Colossians 1:9-12 –

⁹And 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, ¹⁰so 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; ¹¹being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; ¹²giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. ¹³He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, ¹⁴in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Introduction

What is the goal of Bible study? Or, when you study the Bible, what are you after? Maybe even more to the point, what biblical passages inform your understanding of the goal of knowing God’s Word?

The first time I was explicitly confronted with those kinds of questions was about ten years ago. I was going to be teaching hermeneutics (a fancy word for Bible study methods) on a TLI trip. Within the first few pages of the curriculum, I came across the heading: “The Goal of the Bible: ___”. As soon as I saw it, I knew that I’d never consciously filled in the blank, but I should have. The fact that I hadn’t was both surprising and a bit disorienting.

I began running possible answers through my mind, but I never got passed high level answers like “Glorifying God” or “Learning what God has told us” or “Finding God’s will or God’s plan”.

As caught off guard as I was with the initial question, I was even more caught off guard by the curriculum’s answer. As I mentioned, I wasn’t sure what the answer should be, but I was sure the answer I found in the teacher’s manual wasn’t on my radar. The answer it gave was: Practical wisdom (knowing how to live).

For reasons I still don’t fully grasp, that answer just didn’t sit right with me for a long time. I think, maybe, it just seemed too simple, too ordinary, too practical, too under the sun. I’d drunk a lot of big God theology Kool-Aid by that point and it felt like anything other than “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever” or “to delight in the sovereignty of God over all things” was too man-centered, too down to earth.

Of course, it is true that all things ultimately exist for the glory of God (including the Bible and its study), and I knew, of course, that God calls us to live in certain ways, but I’d never quite fit those two puzzle pieces together before then. The Spirit was kind to do so that day. Glorifying God must begin with right doctrine, but it must always end with right practice. I learned then that God theology is the most practical theology of all.

Our passage for this morning shines a bright light on that. In it, Paul helps us to see in simple, explicit, biblical terms that the goal of Bible study is to enable God’s people “to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord” (aka, practical wisdom).

As we consider our passage for this morning, I want to help you see the big idea in it: Living lives that are worthy of the Lord and fully pleasing to Him requires right thinking, right living, and the grace of God. The main takeaway, then, is to give ourselves to prayerfully studying all of God’s Word and prayerfully applying it to all of our lives.

Walking in a Manner Worthy of the Lord

The heart of this passage is, once again, Paul’s prayer that the Colossian Christians would live lives worthy of the Lord. We find that within his recounting to them, his prayers for them; and with that, we find amazing help in understanding what it means to live a life that is fully pleasing to God and how to go about it.

We Cannot Walk Worthily Apart from the Grace of God – Paul’s Prayer of Supplication (9)

To back up just a bit, in v.3, Paul mentions that every time he prays for the Colossians, it includes a time of giving thanks to God for the blessings He’d already given them (namely, their faith in Jesus). In our passage, Paul continued to describe his prayers for the Colossians, mentioning that he also asked God for things they still needed. There are two things I want you to see in that regard.

First, Paul is a model of the kind of consistency these kinds of prayers of supplication ought to have. He recognized a significant need in the church at Colossae and committed himself to taking that need before God until God answered his prayer.

We see this right away in v.9, “And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you…”. We’ll come to the content of the prayers Paul never ceased to pray in a few minutes, but the first point here is that there were prayers he never stopped praying.

To be clear, Paul was not saying (as it kind of sounds like) that he had been praying without stopping (every minute of every day) for months. Instead, simply, he’s saying that he’s taken certain needs of the Colossians to God consistently since he first became aware of the needs.

Think back to our member meeting last Sunday. As elders, we asked you all to prayerfully consider four options for addressing the space issues we have here on Sundays. Our hope is that you would have begun praying that day and that you’d continue praying until the Lord brings some resolution to our situation. We’re asking, in Paul’s 1:9 language, that you’d not cease praying for this until God moves in it.

Praying like that requires love, intentionality, discipline, and trust. It requires love in that you won’t pray for it once, much less all the way through to resolution, if you don’t treasure Christ and long for that which is best for our church. It requires intentionality in that it won’t just happen if you don’t write it down and make a plan to keep it in front of you. It requires discipline in that, as we all know, it’s far easier to begin a good thing than it is to finish it. And it requires trust, because who would keep praying if they didn’t believe God beckons, hears, cares, and will be faithful to His promise to work for our good?

Paul prayed like this and I commend this kind of prayer-life to you all as well. Get a prayer journal. Have certain times of day (or days of the week) that you set aside to praying for the things you write down. And don’t stop praying until God’s answer is clear.

We can’t pray like this for every single request we take before God. But a right understanding of prayer, the world we live in, and the God who hears our prayers, means that we must do so sometimes—that there are some needs that are worth pleading with God for, as did the persistent widow in Luke 18.

The second thing I want you to see here is that Paul prayed like this because he knew that the things the Colossian Christians needed most were not possible apart from God’s grace.

Therefore, he prayed for God’s illuminating grace. The Colossians needed God to open their eyes if they were to see what is true of God and His will; and so Paul asked God for this grace for the Colossians.

Paul also prayed for God’s sanctifying grace. The very heart of Paul’s prayers were for God to grant the Colossians new minds and new affections. They not only needed to see what was true, but they needed to learn to love it above all. And, therefore, Paul prayed for God’s sanctifying grace.

And Paul prayed for God to grant strengthening grace to the Colossians. He knew that the Colossians’ only hope of living as God intended them to through this trial was through God’s power. And so he asked God to grant it.

Everything the Colossians needed comes only by God’s grace. Paul knew that faith-driven prayer is the most significant means of God’s grace for Christians…and so he never ceased praying for the Colossians.

Grace, as a pastoral aside, I would commend three things to you regarding your prayer life. I’m simply going to name them, but I’d encourage you all to press into them in your DG this week. First, your prayer life is probably the best indicator of your spiritual health and maturity. Second, it is usually best to pray the Bible. And third, a robust prayer life consists of a balance between prayers of adoration (God, I praise you for being / that you are ___ ), prayers of confession (God, Your Word calls me to ___, but I have failed to honor that. I am sorry for my sin. Help me remember the gospel and walk in light of it), prayers of thanksgiving (God, thank you for being kind to me in that ___ ), and prayers of supplication (God, please fulfill this need in my life).

So far, the body of this letter has been a masterclass on that kind of prayer life. That is, in vs.3-12, we’re seeing a lengthening description of Paul’s exemplary prayer life on behalf of the Colossian Christians.

What, then, did Paul specifical...