Colossians 3:9-12
9 For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us rot share in the inheritance of the saints in Light.
Paul’s Prayer for the Colossians.
When: Since the day we heard of it
How and the What: Not ceased to pray for you
Prayer: That you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,
Reason for the prayer: Expected Response to the prayer
- So that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord,
- To please Him in all respects,
- Bearing fruit in every good work and
- Increasing in the knowledge of God;
- Strengthened with all power,
- According to his glorious might,
- for the attaining of all steadfastness and
- Patience;
- Joyously giving thanks to the Father,
- Who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in Light.
The Principle of Prayer and the When
There are things about the Christian life that are honestly quite mysterious. Actually, if you think about it, there are a lot of things in our lives that are mysterious to us. You don’t need to know how something works to use it. We probably all use cars, but do we understand all the little parts of a car when we first start one up and drive it around the block? Probably not. Cars were made by man. What about the things God instructs us to do? Do we have to know how it works before we can participate in it? There are things about the Christian life that are mysterious. Maybe that is not the best word but what other word would you use to explain why people pray to a God whom they have not seen for people they might have never met, with the expectation that their prayers will be answered? Believers have the opportunity to do something that doesn’t require travel, or study but does require discipline. We don’t have to have visibility with those we pray for. We don’t have to have verbal contact with others. We don’t even have to know all the details of their life in order to pray for others. We are encouraged or exhorted to pray for people we have not met or know personally throughout scripture.
One other thing remarkable about our prayer life is that very few people know how deeply our prayer life is and it is not one that provides immediate acknowledgement here on earth. Prayer really is one of those investments where we are laying up things in heaven, not here on earth. For example, if I show up and teach a Sunday school, I get acknowledged because you are here and you know (perhaps) that I spend a little time preparing. You get to see the results of my work. This is not the case with prayer since most of the time, we don’t always get to see the answers to our prayers. We don’t have a lot of people who can see the impact of our prayers. And a person who prays has full knowledge that they didn’t accomplish what they prayed for, it was God’s hand that brought this prayer to reality.
One of the practical marks of mature believer is a demonstrated concern for others, shown by their prayers for the saints. In just a few verses before this, we see that Epaphras was this kind of leader and person. He was a leader who prayed for the sheep of his flock. This is what leaders should do. Biblical leadership prays for the people under their care and this is also a role for Fathers, who lead their own home grown flocks.
The How and the What
The how is unceasing.The question might come to a person – if you are praying all the time, how do you get anything else done? I have been told that prayer is responding to God. For some believers, it is as simple as breathing. Call it spiritual breathing. When you have a sense that things are not going well, you would instead of trying harder, first stop and say a quick prayer that God would give you wisdom to find a solution. When you have a sense that things are going well, rather than continue on oblivious to God’s impact in your life, you would give a prayer of thankfulness to the One who has all things in His hands. And when the Lord brings anyone to your mind, you have a strong understanding that perhaps God is bringing people to your mind because He wants you to be involved in their prayer team and He is giving you the opportunity to have an eternal impact. So although there is a good reason to have a specific time set aside for regular prayer, there is also the commitment we can make to always be ready to respond to God at every moment. That is how we live our lives praying all the time. People who live like this are generally thankful and light-hearted people because they don’t carry any of the normal burdens of life – they are constantly giving things back to God. They also are generally not a proud person, because they recognize that all they have in their life comes from God’s blessing and kindness. One of the best tools to remind us of prayer that a believer has is what I have called the fruits of the flesh – in Galatians chapter 5:19. There you have a list of deeds of the flesh. When those things are known to you, you have a stop sign in your life to wake you up and alert you that you need God’s help to live this un-natural life we call Christian. (this list is immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing)
The Emphasis of the Prayer
The next part of this is the central point of the prayers of Paul for the church in Colossae. That you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. Let’s think about this for just a moment. To be filled with the knowledge of God’s will is not the shallow understanding that a person has when they are ready to admit that there might be a higher power in this world. I am amazed when someone tells me that they are a believer and then in the next breath, tell me that they don’t care to know some of the most basic doctrines of the faith. You don’t have to be able to use the fancy theological terms because those are only to make the topics easier to discuss, but you should know about God’s holiness, God’s justice, God’s grace and God’s Sovereign knowledge. But to be filled with the knowledge of God is the idea that signifies the absence of anything else. Another way to look at this idea is the idea of being dominated. That is not a word we like to use, but listen to the prayer with that word: That you may be dominated with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. If someone is dominated by a thing, it has taken over control of their life. It is what they always come back to. We have probably all known someone who has been dominated by drugs or alcohol. When they with people, they think about it. When they are alone, they think about it. It is their friends when no one else will be. It is their comfort, when comfort is needed. And it often becomes their habit, even when it doesn’t seem that they would need it. Think if that were how you and I were with the Lord. Always thinking about Him, always running to Him, and always needing Him. This is being dominated by the knowledge of His will.
