Colossians: Images of Co-inherence
Deacon Femi Fadugba preaches from Colossians 1:15-23. Discussion points: The world was created through Jesus, who is the word of God; God’s vision for the world is so much greater and better than what we could imagine; Jesus told his disciples that the Holy Spirit’s coming would be even better than having him there with them.
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Scripture reader: [Colossians 1:15-23] He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things. And in him, all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning. He is the first born from the dead. That in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death. In order to present you holy and blameless, and above reproach before him. He indeed, if, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven. And of which I, Paul, became a minister.
This is the word of the Lord.
Preacher: Good morning, everyone. My name is Femi Farba, and I'm a deacon here at City on a Hill. I'm very excited to be here and thank you, Fletcher, for the opportunity. I've been wrestling with, the timing and content of my first sermon for a little while, and I'm really excited about this passage. I think it's just, it's brought me so much joy, this week to prepare it, last, last month really.
So about 6-7 years ago, I remember what my Instagram profile page used to look like. It had like maybe like 4 or 5 photos on them. and one of the photos was of me, carrying about a 3, 4 ft long rifle, antique rifle, and I'm sort of like on my lawn kind of looking very tough. And, and this is quite funny, at least to my mates. I think it was really for my mates because anybody who knows me knows that's not really how I roll. You know, I'm also from the UK and we, we're not allowed to have guns over there, which by the way, is a fact for most of the world. I'm not sure. I'm not sure how, how much the PR has gotten on, but yeah, so. You know, and it was just a, a sort of like an inside joke, kind of just looked quite funny. I was in my shorts on my lawn.
So that at that point that was almost in a way how my image was captured to the world, with something like a social media photo. And then I wrote this crazy book, and it did really well, and it got published. And one morning I remember waking up and then suddenly somebody sent me like a link on my WhatsApp and I had a Wikipedia page all of a sudden. and it had like a list of all of like the most amazing things I've done in my life. It was very ego-warming. and, and, and quite, quite cool to see. and then a lot of different things happened, you know, the publicity on the, around the book grew and, and it sort of culminated in this weird thing when my book got leaked to Hollywood.
And then Netflix and also like this actor who's an Oscar winner basically combined and said we want to make a film out of your book and so they acquired my book to turn into a film. So that, that's when everything kind of went to a a whole another level. And The Guardian, the newspaper in the UK basically said we'd love to do a profile on you. And I was quite scared cause I mean I think whenever that happens, when you're speaking to a journalist about your life, there's always a worry that like, you know, how are they gonna twist this or you know. But the profile was very glowing. again, it was basically the best bits of my life, but this time in like color and detail, so even more ego warming.
But really at the heart of it, I don't think I was ever comfortable despite how glowing of a, an image they portrayed of me. Because really, I know that's not my full story. I know that out there, you know, in my history, amongst people who know me, amongst people who I, I'm not really in relation with anymore. There's also like the dark Wikipedia page, you know, and even if people don't know it, I know things that I would hate to be out there.
And so we're gonna be talking a lot about image today and I, I, I bring up that example because this is kind of how we think about image in the modern world in general, you know, one, the fact that image matters. You know, most of us probably looked in the mirror in the last 48 hours because we care how we look to the world. And also, in general, image has this kind of separation. There's a distance between me and my image, even spatially. I'm here right now, but I still have that, you know, profile picture up there on the internet. And so there's this sort of separation where it's not co-located with me. It's also not a, a perfect portrayal of me. It's like a hollower thing and just different.
And so I'm gonna give two quick warnings. One, we're gonna be talking a lot about images which will hopefully appear on the screen soon. and so, you know, forgive me if it does not, the wording's not always clear. Second is we're gonna go on a bit of a journey. And so, I'd appreciate if you follow me on this journey cause in this passage of Colossians 1:15 to 23, Paul is, he's doing a lot, as the kids say.
So he, he's, you know, in there you have like before the beginning, so before the beginning of, of time. And you know later on you have this idea of like reconciling all things like, like almost after the end, you know, so before creation, in creation, he's doing a lot to really talk about who Christ is and what he's come to do. and so my goal is really to, to, to emphasize three points. One. That Christ really is God. There's one message that that is really, you know, he's really trying to portray too that. Christ really is awesome. Like he, there's a really sort of this eminence about him. And then finally, that through Christ we all can be one in God.
