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Well, good morning. I'd like to welcome you to another edition of Anchored in the Word, Morning Reflection. And this morning we are going to be finishing out our study on the book of Colossians. If you have a Bible, I'd like to ask you to take it and turn to Colossians chapter 4. We're looking at Colossians chapter four, verses two through the end of the book. Now I'm not gonna read the entire section that we have here because it's a little bit long, but I do wanna focus on the first couple of verses of the section. Let's begin reading in verse number two together, please. Colossians chapter four, verse two. Continuing in prayer, watch in the same with thanksgiving, with all praying for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance to speak the mystery of Christ for which I am also in bonds, that I may make it manifest as I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. All my state shall Tichitus declare unto you, who is my beloved brother, and a faithful minister and fellow servant in the Lord. Okay, this morning we're looking at Colossians 4 and I did mention earlier that this is an extremely practical section of Scripture. He's going to have a conversation with several of the different people that he's talking to, but I want us to focus on the very beginning part of this section, where Paul talks about prayer and how he wants the people to pray for him. So, as I like to do each morning, I wanted to start out with just a simple explanation, summary statement of this passage. And here's the statement that I've written down. Paul opened his letter expressing how he prayed for the church. Now he closes his letter appealing to the church to pray for him. In other words, when he starts the book, he says, I want you to know, church, that I love you, I care about you, you're on my heart, and this is exactly how I'm praying for you, that you'll grow in grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus. Now as I come to the end of the letter, I want you to pray for me. And I want you to remember where Paul was when he wrote these words. Paul was in prison, and he was in prison for the sake of the gospel. And so when Paul is there in that prison, he has a very unique situation. He can't go about and travel like he'd like to. He can't do a lot of the things that he wants to do. But he still sees himself in a place where God has him, and he believes that there's ministry that he can have in that location. And so Paul is saying, look, I've prayed for you and I've laid out all these truths. Here are some things I want you to pray about for me. And so let's look at a couple of the things that Paul says in this letter. And really, this is a wonderful pattern for how we should pray for one another as well. The first observation I have is found in verses two to three. And here's what we see in this section. Paul is giving three simple appeals about the way that they should pray for him. Here are the phrases. The first one is continue in prayer. The idea is Paul saying, look, I want you to have a continual life of prayer. This needs to be your way of life. In other words, not just in crisis moments when a need arises and you say, now I need to pray because I'm feeling this intense pressure. But he's saying you should be in prayer constantly. There should be this constant communion and fellowship with God where you bring requests to him. He also says, and watch in the same. The idea is be alert to specific needs. If I'm gonna be a prayerful person, then I need to be alert to the kinds of needs that people have. The kinds of needs that I have personally, the kinds of needs that other people have. And that's an important part of being a prayerful person. A third thing he mentions is that they are to continue in prayer with thanksgiving. And I think the sense that he has there is you need to have this grateful anticipation that God is going to work through your prayer. In other words, when I come to God, I don't just bring my request and say, well, I hope that he does this, I doubt that he's going to do this. We have this anticipation that we understand God's character, we understand the kinds of things that God would want to do, We understand his power and his providence and his wisdom and his goodness. And so on the basis of our knowledge of God and our knowledge of the circumstances that we're praying for, we have this grateful anticipation that God is going to work. A second observation we find in these verses, is that he gives them direction shaping the specific kinds of things that he would like them to pray for. So it's not just the way that they approach prayer, but he says, here's some specific things to jot down to pray for me personally about. In verse three, he says, with all praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance to speak the mysteries of Christ. Basically what Paul is doing is he's saying, pray that God would open up specific opportunities for me to give the gospel. And remember that Paul's in prison, so it's not like he's able to travel freely. He's not able to go to cities and go into the synagogue as his normal practice was and preach the gospel