When wars and rumors of war fill our minds, when rates, markets, inflation, and prices make us insecure,

when candidates, debates, and politics fill us with worries, remember that Christ Jesus is our Lord.

When impossible exams, endless papers, sick children, uncertain ministry prospects, empty accounts keep us up at night.

Remember that Christ Jesus is our Lord.

Thank you for joining us today for renewing your mind.

Our guest today is Reverend Joel Kim, teaching from his series Everything in Christ.

We begin with the Apostle Paul's letter to the Colossians, encouraging them to live faithfully

amid pressures from outside and inside the church. Here's Reverend Kim.

As we begin our lesson through the letter to the Colossians by the Apostle Paul,

we want to begin with verses 1 and 2 in chapter 1, and then we're going to actually skip to

chapter 2, verses 6 and 7.

And I think you'll understand why we might begin there in the first place.

But I want to draw your attention to the fact that in many ways, as we write letters these days,

my guess is that many of you don't anymore, in a day when we have emails primarily and texting,

I recognize some of the conventions of writings are no longer followed.

My kids who are in teenagers often think of me as an unhip dad, primarily because I can't text the way they do, often without punctuations, often with acronyms, often with shortened phrases

that I do not fully comprehend. I tend to do all the

punctuations. I capitalize everything, as well as follow conventions of writings that you and I

normally followed when we are younger in the first place. While Paul doesn't write that way,

at least as the moderns do, he writes at a time when there are no emails or texts,

so there were certain conventions that he actually followed. And one of the conventions you see is that

when he begins his letters, he begins with what the scholars now call openings, particular ways

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