Morning. Let’s read from the Word, starting in Colossians 1. We are going to read from verses 1 through 12.
Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ who are at Colossae:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father.
We give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you,
having heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye have toward all the saints,
because of the hope which is laid up for you in the heavens,
whereof ye heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel,
which is come unto you; even as it is in all the world, and beareth fruit and increaseth,
as it doth in you also, since the day ye heard and knew the grace of God in truth.
Even as ye learned of Epaphras our beloved fellow-servant,
who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf,
who also declared unto us your love in the Spirit.
For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray and make request for you,
that ye may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,
to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing,
bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;
strengthened with all power, according to the might of His glory,
unto all patience and longsuffering with joy;
giving thanks unto the Father,
who made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.
And then Psalm 8. We will just read the whole psalm.
O Lord, our Lord,
how excellent is Thy name in all the earth,
Who hast set Thy glory upon the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast Thou established strength,
because of Thine adversaries,
that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained;
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that Thou visitest him?
For Thou hast made him but little lower than God,
and crownest him with glory and honor.
Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands;
Thou hast put all things under his feet:
all sheep and oxen,
yea, and the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!
Let’s pray.
Father, we want to thank You for Thy table this morning. We want to thank You for revealing Yourself to us in it. We want to thank You for the grace bestowed on us through Jesus Christ, and for His being the One who brought us to You and reconciled us to You.
O Lord, how can we not give You thanks, honor You, and tell You that we love You, because You love us so much?
Now, Lord, as we come to the Word today, we ask, how can we say anything that is from You? We cannot. So we look to You, Lord. We would open Your Word, give it back to You, and ask that You will bear witness to Your Son, Jesus.
And in bearing witness, Lord, may it open our hearts to Him. Lord, it is not just our eyes that need to be opened; it is our hearts too. So we are asking that Your Word, by Your Spirit, will be made known to us, and that we would see Jesus. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
This morning, I am going to speak on Paul’s prayer. But before I get to his prayer, there is one part of the prayer that has really struck me. I read the whole of Colossians up to that point because I think it sets his prayer in context.
When we look at the verses in Colossians and Psalm 8, we see Christ. We see Christ throughout the whole book of Colossians. But we see this also: we see man restored to his lost estate.
In Psalm 8, we have what man was originally created for: to have dominion, to rule over the earth. But he forfeited that. He gave it all away.
Through man’s being redeemed by Christ, he is now being used to bring Christ to His earthly throne, where we will rule and reign with Him. Man has been restored—not in the old creation, not in what we were, but as a new man in Christ.
As those redeemed, we have a part in bringing Him to His throne on earth. The Lord is already seated on a throne in the heavenlies. He is already there. But He is not seated here.
Our redemption has to do with bringing that Man from glory to here: to rule and reign, and to restore all that God had lost through man’s forfeited dominion. That Man is now Christ.
From our fallen state, we lost something. But in being redeemed, we are brought into something big.
Why is Paul praying for these people? You look at the beginning of Colossians, and it seems as though they already have it made.
Look at Colossians 1:4. They have faith in Christ. They have love for all the saints. They have hope because they know what has been laid up for them in heaven. They have heard the word of the truth of the gospel and know it to be true.
Why should he pray for these people? They have it made. But he does pray, because I think Paul, in praying for them, is bringing them into something bigger.
A lot of us, when we first came to the Lord, did not have a real big picture. We had a picture of what God had done for us in Christ. But sometimes, when we talk, it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes you just need a picture.
The Lord is trying to bring us into something bigger. I showed a detail from Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel. It is a great detail. Look at the emotion in the face. But if you only see that, you do not really understand what the picture is about. You have to see it in the context of the whole thing.
Does anybody know what that painting is called? Shame on you. Your art-history teachers are turning over; they are changing your transcripts right now. It is The Last Judgment.
It is all centered around the return of Christ. Here is Christ returning. But you do not get that from merely looking at one detail. You have to see the bigger picture to understand the individual.
