A Great Prayer!

The Apostle Paul’s Prayer For The Colossians.

Col: 1:9 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.

Clearly Paul wanted them and us to know God’s will. But so often we think we have some kind of ideal what God’s will is, but because it seems fragmentary and “iffy” we add our own “wisdom” to make it more suitable to our desires. Paul tells us here the secret of really knowing God’s will. He says it is through spiritual wisdom and understanding. Spiritual means the work of God’s spirit. In order to have the wisdom of the Holy Spirit in our thinking we will have had to surrender our ways, our ambitions and our agendas completely to God. In other words Paul prayed that they would be authentic Christians, submitting to Christ by faith, born again and filled with the Holy Spirit.

¹⁰And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, ¹¹being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might

He is saying that once that transformation has taken place in our lives, we who were unworthy become worthy to bear the Lord’s name. God is pleased with that. The fruit we will bear is the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The strength we will have is God’s strength.

So that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully

Why would Paul want us to have endurance and patience unless he thought we would need them? I am sure he foresaw all the pain, frustration, calamities, and persecutions that Christians would encounter but he also saw the Joy at the end. He prayed that we would not only be properly equipped to handle it all, but be victorious and joyous!

¹²giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. ¹³For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, ¹⁴in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Hallelujah!

Howard