Four Things to Pray For. Colossians
1:9-11
We are going to touch on these four
things that the apostle Paul is praying for which should be a pattern and a
model for us in our own prayer life. The focus of chapter 1:3-12 focuses upon the
apostle’s prayer for the Colossian church. In these prayers that we have
recorded in Scripture we get a pattern, a model for how to pray, what to pray
for and where the priorities should be in prayer. It is important for us to pay
attention to them. In verses 3-8 we saw that Paul’s focus was on gratitude to
God. It is our priority in prayer to express our gratitude to God for what He
has accomplished in the life of believers. He expresses thankfulness for their
spiritual growth and the fact that they are bearing fruit, that God is
producing something in their life. This is a priority, not just for other
people but a priority for each of us that we should be praying for our own
spiritual growth and that God might produce fruit in us. Fruit in the Scripture
has several different applications. Generally it talks about production in some
way. It can be production in some contexts in terms of the fruit that is seen
in some congregations where it is talking about evangelism. In other passages
fruit reflects character qualities that are transformed by God the Holy
Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, as per Galatians
5:22,
23. Then we have fruit that is sometimes spoken of in terms of financial
assistance that was given, especially when Paul was taking up a collection to
take back to Jerusalem to help those who were suffering through the famine. So
fruit has a wide variety of aspects to it. So we are not to think of it like
some people do just in terms of overt behavior. When you get into that
sometimes we see some people become fruit inspectors, something that is typical
of what is described as Lordship salvation, which describes a way of looking at
the gospel that if you are truly saved you are going to see certain overt
manifestations of change in your life. This is a shallow and superficial
approach to fruit and is also a legalistic and heretical approach to salvation
because it introduces works through the back door rather than through the front
door.
Scripture teaches that justification is one thing and sanctification, spiritual growth,
character transformation is another. Justification is
when we trust in Jesus Christ as our savior, and while we receive a new nature
and we become a new creature in Christ that does not inevitably produce growth
or fruit. That means our volition has to be engaged, we have to study God’s
Word, God the Holy Spirit works in our life in order for that to be manifest.
So those are distinct, but in Lordship salvation they are viewed as being so
closely interconnected that justification automatically produces some measure
of experiential sanctification.
Paul also expresses his gratitude
for the Colossians that they have studied and assimilated God’s Word into their
thinking and into their living. The focal point is that it becomes manifest in
our lives so that there is a change that takes place. It is not something that
we manufacture artificially, which unfortunately happens with a lot of people
in a lot of congregations, emphasizing just an overt change rather than the
priority of spiritual growth that leads to that overt change.
Then in verse 9 Paul comes back to
what he is praying for, and in these verses down through verse 12 we have four
distinct purposes that he expresses for his prayer life. We are going to move
from his prayer of gratitude to the reason that we should be moved to
gratitude. This passage may seem fairly simple to some of us. Actually, if we
compare it in a lot of different English translations we will see that there is
a variety of ways in which these are paragraphed and the sentences are
punctuated and where the commas and all the other things come into play,
because it is not always that clear in the Greek how this should be structured.
It is a complicated sentence structure for which the apostle Paul is
known.
In Colossians 1:9, 10 we see the
first two things that the apostle Paul prayed for, the first two purposes that
he expresses for his prayer. One thing to note here.
Sometimes we think we can’t pray that (whatever it is) for that person, that is
up to their volition; I can’t pray for that. The apostle Paul said to pray for
things like that, because he is ultimately praying that God would indeed put
that person in an environment or circumstances, or whatever, where they would
be forced (not forcing their volition) or have their options limited and
putting them in a situation and circumstances that would move them in that
direction. So Paul prays for these things; he prays that they would grow
spiritually. We know that ultimately that depends on an individual’s volition,
so why is he praying to God? Because you can’t make the same error an
accountant has made and confuse divine causation with human causation. And we
can pray to God to act in certain ways in people’s lives to bring about
circumstances to move them in specific directions, and that is what Paul is
doing in these passages.
