"Devoted" - Colossians 4

While on sabbatical, I tried to write to all the folks on our jail ministry list and I got some responses. These are from the last few weeks. I won’t give their names but I’ll read a little bit from a few of them. If you would like a copy of all the names so you can write them or pray for them, we have fresh copies on the table in the hallway. As a church that claims to minister specifically to the poor, the addicted and the incarcerated, part of our duty is to remember these.

I have gotten hundreds of letters over the years from inmates all over Texas and almost all of them ask for prayer, and they should. I’m quite sure some of these people probably have nobody else that is praying for them. It is a great honor that they would ask us to pray for them.

When they ask for prayer, they usually ask for God’s help while they are in there. They ask for healing for sick mothers and spouses and protection for their kids. They ask for wisdom to be able to know how to handle themselves in godly ways. But what do you think is the number one prayer request from people in jail or prison? They want to get out, of course!

They ask for prayer for mercy with the parole board or prayer that their allotted time will go quick. They are praying that God will get them out of that place. And can you blame them? Some of y’all have been there. It’s rough.

Now, imagine with me for a minute that you are writing back and forth to an inmate and they ask you for prayer. Let’s say you are writing to someone who is in jail for theft or burglary. And they ask you to please pray for them that God would let them out and would allow them to get back to stealing stuff. That’s their prayer. What would you think about that?

You would probably have a hard time praying for that, wouldn’t you? You would probably think that maybe the parole board should keep them in there a little while longer because obviously they have not learned their lesson. That’s not how this is supposed to work, is it? That person might have something wrong with them.

Well, I bet the Apostle Paul had that said about him a time or two. I bet there were a lot of people who probably thought Paul was messed up in the head. I mean, he had been beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, left for dead, had been desperately hungry and cold and put in prison multiple times, all for just preaching the Gospel and yet do you know what his greatest desire was? To preach the Gospel some more.

In fact, if you will take your Bibles and turn to the New Testament book of Colossians, you will see that Paul’s only prayer request to the people in the city of Colosse was for more opportunities to preach. And did I mention that Paul was in prison at the time he wrote this? Want to guess why he was in prison? Actually, he wasn’t wearing a mask when he went into Walmart and they arrested him. It was sad. No, of course not. He was in prison for preaching the Gospel and his one request was for more opportunities to preach it.

Let’s turn to Colossians 4:2-4. Paul is really wrapping up this letter and a lot of people might kind of skip over the last part here thinking it wasn’t as important as the rest.  And the rest is wonderful stuff! You need to read the little book of Colossians. The whole book will take you 20-30 minutes to read I bet and if we could just live out what this book says, it would change everything for us and the rest of the world. So, later this week, read Paul’s letter to the Colossian church.

In it, crazy old Paul asks the people to pray for him but not how most people ask for prayer. Let’s look at it in Colossians 4:2-4. “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. 3And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. 4Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should.”

Now, in my travels over the last few weeks, I visited some really good churches. Some of them were really big. Some were just large. Some had large choirs or praise bands. Some of the preachers had letters before their names. Some of the churches had many pastors. Some didn’t use physical Bibles. But there were two things that none of those churches had that Christ Fellowship does have. Want to guess what they didn’t have?

Well, first thing you notice is that none of those churches had even a single dog in the whole place. I mean, what kind of church doesn’t have at least one good dog roaming around the pews during the service? Sad really. The other thing I noticed that was missing from those other churches was participation from the folks sitting in the pews. Why, if Billy had busted out with, “It’s my turn to say something now” I don’t know what they would have done. They were really missing out. Those things make our church unique and I love going to a church that does both.

So, I need your help and your input in dissecting this passage so we can understand it better. There is some real meat in these few verses and I don’t want to miss any of it. I want us to pick it clean and gnaw on the bone. So, I need your help. Let’s go back through it verse by verse and see how it tastes. Let’s start with just the first phrase. “Devote yourselves to prayer…”

What does it mean to devote yourself to prayer? What does it mean to be devoted to anything? How do you know if somebody is devoted? Well, the original Greek word means “to be strong toward.” It means to continue strongly. Keep going. Don’t stop. Do it all the time.

When I think of being devoted, I think about my dog, Bo. If you want to know why we have dogs in the service, it started because Bo thinks he needs to go everywhere I do. I’ll be sitting in my chair watching TV and Bo will always be right beside me. He has his own chair and doesn’t want anybody else to sit in it, especially Sara. She wouldn’t dare. But if I get up to go to the bathroom or something, Bo gets up too.

