God Exalting Prayer
Last week, I mentioned that Paul is trying to address two things primarily.
One is the belief, held by most people in this age, that Rome was the light and Rome was going to be the great salvation. Now, really from all perception, that looked to be right. Now we’re going to get to look at it a couple thousand years later and see how false it was, but Rome ruled the world from India to England for 1,500 years. The United States will be 243 years old next July, and it feels like we’ve been around forever. We act like we’ve been around forever. For 1,500 years, Rome ruled the world and did it in relative harmony within the Empire. So, the Empire was vast and brilliant, and a lot of people put their hope in Rome’s ability to take care of them. And Paul is going to go, “Wait a minute. There are going to be some problems with that.”
The other thing that was happening, because the roads shrank the world, is people would begin to borrow from other cultures. The example I gave last week was people would go, “Yes, Jesus is my number one, but my Jewish mystic neighbor is such a good prayer. I’m not a good prayer, so I’m going to borrow some of his stuff." This is called syncretism where they would take from different religions and create this new one. And Paul is going to go after that too. And so that’s what we’re going to see in Colossians over and over again, him questioning the Empire and him attacking syncretism.
This week, I want to re-read what we read in week 1, so let’s look at Colossians 1:3.
“We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth...”
We said last week that he’s going, “Thank You God for these things that You’ve done in the lives of the men and women at Colossae.” What are those things? One is that they were living in such a way that their faith was public. We know that because Paul hadn’t been to Colossae; he’s in prison at this time. So it was Epaphras who was converted in Paul’s ministry in Ephesus that lead to the church being planted in Colossae. And so he’s going, “Man, we’ve heard of your faith and that you love one another deeply because of the hope that you’ve laid up in heaven.”
Speaking of hope, that brings us back to this first week of Advent which I wrote about this week on the website. When we look around at the pain and suffering in this world God's response is to wait. The only way to wait well is if we have hope that this life is not all there is. If your only hope is here, on this earth, in this bit of time, you tend to be a miserable person and you’ve got a hard time loving anybody because all you’ve got is right now. So, everybody becomes means to your happiness and your satisfaction now. That usually makes you a miserable person, because everybody exists to meet your needs. That's how we tend to get into the trouble that we are in. So, he’s going, “That’s not where your hope is. Your hope isn’t in just this life. Your hope is in the gospel and in the future we have with God.”
And I want to remind you that he’s not thanking them. He’s not going, “Thank you guys for loving each other well. That’s such an encouragement to me. Thank you guys for putting your hope in heaven.” He’s not giving them the active agency in this. He goes, “We thank You, God... we thank You, God...” The active agent in their transformation was the Holy Spirit, was God Almighty. It was not their own effort, their own might, their own power, their own ability to pull themselves up from their own bootstraps and get it done. That’s not what’s happening here. You’ll hear that over and over and over again as we move into the next part of this text.
Colossians 1:9-12
And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.
An Apostle's Prayer
In this text, we get the content of an Apostle's prayer for believers. Look at verse 9. “And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you..." How awesome is that? I'm trying to get more into the habit of asking people how I can pray for them. Whether it is the waiter in the restaurant or a co-worker that seems a bit off. It helps me to know what they are going through and is hopefully disarming. And Paul here has just heard a report from Epaphras and he and Timothy are moved to pray. One thing I need to get better at is not just saying, "okay, I'll pray for you." then leaving. I should be saying, "would it be okay if we prayed right now?" The benefit of that is that they would get to hear the content of our prayers like we get to hear the content of Paul's prayer here. And how I long for my prayers to be as God exalting as Paul's. Let's look at four things that Paul prays for these Colossian believers.
Be Filled
"We have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding...” Now I want to stop there because we’ve got to have a hard conversation. Paul says, “I am praying that you would be filled,” which means right now we’re not full. Now here’s why that’s so important. It has been my experience that much of Christianity here in the Bible-belt is based on a conversion experience that usually dates back to when you were a child. And there is nothing wrong with getting saved when you were a kid, but most people have very little transformation in their lives. They don’t really follow the Lord, they haven’t really been transformed.
