Knowledge, wisdom, understanding

March 12, 2008

Colossians 1:9-11 & (12)

“For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you an asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.”

Prayers can be truly special gifts to others. Sometimes prayers require us to generalize and so they can seem impersonal. Other times, when we really know the situation in someone’s life we can pray for those specific things. We can find just the right words to make request of God and in so doing help someone else find a little more peace. Those specific prayers somehow seem to bond us with others for we have been able to be vulnerable with each other and that state of vulnerability somehow has an adhesive-like effect!

The Apostle Paul didn’t have direct experience with the Colossians. He knew of their situation only from the reporting of Epaphras so it would have been easy for this pastoral prayer to be one of those more generalized prayers. Yet, Paul understood what was going on in the church. They were being swayed by Gnostic teachers.

Gnosticism in a nutshell went something like this. There were at least two gods—one higher and one lower. The lower god without permission of the higher began to create non-spiritual things (like the earth, creatures, humans). The higher god not liking what was going on provided a counter measure by giving the humans souls/spirits that would allow them to see through the non-spiritual and claim only that which was spiritual thus lifting them to a higher realm—the realm of the higher god. These Gnostic teachers were using words that would have been familiar to other strains of religion. They were words like knowledge, wisdom and understanding; but the Gnostics were using these words with eschewed meaning so that people were missing the true message of the Christian gospel.

Paul chooses a pastoral prayer as his means for redefining these words and the Christian perspective for them. He calls them to understand that knowledge is not something that is hidden or mysterious, it is the vehicle for doing God’s will and meeting the needs of God’s people. The other words have the qualifier of being spiritual. This is to suggest that they are gifts of the Holy Spirit with wisdom being the quality that enables obedience to God’s direction and understanding being the mechanism for grasping moral choices. Endurance and patience then become the attitudes through which prayer is offered.

Paul wants them to understand in a very pastoral way that his prayer for them is that they will claim all of these things in ways that honor Christ. So, his becomes a didactic means for praying them toward true knowledge, wisdom, understanding, endurance and patience.

As we enter a new week, can we do this? Can we turn our hearts and minds to focus on the ways that we might miss the true message and then seek to find that message through true knowledge and the claiming of wisdom and understanding? I think we will find a freedom in so doing and maybe even the gifts of endurance and patience to boot. Know that my prayers go with you! Amen!