OK, so let's, let's kick off with He is the image of the invisible God. So we just talked about how we in our modern society conceive of image, but how would the audience in Colosi have heard that word image? The original Greek is icon. And you know that later on went to to sort of Roman translation of icon, and that's where we get the word icon from as well.
But this idea of like a representation in a way, a likeness. They would have heard it completely differently to the way I just mentioned the stuff on my my Wikipedia page. They would have seen, for instance, the Roman icon, that, that big eagle, and the Colossae was part of the Roman Empire, right? It wasn't Rome though, but they would have known that whenever you see that eagle and that banner and that icon, that sort of likeness and representation of the empire and the emperor, they would have known that the emperor is basically here like his presence is embodied here. People, armies who carried that icon, if the opposition took it and stole it, people would go to crazy lengths to get that back because they knew that it represented the very presence. That eagle, in fact, was the sort of patron animal of the god Jupiter, who was the sort of the patron of, of, of Rome, so he even had a divinity to it.
And so when, when Paul is saying Christ is the image of the invisible God, he's not just saying he's like this kind of photocopy, this weird separated thing, he's saying Christ really is God made visible. Present Fully powerful, fully united with God. And so I'm gonna Move on to the sort of the, I guess the, the contradiction in a little little boy of, of that because if Christ is really God or the Father, are they the exactly the same, you know, whenever we talk about the Trinity, we're talking about not just 1 equals 2, we're talking about 1 equals 3. And I think we all kind of just allow ourselves to accept it without properly probing it maybe, and there's some dangers in having too much certainty about the mystery of God, but I'm gonna try and at least to elucidate some, some aspects that I think help reconcile some of the tensions.
So how can two be one? So there's this idea in the trinity of, of co-inherence. And so the the the sort of vision here is that the son is in the father. He's in the Father and there's, I don't know if anybody knows, you know, CS Lewis, JR Tolkien, pretty big names, wrote The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe and The Lord of the Rings, etc. They were part of this group of people at Oxford called the Inklings. It's like a club of writers, and there's another guy named Charles Williams, who doesn't get as much clout, but he basically coined this term of of coi-nherence and he said that he thought this was the most important principle of Christianity, full stop, that within this was captured the entirety of our doctrine and theology.
This idea that the Father in him is the son and later on. In the son as the father. We'll, we'll explore this in a bit more detail, but this is how it is possible for you to have this sort of 3 in one aspect that together they form God, even though they're 3 persons. So moving on to Colossians one, verses 16 to 17. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and in him all things hold together. I'll repeat that again. So because there's some big claims here. So just try and absorb the gravity of these claims and and almost take it seriously. All things were created through him. And for him. And he is before all things. And in him all things hold together.
And so this is going way beyond just the sort of philosophical, spiritual, symbolic description of Christ. There's some outrageous claims being made here. First, that Christ isn't just this Middle Eastern Palestinian Jew who was born 2000 years ago. He was. Before creation altogether, before space and time, he existed. And this idea that all things, every single atom, electron in the universe, they all hold together in him. Bold claims. And so I, I just wanna take a second and, and we're gonna deviate a little bit. Fletcher gave me permission to, to fully geek out here.
There was a point when I wasn't a believer and I was essentially functionally atheist. When I was at Oxford, Richard Dawkins was basically one of the four horsemen of new atheism was at its prime. And it was quite a challenging environment to be a Christian and I think for a good decade I, I didn't, wasn't walking in the faith. And it's partly because I didn't see Christ God in the stuff I was doing in physics and, and in so many different domains, and it was amazing to come back to Christ eventually. And it was almost like God opened my eyes and I, I couldn't stop seeing him everywhere. And I almost, it was almost like this, I wish I had, I'd known this before. I mean, I'm sure even the physics would have been a lot better.
So we're gonna geek out because the, the Bible has a very unique position on how the world was created. It's very different. I mean, first of all, it says that there was a beginning. before, before the Big Bang, the general, the general consensus among scientists before the Big Bang theory was that the universe had always been. And this Christian conception of like there being nothing and then something was not the prevailing overall view. So that's one thing, but the bigger thing is that the Christian account of how creation came to being, it doesn't say that God sort of had a hammer and chisel and you know, did things together by hand. It says that God spoke the word and the world came into existence through the word, right? Words then give rise to physical things. Strange, isn't it? Words and then that translates to, to physical things.
