The Child Who Was God (Colossians 1:15–20)

• It’s always a special joy for me also to come  to the Christmas season and have the opportunity   to focus on the simple and yet profound  message of the birth of Christ. You know,   it is an irony of rather significant proportions  in America that we celebrate the birth of someone   we refuse to acknowledge. Sort of a curiosity.
• We have George Washington’s birthday and Abe   Lincoln’s and they have to share a day. And  Martian Luther King gets his own day and we,   to my knowledge, I have never heard of anybody  from the ACLU suing someone for celebrating the   birth of any of those three, it amazes me that  in any public setting on any public property we   can’t celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.
• We can’t sing his praise or articulate his   uniqueness without the threat of a lawsuit or  a ban. Now the truth is, nobody wants to stop   the celebration. That’s not the idea, not the  commercial world anyway, they want the money. Not the government, they need the taxes that  buying and selling and traveling produces,   and not the partygoers, they want the fun.
• If we can just have the party without Jesus,   everybody will be happy. The birthday of Jesus,  frankly has become very useful. It has immense   pragmatic value if you can just keep Jesus out of  it. You might be the impression based upon that   that Jesus is an insignificant person, a figment  of some well-meaning Christians fantasies or some   character of archaic antiquity who has been  embellished through the years to have become   something he never really was and we are kind of  just stripping it down to eth way it out to be.
• Is Jesus someone less important than George  Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Martian Luther   King? Is Jesus someone about whom we shouldn’t  be making so much fuss and certainly not too much   articulation of the character of his life and  what he said and why he came. Is Jesus someone   to be pushed into the background? Should we keep  the party and get rid of the person whose party it   is.
• Is he insignificant? Should people who want to  proclaim Christ and sing his praises be silenced? Well, the apostle Paul wants to help us understand  who Jesus is. And I want you to look at your Bible   to Colossians chapter 1. Among all of the passages  of scripture that we might have looked at to see   the reality of the child who was God, none is  more grand than this one in the first chapter   of Colossians. I want to read to you starting  in verse 15.
• Listen to what the Bible says about   Jesus Christ. “He is the image of the invisible  God. The firs born of all creation. For by him   all things were created both in the heavens and  on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones   or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things  have been created by him and for him. And he is   before him all things and in him all things hold  together.
• He is also head of the body the church,   and he is the beginning the first born from the  dead so that he himself might come to have first   place in everything. For it was the father’s good  pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him.” Every one of those statements that was made  from verse 15 through verse 19 is absolutely   exclusive. They are true of him and nobody  else.