They’ve got this moment where somebody said, “Do you want to go to hell?,” they said, “No, I’d rather not,” and they got baptized after they repeated something that someone told them to say. But they have no real relationship with the Lord, they don’t read the word, they don’t pray, there hasn’t been any real change and yet they go, “I’m a Christian... Why am I a Christian? Well, I went to Vacation Bible School, we put matches together in a cross and lit those crosses. And as I saw those flames, my VBS teacher said that the cross saves you from the flames of hell. And at that moment I went, ‘Okay, that’s what I want. I want the cross. I want Jesus.’” So there’s not an understanding that sanctification is progressive and that we should be growing in our relationship with Christ, that we should be growing in our relationship with God.
We have got to get back to the fact that we are not full and that we are being filled. Now we are 100% justified before God, which means I am seen as perfect and spotless in His sight by the blood of Christ alone. But He is sanctifying me over time. He is growing me over time. He is maturing me into the fullness of faith. So, Paul here is praying, “Father, fill them with wisdom and insight. Grow them and make them more full in their knowledge of You.” This is what he's asking for. This is what he’s praying for.
We see this over and over again. In fact, Paul tends to get perturbed with churches in the New Testament that don’t understand this. Like he’ll start talking and go, “I can’t even talk with you about that, because you’re still so immature. You’re like a 40-year-old man still drinking from a bottle. I would love to talk with you about this, but I can’t. You should be on meat, but you’re still on milk.” Try to understand it this way. If you see a grown man in the kiddie pool, without kids, having fun, isn’t there something wrong with that. I would want to call someone. I’m thinking intoxication. I’m thinking something has gone wrong. If a grown man at a restaurant is drinking from a baby bottle I’m nervous.
So, Paul is going, “Man, you’re still playing in the kiddie pool, and you’re still drinking milk. You should be eating meat. You should be teaching. You should understand these things so much more.” So over and over again in the New Testament, you’ll see Paul start to try to explain some things about the nature and character of God and just stop and go, “You know what? You’re not ready.” And if you have children, you can absolutely appreciate this. You’ve probably tried to explain something to your kid and you’re like, “What am I doing? This isn’t happening. They’re not going to grasp this. I’m trying to teach complex ethics to a six-year-old. This just isn’t happening.” So, Paul will hit this wall often.
I believe that the church exists to bring glory to God through lives changed by the gospel. That’s what we want to see. That's why when we get to the point that we are having baptism services, I'm not going to be the only one baptizing. The people who should be baptizing are the people who were instrumental in sharing the gospel and walking with their friends. As a pastor, I always thought it was kind of weird to have this, “Hey, I’m Logan. Your name is Dave, right? Okay, let’s do this." moment.
We’d much rather it be someone you know, who is instrumental in your life. Because there are two things that happen in that moment. Somebody gets to say, “I was nervous and nauseous and felt like a fool, but I knew I needed to share the gospel with my coworker.” And then somebody gets to say, “Dave was acting real weird and nauseous and nervous, and then he started telling me about Jesus and then I came to that place. . .” So, you get both of those story-lines in the water. Both are healthy and both are good. But both are lives changed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. We want to celebrate the fact that lives are changed by the gospel of Jesus Christ, that we don’t stay the same, that He changes us and we become new creations. So that’s what Paul is saying here, “that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.”
Walk Worthy
Let’s keep reading. “And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him...” This is where I got stuck in my study. I really wanted to dive deep into that prayer that we would walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. If there is a way to walk worthy then that means there is another way to walk that is not worthy and that is terrifying. I don't know about you, but I want to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord.
So, I started looking deeply at this phrase and it is all over the Bible. In the book of Revelation, Jesus says in the letter to Sardis, “Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy (Revelation 3:4). This is not hypothetical. It’s not even a command. It’s a statement of fact. These people at Sardis will walk with Jesus in the age to come because they are worthy. This is not the worthiness of justification; this is the worthiness of not soiling our garments.
In Matthew 10:37–38 Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
This is not a standard held up to show that no one can reach it. This is a straightforward demand and expectation from Jesus: love me more than you love anyone, or you are not my disciple, and you are not worthy of me.