And in this passage we have Jesus being described as the principal agent of creation. He's the main person who was responsible within the Trinity for creation. And throughout the Bible we hear about Jesus being the words. Let, let's just break this down a second, even stepping away from the, the, the passage and just looking at this in. In reality, and I'll, I'll probably start with my field which is mathematics and. And physics. I remember when I was doing my thesis. And it was on quantum information processing. Basically trying to build a memory system for like a quantum computer that would one day come in, in the future. And it was completely theoretical. So we're just writing equations and then you plug into a computer, hope it works. And I remember we came up to like a pretty cool like realization and you're like, OK, we cracked this. But we only cracked it for like a couple of electrons because it had this exponential scaling where when you add one more electron, the math just explodes. And then when you add another one, it's like you're done, right?
So we we kind of got stuck there and just pages and pages of equations like I can't do this as a human being. And then randomly this one guy joined our department, Tom Close, and he was a mathematician. and he looked at my page and I drew up the diagram of it. I was like this Tetris blocks, and he said, oh yeah, those are partition functions. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, Ramanujan, yeah, there's a whole body of math that solves this. And I don't know if anybody's seen The Man Who Dreamed of Infinity. It's like a a movie. He's got a film about him. It's like this Indian mathematician around World War One. And this guy was born in deep poverty and had no formal mathematical higher-level training. But he, he, he dreamed of math and all he did was just think about infinity. He wasn't trying to solve any practical problem. Certainly wasn't trying to build a quantum computer. He just thought that math was beautiful, he thought it was actually the expression of the thoughts of God. And so he would come up with these proofs, and he couldn't even derive how he came up with the proofs. Insane. But he did it for the beauty and love of it, for the, for the love of the language.
And it's just strange that somebody a century before me can come up with this series of scribbles, this language, mathematics is a language, and that can then 100 years later be taken. And it turns out that it explains a theory that hadn't even been established when he was born. This idea of word going to, to physical. I mean we see this all the time in, in physics. The, the planet Neptune. I'm not sure if people, sorry, yeah, Neptune, that, that, that was discovered quite late. People saw that Uranus's orbit followed like a slightly strange path. If you look, you know, kind of just a bit off when you looked at it with Newton's equations. And so someone said, well, what if. We assume the math is right and that there's something there that is causing that deviation. It worked out perfectly with the math and the, the guy who did the math said to the astronomer, can you point your telescope there? And there it was. And so again, this insane example of like words, literally mathematical scribbles giving rise to an entire celestial, you know, body.
We see this also in in music. My nephew is like 11 years old and he's really good on the piano. and he's so good that in his school they had like a concert and they asked him, can you actually play for this sort of like the choir, big choir is a big moment for him. And it was interesting because my, my, my sister sent me the video, very proud of him. And you could see him reading the page notes and like he had the, the musical teacher sitting right next to him helping him flip the pages and when you're playing piano you're controlling the tempo of the whole room so you can imagine almost this orchestra of sound that's the physicalization sound but ultimately being controlled and preceded by sheet music, musical notation, word, linguistic form, that somebody wrote probably before he was born.
Another example, this is one of my favorite ones, it's not even my domain, but biology. So, you know. Before people knew what DNA was, they assumed that, you know, if you zoom into us, you get to like from the an organism to like tissue and cells and then finally you get to like proteins. We're all just made of proteins. There's 21 different types I believe. And you can put them in different combinations like Lego blocks. So everybody assumed that that's how genes were passed down. You just like, I have my own Lego blocks and then somehow that gets copied into the new Lego blocks just like you you just almost. You just recreate those Lego blocks. And it was only they found DNA and they assumed that the DNA was part of just like the scaffolding to hold up the proteins and then. But it was only when a bunch of different things I won't go into, but they realized that these 4 different chemicals within the DNA, the ACTG if you remember, high school biology, were actually essentially letters in an alphabet.
And it's crazy if you've ever seen the way, if you see the way that genes are literally read, they're split apart 3 units by 3 units, so it's like 3 letter words and you can see it just pulling out, literally reading word by word this book that is written inside of us. Right? So I mean if, if you printed out your genetic code, it would literally be a 1000 page book. So it's, it's a book, it's information. Not structure, not physical things, it's actually information and instructions, word that gives rise to our phenotype, to our, our biology, to the physical biological form that we end up expressing. That applies to plants, pretty much every living thing. All right, thank you for allowing me that diversion.
