Prayers

Colossians 1

Great God and King, You have sent forth apostles in former days proclaiming the glory and suffering of the life of faith in Christ.  Thank You for this good Word, and help us to walk in a manner worthy of Your Son.  Grant to us spiritual power that we might give thanks to You for the forgiveness of sins.  We glorify Your Name, O Lord, for the greatness of Your Son.  He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.  All Your fullness dwells in Him.  We have a full reconciliation in Him as we continue in the faith.  Thank You for the opportunity to testify to Your glory day by day.  Through lives of gospel love we rejoice in the truth that Your Son is alive in us.

return to top 

Colossians 2

Lord God, in Your Son is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.  Help us to reject false philosophies and deceitful traditions that would take us away from the greatness of the person and work of Your Son.  We were dead in sin, but through our great Savior we have been made alive through His cross and resurrection.  Teach us not to settle for shadows when we have been given the glory of Christ both within us and among us in Your church.  We have died in Christ.  Let us not return to worldly religious practices that may appear holy and disciplined, but are of no value in our fight against sin.

return to top 

Colossians 3

Father, we are with Christ in heavenly realms.  Therefore we earnestly seek those things which are above.  Help us to turn away from all ugly thoughts, words, and actions.  These will do us no good.  Help us to put on compassion, forgiveness, and love.  May the peace of Your Son and the dignity of His Word dwell in our hearts richly as we sing to You with joy.  Help us to live appropriately in all relationships, particularly within our families.  We want to serve You, O God, for Your Son died for us, and we are alive in Him.

return to top 

Colossians 4

return to top

Devotionals

Colossians 1

It is such a great blessing that there are those servants who have brought to us a true Word from the Lord by the will of God.  That word is full of the grace and peace of God which has been won for us at great cost by Jesus Christ.  God uses that word as a call to our souls, doing a spiritual work that enlivens the faith of the Lord’s people and their love for Him and for all those who belong to Him. 

This Word that comes by the will of God through His messengers excites our imagination concerning the life to come as we consider the hope that is laid up for us in the present heaven. The story of heaven is a part of the good news, the truth that we have heard and believed.  This good news bears fruit wherever it is proclaimed and believed. For this work of fruitfulness to grow in the best way, the message of Christ that is preached must not only be spoken, it must be understood.  Specifically, the power of the word is most clear as those who receive it understand that all the blessings that are for us have come to us as a gift of God.  To see this more and more clearly is to understand the grace of God in truth.

The church that receives the message of grace, hearing of the death of Jesus Christ and the life that He has given to us at such great cost, would naturally desire to speak to others of this good news.  The ears can work without the engagement of the soul.  What is necessary for the fruitfulness of the gospel is a spiritual work.  Without a powerful work of God upon our souls, we cannot have the kind of endurance and patience with joy that is appropriate for those who have been delivered out of the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son.  If we have heard about the inheritance that is ours through Jesus, if we know what it is to have our sins definitively forgiven, if we are aware that we were once enslaved in a world of evil but have now been purchased back, redeemed, by the blood of Lamb of God, it makes no sense for us to be lacking in enthusiasm for this great state of affairs.  We should be filled with joy and have the message of our salvation on our lips regularly. 

When we look at our lives honestly we see that the love of many has grown cold.  How can we recover the warmth of the kind of faith that grows?We need to meditate on the wonder of God, and particularly the glory of the one who has given Himself for our blessing, Jesus Christ.  He is the icon of God, the visible manifestation of the invisible God, and is the source of all creation.  There is nothing that was made that was not made through Him.  This includes not only the wide array of beautiful and orderly organisms and elements in the natural world all around us on earth; we are told that the Son of God also created all things in heaven.  All things were not only created through Him, but also all things were created for Him.  He is the end of all things and He is before all things, in the same eternal realms as the Father and the Spirit.  He is above all unseen authorities, including all angelic hosts, and all things hold together in Him.

Now that Jesus Christ has purchased a people through His blood, He has taken His place as the head of that body that the Scriptures call the church.  This is especially good news for us, since in Him we have seen our resurrection destiny.  He is the firstborn from the dead, and will have complete preeminence forever over everyone and everything in the world of glorious life.

Jesus Christ is obviously not some lesser god.  All the fullness of God dwells in Him, and through the cross He has accomplished what is necessary to reunite heaven and earth that was severed through the sin of mankind.  If we can grasp today the wonder of what is being accomplished in Jesus Christ, how can we not bow down before Him as Lord?  How can we not thank the Son of God who has given us peace through the blood of His own cross?

