The Supremacy of Christ, Part Two

Colossians 1:15-23

Intro: Play “Cosmos” video

Carl Sagan was a brilliant astrophysicist in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but he was virtually unknown until PBS aired his Cosmos series in 1980. As we just heard, he began the series by making this audacious statement. “The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” He finished his opening statement by saying, “I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.” Actually, the second half of his statement is true. We are floating like a mote of dust in the morning sky. You have to give Sagan credit for one thing—he truly was amazed at the vastness of the cosmos. He said, “The size and the age of the cosmos are beyond are beyond ordinary human understanding, lost somewhere between immensity and eternity.” We truly are a mote of dust floating in the sky, lost somewhere between immensity and eternity. Sagan could feel the wonder grandeur of the universe and it made him feel very, very small.

At least his last part of his intro is a thoroughly Biblical idea, captured so beautifully in the eighth chapter of Psalms.

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

^ what is man that you are mindful of him,

the son of man that you care for him?

Three thousand years before the Hubble telescope captured these images of the Eagle Nebula, the Psalmist was absolutely overwhelmed with the immensity of his world. The writer was so overwhelmed that he wrote, “what is man that you are mindful of him?” The psalmist felt very small compared to the rest of the world. How much more is that true today because we know so much more about the universe. Scientists estimate that there at least one hundred billion galaxies in the universe and each of them contains at least 100 billion stars. This would be the number one followed by twenty zeros: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000, what mathematicians call sextillion. If there are sextillion stars in the universe, and it seems there are at least that many, then we really are an insignificant speck of dust floating in the sky.

You would think that a committed atheist like Sagan would conclude that all of life is meaningless and simply lose all hope. But he didn’t lose hope, in fact his life had much meaning. Sagan was instrumental in the promotion of SETI—the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

Take careful note of the mission of SETI. “The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. We believe we are conducting the most profound search in human history — to know our beginnings and our place among the stars.”[1] Carl Sagan was absolutely convinced that we would find intelligent life on other planets. He wasn’t only searching for a few stupid bacteria on Mars, but the search was, and still is today, for intelligent life. How sad that his search included thumbing his nose at God. When he said, “The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be,” there is no question that this statement was meant to directly challenge the truth about Jesus from the Scriptures, especially Rev. 1:8. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

For Carl Sagan, the “Cosmos” was his god. He would take our passage in Colossians 1 and substitute the cosmos for Jesus. “For by the Cosmos all things were created…visible and invisible. All things were created by the Cosmos. The Cosmos is before all things, and in the Cosmos, all things hold together.” Carl Sagan stumbled over the true identity of Jesus Christ which will have eternal consequences. But this can be true of many Christians as well—we stumble over the true identity of Jesus. Do we really know who he was—and is? If you stumble over his identity you will stumble in your Christian life. Last week I focused our attention on verse sixteen. “All things were created by him and for him.” What this means is that you and I exist to make Christ look good; so that he might have the supremacy in all things.

Now please understand that Jesus has the supremacy in all things, whether or not we ever lift a finger to serve him. He doesn’t need us to give him glory as if he is incomplete without us. He has all glory and supremacy. What he wants is for us to be so caught up is his supremacy and so enraptured by his glory that Jesus doesn’t just give us salvation, but Jesus transforms every part of our inner being and every aspect of our daily lives. But for many Christians, Jesus is little more than our ticket out of Hell. As I said last week, that is idolatry, because our focus is on the gift of salvation and not on the giver. What we most want is salvation and not a Savior.

In my opinion, this passage in Colossians is one of the richest and most beautiful sections in all of Scripture. It is about the person and work of Christ. It is about the incomprehensible union of the deity of Christ with the humanity of Christ. How does God become a man? Part of that mystery is contained in this passage. This is about being swallowed up in the supremacy of Jesus Christ.

Most of you realize that I write my sermons before I preach them. For me, writing is an essential part of understanding. Let me tell you what happened to me Friday morning as I was writing this message. When I finished writing the sentence, “This is about being swallowed up in the supremacy of Jesus Christ,” I began to weep. I began to weep tears of joy because of Jesus, because of his cross, because of his incarnation—that God would become a man. As I wrote the sentence about being swallowed up in the supremacy of Christ, I was actually swallowed up in the supremacy of Christ. I experienced Jesus as the center of all of my joy. I wept because I caught a glimpse of the glory of Jesus Christ and I desired him as my only great treasure. You don’t have to cry to understand this, but for me, I believe the Holy Spirit touched me with this truth and it produced in me tears of joy.

