September 9, 2001 Colossians 1:9-14
“How to pray to change lives”
INTRODUCTION
Probably everyone here has prayed for someone at some point in your life. You prayed that they would get well or that they would have safety in a trip that they were taking or that they would get a job that they were applying for. Sometimes things worked out as you hoped. Sometimes they didn’t. These prayers were what I would call “emergency” prayers. Some situation arises in someone else’s life or maybe even our own life, and it forces to get down on our knees. As long as the situation is unmet, we stay down on our knees. But as soon as the situation is resolved, we check that off on our list, stop praying for that person and start praying for someone else who is in an emergency situation. So we move from emergency to emergency. We are reactive instead of proactive. We are always on the defense rather than being on offense.
This morning, I want to show you another way. I want to show you a prayer that Paul prayed for the church at Colosse. It is a prayer that will change people. It will accomplish in people’s lives what all your begging, whining, yelling, and nagging will not do. It is a powerful prayer. It is not powerful because of the specific words that are used but because of the subjects of the requests that you make. You can have complete confidence as you prayer that each and every request you make is completely within the will of God for that person. It is not powerful because it is a magical formula, but because God already desires to do these things in the lives of every person. You are only asking for what God already wants to do. It is powerful because you are praying God’s Word back to Him.
Two things that I need to tell you about this prayer. First, this prayer will not change situations. In fact, because of what you are praying for, it may make situations worse than they were to begin with. That may be necessary in order to accomplish what you are asking God to do. And second, this prayer will only be effective as you pray it on a daily basis for a long time. Paul says in vs. 9 of Colossians 1 where we find this prayer that “since the day [he] heard about [them, he] had not stopped praying for [them].” As the ocean was faithful to send the waves to the shore, so Paul was just as faithful to pray this prayer for the believers. It is no quick fix, and you should not expect changes over night. At the same time that God is changing the person you are praying for, He will be changing you and testing you to increase your faith and your faithfulness. He will be testing you to see if you are truly totally dependent on Him to accomplish what you can never accomplish in your own strength. The more change you want to see accomplished, the more time it will take. It takes thousands of years to turn a lump of coal into a diamond.
Having said that, let’s read Paul’s prayer in Colossians 1:9-12. In it, we will discover 5 requests that will change our lives and the lives of people around us.
1. Pray that they may know the purpose of God. (vs. 9)
So many people are confused about what their purpose on earth really is. They think that it has something to do with what their job is or what the balance in their checkbook says or what kind of possessions they have or how their kids turn out. All of those may be good things, and they can fit into God’s purpose for your life, but they are not your purpose for being here. They are not what God wants to accomplish in you. If your job was your purpose on earth, what happens if you lose your job either through getting fired, through retirement, or through some accident which prevents you from doing your job anymore? If the accumulation of possessions is your purpose in life, what happens when a flood comes along and washes all of your possessions away just like it happened down in southern West Virginia? If raising children is your purpose in life, what happens when they don’t turn out the way that you planned, or what happens when you can’t bear children, or what happens when you lose a child? None of those are your purpose in being here. If your purpose for existence is built on anything that you can lose, then you are on very dangerous ground. As soon as you lose that one thing that is most significant for the meaning in your life, you might as well just give up on life and end it all. That’s exactly what a lot of people do. But God’s Word tells us of at least three parts to God’s purpose for us while we are here. And none of these are things that you can lose.
Salvation “God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”
Growth “desire the sincere milk of the Word, that you may grow thereby”
Glory of God “…whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
Notice that Paul says that they are to gain this understanding of God’s will “through all spiritual wisdom and understanding”. This means “to develop the mind of God,” seeing our world and our lives from God’s perspective. That is the developing the ability not only to determine what is right and wrong but also what is good, better, and best. There are a lot of things that I could include in my life that are good things. A lot of activities that I could do and a lot of organizations that I could get involved in. But I need the ability to sort through all the options and see which things would most aid my growth as a Christian and my ability to bring glory to God. I need the ability to discern the will of God through His Word and through the leading of His Spirit. It is possible – in fact, I believe that it happens all the time – that people who have met that first portion of God’s purpose for their lives, salvation, get so busy with stuff in their lives and include so many activities in their lives that they no longer have room for God’s best for them. They don’t have room for those things that will help them to grow, and they don’t have time to do the things or develop the skills that will most bring glory to God. So pray for people that they will know the purpose of God for their lives.
