Word of Salvation – Vol.49 No.15 – April 2004

 

Paul’s Thanksgiving and Prayer for the Colossians

Sermon by Rev L Douma

on Colossians 1:3-14

 

Scripture Reading: Colossians 1:1-14

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In our days of workaholics, long hours and constant demands, the idea of a minister spending a lot of time in his study praying sounds like a bit of a bludge. And yet the best thing a caring pastor can do for his people is to pray for them, to give thanks to God for who they are and to plead their cause before the Almighty. We notice here in Paul-‘s letter to the church at Colosse that the first thing he mentions is that he is constantly thanking God for them and praying for their situation.

In a sense, what Paul is doing here in our text was a very common thing in letter writing in those days. It was a standard Greek practice to start a letter by thanking the gods for safety and health. Paul was a man of his own time and culture, just like we are of ours. But while Paul follows the format of the time, the content is vastly different. Not only in the sense of the wonderful praise of God, but in the very shrewd way he is already laying the foundations for what he needs to deal with in terms of their problems as a church. His thanksgiving is very clever because what he does is to give his readers a deep reassurance about their faith, that they are indeed true believers.

You can imagine that with the false teachers in their church, telling the Colossians that what they believed and did was not enough to really have the full deal, the believers were doubting their faith. They would have been wondering whether Epaphras had told them everything and taught them properly. When we realise what Paul is doing with this thanksgiving you will see it more clearly. Verses 3-5: ‘We always give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints – the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven…’

Notice the three key words there? ‘Faith, love, hope.’ You will remember the words from 1 Corinthians 13:13. It’s sort of like Paul’s shorthand to provide a basic description of a genuine Christian. Faith, hope and love. These three qualities are the evidence that God is at work in a person. These three do not come naturally to people but are the work of the Spirit.

The first thing we look for to see if a person is a Christian is that they have ‘faith in Christ Jesus.’ Faith is not you or me gritting our teeth and trying hard to believe the impossible. It’s the work of the Spirit who unites us into a living relationship with Jesus. We place our whole lives in trust of Jesus. We embrace Jesus as Saviour and Lord of our lives. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12 that, ‘No one can say Jesus is Lord, except by the Spirit.’

So the genuine work of the Spirit is seen by faith. Note, though, faith in whom? Note Paul’s emphasis. Not just faith in something, or faith in a god, or even God, but faith in ‘Jesus Christ’, or ‘God the Father of Jesus Christ.’ Paul is very particular. There is no other way to know God but through Jesus. That’s the key issue of this letter: Jesus and Jesus alone.

Now this faith in Jesus expresses itself practically in ‘…love …for all the saints.’ If you have embraced Jesus as Lord of your life, then you also embrace fellow believers, the church, as the love of your life. Why? Because the same Spirit that unites you to Jesus, lives in each of the believers. We all live the one life of Christ, and the closer we are drawn to Jesus, the closer we come to each other – like spokes on a wheel get closer as they approach the hub.

So if you say you are a Christian but can’t stand the church, you don’t want to relate to the other believers, then you need to question who you have faith in. You will notice that these two things, faith and love, ‘spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven.’ Paul’s language here does not allow us to think of our hope as a consequence of faith and love, but the reverse. What we experience in our daily living in fellowship with God is but a foretaste of what is reserved for us in heaven.

So we are not to think of ourselves as enjoying all the fruits of Christ’s victory now, as if ‘this is as good as it gets’, or us trying to experience it all as much as possible. The black slaves of past centuries knew life was not good, and through the singing of their ‘Negro spirituals’ expressed their longing for the full joy of God’s grace.

But we today tend to think and act as if we expect it all now, riches, good health, and wonderful ecstatic experiences of God. Our Aussie culture has never been more money wealth driven and experience hungry. The result is we have no patience, no enduring hope. We want it – now! But this world is not all there is. And we do not have to try and achieve it all here.

