever it takes to accomplish his mission.

That'll be first. And then we will do whatever he tells us to do. But like I explained, here's what happens when churches like ours get big and settled, so to speak, we experience a natural inertia.

We move from mission to maintenance and we go from being reckless in the mission to being comfortable in the institution. I saw a chart recently that really, really disturbed me when I think about our church in light of it. Somebody shared it with me about another movement and they said, it's the difference in the first generation and the second generation of a movement.

This is true whether you're looking in the Bible or whether you're looking all the way through history. First generation and second generation. I've edited the chart a little bit, but here it is.

Let me walk you through it. I want you to think about first generation, second generation. The first generation, their attitude is we'll do whatever it takes. The second generation says, I'll only do what I'm asked to do and only if I've asked really nicely and only if it's really convenient for me and my family. The first generation assumes personal responsibility for the mission. The second generation assumes somebody else will do it.

I mean, there's 11,000 of us here. Somebody else will take care of that. Why aren't they taking care of it? What are we paying these people for? The first generation expects personal sacrifice. They come in believing that's what it is. The second generation expects personal comfort. The first generation sees problems and innovate solutions. The second generation sees problems and complaints. First generation sees possibilities and dreams about what could be. The second generation sees barriers and reasons to quit. First generation hears the voice of God firsthand and they own the vision. The second generation inherits the vision second hand and questions every decision.

Why didn't you do that? And this one doesn't work for me and it'll work for my family. I'm going somewhere else. First generation steps out with bold, reckless faith in God. The second generation sits satisfied in the stability of the institution. The first generation feels privileged to be a part of the movement. Second generation feels entitled to the benefits of the institution.

Here is the question. Which of those two lists better describe you? It's not about you and it's not about me. A needed reminder from Pastor J.D. Greer today on Summit Life. So, J.D., this new teaching series first, it reminds us that Jesus is first in all things and should be in our lives and our new resource sort of does the same thing, right? Yeah, you know, Molly, in the Book of Colossians, which we're studying, the Apostle Paul makes it clear that Jesus is not merely one thing on a list of priorities. He's not just one character in God's story.

He's the author of the story. He is the priority list. He is the ground and the foundation of every other priority.

So, in this series, we are asking one simple, but I would say revolutionary question. Is Jesus merely important to you or is He truly first for you? And, Molly, one of the ways that you can apply this concept of Jesus being first in your life is to learn to put Him in that core part of your heart that produces the emotions that we've been looking at over the last few weeks.

Anger, shame, depression, things like that. When Jesus is truly first, then He's going to be the one that is ruling your heart and helping you navigate those emotions and even change some of them by thinking differently. And so, we're providing this resource, Smoke from a Fire, that will help you press into not only some relevant scriptures on the emotions, but that will also give you diagnostic tools to understand your own heart better and how these scriptures apply to what's going on in your heart. Let's meet these difficult emotions with the concept of putting Jesus first.

You can get yours today, as always, at jdgrier.com. Thank you, JD. No matter what we are dealing with, we bring our desperation to God. We will always find Him eager to listen, step in, and provide comfort and peace in the midst of our difficulties. We usually blame our lack of time with God on a lack of discipline, and we try to fix it by making resolutions. But really, it's not so much a discipline problem as it is a theology problem.

Deep down, we really don't feel like it makes a difference to spend our time that way. Your emotions may be telling you that there is nothing ahead but darkness and despair, but you must call to mind that Jesus got out of the grave, which means that He has good plans for you and your family, and ultimately your story can end in victory and not defeat. We have a new devotional and scripture guide that is specifically directed at some of these challenging emotions that we deal with—shame, anger, depression, anxiety.

It's a study called Smoke from a Fire. Because our deepest emotions often function like smoke from a fire, they can indicate what is going wrong in our hearts before we can even articulate it. Let's meet these difficult emotions with a renewed relationship with Jesus, full of prayer and praise. We'll send you this 10-day devotional workbook as an expression of thanks when you donate today to support this ministry. Summit Life is funded by listeners like you, so your gift truly makes a difference. Ask for the Smoke from a Fire devotional and scripture guide when you give by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or give online at jdegrier.com. I'm Molly Bedovitch inviting you to join us tomorrow. Pastor J.D. will challenge us to consider whether we are on the front lines of living with bold, reckless faith, or are we kicking back watching the faith of others from the sidelines? Join us Wednesday to Summit Life with J.D. Greer.