2. Pray that they may live a life praiseworthy of God. (vs. 10a)
What does Paul mean when he says, “Live a life worthy of the Lord”? The word “worthy” means “weight”. So when Paul prayed, he prayed that their lives would have some substance to them – that they would have some weight to them. Now Paul wasn’t praying that they would go to Ryan’s every night and pig out on the food bar so that they would become the heaviest people around. The weight that he had in mind was something totally different.
I need a helper. [place a feather on someone’s shoulder while they close their eyes, and ask them to tell you when they can tell that you have placed it there. Then place a large book on their shoulder, and ask them to tell you when it is there. They should have difficulty with the feather but none with the book.] Two things that are true of a person of weight. You can tell when they are there. They are not invisible. The second thing that is true of them is that they make a difference in whatever situation they enter into. Did you notice what happened to _____’s shoulder when I put the book on it? [The shoulder on that side went down] When weighty people enter the room, things change. The spirit in the room changes, the look on people’s faces changes, the conversation changes. They make a dramatic impact wherever they go. And when they leave, their presence there is remembered because they continue to impact people even after they are physically gone. They are people of influence because they are people with some substance to them.
Jesus was a weighty person. Everywhere He went, people were changed. Nothing was ever the same after Jesus was there.
Now you can be a person of weight by doing something as simple as passing gas. The look on people’s faces change. They plug their nose and get a grimace on their face. The conversation changes. “Oooh! Do you smell that? He who smelt it dealt it!” The spirit in the room changes. Everyone is trying to get out as quickly as they can. You can also be a person of weight by doing something as horrible as killing 6 million Jews. Hitler definitely had a deep impact on the world of his time and the world ever since his day.
Knowing that there are people who are negative weights and positive weights, Paul added some clarification to his prayer. “Worthy of the Lord and may please Him in every way.” He wanted them to live lives that were weighty for the Lord. In other words, the impact that they left behind them was not of how great a person they were, but of how great a God that they served. When their feet left footprints, it wasn’t supposed to be an imprint of their own feet, but an impression of God’s foot. When people remembered and repeated their words, the impression that should be left in their minds was an impression of Jesus, not of them. Then, every impression that our weight leaves behind will be an impression that brings glory to God.
If we are living a life that has no depth, has no character, a life that is merely gratifying the flesh, a life that is spent rather than being invested, our life has no weight whatsoever. The problem with our world and with our churches is that the majority of the people do not care if their lives have any substance to them. They do not care if they are not impacting anyone for Jesus. They are content just to struggle through. They think that their purpose is to survive – to make it from birth to death without too many failures in between those two points. They sit in church, they soak it in, they enjoy the fellowship, but they never do anything for God of any significance or weight!
Imagine praying this for you every day of your life: “Lord, I want to pray in Jesus’ name that you would give my wife clear direction in her life. I pray that she will grow in her relationship with you every day and that in all that she does today, that she will remember that she’s doing it for your glory. And I pray that wherever she goes that she will make an undeniable impact for your kingdom in the lives of other people and in the community where she lives.” What do you suppose would be the impact if you prayed that prayer for them every day? “God, so speak to my children, so work in their lives that their lives will have your substance to them. I pray that they will have an eternal impact on this world for you. I pray that when people see my children coming, that it will put smiles on people’s faces, that it will bring peace to conflict, that it will bring healing to pain.” Pray that they would be a weight so heavy that it cannot be ignored nor removed.
