Made It All

Scripture — Colossians 1:11-20 (NRSV)

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.

Devotion

I originally began to write devotionals for De Pree through a roundabout journey. About eleven years ago, I was recruited by some folks active in the faith and work movement to help establish a blog channel on the religion website Patheos. While there are still a few faith and work blogs on Patheos, which I encourage you to check out, the overall entrepreneurial venture eventually lost its funding and folded. But in the meantime, I’d met some people.

One of those people, Will Messenger, eventually hired me to work for the Theology of Work Project (TOW)—the online Bible commentary and partner of De Pree which provides those helpful “read more” links at the end of every _Life for Leaders _devotional. In fact, eight years ago I ended up being the person providing those links to De Pree (yes, Life for Leaders has been around that long; devotionals started coming out in 2015, in fact.) And then, because one of the _other _people I had met doing the thing that failed was Mark Roberts, somehow six years ago that morphed into an offer to write occasional De Pree devotionals and copyedit everybody else’s. And so here we are.

And yet in all that time, I have never done an in-text commercial for TOW before. But you should know that my devotional titles for today and tomorrow are drawn directly from the TOW commentary on Colossians, specifically the section on Colossians 1:15-20, which begins like this:

The first half of Paul’s letter to the Colossians can be summarized in nine words:

Jesus made it all.
Then Jesus paid it all.

Today’s Scripture reading has a beautiful description of the _made it all _portion of that statement—on the Logos, present before creation and supreme ruler over it:

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 (1:15-17).

The upcoming Sunday, for which these readings are assigned in the lectionary, is Christ the King Sunday. This feast of the church, as I wrote about a few years ago (and as Mark Roberts also wrote about ten years ago) is fairly recent as Christian feasts go, at least when compared to the ones founded centuries ago; it was instituted for Roman Catholics exactly a hundred years ago by Pope Pius XI as a counterweight to the secularism he saw growing around him after World War I, and has spread to many other Christian groups.

There are two ways in which Christ is King for us and for the world, and in all honesty, “made it all” and “paid it all” are pretty good descriptions of these two aspects of his lordship. Today we recognize that Christ is King, worthy of our worship and our homage, because he is the image of the invisible God, the one who created all, the true ruler of this world which human kings and lords only think they control.

The ways in which the Christ who made all things interacts with the world can be mysterious; we have free will, and I am hesitant to point too closely to any one path and say it is the only path God could have laid for us. I think God can work with pretty much whatever we put out there. And sometimes, something that looks like failure can become a very different kind of success in him through whom all things hold together.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: God at Work, Jesus at Work (Colossians 1:15–20).