The apostle Paul picked up this language and says in this verse and elsewhere:
- “Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (Ephesians 4:1).
- “Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Philippians 1:27).
- “Walk in a manner worthy of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:12).
- “May God make you worthy of his calling and fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power” (2 Thessalonians 1:11).
- “Your suffering is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering” (2 Thessalonians 1:5).
The point of all these texts is not to tell that there is an impossible standard we can never meet, but to tell us what normal Christianity looks like. It is a life worthy of our calling, worthy of the gospel, worthy of the Lord, worthy of God, worthy of the kingdom.
But we have all sinned, and we continue to sin. And anyone who says he is without sin “deceives himself, and the truth is not in him” (1 John 1:8). In this age, we will never perform works of righteousness good enough to earn acceptance with God. “By works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20). So, how shall we understand the worthiness of unworthy Christians?
Worthy of Repentance
The key that unlocks this mystery is found in the phrase, from both John the Baptist (Matthew 3:8) and Paul (Acts 26:20), “Repent and turn to God, performing deeds worthy of repentance” (Acts 26:20). “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” cannot mean “Bear fruit that deserves repentance.” because repentance is already there. It comes first: The repentance is the tree; the worthy deeds are the fruit. Fruit does not earn, or merit, or deserve its appearance on the tree.
What is repentance? Repentance is the turning to God as supremely valuable away from all else as supremely valuable. Repentance is the change of mind and heart that results in valuing God above all other things and all other persons. That turning, that change, that repentance is beautiful. This is what humans were made for. This is worthy, it is a suitable, fitting, appropriate response to God’s supreme worth.
So being worthy of repentance does not mean “being deserving of repentance” as if we earned it or merited it. It means an appropriate, suitable, fitting response to the worth of repentance. That's why the ESV translated Acts 26:20, “Performing deeds in keeping with repentance.”
Now let’s take this understanding and apply to Jesus’s words, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). This does not mean that we should deserve Jesus, or merit Jesus, or earn Jesus. Nothing we do puts him in a position of being indebted to us. He has infinite worth and the only suitable, fitting, worthy response from us is to see that infinite worth, and savor it, and prefer him, above all things, as our supreme treasure.
Wedding Feast
This is confirmed in the story of the wedding feast in Matthew 22. Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast” (Matthew 22:3–4). Come, freely. Without money, without price, without merit. Come and glut yourself on the supreme pleasures of my Son’s wedding feast.
But they would not come. They “went off, one to his farm, another to his business” (verse 5). So the king throws open the doors to everyone who will come and sends messengers to invite them all (verse 9). But before he does this, he says, “The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy” (verse 8).
This is identical to the situation where Jesus said, “Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Only here he is saying, “Whoever loves farm or business more than me is not worthy of me.” The principle is the same. Being worthy of the wedding feast is not earning or deserving or meriting it. Being worthy of the feast means preferring the feast over business and farm. You're worthy when you see and savor and prefer the worth of the feast.
I've honestly looked at this enough this week, that I'm tempted to write a book that applies this principle to the commands to be worthy of our calling (Ephesians 4:1), and worthy of the gospel (Philippians 1:27), and worthy of the Lord (Colossians 1:10) and worthy of God (1 Thessalonians 2:12), and worthy of the kingdom (2 Thessalonians 1:5).
In every case, our worthiness is not our deserving or meriting or earning, but rather our seeing and savoring something of infinite worth, and our preferring that worth above all things.
Back to Colossians
So you don't think I'm performing some kind of biblical trickery, let's see that Paul doesn’t leave us hanging here in this verse. He unpacks it right here in this verse in the same way that we just did.
“...so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.” He’s saying that we’re going to please God and live lives worthy of the Lord by bearing fruit and by doing good works that we do because we see and savor the character and nature of God, that we have a knowledge of God that leads to works. Remember. Paul didn't start by praying that they would walk worthy. He started by praying that they would be filled. Worthy fruit flows from a heart that is filled.
