Colossians 1:15-20 Meaning: The King Who Holds It All Together
This past New Year’s, Pastor Keith Roberson gave his boys a Christmas gift that doubled as a small miracle: his alma mater, Texas Tech, had made the college football playoff for the first time in the history of the program. “You want proof of the living God?” he joked from the stage. “Texas Tech was in the college football playoff.”
So they flew to Fort Lauderdale. He took his sons to an authentic Italian pizza place just down the road from the very beach where he proposed to his wife — and yes, they walked over to that beach and recreated the kneeling-down photo, which he admitted was super weird and also awesome. That night they watched the anchor drop in the city square as the new year counted down. The next morning, Texas Tech played the Orange Bowl.
And got slaughtered. Didn’t score a single point.
Here’s the thing, though. Keith called it one of the best trips of his life. Why? “Because I was just with my boys. I’m just with my dudes.” The outcome was a disappointment. The trip was a treasure. Because the greatest thing you can have when you go through something sad is your people with you, so that you’re not alone.
That story sat at the center of A Supreme King, the second message in the SUPREME series at New River Church — a walk through Colossians 1 that climbs from a prayer about walking with God all the way up to one of the most staggering portraits of Jesus in the entire Bible.
What this sermon is about
Picking up Paul’s prayer in Colossians 1:9-12 — for spiritual wisdom, for a worthy walk, for power, for gratitude — Pastor Keith showed where the whole prayer is pointed: verses 13-20, where Paul declares that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the Creator and sustainer of everything, the one in whom all things hold together. The King of the cosmos.
And if he’s King of the cosmos, Pastor Keith said, then he’s King over your cosmos. Your heart. Your life. The question the sermon leaves you with is the question it leaves everyone with: will you let him be?
Presence, not performance
The prayer asks that we would “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him” (Colossians 1:10). And Pastor Keith named the trap right away: it’s easy to read that and go, okay, well, what do I have to do? What do I have to fix?
But that’s not what it’s saying. You can’t do, and you can’t fix. This is not about performance for God. It’s about the presence of God.
“You will walk in a manner worthy of me when you just walk with me. You don’t perform for me. You walk with me.” — Pastor Keith Roberson
That’s where the Orange Bowl story did its work. The team lost badly, and the trip was still one of the best of his life, because what made the trip was never the scoreboard — it was who he was with. The point of walking in a manner worthy of God is not to perform for him but to be with him. Even in the hard moments. Even in the darkest moments, you have the King with you and you’re not alone.
Presence is what pleases him. Your real-time longing for God to speak to you and walk with you — when you’ve failed, when you’ve fallen short, when you’ve had great victories — that’s what pleases the heart of a Father. Not, as Keith put it, “you tap dancing for the Lord.”
And what happens when you walk that way? You bear fruit. You start to matter to the world around you — not because of you, but because he’s with you, helping you love your home and your children and your spouse and your co-workers. Galatians 5:25 — “If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.”
Power for the real, messy world
Then the prayer turns to something every one of us runs out of.
Colossians 1:11 — “being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.”
In other words: God, I need real-time power to face this real, messy world with endurance — and to overcome with joy.
Pastor Keith asked the question that makes this verse personal: when do you most need power? It’s when you tanked it. When you fell short. When you got hurt, were wounded, or wounded someone else. It’s in our failures and shortcomings that we need life the most — that’s the turning point of every book and movie and story ever told.
And the news here is very good: the power on offer is not according to your own strength. Keith was honest about his own track record on that front — a good chunk of life spent trying to do it himself, even pastoring, even being a husband and dad, tempted to control, and failing every time. “My strength is not enough for what this church needs, for what my family needs,” he said. But in him, there is power to overcome, power to be forgiven, power to be restored, power to step into something you’ve never stepped into before.
He pointed to Ephesians 3:16 — “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” The inner being. This isn’t human muscle. This is radical believing.
“There is fresh power to radically believe in the unfailing love of God over our lives.” — Pastor Keith Roberson
If you walked away with one thing, Keith said, let it be that. Power to trust God’s faithful love to rescue us — sometimes from our circumstances, and sometimes from ourselves.
The King of the cosmos
Then came the summit. What exactly are we believing in? Where does all this power come from? Paul answers with a passage scholars consider one of the great Christ hymns of the New Testament.
Colossians 1:13-17 — “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to 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 by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Pastor Keith let the scale of that sink in. The vastness of space obeys his word. If the earth moved even one percent closer to the sun, or one percent further away, none of us could live. One percent. The universe is still expanding — black holes, billions of stars — and the answer to “how” and “why” is that his word is creating and sustaining all of it, for his glory and for our greatest joy.
He brought in the news story of the astronauts who had just traveled further from Earth than any human ever has — the first to see the dark side of the moon on that mission. One of them came back and said publicly: I’m not a religious person, but after what we saw and experienced, I felt like I needed something. So he asked for the chaplain. And the minute the chaplain walked in, he saw the cross and wept. Couldn’t hold it together. Another astronaut on the crew, a believer, said: well, I am a religious person — and I had the same experience.