Do you want to have an appropriate message that would be worth sharing with others?  Think of this Jesus Christ.  Think of His cross, the ugliness and beauty of it, the hate that it represents and the love that it displays, the apparent weakness of it and the overwhelming power of it.  Think of where you would be without this Jesus and the cross, and what kind of hope you would have when your mortal life comes to an end. 

You were not close to God, but far away.  You were holy, but evil.  You were not full of some good purpose for living, but were fighting against God.  But now, because of Jesus Christ, you are reconciled to God, you are counted as holy and blameless in Christ, and even your suffering has great meaning.  Above all, this great divine Son of God is in you, and He Himself is your confident assurance of all the glory of heavenly life.  Your best days are yet to come.  You can safely rejoice in Christ, and you can rightly share the message of this good news with others.  This is a struggle that is worthy of your heart and your life.

return to top

Colossians 2

Our love for the Lord’s church often begins with those whom we know and have seen face to face, but it cannot end there.  We desire the very best for all in the body of Christ throughout the world, and there can be no question about what the best is that we seek for all.  It is not merely riches, comforts, friendship, safety, or the appearance of spiritual wisdom or self-restraint.  More than all these good gifts we want Christ, both for our own lives and for all the churches that we have heard of, and even those of whom we may have no knowledge at present.

Paul speaks of his earnest struggle for churches of which he may have had very little personal knowledge.  It is a striking fact that the growth of the first century church was way beyond the capacity of any of her greatest apostolic leaders to keep up with.  How much more so is this the case in the centuries that follow and especially in our day.  We regularly hear some small bits of information about the progress of the message of Christ in far-off continents.  How many churches are we completely unaware of?  Even if we receive some correspondence from a body of believers in far-off lands, we do not even know whether the message is trustworthy.  Yet the Head of the church, the Lord Jesus, knows all of His people.

In Him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.  It is Christ who makes all the difference between the way of truth and some false spiritual pathway that can only lead to the dead-end of idolatry.  Some of the false roads look very impressive.  Yet they turn out to be only a painted backdrop on an empty stage, devoid of real life.  But we have received Christ Jesus the Lord, the Author of all that is.  It is ours to walk in Him as those who have fellowship with the living God.

Christ is better than any philosophy or any rigorous program of ceremonial or moral discipline.  He is God.  All that is God dwells in Him.  Yet He is also man, so that the fullness of deity dwells within Him bodily, and now He has a resurrection human body.  Though He is a man, the days of His humiliation are over.  He is the head over all rule and authority. 

Our union with Him is a glorious fact.  When he was cut off from the body of God’s covenant people in the ultimate fulfillment of circumcision, that is through His death on the cross, we were in Him in that death, and it was the death of death for us.  When His body was placed in a borrowed grave, we were united to Him, for we were buried with Him.  When He rose from that grave, we were with Him in His resurrection.  Every sacrament of the Old or New Covenant that gave a visible expression to the reality of being a part of the covenant people of God, whether circumcision or baptism, finds its ultimate fulfillment in this: that we who deserved the wrath of God have been saved from that fate because the Son of God was cast off for our sake, and we have been kept in the people of God in Him.  We are united with Christ, and Christ is in us.

This is not merely a ceremonial fact, as important as ceremonies may be.  It has become an eternal reality.  We experience the fact of spiritual life even now, and there is so much more yet to come.  Without this great blessing, our record against God, the debt that we could never pay, would all still be standing against us.  But now that record has been cancelled.  The legal demands of God are not against us any longer.  They were nailed to the cross, and we are free and forgiven in Christ.  No fallen angel can win a case in God’s courtroom against us, since our record is spotless because of Christ’s impeccable righteousness.  Quite the opposite, the cross that is our good news says nothing good about the one who first said to Eve, “You shall not surely die.”  He and His league of allies have been publicly exposed by the dying love of God for sinners, a plan that they have always hated, which has now come to pass, and has been proven successful in the resurrection of Jesus.

Having Christ, we have no good reason to return to any man-made system of ceremonial acceptability.  What we eat or what we do not eat cannot do what only Christ has done through the cross.  There is no holy calendar that we could observe that could make us holy, but the blood of Christ has accomplished that task with much righteousness to spare.  There is no other special spiritual relationship or knowledge that will ever pass as a valid Christ substitute.  The most rigorous program of fleshly denial is still only a fraud that may appear successful to those who imagine that something that we don’t do will finally make us safe in the Lord’s house.  We have something much better than secret experiences or any number of rules that say, “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch.”  We have Christ, and we are in the body of Christ.

