Col. 4:2-4
“Pray Also
for Us”
Is there any difference between us humans and animals? Why ask such a
question when the obvious theme of today’s passage is prayer? Well, as you
know, prayer does not get much respect these days. Prayer is looked down upon
as a sign of weakness. Even if it is not viewed with such disdain, prayer is
considered a “religious thing” that only religious people engage in. In some
sense, prayer IS a religious thing; it may even be rightly called the apex of
one’s religious life, if religion is understood as communing with God. So then,
is prayer something special reserved only for some special, religious people? I
would like to put forth before you that prayer is a distinctly human activity.
By that I mean not only that prayer is something only human can engage in, but
also that it is one of the things that make us humans human. That is why I
started the message by asking about the difference between humans and animals.
Herman Bavinck, an eminent Dutch theologian, once
remarked on the real difference between humans and animals in this way:
“The animals, it is true, have received
in addition to their existence and their life a kind of awareness, but it is an
awareness which can take note only of the visible and sensuous things; they are
aware of the actual, the pleasant, and the useful, but they have no notion of
the true, the good, and the beautiful; they have a sensuous awareness and a
sensuous desire, but they are therefore also satisfied by the sensuous and
cannot penetrate through to the spiritual order…. Just so, too, man shares his
sensuous desire with the animal. Consequently he feels the need for food and
drink, for light and air, for work and rest, and he is dependent upon the whole
earth for his physical existence. But, quite above this level of desire, he
received a will, which guided by his reason and conscience, reaches out to
other and higher goods. The pleasant and the useful, although they have their
value in their place and at their time, do not satisfy him; he requires and
seeks a good which does not become good because of circumstances, but which is
good in and through and for itself, an unchanging, spiritual, eternal good. And
his will, again, can find its rest only in such a highest, absolute, Divine
goodness" (Our Reasonable Faith, pp. 17-18).
From this observation, we can glean much about prayer as a distinct human
activity. Of course, if prayer is viewed merely as an act of petitioning a
higher being with one’s requests, prayer cannot be viewed as a uniquely human
activity. Animals, especially the domestic ones, can be said to engage in a
“prayer” of some sort when they whimper or meow or wag their tails to ask for
something from their human masters. But of course, the only legitimate object
of prayer is God and in this regard animals do not, and cannot, pray. Only man,
because he is made a moral, spiritual creature in the image of God, is capable
of perceiving God and communing with Him. Apart from the angels, man alone can
pray to God.
But we are different
from animals not just in our spiritual capacity to perceive God and pray. Our distinction
applies to the content of prayer as well. For we are creatures who cannot be
satisfied merely with the pleasant and the useful: we are made to seek “an
unchanging, spiritual, eternal good”, that is, “a highest, absolute, Divine goodness”. Having been so made and endowed, can our petitions
be no different from what animals would ask for--what to eat, what to drink and
how to be comfortable in this world?
Having exhorted the
Colossians to persist in prayer (v. 2), Paul goes on to give a specific prayer
request (vv. 3-4): “At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open
to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of
which I am in prison--that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.”
This embodies something so very essential about what we should pray for as
humans made in the image of God.
The prayer Paul requests is that God may open to him and his fellow
laborers a door for the word. What is this door for the word? It is possible
that it is an indirect reference to the prison door. If that were what Paul
meant, he would be asking for a prayer for his release from prison so he could
resume his ministry again. As we will see presently, this is highly unlikely.
Of course, this prayer can include Paul’s release. But it is not the primary
meaning of Paul’s request.
Notice that Paul calls the door specifically “a door for the word”. It
seems clear that this expression is a metaphor for the opportunity to proclaim
the word of God, especially in light of the words that follow: “to declare the
mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison--that I may make it
clear, which is how I ought to speak.” As you can see, what Paul is mainly concerned
about is not his personal freedom from the prison but the freedom of the word
of God to be declared. Of course, there is a clear connection between the door
for the word and Paul’s freedom. His request becomes specifically for his
gospel ministry toward the end: “that I may make it clear, which is how I
ought to speak”. It seems only logical to think then that, in order for Paul to
carry out his missionary task, he should first be released from the prison.
But that logical connection may not be as tight and obvious as we think.
Take a look at how Paul’s request began: “At the same time, pray also for us,
that God may open to us a door for the word….” Who is Paul referring to?