So these are all pretty amazing and we take them for granted and I think it's kind of mind-blowing. But the most quintessential, the most ultimate example, because all of those are just shadows. And don't, don't make the mistake that I've made before of confusing, you know, math with God. I think it, it, it's a sort of shadow of something greater. It's pointing to something. It's a, it's a, it's a sign, not the destination. And the destination really of this whole example is the word of God, this thing, this word, becoming flesh. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
What this is really saying is that this Bible, which is full of different things, it has laws, you know, the 10 Commandments, and I think there's another 400 or so laws from the Old Testament. It has beautiful, crazy prophecies about what will happen in the future. It has wonderful promises. And the idea is that Christ, when he was born, he was the fulfillment of everything in here. You had the word that preceded him and he became the physicalization of everything that's been promised and prophesized. And written as law in the Bible.
OK, so let's, let's jump a little bit into this, so this, this is an interesting one, so. You know, I'll pause because maybe it was missed on the visual. Previously we had the father on the outside and the son was in the middle, and between them was the Holy Spirit. This idea that they sort of share the Holy Spirit. The thing that they share, you know, we all have a spirit. God's, the Father's spirit is the Holy Spirit and the Son's Spirit is the Holy Spirit, and they share it together. And the Holy Spirit represents the ultimate sort of possession, the ultimate thing. That matters most to them, which is love. So the father's constantly pouring out in his love into his son and his son is constantly giving it back. And so there's this selfless, self-sacrificial love in the Trinity that's existed since eternity passed.
And this desire in creation to share that, to extend it beyond the Trinity to us, to all of creation. So we have this conversation where Jesus is sitting opposite his disciple. They've been walking around Israel for 3 years together, and Philip said to him, Lord, show us the Father, the Father God, and it is enough for us. And Jesus is like almost incredulous. He says, you know, there's a bit before this where he says, have you not been with me for the last 3 years? And he says, whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? And so there's almost this inside outie thing that that that happens in in creation, in the incarnation, where God goes from being that the Father goes from being this invisible outside to going to being inside of Christ and Christ is the visible expression of God, the, the visible image of the invisible God.
I, I empathize with, with Philip here and I, I, I think, you know, one of the questions is why, why couldn't Philip see it? Why can't so many people see that Christ is God, and I, I think a big part of that is, is the Holy Spirit. you actually require the Holy Spirit to be able to see God. He is a, a completely necessary intermediary to having access and vision of God the Father. So we've talked about all these amazing, beautiful, transcendent things about God and about Christ and his role in it.
But let's, I guess, go back down to earth because ultimately he, Jesus descended from heaven and became a human being, and was incarnated with with us and so I have this, this question on the next slide which is, you know, why go from, from classy to ashy like. Why would you do that? You know, they didn't have AC 2000 years ago. It was pretty hot, hot in the Middle East. You know, I don't know what the toilet situation was like. You, you couldn't pay me to go back to, you know, 2000 years ago for more than like a few hours. It'd be cool to see, but then I'd be like, alright, let's go back.
So why, why did he stoop? You know, and there's so many other things he had to deal with. Like, even his family that he was born into for a long time rejected him. The Pharisees wanted him killed. We want him killed. Why did they do this? So, many reasons. That's the, this is in many ways is, is the entirety of their faith. But I'm just gonna list a couple of reasons.
Reason number one: to image a good life for us. So we can read the Gospels if you, if you hadn't, John and Mark, you get to actually see what a good life looks like on Earth as a human being. Reason number 2: we messed up. We messed up quite a lot. That's why you had to helicopter down. I have my friend Catherine, who we worked at at BCG, many moons ago, and the worst moment in many ways was when your boss would say, OK, you know what, just send me the deck. And that basically means you messed up so bad that there's no coaching that can save this thing. They just had to do it themselves. And so it, we, we, we messed up pretty bad. I'm sorry to say it, you know, I, I, I wish I could give a more positive message there, but we couldn't fix it. And he didn't lord it over us. In, in the Colossians it says he was pleased to dwell among us. So you know, you have, we were once alienated because of our sin, because of our mistakes. Christ had to come down to fix that separation, complete separation that we have from God, from our own choices. OK.
Then it says on the next slide: Making peace. By the blood of his cross. I think this is probably where in the conversation, if, if, if, if, if I didn't know about the gospel and Christ said to me, alright, so I'm here to help cause you need me to save you, I'd like it. That's, that's fair enough, that's probably true. Then he'd say, and the only way I can do it is by dying on a cross. I'd probably at that point say, that's a bit extreme, mate. Like we, we can come up with a 10 point plan, I promise. I'll really put my, my mind to it, and I, I think Christ's response would probably be. No, you, you really don't get it. And he'd probably say, look, that one stray word that you said to that guy or that girl in 8th, you know, 8th grade, it had a pretty bad impact on her life and you don't even remember it. You know, or that that that straw you threw on the road that killed one of my favorite dolphins.