in those places and meet with churches throughout the week and assemble there and expound the word of God. He doesn't have those opportunities that he normally has. But in the prison, he's convinced that God will still give him opportunities. There are prison guards that he's gonna have conversations with. There are gonna be people in the prison that he interacts with. There'll be times when he has to testify publicly before officials, and he may have the opportunity to present the gospel in those circumstances. And when we read the book of Acts, we see that Paul took advantage of those situations. But the idea is he's saying, pray that God would give me providential opportunities to proclaim the gospel. And then he says in verse 3, for which I'm in bonds. You know, either he's speaking about the fact that as an apostle, he is bound to give the gospel and it is his calling in life and he absolutely has to do this, or he's referring to the fact that he is literally in chains at the time. I kind of lean towards that second situation where he's saying, look, I'm in prison because of the gospel, and I can't move about freely because of my position, but you know what? God can still open opportunities for me to proclaim the gospel, and I'm asking you to pray that he'll do that. A third thing that I see under this point is the phrase in verse four, that I may make it manifest as I ought to speak. In other words, Paul's saying, Pray that I will not let any opportunity go. He's saying when the opportunity arises, when God gives me an opportunity to give the gospel to somebody, have that gospel conversation, pray that I don't waste it. I know that I should take every opportunity. Pray that I'll be alert, that I'll be ready for those opportunities when they come. It's an amazing thing that the Apostle Paul, a person who gave his entire life ministry, willing to die for the sake of the gospel, that the Apostle Paul would ask people to pray that he wouldn't waste opportunities to give the gospel. But that's what he does here. We then see a third observation. He wanted them to live out the same kind of readiness that he was asking them to pray that he had. In other words, Paul's saying, don't just pray that I'll be ready for the opportunities to give the gospel. I'm encouraging you to prepare yourself because if you're asking God to open up doors for me, why wouldn't He open up doors for you? You can move about freely. You're not in prison. You need to be ready for opportunities as well. And so here are the things that he says. In verse 5 he says, When he talks about people without, he's talking about people who are not a part of the church. People who are not believers, non-Christians, people who don't understand the gospel. He's saying you need to know how to relate to people who are not Christians. And unfortunately, a lot of Christians do not know how to relate to unbelievers. And so Paul's saying you need to have wisdom. You need to think about the right way to speak to people, the right timing, the right approach to take. And then he says this in verse five. He says, you need to do this redeeming the time. The idea is don't waste your time with fruitless discussions. You know, sometimes when Christians get into conversations with unbelievers, they can be very aggressive, very condemning, very forceful, and the reason that they get that way is because they feel like, this is the one shot that I have, this is the only opportunity that I have, and I'm gonna make sure I make the most of it. That's not what Paul's saying. Paul's basically saying, don't waste your time with fruitless discussions. There are times that an unbeliever is not ready to hear the gospel. there are times that they're only ready to hear the gospel to a certain point. And I think we need to be patient and we need to recognize that we're just one of the tools that God is going to use in bringing people to repentance and faith. And so my conversation might only take a small portion of time. There'll be another person who comes in with another conversation. And over a period of time, God uses all these gospel conversations to point that person to Christ. And whether I'm the individual who actually is able to point that person to Christ and see that they turn to the Lord Jesus in repentance and faith and call him the Lord for salvation. Whether I'm the person that's in that category or just one who's planting and watering, the reality is it's God who gets the increase. And so, Paul's saying, don't waste your time in fruitless discussions. I even think about the ministry of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ in conversations that he had with people, he spoke in parables. And when he spoke in parables, it really had two effects. One was that he was illustrating truth, but he was also concealing truth. Those who were not really interested in knowing the truth, they just passed on. They weren't interested in hearing the story. But those who wanted to figure out what he was saying, they dug in and they thought and they asked questions. And eventually those parables became simple illustrations that helped them to understand gospel truths. I think about Christ dealing with