Calvary Church is dedicated to doctrine, and we want you to experience the life change that comes

from knowing God's word and applying it to your life. So we explain the Bible first by verse,

every chapter, every book, this is expound. Let's have a word of prayer.

Lord, the evening so far has basically been an evening of prayer.

We opened in prayer, we worshipped you and sang prayers in the form of songs.

But once again, Father, we find the need to ask your Holy Spirit to open hearts, each one of our hearts

and reveal something, remind us of something,

encourage us in something, even reprove us in certain areas of our lives, correct,

exhort, but instruct us, Lord, on how we can be more effective.

And I pray that as we leave after this evening, that being fed your word, the joy of the Lord would be our strength.

So we commit this time to you.

Give us the attention span necessary to get all that we can in Jesus' name. Amen.

Two thousand years ago, in the Roman Empire, in the area of the Roman Empire known as Phrygia, what is today modern-day Turkey,

in a little area known as the Lycus Valley, along the banks of the Lycus River, a tributary of the Meander River, was a little town called Colossi.

Some of the ruins are in the slide just behind me.

It was a little town that really wasn't much of a town, though at one time it had been.

It was a much larger and more vibrant town much earlier on, but two other towns that were neighbor villages or metropolises sort of took the prominence, and their names are Laodicea and Hierapolis.

But this town, Colossi, was a town that was on the main trade route from east to west. And there in that town, a church started.

A church started in Colossi and another one in Hieropolis and another one in Laodicea. None of them

Paul had ever been to. Paul didn't start them. They were started by,

or at least one of them was started by Apaphros, mentioned in this letter. But because it was

on the main trade routes and you had different goods being brought from different parts of the world, being sold there and purchased there.

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