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Hi everyone! I hope you’re having a great week. It has certainly been nice to have sunshine over these last few days instead of the rain originally forecast. I’m doing my best to enjoy it while we have it, since the weather people are promising more cloud and wet in the coming days.

I’m still smiling over the lovely day we had this past Sunday, with sun for our BBQ. Again, thanks so very much to the many folk who helped with prep, set-up, cooking, serving, and take-down to make the event possible! I realize that it involved a lot of work. Please know that these kinds of activities play a significant role in building the relationships that make a church healthy, so there is real spiritual benefit from sometimes mundane-seeming things we do to make an event like this happen. It was much appreciated by everyone, and definitely by me! Now we’ll get a break for a while, with no more major food events on the schedule before the Christmas season. Whew!

I think it was also a good thing to create some awareness of the many ministries and activities that happen around the church on an ongoing basis. I’m always encouraged when I start to count them up, and I think about the many folk who invest their time and energy to lead these ministries, along with the much larger number that are impacted. I’ve been keeping the ministry list in a visible place on my desk as an ongoing reminder to pray specifically for the many ministries that are happening around here, including the ones taking place today.

This next Sunday, we’re going to continue on the theme of praying for the church. This time, though, we’ll step back and think more broadly about the kinds of things that should be on our hearts when we pray. We’ll be looking at the rest of Paul’s opening prayer from Colossians 1:9-12. It’s a wonderful passage. It is, in fact, one of my favorite prayers from the Bible - one I memorized years ago, and one I lean on regularly when I’m wondering how I ought to pray for myself, my family, my friends, and my church.

(If you find yourself looking for a new passage to memorize, and you’ve never considered Colossians 1:9-12, I highly recommend it. I’ve found it easiest to memorize in a fairly literal translation like the New American Standard, which captures the rhythm of the original in a way that I can remember more easily. But of course, any version that resonates with a person’s heart is good.)

If you’re looking to read ahead this week, I recommend reading the whole opening section from verse 1 through 14. That will put our passage in context, and it will highlight just how important prayer is to Paul as he opens the epistle. If you’re feeling really eager, you might consider flipping over to Ephesians chapter 1 as well. As I’ve mentioned already in this series, Colossians and Ephesians were written and sent together, so there are many points of similarity and some very close parallels between them. In Ephesians, Paul’s opening prayer comes at 1:15-23. If you read that prayer immediately after looking at the one in Colossians, you’ll see a number of similarities which help us to appreciate both prayers even more.

One other small tidbit is worth mentioning here, since I won’t have time to explore it on Sunday. In the ancient world, when letters like our epistles were written, it wasn’t uncommon for the writer to hint at the contents of the letter somewhere in his/her opening greeting or prayer. They didn’t use a “table of contents” the way we do, and they didn’t list “things I’m going to talk about” with bullet points. But they frequently dropped hints.  There are a number of examples of this in our New Testament.

Probably the best known of these is found in the book of Acts. The most famous verse in Acts is 1:8, where Jesus tells the disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” This is called a “programmatic verse,” because it tells us in simple terms what we’re going to find in the rest of the book. Acts talks about the coming of the Spirit, and then the story traces the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem outward through Judea and Samaria and across the Roman Empire. This verse is like a mini table-of-contents.

Not every NT book does this, and those that do aren’t all equally clear about it. But you can find a number of examples in our Bible. Colossians is one of the best. In the prayer we will look at this week, Paul has 2 main requests: that the Colossians will (a) be filled with knowledge about God’s plan; and that they will (b) live their lives in a way that is worthy of the Lord and pleasing to Him (verses 9-10). This is a great prayer. It’s also a description of what will be covered in the rest of the letter. Chapters 1 and 2 are going to teach us about the gospel—about who Jesus is and all that He has done for us. Chapters 3 and 4 will give practical instructions on how we should live in light of that truth. knowledge and worthy living. 

In other words, there’s a lot to think about in the short set of verses we’ll be covering. (Oh, and in case I don’t mention it, this prayer is another of those long sentences Paul uses.) I look forward to exploring it together.

Meanwhile, have a great week. God bless you all richly, and we’ll see you soon.

—Pastor Ken