There was at least another person in prison with him--Aristarchus.
Paul refers to him as his fellow prisoner (
We arrive at the same conclusion when we consider how the word “door” is
used in conjunction with the gospel ministry in other passages. Paul says in 1 Cor. 16:8-9, “But I will stay in
Why belabor this point? Why is it important to prove that he was not asking
people to pray for his release--although there is nothing wrong with such a
request, especially in Paul’s case, whose motive to get out of the prison could
not have been for anything else but to continue his gospel ministry. So why
belabor the point? Because there is an important lesson to be learned in the
way Paul deals with his gospel ministry and his personal, immediate
circumstances. To put it simply, Paul saw all of his experiences as the temple
of his worship and service to God. Whether he was free or in prison, whether he
was in plenty or in need, whether he was sick or healthy, it did not matter to
him. There was a way to serve God in every situation: if healthy, in diligent
service; if sick, in patient enduring and rejoicing in the salvation of his
soul; if rich, in humbling oneself as a needy sinner; if poor, in boasting in
the heavenly riches; if free, preaching Christ in the market place; if in
prison, preaching Christ to the fellow inmates and prison guards. If “now is
the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2), as the word of
God declares, then now is also the day of our service to God and His kingdom.
For here and now is all that we have in Christian service. We cannot retrieve
the past. We cannot control the future. But where we are now is what God has
allotted to us. We will all agree that there is no practice run in life.
Whatever we do now is being written on the blank pages of our life and it
cannot be erased or revised. What is done now cannot be undone. And what is not
done now cannot be done without being late. For the pages of our life are being
turned and they do not wait for us to do something.
Doing nothing does not keep the pages of time and our life at the same place.
If we do nothing, we only have blank pages to show for in our biography. Oh,
how many pages are left empty in the annals of our Christian service because we
put it off until a more opportune time and place? Oh, how many countless
opportunities have we lost to serve our God and our fellow saints because we said
we have to first get out of our present difficulties and hectic schedule? Our
excuses have paralyzed our Christian life and service. Because we have it in
our mind that certain conditions have to be met, that things have to be
perfect, before we serve God. It would be like Paul suspending his apostolic
ministry whenever he was in prison, saying, “Woe is me! When can I get out of
this miserable cell so I can start serving God again?” If he did, we at the
least would not have his prison letters in the New Testament.
But what motivated Paul was not merely the force of logic that here and now
is all we have and we must live in the present to live a fuller life. It was
not the grandeur of a full and productive life that he was after. For what does
it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? What drove Paul was
not just the vision of a great life; it was rather the reality of the great
life he already possessed--the abundant, heavenly life in Jesus Christ! Think
about it: what gave him the energy and motivation to persevere through all
kinds of challenges and obstacles to his ministry, his imprisonment being just
one of them? What supplied the fuel for his undying, inextinguishable fire of
hope and his indefatigable service, even when he was thrown into jail--so much
so that getting of prison was not his greatest concern? It was none other than
the object of his greatest concern--the gospel of Jesus Christ. Having tasted
the goodness of the gospel, he could not suppress the desire to proclaim it
whenever, wherever and however he could--not just when he had a podium to speak
from but also when he was stuck behind bars, to use the modern terms.
And it was precisely because of the gospel of Jesus Christ that the prison
was no longer a “God-forsaken” place for him. Because of the gospel, his being
in prison was not a proof that he was cursed by God, or out of His favor. So it
was not necessary that he first got out of prison to feel loved and approved by
God again. How could that be? Because he was in Christ and there is no
condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus! Jesus died on the cross,
bearing the curse of the law and the condemnation we deserved for our sins. In
so dying, He brought pardon for our sins and the perfect righteousness that was
His through His obedient life. And when He arose again from the dead, death
lost its sting and so did our sufferings in this world. Though we still suffer
and die in this fallen world, we no longer suffer and die as the punishment of
our sins! Rather, our suffering and death are to be viewed as our participation
in the suffering of Jesus Christ with a view to our participation in the glory
of Christ and His resurrection! Even when we suffer as a direct result of our
sins, our suffering is the gentle and firm hand of God’s fatherly discipline,
not the sword of punishment by the divine Judge! As we have peace with God
through Jesus Christ, we stand in the presence of His grace--whether we bask in
the light of public acclaim or we are shut up in the darkness of prison. Seen
from this perspective, we can truly say that our crisis is indeed God’s
opportunity to magnify Himself, to magnify the power
of the gospel. The greater the crisis, the greater the
opportunity. This is the reason Paul says, “For the sake of Christ,
then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and
calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor.
