Colossians 4:2-6 "The Inner Life of Prayer & Outer Life of Witness"

Well good morning, guys.

Turn with me, if you will, to Colossians chapter four.

Colossians chapter four.

And today we will be looking at verses two through six, which is all about the inner life of prayer and the outer life of witness.

So we have reached Paul's final instructions to the Colossian Church.

Paul has established the complete sufficiency and supremacy of Christ.

He has thoroughly exposed the false spirituality of the Gnostics along with the dead religion of Judaism.

And he has commanded believers to seek the things above, which involves putting off sin, putting on Christ, and walking in God's original design for us in our relationships.

The meta-narrative of this entire letter is this Christ is supreme and sufficient.

Therefore, seek Him and live for Him.

However, before Paul gives his final farewell in verses seven through eighteen, he has two last instructions for them, two last commands that he deems necessary.

And it is regarding the inner life of prayer and the outer life of witness.

God cares both about the prayer closet and the public street.

He cares about how you talk to God when you're alone and how you act when you're around other people.

All that Paul just wrote should lead to this.

It should lead to prayer and witness.

If it's true that Christ is supreme and he is all we need, then that should lead to a deeper prayer life and a desire to influence lost people around us.

How tragic would it be if we read all of Colossians and it didn't cause us to spend more time with God in prayer or want to advance his kingdom on earth?

All theology should lead to a greater communion with God and a deeper desire to reach the lost people around us.

And so these two areas, they're interconnected private worship and public witness.

If we have a thriving personal relationship with God, then we should have a natural desire to share that treasure with people that we encounter.

Christians should be people who are daily going to the well of living water, but taking that water with us into a world that is trying to quench their thirst from empty wells.

And so Paul, via the Holy Spirit, he starts with the inner life of prayer.

In verse 2, he says, continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.

This isn't merely a command to pray.

This command is how to pray.

Every Christian knows that prayer is important, or at least they should know that.

It is a divine privilege that we have through Christ to talk to the living God.

There are 650 prayers listed in the Bible.

Scripture records Jesus praying 25 different times during his earthly ministry.

In Paul's letter, he mentions prayer 41 times.

Prayer realigns our hearts with God.

We pray because through it God takes our burdens, our anxieties, our fears.

We pray because God accomplishes his will through prayer.

In prayer, our spiritual strength is renewed, our relationship with God grows deeper, and it reminds us that we are totally dependent on Him.

As John Wesley once said, God does nothing but buy prayer and everything with it.

Spurgeon thought so highly of prayer, he once said that I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach.

A Christian who does not pray is like a bird without wings.

It's like a car without an engine.

But this command is not trying to convince us why we need to pray.

That is not Paul's argument here.

His focus is on how to pray.

When we go to the prayer closet, what attitude and mindset should we have?

And here Paul expresses three vital aspects of healthy biblical prayer.

We are to pray steadfastly, watchfully, and thankfully.

Steadfastly means persistently, it means continually, despite difficulty.

Now, why would he say this?

He says this because our tendency, I'll admit, is to be lazy in prayer.

We're inconsistent.

And this occurs for many reasons.

We don't pray because we are arrogant and we feel like we don't need it.

We say, well, I'm doing pretty good this week.

I feel good.

So I don't need to ask God for anything.

Life is good.

I will go to Him when there's trouble.

Or we become discouraged in prayer.

We pray for a loved one.

Lord, save my brother.

Save him.

And then the next day he texts and he says, Hey, I don't think I believe in God at all.

I've decided to be an atheist.

And we say, Ah, what's the point?

I pray and the opposite thing happens.

Or there's just the I'm so busy excuse.

You know, there's so much going on right now.

I can't sit still and pray.

I literally don't have the time.

So we pray only when it is convenient.

Which is why Paul says, pray steadfastly.

Keep on asking.

Keep on seeking, keep on knocking.

It's like the parable of the persistent widow.

Do not give up on prayer.

Persevere in it.

Be patient in it.

Pray when you don't feel like it.

Pray when you have a busy schedule.

Pray when life is good.

Pray when life is bad.

As Martin Lloyd-Jones once said, always respond to every impulse to pray.

Time in prayer is never wasted, and it accomplishes far more than you could ever imagine.