If you do not see the bigger picture, you are left only with the individual. And the Lord would not have us remain simply in that individual place. He wants us in the bigger picture.
Let me show you another thing, just to give us this idea. The Normandy invasion—very good. These are the men getting ready to hit Omaha Beach.
But that picture alone does not tell you much. It is just a group of men in a boat. Even if I show you the invasion, it tells you a little more, but it does not tell you the whole story. You need the big picture.
When I teach history, I teach the big picture. If you do not know the big picture, the other parts do not fit well. You do not know how they fit. And you need to know how you fit into the big picture.
If it is only about you, you have lost the real context of what your salvation is all about. To understand the picture of the Normandy invasion, you have to go all the way back to the expansion of Hitler’s rule and the territory conquered by Germany up to 1942.
Look at what was conquered. Look at what was under the dominion of Hitler. Some nations were neutral; others were under fire, including the Soviet Union. The invasion must be put in context.
Once all of this has taken place, then the invasion comes into being. We see the headlines: “Allied Armies Land in France; Great Invasion Is Underway.” But that was not the end.
The goal was victory in Europe. Even in that one historical picture, you have to know a beginning and a future. You have to know the past and the future in order to put everything into context.
You will never know the importance of these things unless you put them together. Read from left to right, then left to right. The whole thing is the context of everything. You see it all together, and it makes sense. All of it gives the individual event meaning.
That is what is happening here. Epaphras comes and tells Paul about the Colossians, and he gives a great report. It is a wonderful report. Yet they are under attack. They are in danger of having everything robbed from them.
So Paul begins to pray. His prayer begins with this: that they would know the will of God.
What is the will of God? This is the big picture: that Christ might have His rightful place.
That is the big picture of the will of God for us. It is the big picture of the will of God for the universe, for the cosmos. This is the will of God.
We can bring it down and ask, “What does His rightful place mean?” It means His rightful place in our personal being. I did not say merely our personal life; I said our being. It is who we are.
Christ is to have His rightful place at the center of our being. He is to have His rightful place in our believing communities and assemblies—in the places where we live in fellowship with other believers, where two or three are gathered in His name.
Finally, He is to have His rightful place on earth and throughout the whole cosmos. All creation is to recognize His rightful place.
Now, I put this in the order most of us would put it: ourselves first. Or you could say that I went from the smallest to the largest. But when I teach history, I teach the big picture first.
None of these other things makes sense by itself. They are not meant to stand alone. An event in history means nothing unless you see it in its larger context.
You do not understand why there was a revolution in Russia unless you understand how they were running World War I and how they ran their czarist regime. Then you can understand why Lenin promised peace, bread, and land. Otherwise, it is just a slogan.
We generally get stuck at the individual level. That is where we start out, and I am not saying it is wrong. Do not think it is wrong. But there is more.
It is not merely that I am saved from sin, and then I do good things and live a good life. That is what most Christians believe, and it is not altogether wrong. But you have to see it in the context where it belongs.
We have been saved. We have been redeemed so that Christ might have first place in the cosmos and on earth, in our communities, and in us. When God set His plan in motion, it was the big picture first, and then we were brought into it.
We are painted into the big picture. Michelangelo painted himself into The Last Judgment. He is depicted as taking off his old skin. Why? The old man is being done away with. You have to see the big picture: Christ returns, and all things pass away.
This is a wonderful thing into which we have been brought. When Paul prays for these people, his first prayer is that they would know the will of God. The will of God is this greater thing.
He is saying, “Brothers and sisters, I want you to know into what a great thing you have been called.”
When you are brought into something great, you begin to look inside yourself for something that justifies your being brought into it. We all do that. We ask, “Where is the greatness in me that is supposed to rise to the occasion of this great calling?”
What do we find when we start looking inside? We find the old man. The old man has nothing. There is no life in it. There is nothing that I have in myself that qualifies me for this calling. Nothing.
