A Prayer for the Church
Colossians • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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A woman was trying hard to get the ketchup out of the jar. During her struggle the phone rang so she asked her 4-year-old daughter Amanda to answer the phone. And kids view the world differently sometimes. Literally. She answered the phone obediently, "Hello, this is Amanda. Mommy can't come to the phone to talk to you right now. She's hitting the bottle."
See how misunderstandings can happen when you don’t know the whole story. I know a lot of you really don’t like introductions to to books of the bible. Why should I know who wrote it? Why should I know where the city was located? Why should I know what was going on?
Without this information, we do not get an understanding of the historical and cultural background needed to fully know the whole story. Without this information, we read and misinterpret these books with American eyes when we need to see it with the eastern eyes it was intended for. So please do not push this information I am about to give you off to the side. Who knows one day it could be a Jeopardy question that you get to answer.
Let’s start off with the first 2 verses in Colossians
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by God’s will, and Timothy our brother:
To the saints in Christ at Colossae, who are faithful brothers and sisters.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father.
As we can see here, the Apostle Paul is the writer of the letter and He is writing to the church in Colossae. This letter is known as a prison epistle written about 60 AD. It is one of three letters we know that Paul wrote while in prison in Rome. The other two were Ephesians and Philemon. Paul never went to or saw the church in Colossae. We see him say this in
For I want you to know how greatly I am struggling for you, for those in Laodicea, and for all who have not seen me in person.
Paul relied on Epaphras and Philemon to oversee the churches in this area.
Colossae or Colosse depending on how you wish to say it was one of three cities that was about a hundred miles from Ephesus. The other two were Laodicea and Heirapolis. The reason this is important is because these three cities were known as the central hub of where East and West would meet. This made it a prime candidate for religious speculation and heresy. This is the main reason behind this letter Paul wrote.
Paul was fighting a battle on two fronts. He was fighting against Eastern religions and Jewish legalism. Paul was fighting against a very dangerous form of Gnosticism. That is a big word Gnosticism that has a simple meaning…it means to know. A gnostic was a person that wanted to know more and more. A scholarly or a learned man was considered a gnostic. Where Gnosticism becomes a problem and dangerous is when it pushes man made philosophies into divine truths.
It becomes a deceptive combination of many false teachings. Jewish legalism, Eastern philosophies, pagan astrology, mysticism, and many other beliefs systems that does not belong in Christianity. You can compare it to trying to kill a deer with bird shot. You could probably do it, but you’d be spitting out lead everytime you ate. The false teachers were not denying Christianity, but that they were using all these beliefs to lift it to a higher level of understanding.
So why study Colossians. Because we still have heresy in the church today and it is just a deceptive and dangerous as it was back then. When we make Jesus Christ and the Christian revelation just part of the religion, we cease to give Christ the Lordship He deserves. When strive for spiritual perfection or spiritual fullness by means of formulas, rituals or disciplines all we are doing is take a huge step backwards instead of forwards. We can not and must not mix our Christian faith with things of this world like transcendental meditation, body centering yoga, eastern mysticism or things that claim to give you a deeper life. You don’t need a deeper life, you need a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.
Now that we have a better understanding of the background, lets look at a simple and powerful prayer that sets the tone of Colossians.
For this reason also, since the day we heard this, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Here Paul writes such an amazing prayer to the church and in this prayer he express three things we need to look at for the church today.
Spiritual Excellence
Practical Obedience
Moral Excellence
Notice we are talking about excellence, not perfection. Paul was praying for the church to understand that perfection came in the form of Jesus Christ, not in man made efforts.
Let’s start off by looking at
Spiritual Excellence
For this reason also, since the day we heard this, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding,
Paul uses words in his prayer that the false teachers were using such as knowledge, wisdom and understanding. The false teacher were using these types of words to entice the Colossian believers to be in the know with these new doctrines.
“Satan is so deceptive! He likes to borrow Christian vocabulary, but he does not use the Christian dictionary.” Warren Wiersbe
The key word here we need to look at is filled. Paul uses this word in this epistle 7 times. It’s meaning is not just full, but being completely filled. The idea behind it is being fully equipped. It is the same word sailors used to describe a ship filled and ready for a voyage.
