Faithbase

Good morning and welcome to thinking about the Bible and today I'm going to read to you from Colossians. I'm looking over here at my computer screen where I have my e-sword software up and I'm reading from the New Living Translation verses 3 and 4. We always pray for you and we give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all of God's people. Verse 5 which come from your confident hope that of what God has reserved for you in heaven. You have had this expectation ever since you first heard the truth of the good news. What's interesting here is that Paul at this point, we don't know if we ever actually met the people in Colossae, but we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, your love for all of God's people. They heard about these things and he says that they pray for them always and it strikes me that as Christians I think our prayer life is often very self-centered. I know that's, you know, typically I have to be honest with you. When I'm praying it's about my wife and children and grandchildren and our church and things like that. It's about the things that are immediately important to me that are just within my graphs you might say. And as I was reading this again I was struck really again about how Paul, and you might think well it's because of the position he had. He was an apostle and so this was something that was incumbent upon him as an apostle to pray for all Christians. Well yes and no. He was a Christian. We all have the duty to pray for other Christians. So I want to challenge you this morning as we're thinking about the Bible to think about Paul's example here and to expand your reach in prayer. Pray for your church of course but pray for the other churches in your city. Pray for the churches in your nation and so forth and just obviously as we move further out from our experience to become somewhat general and it's a character but certainly be praying for the churches in your city and you might even go so far as to, depending on the size of the city you live in, to actually list those churches and pray for them as you go through your daily prayer time. So we always pray for you and we give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all of God's people. So I challenge you pray. Pray for other people besides your own circle of importance. Pray for other churches and as you think about the Bible today think about what Paul says here in Colossians chapter 1.