the rich young ruler. And he says, go and sell everything that you have and come and follow me and you have treasure in heaven. That was not Jesus saying, you get salvation by selling everything that you have. It was Christ's way of saying, before I go to the next point in our conversation, you need to recognize you don't love your neighbor as yourself. And so let me prove it to you. Sell everything that you have and then follow me. We see Christ doing this a lot. Redeeming the time in gospel conversations means that we don't get bogged down in fruitless discussions. We let the Lord open the doors and we take those opportunities as they arise. And then in verse six he says this, let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt. You may know how you ought to answer every man. The idea is be gracious, speak the truth, use good sense and wisdom as you speak to people who don't know the Lord. The reality is that if we are abrasive and harsh and we push people away from the truth, we actually really do hurt the opportunities that others will have down the road. And we need to really view the long term when it comes to our conversations with people. God may take years of work before a person comes to understand the gospel. And so that's really the sense. Be gracious in your speech, speak the truth, use wisdom, let God open opportunities. So I wanna close with a couple of practical things that I jotted down as I thought about these verses. The first is this. I need to have a life that's characterized by regular communion with God, where there's an awareness of the needs of others, and there's a gratitude to God that anticipates that when I pray, he's gonna work. And that really is the summation of this entire section in some ways. A second thought that I jotted down is this, these events that we're living through, and when I say these events, I mean coronavirus, I mean being locked into our homes, not being able to travel about freely And a lot of events that we were planning to do, things that we were excited about, they're now off the calendar. We have no idea when they're gonna come back on. The truth is these events that we're living through are God-appointed opportunities to engage people in gospel conversations. And God is using these events. He's using these circumstances. He's using them in our lives. He's using them in the lives of the people around us. And he wants us to be ready. When the opportunity comes to have those conversations, And we need to be aware of the fact that God's still in control and on His throne. Three, if Paul needed people to pray for him to make the best use of every opportunity that he had, how much more do I? I'm not Paul. I don't have his boldness. I don't have his wisdom. I am not as diligent a servant as the Apostle Paul. Yet Paul told people, pray that I don't waste opportunities to give the gospel, and how much more do I need that? And the last thing that I jotted down this morning was this. I need to use my time wisely when giving the gospel to people. I need to always remember it's ultimately the Lord who opens the heart. My skill, my persistence, my clever illustrations, I'm not saying God won't use those things potentially, but the fact is He's the one who opens the hearts of men. He's the one that convinces men of sin and righteousness and judgment. He is the one that opens their eyes and removes the veil so that when they see the gospel, it clicks, it sinks in, it brings conviction, and they place their faith in Christ. And while I'm a tool that God uses as I proclaim the gospel to people, He is the one who ultimately brings that person to that place where there'll be regeneration, conversion, repentance, faith, I get to be a part of that many times, either as one who plants or waters, but it's God who gets the increase. And so as I reflect on these truths this morning, I hope they'll be an encouragement to you. Let's bow together for a word of prayer and just commit these truths to our hearts and that God would work through them. Father, we thank you for the opportunity to have studied the word this morning together. I pray that you would open our hearts to these truths, that they would sink into our souls, that they would resonate in our souls. Father, help us to live in the light of these truths. Help us to make good use of the opportunities that you give us. Help us to be gracious and to speak the truth and to trust in your providence. Help us to be prayerful people who have an awareness of need and are gratefully anticipating how you'll work in circumstances. We ask that you'll bless those who have been able to join us this morning and those who will be able to watch this later in the day. May you speak to their hearts through your word today. We ask it in Christ's name, amen. Well, it's been good to chat with you all for a few minutes this morning, and we hope that you have a great rest of your day. Bye now.
Evangelism and Prayer: Colossians 4:2-17
ស៊េរី Anchored in the Word: Season 1
លេខសម្គាល់សេចក្ដីអធិប្បាយ | 48201116195354 |
រយៈពេល | 15:39 |
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អត្ថបទព្រះគម្ពីរ | កូឡុស 4:2-17 |
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