Colossians 1:9 NASB “For
this reason also, since the day we heard {of it,} we have not ceased to pray
for you…” And the first thing they pray for as expressed by the purpose
clause—hina [i(na]— is “and to ask that you may be filled with the
knowledge of His will…” The word “filled” is the Greek pleroo [plhrow], the same word as in Ephesians 5:18 to be
filled by means of the Holy Spirit. The content of the filling is expressed here, it is “the knowledge of His will in all spiritual
wisdom and understanding.” That comes from God’s Word. That is made more clear
in Colossians 3:16 when he says, NASB “Let the word of Christ richly
dwell within you…” That passage from Colossians 3:16ff compared to Ephesians
5:18ff shows the interconnection between the two, that the content of the Word
and one who gives the power, the energy, the understanding is the Holy Spirit.
When we are in a right relationship to Him He utilizes the Word towards our
spiritual growth and spiritual advance. When we are out of fellowship then the
Holy Spirit isn’t inoperative, He is just operating in other areas of our life
not producing that spiritual growth and advance.
So the first thing that Paul prays
for is that they will be filled with the knowledge of His will. That is towards
the secondary objective which the second purpose that he
expresses in v. 10, which is that they “walk in a manner worthy of the
Lord.” He is not just concerned about the fact that you know a lot of doctrine,
that you know the Word, that you understand a lot of principles, that you have
memorized 5000 Bible verses, but that this all towards another goal or
objective and that is that we live in a manner that is worthy of all that God
has done for us. We are not living that way to gain grace,
we are living that way because as we come to understand the fullness of the
grace that God has given us we are moved through gratitude to live for Him in
light of the purposes for which He has saved us. We were saved for the purpose
of good works, i.e. walking by means of the Spirit and applying doctrine and
glorifying God in our life.
Lastly, the purpose for prayer is to
give thanks to the Father, that we might have real gratitude towards God.
Gratitude is based on humility, and gratitude and humility are mutually
exclusive to pride and arrogance. We have to understand why this emphasis on
gratitude because it puts us in a right orientation to the authority of God and
to the plan of God.
We have seen in verse 9 that we are
to be filled with the knowledge of His will. The Greek word used there for
knowledge is epignosis [e)pignwsij], the word that was not used in classical Greek.
It first show up in Koine Greek and Paul is just
taking a little jab at his opponents there among the Colossians. Some people
say they were Gnostics but Gnosticism didn’t really come into vogue for another
50-100 years. But the ideas that were present in Gnosticism were floating
around the Greek culture for several hundred years before it coalesced into
full-blown Gnosticism and they put this emphasis on knowledge. They really had
an arrogance problem with intellectual superiority. These ideas came into
Christianity where people put an emphasis on knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
That has often plagued Christianity down through the ages because Christians
are not immune to the trends of the culture around them and there are often
people who put such an emphasis on knowledge for knowledge’s sake that is
smacks of some sort of neo-Gnosticism. Then we will see a reaction into the
church, which we have seen over the last forty or fifty years, that becomes
anti-knowledge, anti-rational, anti-doctrinal, and that we need to put an
emphasis on our feelings, on our psychological wellbeing, on our emotion, so
that we are “emotionally whole.” Those ideas really come out of the culture
just as much as other ideas do and they have their source in ideas of
contemporary psychology and sociology which brings up
various ideas on the role of men and the role of women and what we produced is
an even more effeminate culture and an effeminate church setting. This is seen
in a lot of the songs that are sung in what is referred to as contemporary
worship. Look back to many of the classic hymns and a number of them were set
to marches. There is a strong masculine tone to the music of the 17th,
18th and 19th centuries. But in the 20th
century and the contemporary setting there is a more effeminate tone to a lot
of contemporary songs, and they are much more subjective and much more focused
on the individual worshipper and his expression of his emotion and emotional
state. This just further increases the feminization of the church and is a real
attack on masculine leadership in the church as well as in the culture.
