Summary

Pastor Dave opens the Jesus over Everything series with a look at Colossians 1:1-8, setting the tone for a series built around a simple but urgent truth — Jesus is over everything. He explains that the church at Colossae, much like modern churches, faced the constant pull of other saviors, other philosophies, and other powers. The letter of Colossians is Paul's answer to that pull: come back to Jesus. Before diving into the text, Pastor Dave poses a question that cuts to the heart of many people's spiritual experience — do you ever feel like God loves you, but doesn't really like you? The good news of the gospel, he insists, is that God doesn't love us out of obligation. Borrowing a lyric from his son and daughter-in-law's song, he puts it plainly: "We did this and we didn't have to." God wanted to love you. That's the message.

The first major point Pastor Dave draws from the text is that Jesus is the message of God. Paul identifies himself as an apostle — a sent one — by the will of God, a word that simply means desire or want. Pastor Dave connects this to the ancient use of the word apostle as an official imperial receipt, a wax seal on cargo sent by the emperor. Paul is essentially saying he carries official correspondence from the true Emperor — Jesus, who rose from the dead and reigns from heaven. The message inside that seal is grace and peace: undeserved kindness and full reconciliation with God. Pastor Dave urges the congregation to break open that seal and read it — not to earn God's love, but because God already loves them. As John 3:16 reminds us, God so loved the world that He sent His only Son. The call is to come to Scripture hungry and desperate, not as a religious duty, but as someone who needs to hear from a God who genuinely wants to speak.

The second point is that Jesus trains us to love each other. Paul tells the Colossians he is praying for them because he has heard of their faith in Christ Jesus and the love they have for all the saints (Colossians 1:3-4). Pastor Dave explains that love is the natural, organic fruit of the gospel taking root in a person's heart. Galatians 5 says the fruit of the Spirit is love, and when someone truly understands that God loves them, they begin to love others. He references Matthew 13:23, where Jesus describes the one who hears the word and understands it as the good soil that produces a great harvest. Faith isn't just hearing — it's retaining, accepting, and holding on to the truth that God loves you in Jesus. And when that faith takes hold, love follows. As 1 John 4:19 says, "We love because He first loved us" — a verse so meaningful to Pastor Dave and his wife that they engraved it in their wedding rings.

Pastor Dave is careful to make love concrete and practical. He points to Jesus washing His disciples' feet in John 13 as a model — not necessarily a ritual to replicate, but a posture to embody daily. Love means taking practical steps for the good of another. He shares a personal story of watching a friend in recovery receive two phone calls from fellow believers who prayed for him on the spot — a simple, powerful act of love. He challenges the congregation to think about who they could call this week, just to check in and pray. He also introduces the church's "three by five" groups — small gatherings of three people doing five simple things: sharing a high, sharing a low, reading Scripture, discussing what they're learning, and praying for each other. It's a low-barrier, high-impact way to love one another as disciples.

The third point is that Jesus is growing His family. Colossians 1:6 declares that the gospel is "bearing fruit and increasing" in the whole world — and Pastor Dave leans into this with genuine excitement. The passage is structured as a chiasm, a poetic form where the center point carries the weight: this movement is unstoppable. As Jesus said in Matthew 16, the gates of hell will not prevail against His church. Pastor Dave draws a parallel between Colossae and Killeen — both overlooked cities in the shadow of larger, more famous ones (Ephesus and Austin, respectively). Paul never made it to Colossae in person. He was focused on Ephesus. But a man named Epaphras heard the gospel there, carried it home, and planted a church. God used someone unrecognized, in an unstrategic place, to do something remarkable.

This is how God still works, Pastor Dave insists. He introduces the idea of spiritual CPR — Cultivate, Plant, Reap — drawn from 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul says he planted, Apollos watered, but God made it grow. Most people come to faith through layers of influence from people who never knew each other. The call isn't to carry the whole weight of someone's salvation, but to be faithful with what God has given — to sow seeds broadly and trust Him with the harvest. Pastor Dave even recalls childhood watermelon seed-spitting contests to make the point: the seeds that landed on good soil grew into watermelons. Just spit the seeds wherever God takes you.

Pastor Dave closes by tying all three points back to the central call of the series: trust Jesus over everything. Trust that Jesus is God's message of grace — His will and His want for you is to know His love. Trust that Jesus will teach you to love others, not perfectly, but progressively. And trust that Jesus is growing His family, using people like Epaphras, like you, like the person sitting next to you, to scatter seeds of hope across the world. When life feels overwhelming and the voices competing for your trust grow loud, the answer is the same: run to Jesus.