I’ll say, “Bo, I’m just going to the bathroom. You don’t have to get up.” And he will say, “Well, I’d feel better if I went along with ya.” That’s what he says. I know it. Anyway, Bo is devoted to me. He doesn’t want me to go anywhere without him and he doesn’t want to go anywhere without me.

We should be like that with prayer. We should be so devoted to prayer that everything we do involves prayer. Several years ago, my mother confessed to me a sin of hers. Oh, yea. Quite the scandal. She told me she cheated…at solitaire. I asked her how she could cheat at solitaire and she looked at me all sheepishly and confessed, “Sometimes I ask God for help.” Yep. A cheater.

Everything Mama did involved prayer. She was devoted to prayer because she had seen the power of prayer. Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to pray without ceasing. That doesn’t mean we never sleep and just walk around like a zombie muttering to God all the time. It means to be in a state of conversation with God at all times. Be devoted to prayer.

But Paul also says this about that prayer, “being watchful and thankful.” While in prayer, be watchful. Watchful of what or who? Paul doesn’t tell us what to be watchful for so I think he means to be watchful for anything that would disrupt that prayer.

How many of you will be all alone and fervently praying for something or someone and then you realize you are thinking about something completely different. I do that all the time. “Lord, please bless Janet and David and…I remember my friend from high school named David. Didn’t he drive a Camaro? I think it was blue. The ocean is blue. I wonder why. Uh oh.” And I realize…I haven’t been watchful. I got distracted.

You probably ought to be watchful for any of Satan’s schemes to distract you but on the other end of the spectrum, you also need to be watching for Jesus to come back. We are going to see in the next few weeks as we look again at the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus Himself expects you to pray with an eye towards His return. It is part of the right way to pray but I’ll talk more about that soon.

Let’s go to the next part of this verse in Colossians. We could do this all day if we aren’t careful. The next part says we should not only be watchful but also thankful. Thankful for what? That should be pretty easy for a true believer. I don’t care who you are or what is happening to you or what has happened in the past or is about to happen in the future. There is always something to be thankful for.

In Matthew 26, Jesus is having what He knows is His last meal. He is sitting at the table with all His disciples, including the traitor Judas, and He tells them that one of them is about to betray Him. Most of them are all horrified at the thought and even Judas has the gall to say, “Surely not I, Lord?” Can you imagine the look that Jesus gave Judas right then? Anyway, it says that Jesus took the bread, gave thanks and they ate it.

If Jesus can give thanks; if the suffering Savior can find something to be thankful for while sharing a meal with the guy that betrayed Him, at His last meal before He knows He is to die, then you can find something for which to be thankful as well. Let’s move on.

In verse 3, Paul says, “And pray for us, too, that God may open a door…” to this nasty old jail cell so I can high-tail it out of here! Well, that’s what I would be saying but, no, Paul asks them to pray for him so he would have more opportunities to preach his message. And what was his message? His only message was the Good News; the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

He goes on to say “so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains.” What does Paul mean here by the mystery of Christ? Earlier in Colossians 1,  Paul said that he had been commissioned to preach “the word of God in its fullness—the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people” (Colossians 1:25–26). 

So, what is the mystery? Well, there could be several answers, none of them really wrong. But I think here Paul is specifically talking about the fact that Jesus came to die for our sins and how, while it was prophesied in the Old Testament, they didn’t know who it was or how or when it was going to happen. It was a mystery to the Old Testament saints.

It was also a mystery that the Gentiles would be included. Paul continued on in the first chapter of Colossians that “The mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints [Israel]. To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26-27).”

I’ll tell you what is a mystery to me. It is a mystery that Jesus could possibly love me; that He would die for me; that He would want me to be in Heaven with Him and that He has prepared a place for me and wants to share His glory with me. That is all biblical and so I know it’s true but it still blows my mind. How about you? Thank you, Lord!

Let’s move on to verse 4 of our passage. It says, “4Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should.” Paul gets specific here as to what exactly he wants them to pray for. He wants to be able to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus clearly. Now, what would hinder him from being clear? What hinders us from being clear when we proclaim the Gospel? I think there are several factors to being clear in our proclamation. The first is we have to have a clear understanding of it ourselves. We have to know what we are talking about and we have to believe what we are talking about. How do you do that? How do you get to where we know what we are talking about? Reading and memorizing scripture is the only way. Paul got it from God Himself. He wrote it down. Now we have to read it and know and memorize it. That’s the first factor in being clear. You have to spend time in scripture.