3. Pray that they may live productive lives. (vs. 10b)
Many of you are familiar with Bruce Wilkinson’s book based on the prayer of Jabez found in 1 Chron 4:9-11. His 2nd book, Lessons from the Vine explores our connection to Jesus as the Vine. In John 15, Jesus said, “I am the Vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." (vs. 5) Here in Colossians, Paul prayed that the people would “bear fruit in every good work”.
You and I will produce some kind of fruit in our lives. That is not in question. What is in question is what kind of fruit we will produce. Will it be good fruit, or will it be poisonous fruit? In the years that you have lived, as you look back, what has your life produced? You may not want to think about it, but you must. You were not placed on this earth to just take up space. You were put here so that Jesus Christ could live His life through you and produce His good works on earth. We, the church, are Jesus’ body, accomplishing on earth all that He would do if He was physically present here.
In Ephesians 2:10, it says “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared for us to do.”
About the first week of September every year, I get a summons from one of our homebound members – Garnet Palmer. She has a large apple tree outside her front door. Her summons is for me to come and pick apples off of that fruit tree. We always know that in the month of September, we’re either going to have lots of apple sauce or we’re going to need vanilla ice cream to go with our apple pie. This past Tuesday was the date of my annual climbing of that tree. While I was up there, I began to think about Paul’s prayer for these Christians to produce fruit in every good work. I thought about what it takes for apple trees to produce good fruit. It takes deep roots. The summers can be dry. They’ve got to be able to reach down to where the water is. It takes protection from internal enemies – namely disease. It takes protection from external enemies – bugs and termites. And it takes unselfishness. Do you remember the apple trees in the Wizard of Oz? When Dorothy went to pick one of the apples off the tree, it rebelled. It yelled at her for taking the apple. Dorothy was shocked not only because the tree was talking but because the tree would not give up its fruit without a fight or at least not without complaint. That’s not natural. What is natural is for fruit trees to produce fruit for the benefit of someone other than itself. I’ve never known a fruit tree yet that was able to enjoy eating its own fruit.
Paul prayed that these Christians would be productive fruit trees – trees that had their roots way down deep in Jesus so that when the dry times came, they would not only survive but thrive. Trees that were protected from internal dangers – anger and fear and improper desires to name a few. Trees that were protected from outside danger – the attacks of Satan and the world. And trees that were unselfish with their fruit – producing for the sweet smelling fragrance to God and the nourishment of those around them.
Paul prayed that these people wouldn’t just be busy about serving God, but that in every good thing that they did for God, there would be positive, nourishing, eternal results.
How would you like it if someone was constantly praying for you that in every good thing you attempted for God, there would be positive visible results that came out of that? Or maybe you like just doing things so that you can look busy. I don’t! One of the chores that I enjoy doing around the house is mowing the grass. I don’t enjoy it because it makes me sweat and because it’s hard work. I enjoy it because after you get done, you get to look back and see that your work actually made a difference. I want to see results!! Let’s pray for results in our efforts to grow a great church!
4. Pray that they will grow in their personal knowledge of God. (vs. 10c)
I believe that the greatest desire of every person’s life should be to know God. And the greatest desire or aspiration for each day should be to know God a little bit better today than I did yesterday. In the church that I grew up in, they had their mission statement spelled out across the front wall: “To know Christ and to make Him known”.
I’m not talking about knowing facts about God or even knowing the events of the Bible from cover to cover. You can know all about a person without ever having met that person. Many of you children will have to do a book report on a biography of some person in history this year. Maybe you’ll choose to do a report on Babe Ruth or Charles Lindbergh or Ronald Reagan. You’ll read that book, and you’ll get all kinds of facts about that person’s life, but you will never have a chance to actually get to know that person. Several months ago, when Dale Earnhardt died, thousands of people mourned his death just like they would have mourned the death of a dear friend. But most of those people had never actually met Dale Earnhardt. They could tell you how many Nascar races he had won, who his greatest rivals were, what the dimensions and horse-power of his car were. But they didn’t actually have a relationship with him.
