Thy Kingdom Sung | Colossians 1:3-20
Colossians 1:3-20 (New Revised Standard Version)
In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God. This you learned from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf, and he has made known to us your love in the Spirit. For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into 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 in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
One of the best ways to worship is through song.
We can learn so much about who Jesus is just in the first few lines of popular songs.
Some passages in the Scriptures are songs or prayers or acts of worship.
The Psalms were the songbook and prayer book of the ancient Hebrew faith community. Some of the prayers and songs of the early Christian Church have been embedded in our New Testament books.
Many scholars believe that these lines from Colossians are part of a hymn of the early church.
For the Christians who sang this song in Colossae, Jesus clearly wasn’t just an ordinary man or teacher or rabbi.
This is not a sustained theological argument or doctrinal description of Jesus. It is ascriptions of honor and praise piled one upon another.
The Romans used a similar tactic to heap praises upon kings and emperors. In that parallel one can see the truly subversive character of the hymn and so of the King and kingdom it praises.
For these early Christians, Jesus was the same as God; and he was to be glorified and praised and honored.
These folks had encounters with the risen Christ that were so life-changing and so transformational that they could not help but tell others about their experience.
All the songwriters; from the folks in Colossea who, so many years ago, sang together about their experience with the risen Lord, to the beloved hymn-writers of yesteryear, to today’s Contemporary Christian musicians; all were simply trying to give their witness, to put into words what they knew from their own experience of God’s Kingdom.