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Hi everyone! I hope your week is going well, that you’re enjoying the flush of color as the leaves change all around us, and that your plans are coming together nicely for Thanksgiving.

Can you believe we’re coming up on Thanksgiving weekend?  I feel like it was just summer, then I blinked twice, and now the stores are filled with pumpkins and people are talking about how they plan to prepare their holiday turkey. I know my American friends always think it’s too early for Thanksgiving. But even as a true red-and-white Canadian, I’m a little surprised at how quickly it has crept up on me this year.

Oh well, it’s a good celebration. There’s never a bad time to practice thankfulness, and I know it will be a joyful time with family and friends. Hopefully, I’ll remember not to eat too much.

In honor of the upcoming holiday, this week I started making a list of the blessings I enjoy in life: home and family, friends and good neighbors, a warm and dry place to sleep, food security, decent health, safety in travel, freedom and a general environment of peace, not to mention a wonderful church community, a firm sense of purpose and hope, the knowledge that I am loved and graciously accepted by a wonderful Heavenly Father, and so much more. The list gets long in a hurry. It makes me smile, and really does prompt a thankful mindset when I reflect on it for even a little while. Yup – Thanksgiving is a good holiday.

Half way through making my list, I found myself humming. I thought for a moment and realized that I was starting to catch mental echoes of favorite hymns. One in particular seems appropriate in this season. It’s familiar, but worth sharing together. It goes:

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father. There is no shadow of turning with Thee.
Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not. As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.

Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest, sun, moon, and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness to Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.

Pardon for sin, and a peace that endureth. Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide.
Strength for today, and bright hope for tomorrow – blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness! Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided. Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.

God is faithful, and I am thankful. May we all find fresh reasons to celebrate His goodness again on this Thanksgiving weekend.

Thanksgiving will be a prominent theme in our worship this Sunday morning, though it won’t be the main focus of my message. I’m trying to keep us moving through Colossians, which means this week we turn to the next paragraph in our study, Colossians 1:13-20. This is one of the most powerful and tightly-packed passages in the New Testament, and one of the strongest statements about Jesus anywhere in the Bible—alongside John 1, Philippians 2, and Hebrews 1. New Testament scholars refer to verses 15-20 as a hymn because the style is very poetic and the content is carefully structured. (In that sense, it’s similar to Great Is Thy Faithfulness, above.)

I love this passage. It’s one of the crucial foundation stones of the Christian faith, and it’s a great encouragement and prompt for worship. The only problem with it: it’s pretty much impossible to do these verses justice. There’s so much in them that we could spend hours and hours and still find ourselves amazed and lost in wonder and feeling like we need to probe deeper. I suspect that we’ll spend eternity pondering the amazing truths that are teased for us here. But hopefully we’ll at least get a start this week.

With that in mind, I encourage you to spend a little time meditating on the passage and praying that we will all have open eyes and ears to hear what it has to say. If you want to do a little more comparative reading this week as well, you could look at Ephesians 1:18-23, John 1:1-14, Philippians 2:1-11, and/or Hebrews 1:1-12. And for the real keeners among us, bonus points for doing a quick review of the Apostles’ Creed (which can be found here for those who never memorized it: https://www.usccb.org/prayers/apostles-creed).

That’s my news for now. Have a great week. I look forward to worshipping together and expressing our thanks to God again this Sunday. Blessings!

—Pastor Ken