That was the problem in Colosse. The folk religion that was creeping into their church was implying a certain ‘fullness’, that they could experience it all there and then. But Paul is arguing for a balance between ‘experience’ and ‘expectancy’. They have faith and love and hope so they are indeed Christians. There is no doubt. They don’t need to experience more.

The false teachers in Colosse arguing as they did for a certain experience of ‘fullness’ or for a ‘fuller gospel’, implied that the Christians had not heard the full story, that Epaphras had not told them everything. So Paul in his thanksgiving goes on to say in verses 5-7: ‘…faith and love spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel that has come to you. All over the world this gospel is producing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since you heard of it and understood God’s grace in all its truth. You learned it from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf.’

Let’s note some of the things Paul says here as he reassures them that they have heard all they need to hear. The gospel is the word of truth. It is a proclamation. It is not a dialogue on ideas, or certain actions. It is a declaring, a witness and proclaiming of the truth of what God has done in Jesus Christ. It is not a matter of debate. Here is the truth, here are the facts God has revealed in Jesus, including especially that He died for sin and rose again from the dead. Here is the truth. Do you believe it? If you do, you are saved. If not, you are damned. The gospel is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is absolute. We can’t add our ideas to it, or take away what we don’t like, or ignore the parts we find hard to accept. Christ is not one of many truths, as if it’s all relative, every one going for his own beliefs and gods. No, Jesus is absolute, and His claim is universal.

Now that is a real scandal in our post-modern society. That claim is seen as ignorance and arrogance in the extreme, and we will have to wear that criticism. But we must, with deep humility and open loving hearts, make this known. Jesus is Lord. As He himself said, ‘I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the father but by me.’

We note also how Paul says ‘all over the world this truth is producing fruit, just as it has been doing amongst you.’ The gospel is not just for a small group of people in their small town, like Colosse. It’s not just a local religion or for certain types of people. It’s for every one all over the world.

Paul is saying to the Colossians, have a look at the big picture. Your faith may seem silly in your local setting, but look how it’s taken off throughout the Roman Empire. That remains as true now as it did then. This claim by Paul comes to us, first, as an encouragement. In our days when the western church is experiencing massive decline, we need to look and see that the gospel is still bearing much fruit elsewhere. Currently 53,000 people are being added to the church every day. In Africa and Asia the church is growing by four percent each year. 2,000 new churches are being opened each week. The church is bigger than you think and God is doing more than you realise. Paul’s claim is also an incentive. When Paul writes the way he does, he is not just making a statistical observation. He is sharing his passion with us.

Here is a cause for excitement and praise. Here is a reason for action. We have the truth of God to proclaim. Everyone needs to hear it. So let’s get involved. This is the ‘truth of God’s grace.’ Is there a better thing in all the world to tell others about? No single word more accurately defines the essence of the gospel in Christ than ‘grace’. It speaks of God’s love and compassion. It tells us that forgiveness and reconciliation, new life and peace are a free gift from God. He is willing to accept us because of Jesus. Being loved by God and given hope is not about what we gain or achieve, nor it is removed by our failures and weaknesses. It’s all because of Jesus, and His doing and dying on the cross.

Now, we notice in verses 9-14 that Paul’s prayer for the Colossians is not just about thanking God for all the good he has heard about. He is not only greatly encouraging them by making it clear they really have heard the gospel and are genuine Christians by their faith, love and hope. Paul says he is praying for them for even more. His prayer for them is fascinating simply because it is so different from what we tend to pray. We can be very short-sighted and self-indulgent in prayer. It’s been said, that which we pray for all the time reveals what we really want.

So what does Paul really want for the Colossians. The verses 9 and following tell us that he prays for three things: for an increase in their knowledge, their holiness and their power. ‘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’ (vs 9).

Knowledge is a vital ingredient of our spiritual development. The repetition of the words ‘knowledge’, ‘wisdom’, ‘discernment’ and ‘understanding’ in Paul’s prayers is really striking. For Paul, sure knowledge is the foundation of Christian life. But what sort of knowledge is it that Paul prays the Colossians might be filled with? We notice it is knowledge of ‘his [God’s] will.’