We pray regardless of what season we are in.

And we do it because we know without it we will spiritually starve.

We do it because our Heavenly Father simply wants us to spend time with him.

We do it because Christ suffered so greatly a cost to give us access to God.

Prayer is the most fundamental manifestation of faith.

And so we must be steadfast in prayer.

Have you ever been praying for an unconverted friend for years who is still unconverted?

Keep praying.

Have you been praying for relief, for the pain to go away, but it keeps getting worse?

Keep praying.

Have you been praying for ministry opportunities, but the doors just are not opening?

Keep praying.

God's timetable is different than ours.

And he answers prayer in his way and in his timing.

Keep praying despite the difficulty.

Secondly, Paul says that we must be watchful in it.

What does that mean?

It literally means to be awake and sober.

You have heard it said, I'm sure.

God doesn't care if you mindlessly pray.

He doesn't care if your prayers are sloppy as long as you are praying.

Well, I would argue that scripture actually teaches us otherwise.

God wants us to pray attentively.

Jesus even rebukes his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane.

He says, Could you not stay awake for even one hour?

Keep alert and pray.

The idea here is focused attention.

We're not lazy or trivial about our prayer life.

We are engaged.

We're listening, thinking carefully about the words we use and the requests that we make.

We are watchful in what we pray and watchful on how God might answer our prayers.

As my wife reminds me, shamefully, how hurtful it feels when she's talking to me, but I'm not really listening.

I might be nodding, I might be looking at her in the eyes, but my mind is somewhere else.

I'm not truly connected with her or fully engaged.

And it's hurtful.

Eastern mysticism, New Age doctrine, if you will, has really distorted our view on prayer.

There is a teaching out there that prayer should be done mindlessly.

They say that you should empty your mind, think of nothing, while you repeat magical mantras.

But that is not biblical prayer.

Prayer defined in scripture is the idea of chewing on something.

You put it in your mouth, you taste it, you chew on it, you consider, you meditate on something.

The mind and the heart are engaged.

There is mental, emotional, sometimes physical effort.

We pray with scripture in mind.

We ponder the awe of God and we love Him with all of our what?

Heart, mind, soul, and strength.

Do you realize, church, that when you pray, you are talking to the creator of the universe.

You are before the throne of glory.

You are conversating with the Most Holy God who permeates majesty, who holds the whole universe in his hands.

Church, God wants our attention, our sobriety in prayer.

Oh, that we would be watchful in what we pray and how God might answer us.

I'm not talking about legalism, like you gotta put on a big show of pious charades when you pray.

What I'm talking about is a humble heart that takes seriously time with the Lord of glory.

Like a little kid who can't wait until his dad shows up, shows home for work, who is eagerly staring out the window.

In the same way, we are eagerly watching how God might empower us, answer us, guide us, and love on us as we seek him in prayer.

Thirdly, Paul mentions with thanksgiving.

Okay, a huge part of prayer is simply giving God thanks.

When we drop to our knees, close our eyes, and think about who it is that we are praying to, there should be an overflow of God, thank you.

You are so good.

This is the God who has given us all things in Christ.

This is the God who, instead of destroying us in his wrath, sent us his one and only Son.

This is the God who is working all things for our benefit and for his glory.

This is the God who transformed your life while you were his enemy.

The God of amazing grace and endless mercies.

But how often, I confess, our prayer life can turn into a depressing, miserable melody.

We go to God in prayer and we just complain about how much life stings, questioning his goodness.

We have a martyr complex, a false humility, if you will, thinking God likes it when we lay prostrate before him all miserable all the time.

Our prayers are nothing more than an incense of frustration and complaint.

Now listen, there is a time and place for lamenting.

The Psalms show us that.

There is a time to process our grief with God.

There's a time in prayer for giving God our requests, but one of the most primary purposes of prayer is that we would simply give Him thanks for all that He has lavished on us through Christ.

And that we would do this with joy.

Our prayers should be saturated with appreciation.

We're grateful for Christ's work, for his promises, for our redemption, for our inheritance.

And the list goes on.

Even in the lamenting psalms, okay, when uh David would wallow and vent for a little bit, he always ends his laments like this: God, you are good.

Praise be to your holy name.

