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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

I'm Cameron DeVasier and I'm Mark Howard and this is Talking Points.

Now on the twelfth lesson, Pastor Howard, of our Uniting Heaven and Earth, Christ in Philippians and Colossians.

The title this week is Living with Each Other.

Yeah, the 2 of us get along every now and then.

We have to sit in this chair, we have to be across the hall, so maybe he's talking about just interpersonal relationships between friends.

What is he actually talking about this week?

Now of course we've been talking in Colossians about dying with Christ and then living with Christ and in our last lesson we there was a lot of talk about putting off the old man of sin and his ways and putting on kindness and humility and meekness etc.

This week actually goes in a little bit more specifically into our interpersonal relationships starting in the home and then beyond.

And so the lesson's description is, in our passage for this week, Paul provides some vital principles for how a Christian family functions best.

But it goes a little outside the walls of the home too, as we'll see.

Okay, well you put the Talks Boys together, so let me have a word of prayer and pass the mic back to you and you can lead us.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the practical counsel here in the book of Colossians.

Thank you that we can study it together as a church family in these Sabbath school groups and help us each to individually take away the lessons that you have speaking to the heart as you only know that we need in a particular way.

So help this lesson to be beneficial for each of us individually, for our church family collectively, and help us to be a witness to the world because of it.

You know, I hadn't thought about it until we just just finished up our review of the lesson and then Cameron said, you know, oh well we're just talking about stuff like husbands and wives, slavery and this kind of stuff.

So it's like, yeah I guess some of this stuff is more controversial.

I'm gonna try not to get deep into controversy today and stick with what we see in the lesson.

My guess is that controversy will be whatever Evers Abba School makes of it.

It'll be as much as little as you want to go.

Okay well this is what I've come up with from looking at our lesson and our passage this week.

Our passage pretty much is taking us from Colossians 3 and verse 18 through chapter 4 verse 6.

Our talking point, first talking point, is Christianity begins in the home, And that is from Sunday and Monday's lessons primarily.

Talking point number 2, we are all servants of the Most High God.

That is drawn primarily from Tuesday and Wednesday's lessons.

And then finally, talking point number 3, the greatest sermon preached is the sermon lived and that is drawn from Thursday.

Okay, so it kind of starts at the home and then builds out beyond there.

Yes, so I'm gonna have you read for us verses 18 and 19 of chapter 3.

Wives, submit to your own husbands as is fitting in the Lord.

Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them.

This is interesting because Paul says something similar in Ephesians.

He says, wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.

So we're gonna start with this very popular segment, the biblical teaching of wives submitting to husbands.

This is always going over like gangbusters for everybody.

And of course 2 men talking about it, 2 husbands talking about it, but it's interesting that as the Bible brings it up, you know, here and again just coming to mind in Colossians, as is fitting in the Lord.

In other words, this was never intended to be a resignation of individuality and the individual will on a whole, you know, what I want to say, kind of a wholesale, like always you can't think for yourself.

This is how it spins that people spin it sometimes like, well, the Bible says that women aren't to think for themselves and this is not what's being addressed here.

So Paul starts out with his counsel to wives as being submissive to their husbands.

This submission, and I have this in our notes, is enjoined upon the wife as a necessary addition after the fall.

Now this is not to say there wasn't some kind of role, different roles in the family prior to sin, but something happened after sin and that something was that disharmony entered and now when you have a marriage, a family, what have you, you have a couple, husband and wife, and you have potential disharmony, somebody's going to have to yield in that situation if you're gonna, if you're gonna be harm, if there's gonna be harmony.

You know, I find in these discussions, just in myself, that it's hard for me to imagine a world without disharmony.

It's hard to imagine a place where you don't have independent fallen natures striving against each other and then these structures are imposed to try to smash 1 down or fit it in.

It's like what would it look like if everybody just got along?

If the man and the woman that God created in the very beginning were on the same page, looking the same direction with the same mission and same purpose, there could still be distinction between husband and wife, which there absolutely were.

But there weren't problems to resolve within those roles.

You know, they both shared that Spirit of Christ.

They were both born reborn, you know what I'm saying?

So what would that look like in a whole society, much less just a family or even a couple?

So it's hard to retrofit into that, you know, to reverse engineer what it must have been like when we take these necessary councils now and superimpose them back on the original Eden ideal.

Well maybe this would be helpful if you would read this statement I have included here from Patriarchs and Prophets, page 58.

And the creation, God had made her, that of course is Eve, the equal of Adam.

Had they remained obedient to God in harmony with his great law of love, there would ever have been harmony with each other.

But sin had brought discord and now their union could be maintained and harmony preserved only by submission on the part of the 1 or the other." Okay, so 1 or the other had to submit, and of course the first pushback may be, well, why isn't it just equal?

Sometimes it's the man, sometimes it's the woman, etc.

And this is not to say that that can't be the case.

That in my home, my wife and I, you know, I'll defer to her sometimes, she'll defer to me, but when you come to 1 of those impasses where it's like we just...

I'm strongly viewing that this is what we ought to do and she's this way, biblically God says in that case if it doesn't violate Christian principle that the woman needs to yield to the husband.

Now I don't know for sure why this is, but a good guess is that, you know, biblically when Eve, for example, took the fruit and she ate and she sinned, when she ran into a...

Ideally, she would have gone to God and said, what do I do?

Instead, she went to her husband, And it's almost when the curse came, God says, your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

The implication is, you chose him to be your head, he's gonna be your head.

And Not that that has to be a negative thing.

We don't have time to unpack everything here, but that's just a conjecture, but to maintain the harmony at home, God said in those situations of potential impasse, somebody's got to yield.

The wife is going to yield to the husband.

Now a flip side of that is the husband's the 1 who has to bear responsibility.

So for example, when God came into the garden, he wasn't like, Eve, where are you?

Despite the fact that she took the fruit first, he was the 1 that had to hold the responsibility.

And it was funny, we talked about this in our in our preparation, that as a pastor I know this, like when we do nominating committee and you know you have the call, you have certain people who say, I want you to be the, could you be the head deaconess?

I'd do it, pastor, but I don't want to be the head.

Nobody wants the position of responsibility until we start talking about this.

Then everybody wants to be, oh no, I want to be the 1 to do it.

But it's not the worst thing to not have to be the guy that you go to.

And in the home, God said, the husband is going to be the 1 that I'm going to hold accountable.

Well, to flesh this out just a little bit more, there were clearly distinctions between man and woman.

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Series

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

12 Living with Each Other

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

01 Persecuted but Not Forsaken

30m

02 Reasons for Thanksgiving and Prayer

31m

03 Life and Death

30m

04 Unity Through Humility

30m

05 Shining as Lights in the Night

30m

06 Confidence Only in Christ

30m

07 A Heavenly Citizenship

30m

08 The Preeminence of Christ

30m

09 Reconciliation and Hope

30m

10 Complete in Christ

32m

11 Living With Christ

30m

12 Living with Each Other

30m

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