It’s not works that leads to a knowledge of God. It is a knowledge of God that leads to works. Get this right in your mind, because one is the gospel, and the other is religion. Religion will kill you. Jesus came to destroy religion. So it’s unbelievably important that you get this. It’s not that we do good works and fall in love with Jesus as a result. We fall in love with the nature and character of God, which leads us into a transformed life. 2 Corinthians 3:18 says, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” So how are you transformed? By seeing and understanding the nature and character of God.
What you’re doing is getting yourself under the waterfall of who God is, and you’re getting swept up and cleaned by who God is and not trying to manage your behavior. Managing your behavior is exhausting and it doesn’t work very well. You tend to be able to subdue it over here just in time for it to pop up over there like an ethical whack-a-mole game.
It’s like our yard that is half grass and half weeds. We mow it and it looks good for two days, except the weeds grow faster than the grass. So two days after we mow it, it looks like trash again. That is managing your behaviors. You can mow it down a little bit, but it’s not long until you see all that stuff again. So instead of going in and going, “Here are the problems that I need fixed,” we instead need to go in and go, “I need to know who He is. I need to press in and figure out the nature and character of God.” And if we go in like that and we behold Him, we’re transformed from one degree of glory to the next, which leads to lives that bear fruit through good deeds.
Be Strengthened
In the third thing that he prays for, we are going to see Paul reiterate this point. Now watch, he’ll take us through this cycle one more time. Verse 11, “May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might,. . .” So the power we need to press in and know the character and nature of God that leads to transformed lives is not ours. We don’t muster it or bring it up from inside. He grants it. It’s our job to ask for it, submit to Him, to plead for it, but we can’t produce it on our own. The reason the Bible is going to say over and over again, “All glory is His... all honor is His... all worship is His,” is because it is. That’s why the Bible keeps saying that, because it’s right. It really is all His.
If you’ve been given the grace to pursue Him and know Him deeply, it’s because He has been merciful to you, not because He looked at you and said, “I think you’re pretty, so I’m going to give you a little extra,” or “I think you’re ugly and I feel sorry for you, so I’m going to give you a little extra.” That’s not how it works. You don’t have this beautiful gift set that God saw and went, “You know what? I don’t think I could make My kingdom last much longer if I don’t have this guy in my team. So I’m going to give him a little bit more grace, I’m going to give him a little bit more mercy and open up his eyes a little bit more.”
If you get to thinking that way, you have a way too high view of yourself. God has never said, “Oh, I hope this works out for Me.” That has never happened to Him. He has never said, “I would really like to do this, but what am I going to do? Nobody’s listening to me right now. It’s Super Bowl Sunday. Maybe we’ll try it again next week.” That’s not how it works.
Strengthened for Suffering
Now watch what he does, because I want to talk for a little bit about this in light of what I believe is a false and horrible gospel that you hear often. “May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy...” I’ve heard this said before, so I’m just going to throw this out there. If it’s God’s will for all of us that nobody to gets sick and nobody has any trouble and we’re all supposed to be wealthy, if that’s true, why do we need to have patience and endurance? If all we have for loving Jesus is a life of ease ahead of us, then why is this in the Bible over and over and over again?
My problem with the Prosperity Gospel, despite the fact that it’s such garbage, is if you just take a step back and look... is this true for anyone? That’s the thing that I get confused by. Who doesn’t bleed? Who doesn’t suffer? Who doesn’t get sick? Who doesn’t have bad years? Who gets this life? If you can show them to me, you’re showing me some three-year-old. And I’ll say, “Let’s hold off until he gets to puberty, okay?” So I don’t understand the mindset of the Prosperity Gospel. I mean the Apostle that is praying for us is a man who was beaten numerous times and is currently writing from prison. The Savior that he is calling us to see and worship was a homeless guy who was beaten and killed for his message.
People get angry when we say that God is part of cancer that you have. People get really angry because they’ve been taught that God’s purpose in the universe is to make much of us, make much of me, make much of you, that there is no hurt or struggle for us. But the Bible just said, “May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience...”
Strengthened for Joy
And then there was one last word at the end there. It says, “...for all endurance and patience with joy,. . .” Joy in my circumstance? God, you must not know what's really happening...
