Watermark Bible Church, Portsmouth, Virginia

We live busy lives in a busy world. There’s this temptation to compartmentalize life in terms of the secular and the spiritual. So, we speak of making time for Jesus or adding Jesus to an already full schedule. The early church faced similar temptations. There was this distorted thinking that they could add Jesus to their religious traditions, their cultural practices, and their belief systems. These destructive ideas diminish Jesus’ deity and chip away at his authority. Paul wrote Colossians so the church would accurately understand who Jesus is. He is supreme. He is sufficient. He is all in all. Jesus is the center of all things.

Worship Christ

Are you excited for Christmas? I hope you are. I hope each of you enjoys a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Lord with your family and friends. I also hope Christmas Eve with your Watermark family is in your plans as it promises to be a very meaningful celebration. However, soon enough, the celebrations will end. We will be waiting for Christmas once again. All of this waiting reminds us we are ultimately waiting for Jesus’ 2nd advent. We’ll talk about that this Sunday as we look forward to the day when the wait will be over.

It’s fun to think about all the different people who held our kids when they were babies. So many different friends and family members. I remember friends from seminary holding Emma. I remember former students holding Bree. I remember an older man who was a part of our church family holding Pierce. There were strangers too. People we’d never met who held our children. Their faces are long since forgotten. Mary and Joseph, I’m sure remembered the day that a stranger named Simeon held baby Jesus. No one would forget something like that.

When you think of a nativity scene all the attention is rightly focused on baby Jesus. However, as you fan out a little bit the other prominent figures are Mary and Joseph. It’s interesting as we read the Christmas narratives in our Bible, while Jesus takes center stage, Mary and Joseph are key figures as well. However, their stories aren’t really told together. Matthew tells the story through Joseph’s perspective and Luke tells the story through Mary’s perspective. This week we will examine the accounts together to get a picture of what was going on in each of their hearts and minds. In doing so, we’ll discover some profound lessons on waiting.

Waiting can be difficult. We’ve all experienced delays where our internal clock begins to tick telling us the outcome should come sooner rather than later. Or when things feel beyond our control and we’re at the mercy of someone else. Waiting is also hard when you are going through a season of seemingly unending pain. We can sympathize with psalmist who asked, “how long, Oh Lord?”.
As we approach the Christmas season we are approaching a season of waiting. We call it advent. Advent means coming. In one sense it’s a time of reflection. It’s a time to slow down and remember that the savior of the world, God himself, was born as a human baby. We remember the humble circumstances of his birth and worship with amazement the lengths our God went to save the world.
Advent is also a season that looks forward to Jesus’ second coming where all the work that his first coming accomplished is fully realized. It reminds us that we are all waiting. Once this waiting is realized all our difficult waits will be over. There will be no more internal time clocks, or seasons of sufferings. We will be fully at ease seeing Jesus’ full control exercised over all his creation.
This Christmas season we are launching into a new series titled Waiting. This series will encourage us to shift our focus from the waits of this life to Jesus, the one whose return we eagerly await. So, come, bring friends, and be encouraged this Christmas season.

Have you ever questioned why you are here? It’s a question that has sent many people on a quest to discover that answer. This Sunday will wrap up chapter 1 of Colossians before we step away for our Christmas series. This chapter ends as Paul describes our purpose with such clarity and simplicity. You won’t want to miss it. In addition, this is a very special Sunday because we will be celebrating communion and ordaining Randy.

Do you enjoy a good mystery? I know I like the suspense and thrill of uncovering the different clues and piecing things together. This week we will be talking a bout a mystery that was hidden for generations and now made known – the grandest mystery of all time. Brennan Penner, our missionary to Belgium, will guide us as we continue our study of Colossians.

Have you ever done something completely wrong but thought you were doing it right? I remember studying to learn Hebrew and I had a method for how to learn the language. A friend of mine found out about my method and said, “Oh no, you’re doing it all wrong. You’ll never learn Hebrew that way. Let me show you how.” That conversation completely changed my Hebrew studies. On a more fundamental level, we’ll see in our study of Colossians that our very lives were broken apart and how came to put everything as it should be.

It’s not hard to look around and see the brokenness in the world. At every turn in one way or another we are confronted with things that internally we know are not as they should be. As we continue our study in Colossians, we’ll see that Jesus reconciles all things. He will set all things as they should be. What an inspirational conclusion to this powerful Colossian hymn!