Scripture: Colossians 1:9-14
Theme: Prayer
Paul shares with us three major things that we can pray for ourselves and for others – 1. To have the ability to be able to clearly and accurately hear God’s voice 2. To develop the desire to live a Holy Life 3. To allow the Holy Spirit to give us the power to live a Holy Life
INTRO:
Grace and Peace from God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit!
I want to talk to you today about prayer.
There is nothing as simple and yet at times as complex and confusing as prayer.
When we look at prayer in its simplest form; it is the communication that goes on between human beings and the LORD GOD ALMIGHTY. Prayer is like a conversation that happens between a child and their parent or between two people who are desiring a deeper love relationship.
We in the Church tend to complicate things when it comes to praying and prayers. All you have to do is to google the word prayer on the internet or begin to look at all the different books that have been written about prayer to understand that you can get lost in the whole idea of praying.
Literally billions of pages, thousands of website articles and podcasts have been written and made centering on prayer. People have written and spoken about:
+The correct language of prayer
+The correct posture of prayer
+The correct timing of prayer
+The correct spirit of prayer
None of that is bad but then again, a great deal of it has been foolish and harmful to say the least. Sometimes people have made prayer so difficult that after you have heard them or read their writings you want to just give up.
Prayer is simply talking to the LORD GOD ALMIGHTY. Plain and simple.
You can use your own words or borrow those written by others. You can argue with God, complain to God, cry out to God, praise God, plead with God, open your heart to God and rest in God.
After all, that is what we see as we read about the lives of those written in both the Old and New Testament. We see people talking to God in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of places. At times they are using words, other times they are using tears or using their hands lifted to the LORD.
+Abraham negotiates with God during one prayer session.
+Moses spends a great deal of time complaining about the People of Israel in some of his prayer times.
+Hannah’s tears become her prayer language.
+Jonah prays from the belly of a great fish.
+The Early Church used worship as a way of praying.
+Ezra would pray laying with his face on the ground.
+King Solomon would pray with his hands lifted high.
As I have studied prayer, I believe that what is most important about prayer and praying is just praying. I think more than anything we need to be authentic in our praying. Prayer is just laying out our hearts to the LORD. Prayer is holding nothing back. Pray is just talking to the LORD.
I mean, it is not as if we are going to surprise the LORD with our words. He knows our hearts. He can see inside our minds.
+He can handle our complaints – Just ask Job.
+He can handle our high-mindedness – just ask the Apostle Paul.
+He can handle our broken hearts – Just ask Mary and Martha.
+He can handle our sins; our brokenness – Just ask King David.
+He can handle our fears and our anxieties – Just ask Esther.
Praying, talking to God is not always easy (on our part) and yet as we grow in our relationship with God it becomes so easy. We sometimes think of it as a cumbersome thing to do but the more we grow closer to the LORD the more we realize it is just two friends talking to one another. Two friends that as the grow closer to one another the lesser one (that would be us) more and more understands that we have been given such a powerful and wonderful gift – the gift of being able to talk to the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. The gift of being able to talk to the LORD GOD ALMIGHTY. The gift of not only being able to talk to the LORD but being able to share time and space with Him.
This morning, in the passage that we have read from Paul’s letter to the Church at Colossae, he is sharing with the Church his prayer life for them.
Paul lists some 12 things in these few verses that he prays for them.
I think what is important for us to understand is that according to most Bible scholars there is a good chance that Paul was never able to visit this church except through his letters. There is good evidence that it was one of Paul’s disciples by the name of Epaphras that started the Church.
Paul was writing to them to help them out. He was writing to encourage them and teach them more about the LORD JESUS CHRIST. He is writing to them while he is sitting in prison cell in Ephesus on trial for his life.
We don’t know if after he was released that he did in fact visit Colossae (I would think that he would have) but what we do have is a letter telling them that they were important to him, that he loved them and that he was praying for them.
What we do have is some things that we can pray for others whether we know them or do not know them. What we do have via Paul are some things that we need to talk to the LORD about for each other, for our family and friends and for even those we don’t know about that live all over the world.
Let’s look at three of those things this morning:
I. We are to pray for one another’s ability to be able to hear God’s voice clearly and accurately
Paul is concerned that this congregation possesses the ability to be able to hear God’s voice. To be able to hear God’s voice clearly and accurately.