Knowledge is something that the
Scriptures emphasize, not for its own sake but that it is only through the
knowledge of God’s Word that we know God’s will and we can think as God would
have us think; and that demands study, a focus upon God’s Word. So the apostle
Paul says that we are to be filled with the knowledge of His will, this epignosis, which is a full knowledge and
it only becomes epignosis
because of the role of the Holy Spirit in our life.
We want to go back and look at how
we are filled with the knowledge of His will and what wisdom and spiritual
understanding is. The thinking ability of our soul is described by the Greek
word nous, which is the word for
mind. This is our thought world. Then there is another word that is used in
Scripture that focuses more on the center of our thinking and that is the Greek
word kardia translated “heart.” In
Scripture when we see the word “heart” it never refers metaphorically or
idiomatically for the organ that pumps blood through our body. It is used in a
way similar to our English idiom when we refer to the heart of the matter; it
is talking about the very center or core of something. So the metaphor here has
to do with going to the real core or center of something, and therefore the kardia is the place where our core
belief system, our core value system is. It is out of the heart, the Scripture
says, that come the issues of life.
What we see in terms of a biblical
or Scriptural description of how spiritual learning takes place is we have in
the church age a pastor-teacher. Teaching is how the pastor functions. The
pastoral metaphor in Scripture is really one of leadership, leadership through
teaching. That is really the essence of the pastor-teacher role in Scripture.
He is the one who guides, directs, teaches and warns through Scripture. So the
pastor teaches under the ministry of the Holy Spirit and when the audience is
being filled by means of the Spirit the role of the Holy Spirit is to make
teaching clear. We all know there are difficult things in Scripture, so if we
come out of Bible class some night and say well that was about as clear as mud
that doesn’t mean we weren’t filled with the Spirit; it just means that this
was a tough piece of steak and we are going to have to chew on it for a while
under the ministry of the Holy Spirit before it really becomes clear to us.
Sometimes we have to hear things 75 or 100 times in the process of growth, just
like any other area of learning, before it really becomes clear to us. What the
Holy Spirit does is make the truth understandable to us. He doesn’t understand
it for you; that is mysticism. Then we have a basic choice to make: do we
believe it or not? We can’t believe something we don’t understand. Belief is a
cognitive concept and if you don’t understand something you can’t believe it.
Believing is that first volitional decision: am I going to believe that what
the Bible says is true in whatever area of doctrine it might be? Then that is
what goes into our soul at a level of basic academic knowledge or, what is
referred to in the Greek by the Greek term gnosis.
We understand it; we believe it; it is part of our thinking. The first
volitional decision just has to be to study and make it understandable, to work
at it to understand it. Then the second volitional decision to make there,
after we understand it, is to believe it. This is when it gets converted to epignosis or full knowledge and the Holy
Spirit stores that in our soul.
In any area of life we learn
thousands and thousands of pieces of data and we only apply a small percentage
of it. So we store all this doctrine in our soul but that is not the end game.
That is what Paul is talking about here in terms of the process of being filled,
but then when he comes to being filled with wisdom and understanding that has
to do with applying what has been stored. When we come to situations and
circumstances and we come to decisions and challenges in life then we have to
apply it. So we take this knowledge that is usable and now we have to decide
whether or not to apply it. This is the third time that we have to engage our
volition. We apply it, and that is wisdom.
1.
Under the filling of the Spirit we
have to decide whether or not we are going to study the Word. That is the first
volitional decision.
2.
Having studied it we then have to
decide whether we believe it. That is the second volitional decision and at
that point it becomes epignosis.
This is usable then, potentially ours for spiritual growth.
3.
Then we have to make the last
decision, and that is to apply it. Just because it is epignosis and we believe it under the ministry of God the
Holy Spirit does not mean that we automatically apply it. Some people have that
idea, and they think is what the filling of the Spirit is, that of we are full
of the Spirit He just somehow disengages our volition and overrides it. That is
the problem with that word “control.” It is more influence, not control. We
have to make that volitional decision to apply doctrine in that particular
circumstance.
