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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Talking Points 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven and Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

Kameron DeVasher

Mark Howard

01 Persecuted but Not Forsaken

02 Reasons for Thanksgiving and Prayer

03 Life and Death

04 Unity Through Humility

05 Shining as Lights in the Night

06 Confidence Only in Christ

07 A Heavenly Citizenship

08 The Preeminence of Christ

09 Reconciliation and Hope

10 Complete in Christ

11 Living With Christ

12 Living with Each Other

13 Standing in All the Will of God

I'm Cameron DeBasier and I'm Mark Howard and welcome to It Is Written.

Yeah, well this is Talking Points, but you are wearing an It Is Written hoodie.

Yeah, I actually got this from my friend Wes Peppers.

Ironically, if you know Wes, I mean, they gave it to Wes to wear.

Like yeah, Wes is a really skinny little guy, right?

He used to play football and everything else so obviously it didn't fit him.

I didn't know if you were throwing Wes under the bus, it's like they gave it to him and he gave it to me.

The man's like no I'm sure he's still very supportive of It Is Written.

No actually that was before he worked with It Is Written and he's working with It Is Written and doing a great work.

Yes, we love the supporting ministries like it is written that we partner with.

That's right, we are on our Sabbath school study right now and we're on the 13th lesson.

The very last 1 titled Standing in All the will of God.

There has been a, especially for the last several weeks here of these lessons, there has been a move like a funnel down from the broader principles of Christian living down to very practical concerns And now we get to the very, very tail end, the very last verses, the book of Colossians.

And the Apostle Paul is giving his greetings and final salutations here to the people in Colossae, and through them to other churches too.

And so what I put a little note here that this lesson extracts practical lessons for ministry from the closing verses of Paul's letter to the Colossians.

So we've looked at the home, we've looked at kind of broader society, now we're gonna 0 in on what can we learn about ministry from Paul's own closing exhortations here in the Book of Colossians.

Well why don't we have a word of prayer and then you can give us our talking points and we'll dive in.

Father in heaven again we are so thankful for the testimony of your word.

We're thankful for the experience of the Apostle Paul and his counsel to us from that experience.

We pray that the Holy Spirit would help us to draw appropriately from that today as we seek at this age in our history to finish the work you've given us to do.

That was started by the apostles and we ask and pray these things in Jesus' name and for his sake.

Interesting now that I think about it as I was praying that we're finishing up what he, everything he's talking about here, he launched and he's passing it down so we can finish it up by God's grace.

Amen, we're an extension of the very thing we're reading about.

Well this week, even though we're only covering Colossians chapter 4 starting with verse 7 and then going to the end with verse 18.

So it's rather small section of Scripture.

It's only part of the last chapter, but it does include a lot of very personal things the Apostle Paul, like his notes to people, his exhortations, and you get a picture of how he operates the church.

So 3 lessons, or 3 talking points we've taken from this week's lesson are, document number 1, people are the best investment in ministry.

That's where we should spend our time and our money, our effort, our energy should be investing in people.

And this comes from Sabbath, Sunday, and Monday.

It's kind of a running thread throughout this lesson.

Talk point number 2, the church is always at risk of becoming Laodicean.

Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday kind of touch on this issue but we'll see that the Laodicea Church was connected to the church in Klose and there's an interesting development there that we can learn from.

And finally, talking point number 3, we become tomorrow what we choose today.

This is from Monday and Wednesday but that means individually and corporately as the bodies of Christ, would we choose, how we choose to act and behave and conduct ourself will determine what we're gonna be in the future.

So let's go back to talk about number 1, people are the best investment in ministry.

Now I know and you've been a pastor for many years and we've both been in different capacities of ministry, it's easy to pour money, resources, attention, and time into programming and like sweatshirts and all kinds of good gear and inspiring, encouraging things and video production.

All of that is good and it certainly has its place, but if you had to choose 1 spot to really pour yourself into as a minister, it should be into the people who you're ministering, not just to, but you're ministering through.

This is 1 of the things I think it's a clear take away from Paul's ministry.

And we think we've, I think in previous lessons we've touched on this, how Jesus himself, the ultimate apostle, the 1 sent from God for this missionary journey, didn't just come to do ministry, but he trained ministers to work along with him.

In fact, right from the jump, in the beginning of his ministry, he starts collecting disciples.

It certainly had to be a temptation, but you think it would have been more effective to just, hey, he just could have gone out and 100% instead of having to work through them and say, no, no, no, no, do it, just do it, right?

I mean, he knew that that was the, anyway.

Well, even if you have a James and a John, the Sons of Thunder, you have a talkative Peter, you have a doubtful Thomas, even with their problems, it's still better for the ministry to work through the people than just do it all yourself.

Paul understood this too and you see it all through his New Testament ministry and it's right here in the book of Colossians.

So for instance, why don't we just read a few verses.

If you read verses, well the whole thing is greeting.

I don't really know where to start but what did you read 7 through 9?

