Faithbase

Good morning and welcome to thinking about the Bible and we are still in Colossians. I want to continue through this letter and probably maybe go all the way through the letter but at this point as I've been reading this been thinking about some of these things and verse 6 is where we ended we actually jumped ahead to verse 23 as well but I want to start with the verse 7 where Paul writing to the church of Colossae says you learned about the good news from Epaphras our beloved co-worker he is Christ's faithful servant and he is helping us on your behalf he has told us about the love for others for that the Holy Spirit has given you so that we have not stopped praying for you since we first heard about now just to break in there for a minute Paul is again talking about praying remember a couple days ago we said how Paul is praying for a church full of people he never met and well we'll continue here so we have not stopped praying for you since we first heard about you we ask God to give you complete knowledge of his will and to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit all the while you will grow as you learn to know God better and better so this is the kind of prayer that he's praying we didn't talk about this of course back there in verses 4 5 3 4 5 when I said it'd be good idea for us to expand our circle of contact through prayer it's interesting that the prayer is specifically about growing in knowledge of God's will to have wisdom and understanding so that we can honor and please God and produce good fruit and grow to know God better and better so this is basically the same idea of being saved by grace for a life of good works and that's what Paul is praying for Paul and his companions are praying that the church and Colossae will having been saved by grace produce good works that they'll have understanding they'll have wisdom they will have the ability to honor and please the Lord and produce good fruit so when we pray for our fellow church members our other congregations elsewhere and we can pray this of course for our own church no question but I mean praying for those churches that we have on our list if you've done that or want to do that we can pray that they will have spiritual wisdom understanding that they will have complete knowledge of God's will they will always honor and please him they will produce every kind of good fruit and come to know God better and better knowing the Lord Jesus Christ and growing in that relationship so that's the direction we can go with prayer when we are in the prayer in this process of praying for these churches that we don't even know and again of course pray that for our own congregation and for that matter for ourselves so as you're thinking about the Bible today you can think about what to pray for the churches that you have on your list as you continue to pray and continue to ask the Lord to bless those congregations see you again tomorrow