And that’s what I’m talking about. Having a relationship with God that gets a little bit deeper, a little bit stronger and a little bit more intimate every day.
The thought of having a relationship with God is totally foreign to some people’s way of thinking. Do you know that the opportunity to have a relationship with God is one of the great things that sets us apart from all the other religions of the world? People of other faiths may know about their god, but they don’t even have the option of getting to know their god personally. And even for some Christians, they think of God as being out there somewhere. He’s the Creator of the universe. He’s too far above me for me to get to know Him. The point of Jesus coming down to earth was to bridge the gap between us and God so that we could get to know Him.
Getting to know God will cause you to get to know yourself in comparison to Him. That’s a scary thought. And that’s why some people don’t even attempt to enter a relationship with Him. What if they don’t like how they look when compared to a beautiful holy God? Or worse, what if God doesn’t like what He sees when in the process of getting to know Him, He gets to know me? Can I pass on a piece of information to you? God already knows you. He knows you better than you know yourself. And He loves you, and He can change you into a beautiful person.
Well, what if in the process of getting to know God, I get discouraged with what I discover? That can happen with people. It’s a big part of the reason that the divorce rate in our country is so high. Two people enter into a relationship, not really knowing the other person. As they begin to get to know that person, they discover things about them and character flaws that they have. They decide that this was not the relationship that they really wanted. Will you be disappointed with God if you search too deeply into His character? Will there come a day that you wish you had never met Him? No, God will never disappoint you. The more that you get to know Him, the more that you will want to get to know Him even better.
If I did not know you and wanted to know you better, you and I would have to share time with each other. We’d have to talk together. We’d have to do things together. In our romantic relationships, we call this process dating or courtship. While we were together, we would have to share our joys, hurts, experiences, thoughts – share how we feel about certain things. The more we shared with each other, the more intimate we would become in our friendship and fellowship with each other. Before you know it, we would know how the other one felt about something before it would come about. We would know how the other would react to a situation. We would know the perfect Christmas gift for them without them even having to ask for it.
There are all kinds of levels of relationship. There are people that you say “hi” and “bye” and “gonna be a hot one today” to as you pass them in the halls of your office or the streets of your neighborhood. There are others that you could share a meal with in a restaurant and actually carry on a decent conversation mostly consisting of current events in the world. Then there are those people that you can actually take the risk of sharing feelings and fears with. At the deepest level of relationship are those people that you can totally be yourself with. Those are the truly intimate relationships. Those are the relationships where you can risk it all – you can let it all hang out and hold nothing back and still know that they will be there tomorrow. What level of relationship do you think God wants with us? I’ll give you a couple of clues. He risked everything by sending His one and only Son, and He’s given us the Bible to communicate what He’s done in the past, what He’s doing today, and what He’s going to do in the future. He’s told us how He feels about us, about the world and about our responsibilities to Him while in the world. That should tell you that God wants your relationship with Him to be more intimate than with your mom and dad, your siblings, your football buddies, your children or your spouse.
The only way to get to know Him is to get in this Book and experience the truth. When you apply the knowledge you have and start living that knowledge, the more God will reveal to you. The way you will grow in you closeness to God tomorrow is to obey Him today. Obey Him again and again. As we obey Him in the simple things, the intimacy will grow. God will trust us with more knowledge of Himself and His ways.
If I could pray only one prayer for my wife, my children or for you, it would be, “God, give them an increasing understanding of who you are, and cause them to want to know you better today than they knew you yesterday.”
5. Pray that they will be filled with the power of God. (vs. 11)
Look at vs. 11 “being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience…” If you and I were to pray this for someone, what we would be praying for is that they would experience the supernatural power of God in his/her life for living. The only way that we can fulfill all these other things that we are praying for is through the power of God. The way to fulfill God’s purpose for us is through His power. The way to live lives of substance and influence is through the power of God. And the way to be productive in all that we do for God is through the power of God. We can’t live in this world in our own strength. It is impossible because God never intended for us to live that way.