You may ask, “Well, gee whiz, then why does the Lord show me?” Do you remember the Sermon on the Mount? What is the first thing the Lord Jesus says?
Blessed are the poor in spirit:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Why are they blessed? There is nothing there. I do not naturally look at that as being very blessed. But I have Someone now to turn to, because otherwise I would never turn to Him.
Paul wants to show them this: you have been brought into something great. You may begin by thinking, “I am pretty good. I have been brought into something great.” But then you find yourself in places where you are meant to serve the kingdom of God, and you look within yourself and find nothing able to bring these things to pass.
What do you do? You look to God, because God is our salvation.
Our salvation is not merely that our sins are forgiven. Our salvation is God. God is our salvation, because forgiveness of sins is with Him. Judgment is with Him. He is our salvation.
So we find that there is a poverty of spirit, and we look to God to help us, to come in and reign in us. It is not our aspiring to do something that lifts us to great things. It is our being called from on high to be part of a work so much greater than ourselves.
When we see our own bankruptcy in bringing it about and turn to God, we are enabled to look to God. That is why we pray as the psalmist prayed in Psalm 121:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:
from whence shall my help come?
My help cometh from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
Paul wants us to know His will because His will is a great thing. It is a great purpose into which we have been brought. He wants us to know it so that we come to the place of saying, “I have nothing.”
But it is not merely, “I know His will. What is next?” That is what we do. “Oh, I learned that. What is next? We studied Colossians. What is next?” We are often in that kind of place.
Paul says, “It is not that I merely want you to know His will and the big picture of His will. I want you to know it in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.”
In other words, God wants us to know this will and purpose so that we may order our lives in line with that purpose. We are not left on our own to order our lives, so do not think I am saying that you must work for it and everything will be okay.
We are not after spiritual truth merely for the sake of knowing truth. It is not, “Okay, I know that. Notch my belt.”
Where does this wisdom come from? It comes from God. And where do we receive God’s wisdom? We receive it from His Word.
It is not simply that we have a quiet time and suddenly things pop out at us. We must understand that it is not as though we sit around while everything simply comes to us and is given to us.
Remember Isaac. There was a famine, and Isaac was going to leave the land. But God stopped him from going to Egypt and told him to stay where he was.
It was as if God said, “Isaac, everything you need is provided in this land.” Isaac did not say, “Okay, show me. I want to see corn sprout up just as You did in creation. Speak it into being.”
No. What do you find Isaac doing in Genesis 26? He plants. He digs wells. He does these things.
I think our mindset is that we are becoming welfare Christians, expecting everything to be given to us while we do nothing for it.
That is something especially for you who are second and third generation. When I teach United States history, I teach the civil-rights movement. I scold my students, especially my African American students. I tell them, “You do not even realize how your grandparents suffered so that you could be here.”
You have lost that awareness, and now everything is given to you because of what they did. But what are you doing to make sure of that dream? You are expecting everything to be given to you.
We receive wisdom through His Word, and that means that we must engage ourselves in the Word. I do not merely read it, put it aside, and say, “Well, I read the Word for today, and now I can go on with the rest of my life.” Engage.
Do you engage in conversation with your parents? How many of us really engage with someone else?
What does it mean to engage with somebody? If I am talking to Jerry, I look him in the eye. I let him read me, and he lets me read him—unless he does not want to, in which case he will look down or look away. But that is what I mean by being engaged.
When I went after my wife, I had to engage her before I got engaged. I had to see into her and let her see into me.
When we are engaged in the Word of God, we are letting God look into us through His Word, and He is letting us look at Him. We can see who He is because He is revealed in His Word.
You have to look for Him. You have to be engaged. You have to have a desire to find Him, and you have to have a desire to be found out by Him.
If you want to know, if you want to be brought into this big picture, you have to open yourself to God and let Him open Himself to you by opening the Word and prayerfully reading it.