To be saturated, dominated, totally under the control of the knowledge of His will. Guys, how many of you here understand your spouse completely? Probably not too many. But how many of you here know more and more what she wants in her life? It seems the longer you are married, the more you grasp what it is that your wife wants if you are pursuing that knowledge. It is not all that different for a believer, as they spend time serving the Lord, they will understand more and more what God’s will is and how it looks in each believer’s life. Because God made us so different, God’s will for my life will look very different than God’s will for your life.
There is often a question or two that pops up in my mind when I come across a passage like this. • The first one, how do I acquire this knowledge of His will? I think it is a pursuit or a journey, not a destination that we arrive at. Proverbs 1 tells us: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; Fools despise wisdom and instruction. James 1 tells us: But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him. There has to be a desire to know more about God, an understanding that it is God’s to give, and an understanding that most often it is acquired through God’s word and by God’s Spirit. Don’t think that you are going to find God’s answers without God. This is not the SAT test, where the smartest are the ones who get into the best college. This it God’s wisdom, and there are not many wise, not many rich and not many famous who come to Him. The reason there are not many of those people is because they can’t humble themselves enough to seek God’s will by God’s means. They are often too busy to spend time on something they can’t touch, taste, smell or spend.
• The next question that might come up: How is this different than being saved? It is true that God had to open up our minds to know more about Him in order for us to come to a saving knowledge of Him. Without His help, we wouldn’t know that we were sinners and we would have a very hard time understanding how one man could give His life a ransom for many. But having enough knowledge to come to God for redemption is very different than being filled by that same knowledge. I wish it would have all happened at the same moment, but it did not.
Next, Paul gets qualitative when he describes the kind of filling he is praying for this church. In all spiritual wisdom and understanding. This is an indication of the change that Paul expects to see in the lives of the church members. Spiritual wisdom only has one source. True, you might get it from the Bible, or a Bible study, or a book, or a discussion with someone else but the true source is from God. Sometimes the biggest challenge is discernment to tell what is truth and what is for the “poubelle” or garbage. That is where the Scriptures are so important. We hold truth up to the Bible to test and see if it is God’s truth or not.
Note also that there is the expectation that the knowledge of His will is going to shape and build your smarts and your behavior. Being dominated by the knowledge of His will is going to so shape your life that everyone around you is going to know it is there. They may or may not admit it to you, but it is going to impact how you behave and others will see it. Earlier I referred to the addict, who thinks of nothing but getting in touch with their addiction. Do you think that people in that person’s life know something wrong is going on? Of course they do. And so will people know that something is up in your life when you are filled by the knowledge of His will.
Be careful of the other things that might not want to be left behind when you are filling your life with His will. The distractions around you are like the little two-year old who is screaming for attention. They will seem to get louder and louder without warning. What are those things that want your attention? Maybe we can list them in the class, so that we can talk about how to move from them in our Christian life?
May the Lord fill you with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.