To some of you, this portion of the prayer is probably the most appealing. We all like the power thing. We feel so weak that it would be really nice to be powerful once in while. But in order to have God’s power, something else has to happen first. And that’s what we talked about a moment ago – a personal growing relationship with God. You can’t separate God’s power from His person. Your prayers and your life will never be powerful until you spend time getting to know God. You’ve got to have a strong relationship with God if you expect to have His power flowing through you. In Acts 8, we are told about a person who didn’t understand this. He tried to have God’s power without developing His relationship with God. [tell his story concentrating on vs. 18-23]
The power that Paul prayed for these Christians to receive and the power that we should pray for one another to have is not the kind of power that can make our problems go away. Paul says that it is the kind of power that will enable us to endure and exercise patience in the middle of our problems.
That word “endurance” means “to bear up under the weight and pressure of a given situation and not give in regardless of what is going on.” The power that we are praying for is the ability to bear up under our problems without allowing them to crush us. It is the ability to prevent our problems from squeezing out all our joy. It means not allowing our beliefs or our faith to be negatively affected by the circumstances that we face. It also means not reacting to situations with revenge and retaliation when someone attacks us.
In the many days and nights that Roy and Mary spent up at Ruby Memorial Hospital watching over Ryan, there were many opportunities for their faith to be tested and every ounce of hope to be squeezed out of them. Dr. D – or Dr. Doom as Roy liked to call him – would come and talk with them, and he never had anything encouraging to say. He would constantly tell them how bad things looked and how poor his chances of survival were. How could they keep their faith in a good God in the midst of all that? Through the power of God.
Each day that you go to work and face the ridicule or at least the avoidance of others in your office because of your faith, how do you bear up under the weight that tries to get you to compromise your standards? Through the power of God.
When you students go to school, particularly you teenagers, and you are constantly faced with pressures to do things that you know are wrong – cheating, alcohol, sex, drugs – how do you say “NO” to the pressure and keep to your beliefs? When you’re faced with evolutionary teaching that contradicts the Bible, and biblical facts are ridiculed and disputed by the teachers or the curriculum, how do you continue to keep your faith in God? Through the power of God.
Do you see that we all need the supernatural power of God in our lives? We cannot live our lives victoriously without Christ living in us though the Holy Spirit. Friends, I know a lot of people who need this prayer prayed for them, and you’re looking at one of them.
What would it do for you if you knew that you had someone praying a prayer like this for you every day? A prayer for you to know God’s purpose, to be a person of influence and substance so that you positively impact every life and situation that you encounter, to be productive in every good work that you do, to get to know God better today than you did yesterday, and to experience the supernatural power of God in your everyday life. Would it encourage you? Would it change your life? Would you be willing to pray this prayer for someone you know every day? Maybe your kids or your spouse or your pastor.
CONLUSION
To start the process off, we’re going to close a little bit differently today. The best way to learn to pray is to pray. I need the ushers to come forward and give out one of these cards to every person here. On this card is a prayer based on the prayer that Paul prayed for the Colossian Christians. In a moment, I’m going to ask you to pair up with another adult or teenager in this group. Then I want you to pray this prayer out loud, first for yourself and then for the person next to you. You don’t have to worry about not knowing what to say or about praying too long or too short. The prayer is right there in front of you. In the places where there are blanks, insert the name of the person that you are paired with. If there are children near you, include them in your group, and pray this prayer over them. When everyone is done, I will close us all in prayer together.
But before we do that, it occurs to me that there may be someone here who hasn’t fulfilled that first step of God’s purpose for your life. There has never been a time that you took Jesus Christ as your Savior. You have never begun a relationship with Him. If that is the case with you, then I want you to tell that to the person next to you. They can either tell you how to begin that relationship, or they can bring you to me, and together, we’ll help you get to know God today like you’ve never known Him before.