The Head of this body is the one through whom all life comes.  The body itself is composed of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, even from places where we have never been.  We have precious eternal connections with people we have not yet see, though they too are in Christ as we are in Christ.  We simply will not give up this great Christ, the Lord of immortality, for human rules and philosophies that must perish, and He will never give up on us.  We cannot choose some other supposed savior from the varied options of self-made religion.  The Lord of glory died for us, and has secured for us the riches of heaven.  A lifeless idol, or a human philosophy, cannot love us as He has loved us, and cannot raise us up as He has raised us.

return to top

Colossians 3

We live on earth, and earth is quite a place to be.  There is so much to see here, and so many people to enjoy.  This is also a place with a serious problem.  Sin and the judgment of God have taken a toll on the earth.  There is something within us that longs for some other place, some other age, some other person or God who will make things right.  We are told that God “has put eternity into man’s heart” in such a way that man “cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).  There appears to be a universal yearning for something more, though we perhaps suppress this desire in our denial of God.  But for those who have the wonder of Christ in us, the hope of glory, there is no need to deny Christ, and no sense in ignoring glory. 

There is a realm of glory, an age of eternity, and a person who is the Lord of both.  We have been raised with Him, and it is our great privilege to seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God the Father.  For so many important reasons we should set our minds on things that are above in heavenly realms, rather than longing for things on the earth, where the most durable treasures still decay.  It is a true principle that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).  In our union with Christ in His death, in some sense we have truly died, and yet we live.  Not only do we still have as many days remaining here as the Lord wills, but more than that, our life is even now somehow above in heavenly realms, where Christ the Son of God lives and reigns.  He will return from that place as He has promised, and we will appear with Him in His glory.  This is something we should be thinking about regularly and specifically.

It is not as if men have nothing else to think about on earth.  We can think about all the pleasures that this world affords, many of which may involve immorality, and might be an offense against our God and against our new life that we have been granted in Christ.  We need to see these kinds of idolatrous lusts as something of our old life that is now dead through the death of Jesus on the cross.  There is a way of thinking, speaking, and living that must be put off now, and there is a new way of honest love, a new way of heavenly society that we need to pursue more fully here below.  As we hear the Word of God, the self is being renewed with resurrection life, and we are made by the Spirit of God to be more like Jesus Christ.

Whether we are Jew or Gentile, or any other way that we might define ourselves according to the categories that the world uses to segment people, these things are nothing compared to the eternal fact of our citizenship in realms of glory as God’s chosen people.  This realization has great earthly significance.  The root of our lives has been planted in the soil of heaven in Christ’s ascension, and the fruit of Christ-like meekness and love should fill the earth wherever we go.  As the church lives in the world, we should leave our Savior’s fingerprints of life on everything we touch.  This is the way to live out heavenly peace in a place that seems to be far too ready for a fight. 

We have also been called to have unusually thankful hearts before the Lord who saved us by His blood.  When we refuse to be thankful, we unnecessarily invite trouble into our lives.  The alternative to that kind of disorder and disappointment is to let our hearts be filled with the Word of our ascended Lord, who is singing to us in the Scriptures of the glory of that realm above.  In the voice that comes from the heavenly Word that rings in our hearts we have the message that we need, a message that not only corrects our idolatrous immorality, but also teaches us about a better way of life, a life of thankfulness to which we have been called.

This way of life does not resist that structures of authority that we have here on earth, but joyfully submits to the pattern of husband and wife, parent and child, superior officer and obedient foot soldier.  Whatever our position may be, we can live it out in appropriate respect for those who are in some sense above us, and with generous love toward those who are in some sense below us.  This life is a gift from God for us, an opportunity, and if we have to suffer in it for a time, we know that in just a little while we will be in that other realm with Jesus Christ.  It is our joy to please Him now as we consider what He has reserved for us above. 