In the New Testament, to be filled also meant you were controlled by it. An example is someone who is filled with anger, is controlled by that anger. To be filled by the Spirit, is to be controlled by the Spirit. Paul is saying we are to be filled by His will, His wisdom and His understanding, not man’s view of those three things.
God wants us to know His will
And he said, ‘The God of our ancestors has appointed you to know his will, to see the Righteous One, and to hear the words from his mouth,
God also wants us to understand His will
So don’t be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.
There are two ways to know and understand His will and that is through general revelation and specific revelation.
General revelation is revealed to us through God’s Word. The Bible in your hands is God’s general will for your life.
Specific revelation or specific will of God for any given situation must always agree with what He has already reveal in general revelation. In other words, the better you know God’s Word the easier it will be to determine His specific direction He has for your life.
But what we want is to know God’s will through signs and billboards flashing “This is what God wants you to do.” Guess what the bill board is in your hands. All you have to do is read it and study it.
The first step toward fulness of life is spiritual intelligence. It is the beginning of a beautiful and fruitful Christian life. It is growing in the will of God by knowing the Word of God.
Practical Obedience
Peter T. Forsythe was right when he said, "The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom but its Master".
so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God,
The false teachers back then and the false teachers today will regurgitate spiritual knowledge, give you verses upon verse, rituals upon rituals, formulas upon formulas, but they do not relate this knowledge to life.
They miss the point of learning and living the Word of God. True spiritual wisdom must affect our daily lives.
In other words, you must walk out the Word of God and you must work out the Word of God.
Church if there is any point today you get make sure it is this…You cannot work for God unless you are walking with God, and you cannot walk with Him if you are ignorant of His will. The person who spends time daily in their bible and in prayer will know God’s will and they will be able to walk with Him and work for Him.
Service to the Lord is the direct result of Christian devotion to the Lord. The work we do is a direct result of the life we live for the Lord.
What the believer needs more today is balance. In our lives, we need to get to know Christ better through prayer and study, but we must also put our faith to feet and serve the church and the community. You maybe the only bible someone will read. Are you worth picking up to read?
The more time we spend with God, we get to understand Him and His will, and in turn, we go out and obey Him, which makes us learn more.
Practical obedience is pleasing God, serving Him, and getting to know Him better.
Paul prayed for us to have spiritual knowledge which would result in practical obedience, which in turn would bring
Moral Excellence
In his 1983 acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] recalled the words he heard as a child, when his elders sought to explain the ruinous upheavals in Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." He added, "If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: 'men have forgotten God.'"
being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light.
Spiritual knowledge and conduct should be related to a moral character. The church in Colossae and the church today are more concerned with giving you the knowledge and asking for service without connecting them to the important matters of moral christian character. They emphasis head knowledge without applying heart and love to the christian and to the community.
Knowledge, conduct, service and character all go together and if one is missing our lives are out of whack.
Paul calls it being strengthened with power. The word power has two meaning dunamis (dynamite) inherent power and kratos manifested power or power that puts forth action.
What Paul is praying for and what we should pray for also is for God’s inherent dynamite power be at work in our lives so we can have power that puts forth action. It is this power we pray for that will give us the moral character to endure and have patience. Endurance and patience are not things we like to pray for but it is what makes a Christian strong in moral character.
And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope.
Too many Christians quit when the circumstances get difficult. The greatest victories the church has had comes on heels of perseverance.
Charles Spurgeon once said that we should have the perseverance like that of the snail reaching the ark.
Patience is a product of endurance in action. We are not called to be arm chair Christians, we are called to be soldiers ready for battle and persevering when the times are tough.
Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us,
God’s power is evident in our patience and endurance but also in our joy. Our moral Christian character is never more evident when we show joy even in the roughest of circumstances.
It is a very difficult matter to understand when God permits affliction or loss to come into our lives. Our humanity wants to cry out, "Why me God? I love you and faithfully serve you. Why did you permit this sorrow to happen to me?" . . . one reason for affliction is to make us into instruments which will be of greater use to God.
Explain Forged in Fire.
Today we have reviewed a beautiful prayer. One that calls out for spiritual excellence so we can live to please God. One that calls out for obedience, so we can walk and work in God’s will. And both of these brings about a moral character in the Christian to persevere joyfully when times are tough.
My question is this…How have you prayed today?