Okay, Tychicus, a beloved brother, a faithful minister, and fellow servant in the Lord, will tell you all the news about me.

I am sending him to you for this very purpose, that he may know your circumstances and comfort your hearts.

With Onesimus, a faithful and beloved brother who is 1 of you.

They will make known to you all things that are happening here." And then he goes on to talk about Aristarchus and Mark and Barnabas.

Right, that's the whole point is that in verses 7 through 18, these closing verses, he doesn't just say, and these are my concluding words, love Paul, and that's it.

He purposely folds in all these other people, and he's actually orchestrating them.

I put it in the notes here, that in the closing 12 verses of Colossians, Paul highlights Tychicus, Onesimus, Aristarchus, Mark, Justice, Epaphras, Luke, Demas, Nymphos, and Archippus.

And I don't know if I'm slaughtering those names or not, but he has a network of people that he's not just ministering to, but he's ministering through them.

Sabbath, paragraph 3, kind of talked about this.

Through personal visits during his travels and especially as a prisoner through his epistles, Paul was constantly linking people and churches.

He recognized that the success of the gospel mission depended upon everyone working together.

Now this kind of dovetails nicely or bookends this whole quarterly that we've been looking at because these are of course these 2 books that we've been looking at, Philippians and Colossians, are just 2 of the multiple prison epistles that Paul writes.

And also it's not like every letter he wrote was while he was in that town.

In fact, the reason he's writing a letter, because he's not in town, whether it's from a prison or some other place, Paul is constantly administering the work of the church through letters or occasional visits but mostly through the ministry of other people.

So you notice there's a theme in the New Testament which is always Paul and, Paul and Barnabas, Paul and Silas, Paul and Timothy, Paul and Timothy.

And here he's got a whole list of these people that Paul, while he's doing his ministry, is consciously, consistently raising up other people who can carry that torch and building a network that even if he's locked in prison, he can send this 1 over here and that 1 over there, and he can run literally the church, the New Testament church, almost, I say almost single-handedly, but it's not like he needed 100 Pauls, but Paul needed to work through a network of people who would then have a network of people, and it was a strategy for taking the gospel to the world.

There's a great statement from Sermons and Talks, Volume 2, page 22.

When 1 soul is soundly converted, he is the 1 particle of leaven introduced into the mass, the consistent example of 1 truly converted soul no human being can estimate.

There is a moral power from God by which the lowest subject, if properly instructed, will become an instrument of righteousness.

So whether it's a Timothy, a young Timothy, or a Titus, or an Onesimus who was in his slave condition, you know all these different issues he's had, he said but I can use this for ministry and he looks for every opportunity to not just minister to people but to put them to use in ministry.

And Pastor Howard, you and I are in the Personal Ministries Department, Sabbath School and Personal Ministries, which my friend, Sabbath School should be a spring for personal ministry work, every member being a missionary, I can't tell you how much, how big of a burden this is on my heart, and I have to assume it's on yours too, that churches today need to recapture that New Testament model of not just ministering to people but through people, that the work of the pastor is not merely to win souls but to raise up soul winners.

And whether it's a New Testament church, the early Adventist church, the church has always grown best when every member shares in that mission, and anytime when we let go of that, or we change our model, or put our focus of ministry somewhere else, the work starts to languish inevitably.

Well, let's just unpack the word mission a little bit.

Because mission is, we're so inundated with buzzwords in our church today.

So you can throw the word mission around in a meeting with 10 people and you'll have 10 different definitions if you ask for it.

So it strikes me in this statement I just read, there is a moral power from God by which the lowest subject, if properly instructed, uses the old statement about the army of youth.

What might an army of youth rightly trained furnish etc.

And that training we just had a meeting where we talked about the 1 of the challenges we face the catch-22 with ministers and members where men members need trained.

So with ministers, and this is an overgeneralization, but this is a legit conversation that we had, oh, the pastors don't wanna be told, they want some flexibility, they want elbow room, they don't like to be given stuff to do, they want to be able to be creative, etc.

And so this was a part of the discussion that came up.

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Series

Talking Points 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven and Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

13 Standing in All the Will of God

Transcript

Parent Series

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Recorded

Talking Points 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven and Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

12 Living with Each Other

30m

Talking Points 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven and Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

01 Persecuted but Not Forsaken

30m

Talking Points 4th Quarter 2025: Lessons of Faith from Joshua

13 Choose this Day!

29m

Talking Points 3rd Quarter 2023: Ephesians

01 Paul and the Ephesians

30m

Talking Points 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven and Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

10 Complete in Christ

32m

Talking Points 4th Quarter 2024: Themes in the Gospel of John

13 Epilogue: Knowing Jesus and His Word

29m

Talking Points 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven and Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

11 Living With Christ

30m

Talking Points 3rd Quarter 2023: Ephesians

14 Ephesians in the Heart

30m

Studies in 1 Corinthians

02 Conflicts and Divisions in Corinth

50m

Talking Points, 3rd Quarter 2021: Rest in Christ

11 Longing for More

27m

Sound Doctrine