There is a great fault in me there. It is so easy not to prayerfully read the Word, but simply to look things up for a message or something like that. I can go to a commentary, but prayerful reading is where we say, “God, You have to show me. You have to let me see. You have to reveal Yourself to me, because my mind will not be able to fathom You.”
Study. You study the Word. You do not merely read it and close the book like you do your textbooks, and then get AP notes. You know what I am talking about. No, you study it.
A lot of us do not study anymore. Even us older people—we go to the Word, but we do not study it. We may read it and have fellowship over it, but we do not study it.
Please do not misunderstand me, but if you are going to have fellowship over the Word, let it be intelligent. Study the Word. See what it says. See what is in context. Have you read the book of Colossians? Have you read that letter and seen what it is talking about in its entirety?
When Paul has brought these people low, the next thing he does, beginning in Colossians 1:13, is bring them to Christ. The rest of the book is about how great Christ is, about being brought to Christ, and about needing Christ.
You cannot bring Christ back to His throne here on earth without Christ in you.
Then you need to reflect on the Word. Reflect on it. Think about it.
How many of you are going to eat today without chewing? I am going to watch. Like snakes—you know, the mouth gets bigger and goes around it. No, you chew.
What happens when you chew? You get the flavor of the food. It is broken down, and it touches your taste buds. Your taste buds say, “Man, that is pretty cool.”
You chew it. You allow it to be broken down so that you can not only swallow it, but so that it can be assimilated into your life. If you do not chew it, it is simply going to go out the waste door. It has to be digested.
When you give yourself to God and His Word in this way, God, by His Spirit, is able to direct your thoughts to a certain passage, a certain word, or a certain event in Scripture. He is able to direct you.
He sustains your energy because your interest has been awakened. He enables you to hold that Word, take it in, and receive its full benefit. Then it can become light and revelation to you.
You need the Word to break through so that it becomes light and revelation. Otherwise, we merely read it, and it becomes nothing more than a textbook. But it is meant to show us who God is, reveal God to us, and give us life.
Secondly, Paul speaks of spiritual understanding. What is spiritual understanding? That is a big term.
Spiritual understanding is the Word being quickened, made alive, and translated to you so that you know what it means. It is not something you understand merely so that you can store it in a box. You know what it means so that it can be applied to your life, your life situation, and your knowledge of God.
Your knowledge of God should lead you to faith. It should lead you to believe that He is who He says He is, and that if He has asked you to do something, He is able to give you success in it. That is spiritual understanding.
To take our part in this grand purpose, Paul wants us to know His will so that we might walk worthily. When I speak of walking worthily, I am not talking about earning something or having a holiness that earns points with God.
Think again of those soldiers. If you are going to be a soldier in service, what does it mean to walk worthily? Certainly, you have to obey orders. But it means more than that.
Consider the negative side first. 2 Timothy 2:4 says not to be entangled in the affairs of this life.
No soldier on service entangleth himself in the affairs of this life;
that he may please Him Who enrolled him as a soldier.
To walk worthily is to know that you have been called to something higher, so that you can put other things aside and say, “I am not going to entangle myself in that because I have been brought into a higher purpose.”
When those soldiers were drafted into the army—or some actually enlisted—they went off to camp and were set apart for that purpose. When they went on leave, they were not meant to entangle themselves in other things because they saw that they had been called to something greater.
They were defending the free world. What about us? We are called to bring Christ down, to have His throne on earth. How much higher can you go? You cannot. But that is our calling.
Do not be sidetracked away from the purpose. Do not be caught up in your own self-interest.
There is another aspect to walking worthily: submitting to training. Hebrews 12:5–11 speaks of our being under discipline.
We submit to training because we are being prepared for good works. We are being prepared for something that will help bring in the King. You may not even know why the training is good, but the One who is training you—the Holy Spirit who lives in you—is training you for something.
I played basketball in college. You have a coach and an assistant coach. The coach makes the plans, and the assistant coach goes out and sees that they are carried out.