At first that may sound a little strange but once we think about it being able to hear someone’s voice is vital. It is of supreme importance.
Remember Jesus’ conversation in John chapter 10 about the shepherd knowing his sheep and the sheep knowing the voice of their shepherd.
Jesus of course was using something that at the time could be seen all over the hills of Israel. Like the old cattle drives of old that happened in the United States, in Israel there were great sheep drives and great sheep gathering areas.
Shepherds would join their flocks with other flocks, so that they could provide some additional protection and companionship. For the most part, being a shepherd was a lonely and exhausting job. When you could, you would link up your flock of 20-50-100 sheep with someone else’s flock of 20-50-100 sheep. That way you could have more eyes on the sheep, provide more security and share some local news and information.
However, when it was time to go how do you separate all those sheep back into their individual herds?
Shepherds would teach their sheep to obey on certain commands, certain words and sounds. They may whistle a certain way and the sheep would come to this shepherd. They may say certain words and the sheep would go with that shepherd.
Sheep would learn their own shepherd’s voice and would go with them.
For that to happen, it was important for the sheep to learn their shepherd’s voice. For sheep that didn’t learn or wouldn’t learn usually found themselves in danger or being eaten by a bear, lion or other predator.
Their lives depended on them being able to hear and obey their shepherd’s voice.
The same is true when we pray. We must tune our hearts, minds and souls to be able to hear God’s voice.
+That is one of the greatest reasons we are encouraged to get into God’s Word.
When we read and study the Bible, we learn how to tune into God’s voice. As we see how God spoke to those in the Bible, we can better know God’s voice as He speaks back to us.
The Apostle Paul knew that being able to hear God’s voice was vital. For part of his life as a believer he had shut off God’s voice. He had meticulously read the Scriptures; he had taken great pains to do adhere to all the rules and rituals and live by them.
However, what he had not done was tune his heart to truly hear God’s voice. If he had, then he would have never held the coats while they stoned Stephen and he would have never persecuted the Early Church.
So, what he does here is to share with the people of Colossae that he is going to talk to the LORD regularly about them being able to truly hear God’s voice. And in writing this to them, he is instructing them that they should be praying to be able to hear God’s voice.
There is a world of difference between
+Thy will be changed
+Thy will be done
Too often we spend our time praying – THY WILL BE CHANGED when we ought to be praying – THY WILL BE DONE.
And for THY WILL TO BE DONE – we must listen. And to listen we need to pray for one another to have tuned in hearts and lives this morning.
II. Paul goes on and prays that the People of Colossae develop the desire to live out a different life – A Holy Life
The people of Colossae were not raised in either Judaism or Christianity. They were raised worshipping the gods and goddesses of the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians and the mystery religions.
As a result, the Colossians adopted a different mentality and a different set of behavioral and ethical standards. These standards were quite different than those held by the Early Church.
For example:
+The physical human body for most Greeks, Romans and Egyptians was something to worship and to adore. It was something to be put on public display in the town square, in different buildings and even in the home.
When they created their statues often the images were displayed nude or without very much clothing.
When they held their athletic events often those who would be competing would do so in the nude or again with very little clothing.
What we would call immodest the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians would call normal behavior. They believed that the more beautiful the physical body the more people should be able to view that body and intimately share that body.
The Apostle Paul understood this basic difference and many more other differences which he outlines in several of his other letters. Some of those differences included things like an inclination towards sexual promiscuity – the idea that one should regularly participate in as much physical intimacy as one could and with as many different sexual partners as possible.
Other differences included idolatry, the practice of witchcraft, offering up infants or young children for human sacrifice, human trafficking along with everyday drunkenness, the use of filthy language and violence.
In contrast to all this behavior, the Apostle Paul wants the Colossians to live differently. He wants them to allow the Holy Spirit to lead and guide them to a different way of living; to behaving like people made in the image of the One True God and live in such a way to as to honor God and honor one another.
All of this reminds us of another person that spend years teaching his people how to live a new life. That of course was Moses of the Old Testament.
When the Children of Israel left Egypt, they understood very little about how to be a true follower of God. All those years of living in Egypt had led to them to believe in all kinds of gods and goddesses and adopt many of the behavioral and ethical habits of the Egyptians and the other cultures that surrounded them.