Now when we think of knowing the will of God, many Christians think of it as finding out whether God wants them to go for a certain job, or whether he wants them to buy a new car, or is this person the right one to marry. But, as one commentator put it, that’s often just another form of self-centredness, no matter how piously we dress it up. It’s not really about God’s will but ours.

When the Bible speaks of the will of God it has a much grander idea. It’s talking about what God has revealed to us about His plan of salvation and how He wants us to behave. The stress on His will places us in the servant position and calls for our worship and obedience. As Psalm 143:10 puts it: ‘teach me to do your will for you are my God.’

So it’s about obeying the agenda of God’s revealed will in the Bible rather than forcing our agenda on him. Paul, in typical Jewish fashion, prays for knowledge ‘through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.’ So he is not talking about the abstract academic knowledge that characterises so much of our western education. He is talking about a practical ability to think soundly with the result that we live wisely. You can be academically clever but practically stupid. Paul prays for the kind of knowledge Joshua was encouraged to look for. He was instructed to meditate on God’s law ‘so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.’ It’s by being based on God’s Word that we are filled with spiritual understanding. Paul is not praying for a natural increase in the ability to think, but that God fills us with knowledge. It’s a work of the Spirit through the Word of God.

Secondly, he says in verse 10: ‘And 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.’

So he prays that they might be holy, that they live lives that are worthy of the Lord. The society in which Paul lived was acutely conscious of the issues of honour and shame, like the eastern cultures still are today. People would do all they could to avoid bringing shame on their family, and they would fight to defend the family’s honour. So Paul wants the Colossians to bring honour to the name of Jesus by the way they live; they should avoid bringing shame on His name. We note that He says that they (and we) should ‘please [God] in every way.’

That is very comprehensive. We are to ‘bear fruit in every good work.’ Now that’s a big challenge, but look where it leads: ‘growing in the knowledge of God.’ Obedience is the key. Obedience of a very practical kind will lead to a greater and greater knowledge of God. He cannot be known where obedience does not exist.

Now this is interesting. Paul has already spoken in verse 9 of the knowledge of God. So why does he repeat himself? Well this second reference to the ‘knowledge of God’ is different to the first. The first was related to His will. Now it’s concerned with God Himself, His person, His being, His character. This is not a circular argument but a spiral argument, we are going on a higher plain. If we want to know God more and better, we must be obedient to God. We must know His will, obey it and then we know God even better.

Now this is a demanding vision Paul puts before them, so we can see why he now prays in verse 11: ‘being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience.’

It is not possible for us to grow spiritually and have an impact with the gospel unless God gives the strength for it. It is beyond our resources. But God’s ‘might’ is ‘glorious.’ His is the power of the Creator who brought everything into existence out of nothing. His is the might that brought Jesus back from the dead. So we don’t have to worry about the adequacy of our resources.

Now with such a bold assertion of God’s power, we might think Paul would encourage the Colossians to conquer the world with the gospel in this strength. But he doesn’t. What he says seems an anti-climax. He prays that the Colossians might have the strength for ‘endurance and patience.’ In other words, they have the strength to continue to remain faithful in the long term, despite the influences on them in their town.

Hanging-in for the long run is hard for us these days. With people who have grown up with McDonalds and fast foods, we expect instant success, via the big moment. But the hardest thing is to remain faithful to Jesus and in proclaiming the gospel, day in day out, year after year. To do it, we must turn every day again to God to ask for his ‘glorious might’. In doing so we realise we achieve not by our strength but by His grace. That is what keeps us humble. That is what keeps us in worship of God. It’s what keeps us having hope.

If the coming of the kingdom were dependent on our efforts and success, things would not get too far. But behind the struggling church and all the fallible believers in it, who tend to compromise so easy with the world, is the Almighty God who has already ‘rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the Kingdom of His beloved Son.’

Amen.