How do we get from epignosis to wisdom? That comes through
the process of meditation. Meditation isn’t the eastern concept of meditation which in eastern religions is more the idea of emptying
your mind. In the Scripture, when we look at the words in the Old Testament it
has to do with focus or concentration on something; thinking through what the
Word of God says. It is not just going to Bible class and taking notes but
realizing that is just the means to an end and that what we need to do is then
go and think about what it is that we have learned from the Word, so that in
that process God the Holy Spirit uses that to help us understand application.
There are four different Hebrew words
used which are translated “meditation” in our English
Bibles. The first is amar, which is a standard word for to say or to speak. But it also
has the meaning of saying something to yourself, and
that is when it is translated “meditate.” We are talking to ourselves. We have
conversations in our mind about how we are going to make certain decisions and
what we are going to do, and so in this sense we are taking the Word of God and
are rehearsing it in our minds; we are thinking about what it means and about
its implications. That is one of the great values of memorizing Scripture
because it means you have to say those phrases over and over again as you are
working through the process of memorizing. And as you are saying them over and
over again you are thinking about what they mean.
The second word is baqar
which means to seek or to enquire. So what you are doing now is thinking
in an investigative sense in terms of the meaning and implications of what we
learn from God’s Word. We want to drill down into what these promises and these
verses mean.
The third word is hagah which
means to utter or to mutter, to moan, to meditate, to devise or to plot. It is
very similar to the word amar but it is thinking about something; it is working through the
structure of these things that we have learned in God’s Word to apply them.
Fourth, the primary word that is
used (though these others are used a lot) is siach, which means to meditate, to muse,
to commune, to speak, sometimes even to complain. It has the idea of rehearsing
something over and over in our mind, to talk to one’s
self about something. It is something that we chew over mentally. So we are
mandated in many passages to meditate. It is a focus toward application and
understanding.
When we look at Colossians 1:9 we
see that Paul prays for all those at Colosse: “…you may be filled with [with
reference to] the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and
understanding.” The word “spiritual” is an adjective and it applies to both
wisdom and understanding.
Chokmah is the Hebrew
word for wisdom and bin is the word for “understanding.” Bin means to decide between something
and it has to do with decision-making and understanding the issues so that you
can choose and make good biblical decisions. Chokmah in the Jewish world was very
different from sophos [sofoj] in
the Greek world, which had more to do with academic knowledge, intellectual
attainment and sophistication, understanding of philosophy, and trying to
unravel all of the confusing things about reality on the basis of human reason
alone. But that is not the Jewish concept of wisdom. The Jewish concepts were
much more concrete whereas the Greek concepts were more abstract. For the Jews chokmah was
skill, skill at taking academic knowledge about something and applying it in a
way that produced something of beauty, something that had a tremendous
attractiveness. When we apply that to the Christian life it has to do with
application. God is working in us to produce something that brings glory to
Him. So the application of His Word in our life is designed to produce
something that reflects His glory, something that is beautiful and something
that reflects the sophistication and the complexity of God’s plan and purposes
and who He is.
Understanding, on the other hand,
precedes wisdom because understanding has more to do with discernment and
application in decision-making. It has to do with critical thinking about the
details and the challenges and decisions of life, whereas chokmah has to do with the skillful
application of doctrine to the details, challenges and decisions of life.
The Psalms, Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes are all referred to as wisdom literature. Proverbs has a lot to
say about wisdom and understanding.
A.
The starting point: Proverbs 1:7 NASB “The fear of the LORD is the
beginning of knowledge…” What is the fear of the Lord? This isn’t being afraid
of God. It has to do with subordination, submission to His authority. We
recognize that God has created everything, things are the way they are because
God said so, and if we don’t live in accordance with how God made things then
things can get pretty bad. We are not going to operate on arrogance and think
that we are the creator and are going to define all reality; God is the one who
has defined reality. It has to do with respect for God in that sense, a healthy
respect. This is the starting point of knowledge. Why is that? Because if we
are not subordinated to God’s authority there is no humility there; we are on arrogance. If we are on arrogance then we can’t
learn anything. An arrogant student who thinks he knows everything is a
terrible pain in the gluteous maximus for his teacher because he thinks he knows better.
