9 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. Colossians1:9
Paul, the early church's great missionary and church-planter, prayed for the church. We have a couple of these prayers preserved in his letters and they are all profound...
In this prayer he has a rock that he throws into the pond and then there are ripples that flow from that... Today we'll look at the rock, tomorrow the ripples...
If you could pray one thing for the church, what would you pray?
For a church he had not founded or met, Paul prayed that they as a congregation would know God's will. They needed to know what God's plan for them was.
But Paul's prayer is not for a crystal ball where they will know God's will as facts or step by step instructions. (e.g. "Tomorrow do this and the day after do that...") This is not horoscope knowledge of God's will as steps along a path. This is not Morpheus watching Neo in the Matrix and saying "turn left, duck under the table, climb out this window..."
Paul's prayer is that the knowledge of God's Will would come through spiritual WISDOM and UNDERSTANDING. It's not that God's will comes to us as a set of directives or instructions, but rather that our thinking processes and reflex responses will become attuned to God's plans and desires for our lives.
Paul prays that the knowledge of God's Will won't come as an external prompting, but rather that it become internalised in our thoughts, values and decision-making processes. His prayer is that the very core of our lives become infused with a sense of:
"What would God want?"
"What would glorify Him?"
"What would He do in my shoes?"
"What would Jesus do?"
And that our hearts, minds and souls will begin intuit the right answers because of our love and understanding of God.
Tomorrow we will look at the ripples that flow outward from this!
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