Even the skeptics have to wrestle here. Keith cited David Hume, the Enlightenment philosopher who had no interest in defending religion, who nonetheless conceded that the orderliness of the universe is so inexplicable that you certainly can’t disprove God by it. Science itself rests on the uniformity of nature — a two-pound rock today is a two-pound rock tomorrow; the aerodynamics that fly a plane today will fly it tomorrow. As Keith put it, borrowing a line he loves from Dr. Keller: it’s not chaos, it’s cosmos.
And it’s not just the visible world. Paul says visible and invisible. We all sense a moral order — we know that love and joy are treasures and that hatred and cruelty are evil, and we know it’s more than chemical reactions in the amygdala (a word Keith’s family, sitting on the front row, had to help him pronounce). If everything were just chemistry, then cruelty and prejudice would carry no moral weight either. Deep down, we know there is something more. He holds it all together — the physics and the morality, the seen and the unseen.
That’s also why “live your own truth” can’t carry the weight we put on it. You can’t have eight billion personal truths without them invading each other — which, Keith observed, is exactly why the whole world is living offended. That is chaos. But in the cosmos, the King shows us in our hearts what is true.
“He’s the King of the cosmos and he is over your life. Will you make him king? Will you bring him in and let him be king?” — Pastor Keith Roberson
And here is the pastoral edge of all that cosmology: just as Jesus upholds the universe, he will hold you together in his lordship. The same way he does it out there, he does it in here. Even the most dedicated followers of Jesus walk through seasons that feel like personal chaos. The promise is not that chaos will stay far away from you. The promise is: I’ll hold you through it. Chaos and covering are not about the circumstances of your life — they’re about whether, regardless of what you’re walking through, you are held, covered, loved, forgiven, and restored each and every day.
Qualified: the word that means “made worthy”
So how does that kind of peace actually get applied when you’re going through something painful? The final piece of the prayer answers it.
Colossians 1:12 — “giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”
Pastor Keith camped on that word qualified. His translation: in Jesus, you have been “worth-ed” — and no, that’s not a word in the dictionary, but it’s what the word means. He took you in the shambles and the hardship and the pain, scooped you up, and made you worthy. Spoke his life over you. Gave you his righteousness, his authority, his power, his heart.
“God descended, came down, got with us face to face in his Son and said, ‘I bring you my worthiness. You are made worthy.’” — Pastor Keith Roberson
God is not standing at the top of the stairway saying, come on, do enough good stuff, show up to church enough, and maybe you’ll get there. He came down. Which means you can stand up in confidence, walk out of the building, and live a brand new life today — and have a brand new one tomorrow.
The sermon closed with open hands. Name the places you try to control, the fears, the hurts, the loneliness — and offer them to the one who upholds the universe by the word of his power. It is not too big for him. And if you’ve never asked Jesus to be King over your life, Keith pointed to the oldest promise in the book: if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). You can do that today.
What this means for your week in Franklin
If you take this sermon seriously, four things change about this week.
- Walk with him instead of performing for him. The worthy walk is not a checklist. Show up tomorrow morning and just be with him — in the commute, in the kitchen, in the hard conversation. Presence is what pleases him.
- Ask for power exactly where you tanked it. Don’t hide the failure; that’s the very spot the power is for. Pray for strength in the inner being — fresh power to believe in the unfailing love of God over your life.
- Bring him the small stuff too. If he’s King of the cosmos, he’s King over your calendar, your worries, even the tiny decisions. Nothing about your life is too little — or too big — for the one who holds it all together.
- Lead with thanksgiving. The prayer ends with giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you. Start one day this week by thanking God that you have been made worthy — and watch what it does to everything that follows.
Watch the full message
The full sermon — “A Supreme King” from the SUPREME series — is in the video above. We post a new message every Sunday from New River Church in Franklin, TN. Browse our message library for more from the SUPREME series and other recent teaching.
Coming Sunday at New River Church in Franklin, TN
If this message resonated and you’d like to experience worship and community in person, we’d love to have you with us. New River Church meets Sundays at 9:00 AM and 10:45 AM at 1153 Lewisburg Pike in Franklin, TN 37064 — just minutes from downtown Franklin and easy to reach from across Williamson County, Brentwood, and Spring Hill.
You don’t need to dress up. You don’t need a good voice. You don’t need to know much about church or the Bible to come. We’re a community of ordinary people walking through ordinary life, trying to do it together with Jesus at the center. Whether you’ve been a Christian for forty years or you’ve never set foot in a church, you are welcome here.
If you’re new to the area or new to faith, our First Time Guest page walks through everything you need to know before your first visit: parking, what to expect on Sunday morning, what your kids will experience in River Kids, and how to find us when you arrive.
If you’re looking for deeper community beyond Sunday morning, our Community Groups meet across Franklin and the surrounding area throughout the week. Groups are where Sunday morning faith becomes Tuesday afternoon real life.
Whatever you’re carrying right now, you don’t have to carry it alone. There’s a place for you at New River Church in Franklin, Tennessee. Come as you are.
Watch more sermons: newriverfranklin.com/messages Plan your visit: newriverfranklin.com/firsttimeguest Find a group: newriverfranklin.com/groups
📍 New River Church | 1153 Lewisburg Pike, Franklin, TN 37064 | Sundays 9:00 AM & 10:45 AM
