☝️ Colossians 3:1 | "..seek the things that are above.."

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📧 In today’s email…

• 🤓 Background context on Colossians

• 👀 Keeping an eternal perspective

• 🙏 A prayer and reading to set the tone for the week

• 🎵 A song to help you meditate and memorize this week

Let’s dig in…

 🧠 Memorize

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above,

where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Colossians 3:1

Author & Book Context: Colossians ✍️ 

• What: Colossians is a letter written by Paul to the church in Colossae

• When: Paul wrote Colossians ~AD 60 during his first Roman imprisonment, which is around the same time he also wrote Ephesians, Philippians, and Philemon.

• Where: The city of Colossae was about 100 miles east of Ephesus in modern-day Turkey.

  • Take a look a the map below to locate Colossae in relation to the other early churches 👇️ 

Looking at the map, one of the things that strikes me is how far the gospel of Jesus had traveled within just 30 years of his death and resurrection.

Praise God for the early church missionaries who gave up everything for the sake of spreading the gospel! 🙏 

📹️ For a short video overview of Colossians, check out the Bible Project’s video here.

Paul, Epaphras, & The Church at Colossae 🤝 

Unlike the recipients of Paul’s other letters, it seems that many of the Christians in Colossae, had never met Paul:

The gospel may have reached Colossae during Paul’s missionary work in Ephesus (Acts 19:10) —

— but it was likely founded by Epaphras, one of Paul's fellow missionaries.

For every Paul and Epaphras famous for spreading the gospel, there are millions of other followers of Jesus whose names we’ll never know who passed on the gospel from generation to generation.

This week, we’ll be doing 2 things:

1. Inward: Learning to turn our attention towards ‘the things that are above’

2. Outward: Remembering we have the opportunity to invite others to experience something (and Someone greater than this world has to offer)

Apply & respond: A prayer and reading for the week 📖 

Consider this as you memorize Colossians 3:1 this week:

A poet named Mary Oliver once said:

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

In order for us to become devoted to the eternal, we first have to turn our attention to it, beginning with our thoughts.

Pray 🙏 

Lord, it is so easy to get caught up in the things of this world. Please teach me what it means to seek the things that are above this week.

Help me begin to form the habit of keeping an eternal perspective. Amen. 🙏

Read 📖 

Read Colossians 3 slowly, preparing your heart to be worked on this week.

🍽️ Bonus: Read it out loud at the dinner table with your friends or family.

Listen 🎵 

Ever wonder why you can remember lyrics from a song you haven’t heard in 20 years? What if we could use that to help us memorize Scripture?

Occasionally, there are songs we find that can help us soak in the verse we’re memorizing.

Here is a beautiful song that includes our memory verse this week along with the two verses right after it.

Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Music

LAUGH 😂