So to learn anything there has to be a measure of humility, and the more humility
the more the potential for learning. The fear of the Lord here is an expression
of orientation to God’s authority—grace orientation, humility, the fear
of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge—“… Fools despise wisdom and
instruction.” Fools reject the
authority of God; they despise wisdom and instruction and in their place will
substitute a pseudo wisdom, an intellectualized
academic type of wisdom, but it is not wisdom in the biblical sense.
Proverbs 9:10 builds on that. NASB
“The fear of the LORD is
the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy
One is understanding.” Notice: wisdom, knowledge, understanding; they all connect to one another. Wisdom and understanding
are more related to application. In the parallelism of verse 10 the fear of the
Lord is parallel to knowledge of the Holy One. So knowledge of the Holy One
here isn’t understanding His attributes, it is related
to understanding His authority.
B.
The prerequisite for wisdom is humility. If flows from
the fear of the Lord. Proverbs 11:2 NASB “When pride comes,
then comes dishonor [shame], But with the humble is
wisdom.” When we operate apart from God’s Word it is always going to end up in
shame, but humility under the authority of God produces wisdom.
Proverbs 15:33 NASB
“The fear of the LORD is
the instruction for wisdom, And before honor {comes} humility.” This is why you
can’t learn leadership at the top. A good leader is a good follower, because if
you don’t understand principles of authority which you learn through submission
to authority, and learn humility, you can’t be a good leader. A good leader is
not arrogant; a good leader has to understand authority.
Proverbs 22:4 NASB “The
reward of humility {and} the fear of the LORD
are riches, honor and life.” Proper understanding of who
we are and submission to God’s authority is the key to genuine prosperity in
life. This refers to soul prosperity, not necessarily physical prosperity.
C. The
emphasis in the Proverbs is on the priority of wisdom. Proverbs 4:7 NASB
“The beginning of wisdom {is:} Acquire wisdom; And with all your acquiring, get
understanding.” Wisdom is the principle thing, not our material possessions. It
is more important than anything else in life. Wisdom is the
principle thing, therefore get wisdom. “And
with all your acquiring, get understanding.” That is just another way of saying
that in the process of pursuing wisdom you get and acquire understanding, which
has to do with decision-making; wisdom has to do with application.
Proverbs 23:23 NASB
“Buy truth, and do not sell {it,} {Get} wisdom and instruction and
understanding.” That is the priority.
D.
Wisdom has value. Proverbs 8:11 NASB “For wisdom is better than
jewels; And all desirable things cannot compare with her.” Whatever your top
ten list is for what you want at Christmas or your
birthday or whatever it is, nothing compares to your knowledge and application
of God’s Word.
Proverbs 19:8 NASB “He
who gets wisdom loves his own soul; He who keeps understanding will find good.”
E.
There is only one source of wisdom. Proverbs 2:6, 7 NASB “For
the LORD
gives wisdom; From His mouth {come} knowledge and understanding. He stores up
sound wisdom for the upright; {He is} a shield to those who walk in integrity.”
So only through the study of God’s Word, through the filling of the Spirit,
learning and applying, it do with have wisdom and understanding.
F.
Biblical wisdom is the only hope for meaning and happiness in life.
Proverbs 3:13
NASB “How blessed [happy] is the man who finds wisdom And the man
who gains understanding.” Without it life is just a pursuit of our own
self-absorption and self-indulgence, and that doesn’t bring happiness at all.
In terms of spiritual understanding
two verses in the Proverbs apply. Proverbs 10:13 NASB “On the lips of the
discerning, wisdom is found, But a rod [divine
discipline] is for the back of him who lacks understanding.” Proverbs 14:33 NASB
“Wisdom rests in the heart of one who has understanding, But in the hearts of
fools it is made known.”
So when we look Colossians 1:9 Paul
is praying that we might be filled with the knowledge of His will, i.e. knowing
God’s Word, in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And this is for the
purpose that we can walk worth of the Lord. What we have seen here is the first
of these priorities of prayer. And then in Colossians 1:10 NASB “so
that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord,” which is the second
purpose.