Uncompromised: The Book of Colossians | The Real Jesus

We want to welcome all of you to this really interesting moment as we begin this new fall series out of the book of Colossians.

Now, interestingly, we have multiple times in the last two or three decades in this church sort of referenced Colossians, done a sermon here or there out of Colossians, but never in our history that I can find.

We have never walked through this book in a systematic way.

And there's a very specific intention of why we've decided to do this now, which I'll share at the end of our moment together.

I want to begin by setting up some background to this book that some of you have read, some of you don't even know about.

And I want to make connections to other parts of the Bible so you can see how this sort of spider web comes together and gives us context.

In the book of Revelation, Jesus ends up speaking not to one, not two, not three, not five, but seven local churches.

And one of them is found in a city called Laodicea.

Jesus has unbelievably strong words, not in a positive way, for that local church.

If you've done church for a while, you'll know the phrase lukewarm or don't have a lukewarm faith, which comes from this interaction between this local church and Jesus.

We find these words in Revelation 3.15.

This is Jesus speaking to this local church.

Now, he says, I know your deeds, that you're neither cold nor hot.

I wish you were one or the other.

So because you're lukewarm, neither hot or cold, I'm going to spit you out of my mouth.

Good morning.

Now, this only makes sense when you know the area.

Laodicea had two sort of twin sister cities near it.

One was 10 miles away called Colossae, where this church we're talking about, Colossians, is written to.

The other is called Heriopolis, and it's six miles away.

Now, Colossae was famous for one thing.

It had world-renowned freshwater springs, cool, pure water from the mountains.

In other words, in 2026, large corporations would want to buy those springs.

Now, Heriopolis had the exact opposite of what Colossae had.

It was world-famous for hot springs.