I rejoice in you, I give thanks to you.

Even Job, after he lost everything, he ends his prayer with, May the name of the Lord be praised.

Church, if someone was to secretly record your prayer life and play it back to you, would your prayers be steadfast?

Would they sound watchful?

Would there be an overflow of thanksgiving?

Or would your prayers be few, lazy in thought, filled with complaints and frustrations?

May our prayer life, church, be steadfast, watchful, and thankful.

Now that we have established how to pray, Paul gives us a real life example of something we should be praying for.

In fact, he uses this command to ask for a personal prayer request.

He says in verses three through four, at the same time, pray also for us, that God may open 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.

I love the how the Apostle Paul is not afraid to ask for prayer.

Okay, he knew that his ministry rested on the prayers of the saints.

God accomplishes his purposes through the prayers of his people.

I am convinced the only reason I stand up here today and I didn't die years ago from a drug overdose was through the prayers and the pleas of my mother.

Through the sovereign will of God.

God's sovereign will is accomplished through prayer.

And if there is a prayer that God loves to answer, a request that is totally in line with God's heart and will, it is this, and it is twofold.

One, that opportunities would be opened for the gospel to be shared with lost people, and secondly, that God's people would know how to articulate the gospel.

This is Paul's prayer request here.

Why do we need to pray for evangelistic opportunities?

Because so many doors are shut.

Look around the world.

Satan is called the God of this world, and he has locked out Christian missionaries and Bibles from so many areas around the world.

There are people so closed off from the gospel, they won't even give you the time.

It is estimated that out of the 8 billion people alive in the world today, 3.4 billion of them live in unreached people groups with little to no access of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

There are cultures in the world where if they discover that you are a Christian, they will kill you.

There are hard people in our life, loved ones perhaps, who would tell you to shut up if you brought up Jesus in a conversation.

And what we need is divine influence and intervention.

For God to create an opportunity in an impossible situation.

From a human perspective, declaring the mystery of Christ in some environments, it seems impossible.

Which is why we pray for God to move and open doors and hearts, providing opportunities to share Christ to people who are not exposed to the good news about Jesus, and they are heading towards a literal, eternal hell.

I had a boss once who was an atheist, he was a very hardened man, who I tried for months to evangelize.

And every time I tried to take the conversation towards Jesus, he would totally shut it down.

But the funny thing is, I never prayed for the opportunity.

I was always just trying to force it in the flesh.

So finally I asked God for help.

I said, God, please help me here.

This guy is just getting nowhere with him.

And that week, we were painting a garage together.

We're both on a ladder on the back of this garage, and he turned to me and he said, Jimmy, I know you've been through some stuff in life, and you're doing great now.

So what's all this Jesus stuff about?

I'm just curious.

We forget so often that we don't have because we simply don't ask.

There are so many people who wish to be used by God to be a useful tool in his hand, but they are too self-reliant, too self-dependent.

Here is a ministry tip 101 rely on God in everything.

And prayer is the very act and posture, if you will, of saying, God, I'm dependent on you.

I need you.

And nothing good can happen apart from your providence.

You can preach all you want.

Want.

You can try to reach lost people all you want, but if you do not ask for divine influence and intervention, your efforts will fail.

Your message will fall on deaf ears.

We must rely on God that He would open doors, ears and eyes.

And this happens through prayer.

Now there is another aspect to this prayer.

Look at the second part of it.

Paul asks for discernment, for articulating the gospel.

Why would he ask for this?

Paul is an absolute genius.

He knows the information and the basic tenets of the gospel.

He is one of the most brilliant, educated Christian men in all of history.

He was trained in rhetoric.

He asks for this because he needs divine wisdom in presenting the gospel to different kinds of people and cultures.

There's only one gospel.

It doesn't change, but our presentation of the gospel is going to vary depending on our audience.

Tim Keller says this while there is only one gospel, namely that we are saved from divine punishment by Christ's work, not our own, there are different gospel presentations of the one gospel.

A quick look at Paul's gospel presentations in Acts 13, Acts 14, Acts 17 shows how much he adapted the gospel without compromise to different cultures.

The way we communicate the gospel to a rich man, a homeless man, or someone from the Middle East, it's going to look different.