I think he'd, I think he'd also say you don't know how good I want things to be for you. Your goals, your aspirations, they are so meager. And so I'm wanting to sort of fix this gap, and he, as he's listing it out, you know, the gap between where I'm at and where things could be in the lovely world is just growing. And I think in the end we'd get to a spot where my arms couldn't stretch any, any further and it would be so big that gap that the only thing could that could fill it is God Himself. He says he has now reconciled us in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you wholly and blameless and above reproach before him.
So, if we move on, what, what's, what's going on on the cross then? And I, I think I'll break it down into three parts. So the first is there's an exchange. Right, so how, how did he fix it? How did he fix me? How did he plug that gap? And so you have this idea, and I, there's a mystery here, but in some ways in about 10 minutes we're gonna come up and partake in this mystery, whereby you have Christ. Shedding his blood. So his blood is coming out of him and we're about to literally drink wine that he said we should drink in remembrance of his bloodshed. And in exchange, he's absorbing our sin. There's an exchange there. The sin that is in us, that is keeping us separate from God, he's taking that into him.
And it's not just like a substance where he's taking on some sin. It says that Christ became sin. He literally embodied it at one point, he was sin. He went from being God to being sin. So there there's an exchange there. part two, the cost. You know the I think we always think that the death, his physical death was the main part of the cost that he paid, but I actually think it's way beyond that. I think the real cost for him was separation. Right? In the Garden of Eden, when when they first sinned. God said, if you eat that apple, you will die. But they ate the apple and they were still walking around, right? So what did death really mean? It meant separation. After that, they were separated from God.
And I think this is the real cost that Christ paid on the cross. It wasn't his biological death, it was the fact that for the first time since eternity passed, he was separated from his father. We, we see in in Matthew, he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The father had to turn away from him. And you know, he says he he yielded up his spirit, even the Holy Spirit, there was a sort of separation there for the first time ever. And I think we always look at the the agony of Christ in that moment and I think that is important. What about even the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit who is usually portrayed as the power element of, of God. He had to watch his best friend, the one who creates the entire cosmos, be powerless, beaten, whipped, hanging on a cross. The father, who would have just, you know, who, who wants to see their child go through that?
And it and it had to be Christ. I kinda in my imagination I have this, this almost conversation happening between them where it's almost like the Father's saying, don't go, and the, you know, the son is like, I have to go. You are love. You're the source of love, that's your role. If, if you do this, people will never believe that that it can be extended. I've received your love for all of eternity past, and I have to prove that others can receive it and be loving too, that they can become like you. You can't do it, it has to be me.
It's almost like, there's a woman named Carol Dweck who came up with a growth, growth mindset thing. Have anybody heard of that? If you have a growth mindset versus anyway, so she has this great theory, but some, some people did some stats on it and they found out that whenever she goes to place and teaches growth mindset. Performance boosts, right? And then she tries to teach this to other people, but they did studies on when other people do it and you don't really get the same effect. So there's something it's really her, right? There's something about her that's really doing this, right? To prove it. I mean and and that's great, but also when she passes, that's kind of gone. It doesn't scale. So it has to be proven that this thing in her can be passed on to others.
It had to be the son. And I'm sure the son said, look, I, I've gotta go, and you know there's gonna come a point when I am going to be so afraid that I'm gonna tell you to get me out of this. And you have to say no, and just give me strength instead. I'm, I'm, that is extra biblical, just to be clear.
OK, and then part three is the resurrection. We get onto the, the, the good positive stuff now. and so this was a bonus part of the exchange. Christ has taken away our sin, but he also gives us His Holy Spirit. So that, that Holy Spirit then enters Christ again, reanimates his body, fills it with life and the love of the Father again. And because Christ was connected to us in that exchange, we also receive His Holy Spirit. OK, I'm gonna just read this passage and I, I know I'm running a bit on time. Hopefully you guys be a little bit patient with me. I promise it's, it's getting to an important ending.
