Thanksgiving and prayer
For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. 10 And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.
Paul was a firm believer in prayer. Here he assures the Colossian Christians that he has been praying for them. Prayer for all the Christian congregations was a part of his daily routine. From the time they had first heard about the congregation in Colosse, Paul says, he, Timothy, and the others had remembered the Colossian believers in their prayers. Encouraged by the blessings God had already bestowed on those believers, Paul and his coworkers constantly asked for more. Knowing that the apostle and his fellow workers were praying for them should have made the Colossians even more receptive to the encouragements and warnings Paul was about to give them in this epistle.
The specific requests that Paul made in his prayers for the Colossians were dictated by the Colossians’ special needs. Reading between the lines of Paul’s prayer requests, we see some rather direct references to the situation in Colosse. The apostle’s first and basic request for the Colossians was that the Lord would fill them with a clear knowledge of his will.
Paul wanted the Colossians to have not just a fact knowledge but a clear and penetrating insight, a heart-transforming and life-renewing knowledge of God’s revelation in Christ. This knowledge, for which every Christian ought to pray, is both satisfying and practical. It includes wisdom, the ability to properly apply one’s faith in various situations, as well as understanding, the ability to evaluate spiritual matters and reject that which is false and cling to that which is true.
The opponents of the gospel in Colosse boasted a great deal about their knowledge. Clear knowledge of God’s Word and will, Paul says, will enable the Colossians to see through all false claims and remain faithful to the Lord. Paul’s prayer surely also included the request that God would use the very words he was writing to the Colossians to strengthen their knowledge and their hold on the truth.
Clear knowledge of God and his will guides the believer in conduct worthy of the Lord. Paul prays that the Colossians will conduct themselves in harmony with their believing relationship to the Lord. A Christian constantly and earnestly strives to please God by living a life in harmony with God’s will. The more thoroughly God’s children come to know him, the more they will mature in their faithrelationship with him, and the more they will desire to obey him by thinking, saying, and doing those things that will be pleasing to the Lord whose name they bear.
With four phrases, Paul describes in verses 10 and 11 the kind of Christian lives that he prays will characterize the Colossians. He prays that they will bear fruit in every good work. Good works—the thoughts, words, and deeds that please God—are the fruits of faith. As Christians grow in their knowledge of God and his love, their faith grows. A growing faith will reveal itself more and more in the fruits of practical holiness.
By mentioning growing in knowledge as an element in a God-pleasing life, Paul shows how a Christian life can be seen as a perfect circle. Knowledge of God and his saving will for sinners is the basic blessing. It, in turn, results in love for God and in the desire to serve God with a holy life. An important element in a life that pleases God is using God’s means of grace, the gospel in Word and sacrament. As Christians use the means of grace, the Holy Spirit works in their hearts to strengthen them in faith and in the knowledge of God and his will, especially his saving will for them. Thus Christians come full circle.
In spiritual things, as in many other things, knowledge is power. As Christians come to know their Lord more deeply, he fills them with the spiritual strength that enables them to confess, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:13). Through the gospel, the Holy Spirit fills believers with his strength, not in a measured or sparing way but in proportion to his limitless power. That strength enables believers to perform their tasks and live their Christian lives confidently and without fear. It gives them the courage to endure hardships, persecutions, and temptations with brave patience and even to forgive those who oppress them.
Finally, a God-pleasing life is marked by joyful thanksgiving. Paul’s entire epistle to the Philippians is an encouragement to joy and thanksgiving, even in time of tribulation. He repeats that encouragement here.
As he brings this extraordinary prayer to a close, Paul highlights once more the most important reason Christians have for giving thanks. God the Father, to whom believers’ thanks should forever ascend, has “qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.” In the Old Testament the Lord provided the people of Israel with an inheritance in the land of Canaan. New Testament believers share in an even better inheritance, a spiritual one.
The Colossian believers, who had mainly been drawn from the gentile world, had at one time been strangers to God. They had been alienated from the church, God’s kingdom. Since Adam’s fall into sin, all human beings, Jews and Gentiles alike, are enemies of God and strangers to his kingdom by the very nature that they inherit from their sinful parents. But by his grace God had qualified the Colossians to share in the inheritance of his saints in light. This was something God did and not something they deserved or worked for. An inheritance is a gift, something not earned but freely given. Furthermore, their spiritual inheritance is not something for which believers are naturally fit, but something for which they have been “qualified” by God.
The great inheritance of which Paul speaks is called the “inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.” “Saints,” separated ones, is simply another name for believers. “Light” in Scripture means all of the things that have to do with God and holiness, spiritual wisdom, salvation, and life. In his undeserved love for sinners, God qualifies them to share in his kingdom of light. He reaches out through the gospel to rescue them from the kingdom of darkness and death and brings them into the kingdom of Jesus, his Son.