So the principle here is this: we also pray for divine help in articulating the gospel of Jesus Christ.

God, I need your help here.

This guy's a Buddhist.

I don't know much about that.

Not sure how to approach it.

Help me, God.

Help me to articulate.

Give me wisdom and tact.

So, yes, we need prayer for boldness to preach the gospel just in general, but we also need prayer on how to be clear and articulate.

And there are great tools available to help us, whether it be the Romans Road, the bridge illustration, or going to an evangelism conference.

These things are good and helpful, but may we never forget that first and foremost, we need the Spirit's influence, discernment and wisdom.

As Ravenhill once said, whatever form of evangelism, if God is in it, will work.

What a great example Paul gives us here.

This church is the inner life of prayer.

Steadfast, watchful, thankful, praying for ministry opportunities and for gospel clarity.

May this be a reality for us this morning.

Now Paul shifts gears here and he starts honing in on the outer life of witness.

There is a real thriving inner life that we have with God, but there is also a real thriving public outer life that we should be living as well.

So Paul says in verses five through six walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time.

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.

So right off the bat, the implication here is that Christians are not hermits.

Extreme separatism is a terrible misapplication to holiness.

To be holy is not to be away from the world, but it is to remain holy in it.

Leonard Ravenhill once said this, it's one of my favorite quotes from him.

He said, The greatest miracle that God can do today is to take an unholy man out of an unholy world and make that man holy and put him back into that unholy world and keep him holy in it.

There is a walking in wisdom amongst outsiders.

And this includes making the best use of our time, as the verse says.

If I go to a work party and most of them there are unbelievers, I'm going to conduct myself in a respectful, godly way.

We use prudence and wisdom amongst outsiders because our actions are a witness to them.

You represent Christ.

Unbelievers, they may not be reading scripture, but they are reading you.

But this goes beyond just conduct.

It involves speech as well.

Look at verse 6.

Our speech is to be gracious and salty.

Gracious meaning loving, charitable, life-giving language.

It is the opposite of being rash, harsh, vulgar.

There is grace in what we say and how we say it.

If we are at work and our manager, who's an unbeliever, screams at us for doing a bad job, we don't strike back and cuss them out.

We instead calmly say, I'm sorry.

I apologize.

I'll try harder.

Or if our unbelieving neighbor comes over and starts venting to us about how terrible of a wife he has, we don't feed into it, say, yeah, what a terrible woman.

No.

We say, wow, I am so sorry that you're going through that.

And if it's okay with you, I'm going to be praying for your marriage.

If my unbelieving coworker cracks a crude sexual joke, starts nudging me with the elbow, saying, Isn't that funny?

I'm going to respectfully say, I really don't find that stuff funny anymore.

And I'm trying to be pure with my relationship with Jesus.

So our speech is gracious, but it's also salty.

Okay, salt preserves, it has healing properties, it adds flavor.

Therefore, we should always be ready to answer others' questions about our faith.

And our words should always reflect Christ, bringing a different flavor to what might otherwise be an unsavory conversation.

This fallen world has the same voice.

You have a hard marriage, get a divorce, go find someone else.

You feel miserable, go take the edge off, go get drunk, have fun.

Someone hurt you, go hurt them back, make them feel your pain.

You feel unfulfilled, go and pursue whatever makes you happy.

This world has the same tune, the same counsel and advice.

And what makes us salty is when we don't give the expected worldly response.

Instead, we give words of truth, words of life.

We are gentle, calm, confident, spirit-filled.

They can sense genuine care and love in what we say.

Hey, you feel miserable?

Let me tell you about what Jesus has done in my life.

Hey, has someone hurt you?

Let me tell you about forgiveness, what it is, and what it means.

Hey, you're having a difficult life circumstance.

Let me tell you about what God's word says and how it is relevant to your situation.

Our voice should be used as a mouthpiece for Christ.

The idea here is vocal holiness.

In fact, this is one of God's great purposes in salvation.

We read it this morning in our call to worship, 1 Peter 2.9.

It says that we would be God's special possession for the purpose of declaring the praises of Him who called you out of darkness and into His marvelous light.

We are a city on a hill.

We're a shining light in a dark, perverted world.