Let us also note briefly that this request is made by Paul, an apostle
of Jesus Christ! He encountered the resurrected Lord in a most dramatic way on
the road to
The special endowments Paul received from the Lord must have given special
abilities to fulfill his mission, no doubt. But they must have also given him a
heightened awareness of the spiritual reality that stands behind the visible
reality, particularly the true extent of the challenges he faced in his
ministry. Reflecting on his ministry, he says in 2 Cor.
2:15-16, “For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved
and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to
the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things?” Because
of his spiritual endowments, he must have had a clearer perception of the
spiritual reality. He is overwhelmed by the gravity of his mission, which was a
matter of life and death, a matter of eternal consequences. But he is not
paralyzed by this prospect. How? He goes on to say in (2 Cor.)
3:5-6, “Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming
from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be
ministers of a new covenant….” Do you see why Paul felt compelled to solicit
the prayers of the congregations he ministered to and wrote to? His request for
prayer was not just a formality he followed. He was keenly aware that his
competency as an apostle came not from himself but from God. Perhaps he was far
more keenly aware of this fact than we can ever be precisely because of his
special gifts. For even with these special endowments he still experienced the
force of opposition and rejection from the people he preached to. He recognized
that even his special gifts, though granted by God, could not be effective
apart from the Lord’s anointing and blessing. This is not to say that the
apparent failures of winning converts were an indication of his unfaithfulness
in the ministry. Nor can we say that, when Paul did everything right, his
efforts guaranteed success. But one thing was sure: he needed to ask for the
Lord’s blessing upon his ministry because the success came only from God. So he
prayed and so he appealed to the churches to pray for his ministry.
So it is prayer that Paul requests. Although he is appealing to the
Colossian Christians, he is not asking for what they can do for him. The
help he is seeking does not come from them, ultimately. The help he is seeking
comes ultimately from God. It is God alone, who can supply what is necessary to
make Paul’s (or anyone’s ministry) efficacious and successful.
Then why is Paul asking the other Christians to pray for him, particularly
for his ministry? At the most basic level, Paul is calling on the Christians as
his fellow laborers to participate in his ministry through their prayers for
him. Prayer, as we saw last week, is the secondary cause God uses to accomplish
His purpose. But there is something quite fascinating about Paul’s request when
viewed from the redemptive historical perspective. When we survey the Old
Testament and look up the instances of intercessory prayer (i.e., people
praying for others), we discover a dominant trend: intercessory prayers were
offered by those who were in position of greater, higher honor. Job prayed for
his children and he was told by God to pray for his erring friends. Moses
prayed for Aaron that God’s anger against him might be subsided. People asked
Samuel to pray for them. Kings prayed for the people (1 Kings 8; 2 Chron. 30:18). Kings asked the prophets to pray for them
and the nation. The only exception seems to be Ps. 72, in which the people are
exhorted to pray for their king (Ps. 72:15). But prayers were usually made by
the superiors for the inferiors. This is not to say that families never prayed
for one another, even children for their parents. But one thing we never see in
the biblical record is any prophet asking for prayers on their behalf from the
people. The prophets were, after all, the mouthpieces of God. As such, they
were in intimate fellowship with God, allowed into the council of God and
angels. But here in the New Testament, Paul, an apostle, asks for the prayer of
lay Christians for his ministry. This does not mean that his apostleship was
something inferior to the office of the Old Testament prophet. What did Paul
say regarding the relationship between his ministry and the ministry of Moses,
the archetype, the first and the greatest, of the Old Testament prophets? “Now
if the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such glory that
the Israelites could not gaze at Moses’ face because of its glory, which was
being brought to an end, will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more
glory” (2 Cor. 3:7-8)? Paul is saying that his new
covenant ministry is far greater than Moses’ old covenant ministry. Paul’s
request shows, rather, how the status of the people of God is elevated so high
in the new covenant in Jesus Christ! The people of God are no longer just poor,
lowly beneficiaries of the covenant ministries; they are now called as active
participants in the ministry of the covenant as they pray and support the
ministers of the new covenant. They can now share in the glory of the wonderful
works of God! And remember that the Colossians were Gentiles in the flesh. As
the royal priests, they could pray even for the apostles and their ministries!