In every opportunity for honest work and gentle service, the wounds that we bind on earth are somehow an expression of our care for the One who was wounded for our transgressions.  There is some mysterious representation between the ones we love and care for here, and the One who loves us forever in the heavens.  He feels the kindness of a gentle embrace.  He hears the word that is spoken in love.  He receives the gifts that we give to the weak and the poor, and none of this is forgotten in the heavens.  We serve the Man of Sorrows when we serve the weak.  He has already given the full measure of His love in winning heaven for us through the cross.  He knows how to repay us for any act of resurrection love to which we give ourselves in His Name today.

return to top

Colossians 4

We have a Master in heaven.  No matter how many people we may rule on earth, we are not the ruler over Jesus Christ.  Having a master over us, should we consider our position to be unfortunate?  That depends entirely on the one who is our ruler.  There is no better master than Jesus.  What kind of master is willing to give his life for someone who is his servant?  This is what Jesus has done for us.  Can there be any doubt of His affection for us and His commitment to us. 

Not only do we have the best of all masters, but our Master is in heaven, at the center of all rule and authority, with a Name that is above every other name in heaven or on earth.  When we recognize His presence with us, we are forced to consider a very mysterious fact: that Jesus, who is at the right hand of the Father in a realm that is somehow beyond us, nonetheless assures us that He is with us with all His divine power and love.  We acknowledge this when we pray.  His ear is not too far away to hear us, and His embrace reaches us though His Word, His sacrament, and through the arms of love stretched toward us in the body of Christ.

The progress of growth is an amazing thing to consider.  As with Christ, in the church we have a community that is a heavenly entity, and yet we are near it and in it on earth.  For any of the nations of the world, there was once a day when the body of the Lord’s worshippers had virtually no expression within that land.  Then God opened a door for the Word in that place, and those who had been sent out to preach went through that door.  When men preached, people heard and believed, and they were brought into the body of Christ.

The message that the church declares is called here “the mystery of Christ.”  It is a mystery not because we are unclear how it is going to end, but because something that was once hidden has now been so clearly revealed.  All of the many Old Testament references to the coming Messiah and to the facts of His death and resurrection have now become wonderfully alive to so many people.  It is as if the mystery was solved in the coming of Jesus and in the events of our redemption.  Now we revel in the wonder of the clear revelation of our rescue from the bondage of sin.

Meanwhile, there are so many that have still not heard this message, and many more have not really embraced it.  This heavenly institution, the church, is living in a world where there are many outsiders to the kingdom of heaven.  We need to conduct ourselves wisely here, for we are representatives of the Messiah.  That means that we have a job to do, and we cannot waste the brief years of our lives that remain.  Our speech should be seasoned with the truth of God’s covenant love and grace, the salt of our sacrificial offering of our lives for God’s purposes.  We undertake this mission together with others with whom we have a vital Christian connection.

There are men like Tychicus in our lives who are brothers in Christ and faithful servants in the Lord.  They come bearing the news of others who preach the Word, and of many who have heard and believed that message of Christ.  There are others like Onesimus who have come from our own churches and who have been sent out as the Lord’s representatives to other lands.  We are always happy to hear of their progress and we pray for them in their various trials and victories. 

There are even men like Paul and Aristarchus that may be detained for a season by civil authorities who have mistakenly come to the conclusion that it will be wise to stop the progress of the church through the imprisonment of the teachers of the faith.  There are gospel companions like Mark, Barnabas, and Luke, who we read about in other places, as the Lord brings us through such a variety of life experiences in His service, strengthening the bonds of lasting affection among those who are committed to the Word of the Lord.

There are many whose names and stories we do not know, but we understand that they labor in prayer for us.  They want to see us growing in Christ as those who would be eager to follow the Lord’s will in difficult situations.  In addition to these individuals there are whole churches about which we know very little, yet we have Christ as our common bond, and we wish them well.   No matter what we know or do not know about such bodies, we can rightly ask the Lord that all of the gatherings of those who worship Him would think and live more and more according to His Word.

In all of our acts of service in support of this worldwide community of the kingdom of heaven, we hope to faithfully fulfill the charge that God has given to us.  The service we give to others is an expression of the divine love of the One who was utterly faithful, even to the point of His death on the cross.  He came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.  If we suffer in a heavenly cause, we will not lose.  If our days end in the prisons of men, we have a home for us where Christ is now seated at the right hand of the Father.  The fact of a glorious eternity even now reserved for us in heaven, if embraced with the fullness of the soul, is enough to turn our chains into badges of honor that the whole church can consider together with some measure of joy.  The Lord’s grace has been won for us through the cross, and that same grace will abound, and will be with us forever.

return to top