When we live like Christ and we talk like Christ to a world that is debased and wicked and utterly perishing.

God didn't save us so that we could huddle together and grow old together alone in a monastery, saying, I want nothing to do with those sinners.

We have God, they don't.

Good for us, bad for them.

No, that's not the heart of Christ.

That's not his mission.

His mission is to make his appeal through us, the church, that we would implore people, as 2 Corinthians 5 says, that on Christ's behalf you can be reconciled to God.

Of course we don't unequally yoke ourselves to them, according to 2 Corinthians 6.

There is a limit of intimacy.

Obviously, we don't participate with them in evil.

According to 1 Corinthians 5, we don't drink with the drunkard, we don't sin with the sinner, but they're all around us.

They're unavoidable.

So what do we do?

We do this.

We model Christ in both our conduct and our speech.

They shouldn't influence us with their darkness, but rather we should influence them by shining Christ's light in their darkness, praying that God may grant them repentance.

We're not all evangelists, but we are all called to evangelize.

As Spurgeon once said, every Christian is either a missionary or an imposter.

We forget that God saved us so that we would turn around and be an example to the world of what God can do in the life of a sinner.

So, Proclamation Church, our application this morning is pretty straightforward.

First, how is your inner prayer life?

What better describes it?

Is it inconsistent, random, sloppy, mindless, filled with complaints, with very little thanksgiving?

Or is it disciplined, persistent?

It's intentional, you're engaged, and it's full of overflowing praise and joy.

Is your prayer closet a sacred delight, a place of refuge where you eagerly can't wait to go each day to spend time with your father?

Or is it just a nagging obligation to you?

Church, how is your prayer life?

And secondly, how is your outer witness?

Do you even care about lost people around you?

Everywhere you go, whether it's the grocery store or to the workplace, are you thinking about how you're walking and how you're talking?

Are you intentional, intentionally using your words and your actions to magnify Christ?

Or are you just a secret Christian, a private Christian?

And no one can even tell because you walk and talk like the rest of the world.

You don't live on mission because it's too much work, you're so busy, it involves too much sacrifice, or people might think you're weird.

Here's the reality: our prayer life and our outer witness is a gauge, if you will, of where we are at spiritually.

If our prayer life is not good, and we're not thinking every day about how we can draw people towards Christ, our Messiah who saved us, that is a huge red flag.

That is a spiritual alarm sounding off, saying something is seriously wrong with your spiritual health.

It means that we have either one lost our first love, or two, we have totally lost sight of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Because the work of Christ has given us access to God through prayer, and the gospel has given us a new life and message that should be shared.

So if we're not spending quality time with God, we're living for God, it's safe to say that something is off.

And if you're anything like me, thinking to yourself, man, this is convicting.

Because my prayer life is not what it should be, nor is my witness.

My encouragement today is not try harder or do better.

My exhortation is this: go back to the foot of the cross because you've forgotten what Christ has given you access to.

You have forgotten your mission as an ambassador.

Jesus Christ has paid for our sin and it is sufficient.

He died in your place as a criminal as he hung on that tree.

He took on hell that you and I deserved, and he paid every last penny as he shouted, It is finished.

And he died and he rose again as the Savior who now sits at the right hand of God in what he accomplished is this a salvation is now freely available to anyone who comes to him in faith.

A salvation that will transform you from the inside out, a salvation that makes a sinner a saint, a salvation that not only rescues us from God's future wrath, but gives us adoption into God's eternal family.

He gives us a real, tangible relationship with him.

The veil has been torn that we can now approach God through Christ, commune with him, walk with him all the days of our life and into eternity.

We no longer have to live lost in a dark world.

And he gives us a new purpose, not a life lived for hedonism.

So you can live every day doing whatever you want, fulfilling every sinful appetite, no.

But an eternal mission where we can participate in advancing his kingdom on earth.

And this involves reaching those who are still dead in their sins.

So remember the cross of Christ this morning.

Worship the risen Lord.

Go back to the Bible basics that nothing in my hand I bring, but simply to the cross I cling, and you will find that naturally that your apathetic heart towards prayer and evangelism will be renewed.

Our motivation is not, I just need to do better.

Our ultimate motivation is this the amazing love of God that is seen in the face of Christ.

Let's pray, church.