By: admin On: March 29, 2015 In: Margy's Books Comments: 0

Since God is the Creator who holds all things together, He knows how to best fix and order our lives.

The goal of Together in the Faith is to understand what it means to live out our Christian lives in the sufficiency of Christ. The knowledge that “Jesus holds all things together” has great practical implications not only for our personal lives, but for our relationships with others. Consider that we were created for God’s purposes and that He is the One sustaining us every step of the way. When Paul uses the phrase, “In Him all things hold together,” he is speaking of Christ’s power to sustain and to prevent breakdown.

The book of Colossians is a message for our times. With so many voices competing for our attention it’s easy to relegate the Word of God to another voice among the multitude of voices clamoring for our attention. This was the danger the Colossian church faced and that which occasioned Paul’s epistle. The threat was subtle, but deadly. Subtle, because it did not attempt to displace Christianity, it only wanted to drown its influence. The Colossians were not in danger of leaving Christ for another faith, nor were they searching for a deeper spiritual experience. The Colossian culture merely wanted to add to, or mix Christianity with everything else. This mixture would have forever diluted Christianity’s influence, by making it something other than what it truly is, a whole life view.

We can fall prey to the same danger today, by failing to examine our hearts, or comparing old ways of thinking to the Scriptures, to see if our prior attitudes should be maintained, changed, or discarded totally. It is by careful introspection that we give Christ, the preeminence overall and we become what God intended us to be. Paul argues, If Christ is preeminent over all creation, and if Christ is worthy above all to be praised, and if Christ is sufficient for all of our needs, then the right response of the heart is to place Christ on the throne of our hearts and to remove all competitors from His throne, even ourselves. When Christ alone is at the center, what results is renewed thinking from a new mind. What is birthed is a transformed life. What is beheld is a changed character, and what we have become is new women.

What this produces is Christian community held together by our mutual love and affection for the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ at the center means unity. A unity of mind, a unity of spirit and an overarching desire to glorify Him in all that we do. This unity bridges racial, economic, and cultural differences. It bridges generations, social status and educational backgrounds, because we are unified by what we have in common, and not stumbled by what makes us different. Most importantly, it produces a genuine love for one another. This is the hope of this new journey through God’s Word that we are about to embark upon. In the weeks to come, we look forward to the changes that the Spirit of God will produce in your lives and we look forward to the amazing stories of growth that we will hear and enjoy.

Together in the Faith: A Study in the Book of Colossians (Held Together) (Volume 2): Margy Hill, Leroy Hill: 9781511410816: Amazon.com: Books