Oh, how high God exalted them in Jesus Christ! Oh, what a privilege it is to be
able to pray for God’s servants!
There is another redemptive historical observation to be made. We already
saw that, although we may thing that praying for others is the most natural thing,
it was not necessarily so in the Old Testament. And now hear these words from Jer. 15:1.
“Then the LORD said to me, ‘Though Moses
and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward this people.
Send them out of my sight, and let them go! And when they ask you, “Where shall
we go?” you shall say to them, “Thus says the LORD: ‘Those who are for
pestilence, to pestilence, and those who are for the sword, to the sword; those
who are for famine, to famine, and those who are for captivity, to captivity.’”’”
There was a time in the Old Testament when even the prophets were forbidden
from praying for the people of God. Why? Because their sins had reached their
full measure and the time of their judgment had arrived. Even in the Old
Testament, this ban on intercessory prayer was not a norm, of course. However,
its presence enhances dramatically our appreciation for the rich grace of God,
which is ours in Christ Jesus! In Jesus Christ our judgment has passed over us
once for all, never to inflict its punishment upon us! No judgment of God hangs
over God’s people, which makes them beyond help, beyond prayer! We have in
Jesus Christ an intercessor, who is far greater than
Moses and Samuel. Their prayers can be rejected by God but not Jesus’ prayers. “Five
bleeding wounds he bears, / Received on Calvary; / They pour effectual prayers,
/ They strongly plead for me; / Forgive him, O forgive, they cry, / Nor let
that ransomed sinner die” (“Arise, My Soul, Arise”)! His intercession for us, bathed in His
precious blood, God will never reject. Our prayers are offered in the shadow of
Christ’s intercessory prayer. We can now freely and joyfully and generously and
boldly pray for one another! Do you see how terrible our prayerlessness is? Do
you see how terrible it is to neglect such a gracious and wonderful gift of God
unto us? Do you see what blessings are yours if you just reach out and grab a
hold of this gift of prayer?
If Paul, even with all of his apostolic gifts, felt so in need of prayer,
how much more does your pastor need your prayers when he is but an ordinary
officer of the church without the supernatural gifts of an apostle? But I guess
it all depends on what our expectations are. If we want nothing more than a
nice, coherent discourse on a passage of Scripture with some rhetorical flare
to spice up things, then we don’t really need to pray for pastors. We just need
to hire a pastor, who is a gifted speaker, and there is the end of the problem.
But what if the pastoral ministry is more than that? What if the Lord, who
purchased the church with His own precious blood, wants much more than that? What
if God wants all the hearers of His word to be jolted out of their nonchalant
attitude, out of their as-if-sitting-on-the-couch-to-watch-TV posture, and
brought to the edge of their seats in wide-eyed wonder and amazement because
they know that they are hearing the word of God? What if God wants His word
preached to bring conviction of sin deep into the hearts of its hearers, to
make them horrified by the sinfulness of sin--by its offensiveness to God, by
its sheer ugliness, by its devastating effects? What if God wants unconverted
sinners to strike their chest and plea for His mercy at the preaching of His
word? What if God wants even deeper conviction to run through the veins of the
Christians to make them repent of their sins and mortify them? What if God
wants to see His people to love and respect and hunger for His word more than
anything? What if God wants His people to respond to His word with an obedience
that is right away, all the way and the happy way? What if God wants His church
to be filled with lives that are being saved and hearts that are transformed
and minds that are renewed every time the word of God is preached? Should we
want such things in the
Do you pray? What do you pray for? Prayer is not something special reserved
only for some special, religious people. Other than the angels in heaven, only
human beings can pray. Those who do not pray in communion with God have
forsaken something that is at the core of their humanness. And it is not just a
question of whether we pray or not: it is also about what we pray for. The very fact that we are to commune with God through prayer shows
our spiritual essence. Though made out of the dust of the ground, our
spirits are oriented toward heaven. Christian prayer is not about making some
special people. It is about restoring and perfecting the image of God in the
fallen man.
Oh, saints of God, let us begin now, today, and not put off praying for the
ministry of this church, especially praying for me as I preach and teach and
visit with you! Would you not pray? Would you not be encouraged by that great
gift that prayer is to the
© Copyright by Jeong Woo "James" Lee
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