[My goal is not to make you cry.] I don’t want my experience to become your experience, but I do want each of you to be swallowed up by the supremacy of Christ. And as I say this, I realize that I have barely begun to explain what I mean by this. First, it is what Paul meant by the difficult second half of verse sixteen. All things were created by him and for him. The very one who created the universe and who created us, brought us into the world for him. We were created to be swallowed up by the totality of his being. We were not created for mere survival in this fallen world. We were not created to push our way through the ups and downs of life, to eke out a living, to tolerate going to work, to just get by in the parenting years, to have a mediocre marriage, to pay the bills, to worry about cancer and dying, to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. In short, we were not created for this world. We were not created for this world and to add salvation to our hard lives so we can have a ticket to paradise, as wonderful as that will be. But we were created by Christ and for Christ. We were created so that Christ might have the supremacy in all things, and, that we would be swallowed up in the supremacy of Christ.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. I have been struggling with our Building a Legacy of Grace campaign. I don’t think we are making a mistake by building—nothing like that. I am not discouraged that we won’t get enough money to build. I do not regret using an outside consultant to help us with fundraising. I appreciate what this campaign has accomplished so far through the involvement of so many. We have a great team of people who have pulled together and worked extremely hard so far. It is a good process and I am grateful for it. But I have been struggling with my part of the legacy campaign. It falls upon the pastor to write the vision for our Legacy campaign. You can ask Brian Larrington about this because he was waiting for weeks for me to finish the vision statement. But every time I sat down to write it, I always had this huge mental block, like the Great Wall of China, I could not get over it or go around it. Brian kept waiting and waiting patiently for me, but I just could not get a vision statement written.

I think the reason is that whatever vision I could write, it was always too small. We know that we need our own building. That is so painfully obvious it hardly needs mentioning and I think it is the main reason that there has been such a high level of enthusiasm about this Legacy campaign. But we know that the building project is not really about the building. You can’t write a vision statement about the necessity of a building if all you have is the building itself. It’s not about the building but it’s also not really about the ministry. Of course the ministry is more important than the bricks and mortar, but ministry alone is still too small of a vision. Discipleship is too small of a vision. Evangelism is too small of a vision. The only vision that really sets me afire is the supremacy of Christ. I believe that this must be the center of all our ministry at Grace Church. I believe it must be the central reason why we should build a building.

But this is why I found it so hard to write the vision for the building. How do you take a vision like the supremacy of Christ and put it into a concise vision that is easily and quickly understood? If I were to tell you that we need to construct a church building because we want to run our own AWANA program, you immediately understand what I mean, because the vision is so tangible. Ultimately, it is the same reason that any organization or business would want to construct a building. A bank needs a place to store their money and service their customers. A gas station needs a space to store their underground gas tanks and a building from which to sell beer and cigarettes. Cigarettes, bank loans and an AWANA program are tangible uses for a building. But when I tell you that we need a building in order to spread a passion for the supremacy of Jesus Christ, you look at me with blank stares.

Let me zero in a bit more on what this means. Part of the answer is found in verse 23. “This is the gospel that you heard and that has been preached to every creature under heaven.” When we say that we shared the gospel with someone, we usually mean that we talked to a non-Christian and told them the basic plan of salvation. The gospel is that we are sinners, and that Jesus died and rose from the dead in order to pay the penalty for our sin, and that if we trust him, we will be saved and go to heaven. This is a basic gospel presentation, right? So then, is the gospel for believers or unbelievers? If we use the word gospel in its most narrow definition, then it is for unbelievers, because they are the ones who need to hear and understand the plan of salvation. But the gospel as Paul uses it in this passage is itself the supremacy of Jesus Christ. The gospel is not to be limited to the initial act of salvation. The gospel is not just for unbelievers, the gospel is also for believers. Salvation is part of the gospel—it is part of the supremacy of Christ, but it is much more than this. It is the foundation of and totality of all that it means to be a Christian.

In order to see how this works, let me ask you a few questions.

Q. How does a person get saved?                                            A. The gospel

Q. How does a couple improve their marriage?                         A. The gospel

Q. What is the best way to parent your children?                       A. The gospel

Q. How do you make decisions about spending your money?    A. The gospel

Q. How do you run a church?                                                   A. The gospel

Q. How do you cope with death and loss?                                A. The gospel

Q. How do you overcome anger, pride and other sins?              A. The gospel

Are you getting the picture? There is not a single area of your life that is not touched by the gospel. The supremacy of Jesus Christ works its way through every nook and cranny of our daily lives.

One more question.

Q. How do you build a legacy of grace?                                  A. The gospel

Preach the gospel next week using this passage…

Rich Maurer

October 14, 2007