So this is Jesus speaking before he died. He said, it is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the helper, that's the Holy Spirit, will not come to you. But if I go I will send him to you. You have to pause there cause you're saying something kind of wild, which is saying this situation where you get to see God and I'm right here and you know like 5 ft away. There's something better, right? You're better off in the next situation, which is again a wild thing to say, but it's because he knew what the Holy Spirit meant. That's what it means. It means the Holy Spirit is a big deal. And so, why is the Holy Spirit such a big deal? This is a day of Pentecost, we're celebrating, receiving the Holy Spirit. It's because God isn't just gonna be adjacent to us, with us, among us, God gets to be in us. We get to be in God. We get to enjoy that same co-inherence that the son has enjoyed since eternity passed. That is the culmination of the entire project.
And he's the head of the church. The head of the church, so I don't know if anybody watched Power Rangers before, but you have this picture of almost like. You know, the different zords coming together and then making the megazord. Every single episode was the same thing, wasn't it? And that's the vision that we have of the church, that it's not just a a a individualistic thing. There's a a unity that comes because we all have this spirit. We form the body of the church and Christ forms the head.
OK, so just to kind of get to the end, so there's a big if here. I remember reading this passage, like damn it, why did that if have to be there? You have all of these awesome promises and it's like, if, it is a pretty big condition. If indeed you continue in faith, stable and steadfast. Not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven. I mean that's that's kind of wild, isn't it? It's sort of like I have all of these things and the the condition is if you're perfect every day. So that was a bit of a letdown for me, but I think actually the reason why that held me back and why I was let down is because I think I wasn't really understanding the message that I'm preaching myself right now, which is. It's not that it's me and God, or sort of like me, you know, Christians, we say God did it, not me, you know, or, or say God is with us, or it's God plus me. It's the fact that God is in me. And so he's actually the author of my faith. He is the one who is in me, providing me with the faith that I need every single day to continue in the faith in him. His faith is in me so that I can continue in him.
And all of a sudden the weight, the pressure of being this person every day dissipates because he is doing the work and all I have to do is accept it, surrender, let go. So this has been quite a a a an abstract at times theoretical discussion, but it culminates in, in a very practical ending. Where where does it all go at the end of it. I think Jesus gives us a a good description, he says, in my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?
And so we have this promise of co-inherence, explicitly Christ saying you get to live in the Father. For all of eternity. So, I'm gonna just take a few minutes right now for us to practice co-inherence before we move on to, to key meaning. So if everybody would just close your eyes. We have everything we need. We have our imagination, imagination, our, our word, we have silence, we have the Holy Spirit. Just allow yourself to let go. Let go. The task list that's coming up after the church, like of worries. Let go of fears, concerns, even ambitions. And just imagine yourself in the heart of the Father. Imagine God Himself embracing you. Imagine that he's actually a god who's not ashamed of you. Who doesn't feel like you have to do that one thing to be worthy. Of living here, of being in this place. Just allow him to pour his love into your heart through his spirit.
And finally, just take a second to listen. Because we serve a God who speaks, and he's in us speaking all the time, even right now. He has a word for all of us. So just hear that word, it's probably going to be different to what you want or what you might might have been thinking your your train of thought beforehand. But hold on to it, receive it with thanks, and come back to this place. After the service, it'll be right here waiting for you. God is always here waiting to pour his love into you, to speak to you, to counsel you on the best part. Of what's to come. In Jesus' name.
On the night that he was betrayed, Christ took a loaf of bread and he tore it. And he said, This is my body broken for you. And he took a cup and he said, this is my blood shed for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And so in response to hearing the gospel preached each week, we participate in a sacred meal, where we're reminded that Christ is present with us each and every week as we worship together. And so if you're a Christian here this morning, you're invited to the table, we would invite you to come and receive this meal, to be reminded of Christ's broken body and shed blood on your behalf.
If you are not a Christian this morning, instead, we encourage you to receive this message that Femi just so, so powerfully. Presented to us that the Son of God really is Jesus and that he has, he really is awesome and that he really can fill you and help you to know God. So if you would stand as we prepare our hearts to receive this communion meal, I'm going to pray for us one more time.
Father, as we come to this meal, we pray that we would enjoy fellowship with you. That we would be reminded that your kingdom has come. And God, we pray that you would use this to bring a bit more of your kingdom in our lives. That as we're reminded that you're present with us through your Spirit, that we get to live in you, that we are your body and you are the head, that you love us, you care for us, you sent your Son, so that we might know you, God, that these things might reign true as we take the sacred meal. In Christ's name, we pray, Amen.