I’ll give it to you like this. I know that some people go for a run and they don’t come home. Some people get in the car, maybe kiss their spouse goodbye and don’t come back home. And I know last night, we celebrated light up Williston together as a family, and I got in bed with my wife and I woke up this morning we had breakfast together. I’m going to die just like you. I don’t know when, but it’s coming. I have a little window of time, a vapor here on this planet. I don’t know how long that window is, but it means that I get to climb in bed tonight and be unbelievably grateful that I got another day. It means I get to wake up tomorrow (Lord willing) and be unbelievably grateful that I got another day. And that mindset brings me an immense amount of joy regardless of circumstances.
Giving Thanks
Now I want to finish this prayer because here we get the fourth thing that he prays for and we get to see a pattern emerge in Paul's prayer that should be evident in our prayers as well. “May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father...” I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to us as a culture. I mean, we are so negative. The lenses by which most of us see are the lenses of “what’s wrong with it?” So everything is, “What’s wrong with it?” We love arguments. It’s just how we see the world. Think about some of the most popular TV shows, and I won’t even get into CNN and FOX News. Even if we just look at daytime TV, look at The View. The entire show is 4 or 5 women who disagree about everything sitting across from each other arguing for an hour. It’s one of the most popular shows. People tune into this and love it like, “These ladies are going to argue about everything." And they salivate. We even see it on channels like ESPN where there is this show called Pardon the Interruption that is just two guys who disagree about sports yelling back and forth about statistics and predictions.
Our culture sees through the lenses of “what’s wrong with it?” So it’s hard for us to be able to acknowledge what’s right and what’s good, because we’ve been trained to spot and pull out what’s wrong and what’s bad. And this is very detrimental to our heart. It stresses us out, it’s exhausting and you turn into judgmental, proud, wicked hearted people. That’s what happens with a lack of gratitude. So you don’t go, “Oh, I get to eat good food tonight;” you go, “Oh, there’s an hour-long wait?” It shames us in the global scene. We’re so impatient, so selfish. It’s just who we are. It’s the air we breathe. So the Scriptures here are saying, “No, be grateful. Be grateful for what you’ve been given. Have a heart filled with gratitude.”
And we see this pattern that we are able to be thankful to God in the midst of our suffering because he has strengthened us. And we are able to walk worthy of the Lord because he has filled us with a knowledge of and passion about and joy in God. God fills so we can walk worthy and he strengthens so we can give thanks. But keep looking because Paul starts with God and he ends with God.
Qualified for Inheritance
“...giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.” I love that. What is the qualification of an inheritance? Being a child in right standing. We are in line for this inheritance because God qualified us through the blood of his perfect Son. So I’m able, as a sinful, wicked man, to approach the throne of grace with confidence, which means I can go talk to God and know that He is going to hear me and listen to me and not destroy me, despite the fact that I deserve it. And I can do that not because I’m a good man but because I’ve been qualified to do that by the Father through the Son. I can come to the Father because of the cross of Jesus Christ, and when I come to the Father, I come through the blood so that when He sees me, He sees me as perfect and spotless.
It’s not, “Oh, you had a bad week, Logan. I’m not listening to you right now. You struggled, you slipped and fell. You go back and clean yourself up and then come back and we’ll talk.” That’s not how it works. I get to come because of the blood of Christ and plead with the Lord. I’ve been qualified by an act of God, not by my own actions. You don’t qualify yourself before God. That’s why I’m constantly preaching against behavioral modification, because you can’t make yourself clean enough to approach God’s throne. It’s grace alone that enables you to do that.
It is by his grace that we are able to come to dine at his table. "Romans 5:8 says that "God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." This bread and this cup represent the broken body and shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. He gave us this example and told us to remember, but he also said that he wouldn't drink of the cup again until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God. So in communion, we stand at the foot of the cross and behold our God and remember his suffering, but the great thing is that communion is also a picture of the hope that is coming. So as we take of the elements, please let your mind go to the wedding feast of the Son and the table overflowing with wonderful gifts from the king. And see Jesus there raising his glass once again finally with his people as his kingdom is finally fulfilled.