Part of the most transformational chapters in the Old Testament are those that we find in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy where the LORD GOD ALMIGHTY takes great pains in sharing with Moses, who then shares with the Children of Israel a new way to live. They were to live a way of life that Jesus would succinctly describe this way:
Once a lawyer asked Jesus, "What is the most important of all the commandments?" Jesus answered, "The most important is: 'The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, with your whole mind and with your whole strength.'
"The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."
Those commandments – loving God, loving oneself and loving others – when they are put into daily practice are the ingredients to living a holy life.
And that is the rub – for it takes connecting with God and then with connecting with others for us to be able to live out this new life in Christ. It takes allowing true love to be our guiding light. It takes a great deal of what Paul tells the Church of Philippi:
Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.—Philippians 2:12-13.
All of this leads us to the Apostle Paul’s third prayer request:
III. Paul prays for the Colossians to allow the Holy Spirit to give them the power to live differently
Have you ever tried to stop a habit?
Have you ever tried to change your mind about something?
If you have, then you know that it takes a great deal of will power to stop doing something, thinking about something a certain way or feeling about something a certain way.
Paul understood how difficult it was to suddenly turn your life around.
From the time we see Paul coming to faith in Acts 9 and then going out to work among the Early Church, we must understand that several years had passed.
Paul didn’t go from persecuting the Church to leading Sunday School in a matter of days or weeks.
He knew that what he was experiencing in Christ was a total shift in everything he had been doing, thinking and feeling.
He knew it was going to take some time to reset everything.
Thankfully, he had Barnabas and others that helped him in his transition from persecutor to missionary.
It isn’t by accident that Paul would write to his churches such things as:
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.” - Romans 12:1-2
“Do you not know that is a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run is such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” – 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
“So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” – Galatians 5:16-18
Paul knew that he had to change. He also knew that those who read his letter and that attended the Church of Colossae would need to change.
He knew firsthand how difficult that process would prove to be for many of them. And so, he prays that they will lean into the LORD for power and strength. He prays that they will continually go to the LORD for correction, reproof, guidance, comfort, encouragement and progress.
The walk of the Christ follower does not end when we come to faith.
The walk of the Christ follower is one that is ongoing. It is a lifelong adventure. With each step we grow closer to the LORD. With each step we keep our minds and hearts on what is above and not on what is on this earth. With each step we lean into being more like Jesus and less like the world.
To do that we will need help.
Help that comes from God above, the Holy Spirit inside and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ alongside us.
That is why the Apostle wrote such passages as:
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. – Ephesians 4:32
In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words – Romans 8:26
This morning, Paul wants to understand:
+That we have this wonderful gift called Prayer
+We are to use this gift to grow closer to the LORD
+We are to use this gift to help others
All to often we find ourselves praying for people’s health, their finances and even for them to come to faith.
Those are great prayers, and the LORD loves it when we spend time praying for others.
Here, the Apostle wants us to go a few steps forward:
+To pray for ourselves and for others to be able to hear God’s Voice. To pray that we all will be able to tune into what God wants for our lives over the noise of the world around us.
+To pray for ourselves and others to be able to change – to grow in our walk with the LORD. To continually allow the LORD to renew our minds, strengthen our hearts and to walk of what could be called progressive holiness – becoming more and more like Jesus.
+To pray for ourselves and others to be empowered by God’s Holy Spirit so that we can both hear and be transformed.
In James 4:2 we read these little but oh so powerful words:
“You have not because you ask not.”
Sometimes we don’t see a growth in our own lives and perhaps in the lives of others because:
+We are not asking God to help us and others understand Him better – to be able to hear His voice more clearly. In fact, we may have never realized that we need to pray such prayers.
+We are not asking God to help us and others grow in our/their walk – we are not asking God to prune us and others be more fruitful. We are not asking God to help us and others become more like Jesus.
+We are not asking God to help us and others experience more power – more of the Holy Spirit so that we can all live an Abundant Life here and now.
Paul teaches us a great deal in his letters.
This morning, let’s put what we have seen here in this passage into practice:
+Let’s pray for ourselves and others to
-Be able to God’s voice more clearly
-To be able to change our lives for the better – to love Him, ourselves and others more and more and become more and more like Jesus
-To have more power to do His Will.