Another factor is knowing who we are talking to. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 9 that he tries to talk like the person he is talking to. If he talks to a person of great intelligence, he uses words the man can understand and logic the man can appreciate. If he is talking to a redneck, he talks like me; slow with simple words and not real deep. It also means, like Jesus said in Matthew 7:6, not to throw pearls before swine that we shouldn’t try to give the precious Gospel to those who refuse to hear it.

That may be someone that is an Atheist and is violently against Christianity. For those people, you have to approach them with a lot of love and prayer and they may never be responsive to the Gospel and that’s on them. If they are going to be hostile toward you and what you are trying to share then at some point you have to just dust off your feet (Mark 6:11) and let them go. That’s sad but the Gospel requires a person to make a choice and (as the great rock band Rush said) if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.

But, while Jesus may have been referring to Atheists when He talked about throwing pearls to swine, I’m afraid He is also talking about a lot of religious people. Even today, I think there are a lot of good, moral, church-going people that sit through sermons week in and week out and think they are saved but they have never made the choice to be devoted, not just to prayer, but to Jesus.

You can hear the Gospel a thousand times and it can be voiced clearly but still not received. Just because you have been going to church all of your life or just because your family was good and moral and your mama taught Sunday school and your daddy was a deacon and he built this church does not mean that you are a true believer.

I knew pretty quick into my sabbatical that my first message when I got back was to make sure that the ones I love hear the cry of my heart (Loving My Jesus lyrics). I have to make sure that as the under-shepherd, the sheep I am given are born again new creations, so I want to speak to everybody here this morning. I don’t care about your church attendance or how good you are or how much better you are than somebody else. When you die and see Almighty Holy God face to face, He’s not going to ask you about that.

I am praying right now just as Paul did that I am able to proclaim the Gospel clearly because I would hate to think of any of my church family or anybody on Facebook watching or anybody in jail reading this not going to Heaven for eternity. Because the only other option is Hell and that’s bad news. And there really is a Hell and it is more horrible than we can even imagine. And the only thing that keeps us out of Hell is the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross to pay the price the Father set for our sins.

We are all sinners. Romans 3:23 tells us that and our hearts can’t deny it. That’s bad news. Then Romans 6:23 says that what we deserve for that sin (our wages) is death in Hell for eternity. That’s more bad news. The Good News – the Gospel – is found in places like the simply worded John 3:16 that says that God loved you so much He sent His only Son, Jesus, to pay that price and take what we deserve and all you have to do is believe in Him.

But that’s the tricky part. “Oh, I believe in Jesus!” Sure you do. So do the demons of Satan. James 2:19 tells us that and it says they believe and are scared of Him. So, what does it mean to “believe” in Jesus? The original Greek word is “pisteuo” and it means not just to believe but to be persuaded of and hence to place confidence in; to rely on and be devoted to.

Let me ask you a question. What does it look like to be persuaded of and to rely on and be devoted to? On September 1, 2011, I was sitting and talking to Brian and Belinda Amerman in their living room and they told me about how they had gone to church for years and how they had not always been great people but they had made some changes and were living better and they seemed to be doing pretty well.

But then I asked them to tell me about their salvation experiences and do you know what they both said? “We don’t have one.” How refreshing! Seriously. I’m so tired of asking people about their salvation experience and then hearing them tell me about all the churches they have gone to and all the good things they have done and all the religious experiences they have had. That stuff is meaningless unless you come to the point in your life when you make the choice, like Brian and Belinda did that beautiful day, to be devoted to Jesus Christ.

If I asked you married folks to tell me when you got married and you said, “Oh, we’ve always been married”, do you know what I would have to assume? If you told me that you got married sometime, oh, about between 2002 and 2013, do you know what I would have to assume? If you told me that you believe in marriage and come from a long line of married people and you love marriage but you can’t tell me the date or describe the wedding or tell me how your husband proposed, do you know what I would have to assume? You are not married!

It’s the same with becoming a Christian. Nobody eases into belief. You don’t slowly, over the years slide into a life-changing relationship with Jesus. No. It is a one-time big deal that you will remember for the rest of your life. You may not remember the exact date but you will remember the circumstances. Who were you talking to or hearing that clearly shared the Good News of Jesus dying for your sins? Where were you? What was your response? Did you get baptized that day or was it soon after? You ought to know the answers to those questions if you are a true believer.

If you are not sure of those answers, maybe you need to come forward right now and make sure. Maybe you just don’t remember all the details but you really are a Christian. Well, come forward right now and let’s just make sure. I would love to talk with you right now. I don’t care about social distancing. I don’t care if you are infested and infected. Phooey on Covid! Come down right now as the music plays. We aren’t guaranteed another breath.