In the 1970s, basketball season began at the end of November. School started after Labor Day, and from Labor Day until October 15, we had what was called conditioning.
We were basketball players, but we could not touch a basketball. So what did we do? We ran. We ran, and we ran, and after that we ran.
Twice a week, we ran a hill—Bastanchury Boulevard in Fullerton, California. It was a steady upgrade for about a mile. Killer.
You would think, “Is this guy trying to kill us?” In September and October, with the Santa Ana winds, it felt that way. Then Coach Sims, our assistant coach, had us doing calisthenics and leg lifts after we had run the hill.
Coach Sims would ask, “Do you know why you are doing this?” And we would say, “Yes, you are torturing us.”
He said, “Because when it comes to February, you are going to be running circles around your opponents.”
I did not think about that then. I only thought, “I want this to get over. I cannot wait until October 15, when we can get into the gym.” But in February, we were running circles around our opponents.
When you are trained like that, and you give yourself to the discipline and to the one who is disciplining you, you find that you can believe him. He brings you into the circumstances for which he said the training was preparing you.
Think of the men who landed at Omaha Beach. They had been trained to know how their guns worked, to work together as a group, and to face what lay ahead. All that training prepared them for that one time.
They may have thought their drill instructors were crazy. But when they came under fire, all those things came into operation. They were the very things needed for that moment and for the victory that was to come. All of it was necessary, and they gave themselves to it.
There is a positive side to this too: fruitfulness. Fruitfulness comes from carrying out orders. You do what you are told to do.
In Christian language, this means there is an obedience given to the Lord. It is not merely obedience to commands in the abstract—“These are the commands; obey them.” It is obedience to the Lord speaking within you through the Word, making things alive to you, and then your obeying them.
When that rhema, that word for the day and for the moment, comes to you, you obey it. When you do, you find that God is true, and fruit is borne from it.
What the Lord has planted in you for that time comes to full fruition. It ripens and becomes ready for others to taste.
An apple tree never eats its own apples. But those who pass by do. Whether they are of the household of God or those who are not saved, the fruit is there because you have undergone the training, been the obedient servant, and been the obedient soldier available for that time.
Obedience carries a sentence of death.
I do not know how many of you have watched Saving Private Ryan. When those first-wave soldiers were approaching the beach and you heard the bullets striking the front door of that landing craft, then the door dropped and those first men were killed.
For us, when there is obedience to orders, there is a death. It is a death to self. There is a death to self that has to happen for fruit to come forth.
Unless a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die,
it abideth by itself alone;
but if it die,
it beareth much fruit.
Something happens.
Some obey because they consider themselves already dead. I watch war movies—sorry. In Band of Brothers, once they go into D-Day, there is one man who does heroic, almost insane things. He runs into enemy fire.
When he does these things, it frees up others and helps them win. Somebody finally asks him, “Why are you doing that?” He says, “I have considered myself already dead, so why try to save my life?”
“I will just go and do these things, and if God lets me live, He lets me live.” And he did. He lived through the whole war. It is incredible.
But that is like being a bondservant. That is like saying, “I am dead. I am dead to myself. I am dead to my life. I do not want to live anymore. I want to live for Christ.”
Not all of us are there, because some of us are still entangled. Some of us are still thinking about ourselves. But through obedience comes epignosis: true knowledge, real knowledge, experiential knowledge of God.
We see that God is real. We see that God is powerful. We see that He is faithful. We see that His plans really are the best plans. Romans 12:2 tells us that we may prove what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God.
We also see His love: His love for us, His love for the world, His love for the saints, and His love for His Son.
Because you see the big picture, you can care for the other people in your unit. You have all been put together to accomplish the same thing.
You see that you need one another as brothers and sisters, that you are part of a body, and that you are all under one Head. You are all moving toward the same purpose.
None of us is called to a different ultimate purpose. We are all called to bring Christ back to earth. We may have different vocational callings. You may be led to be a teacher, a housewife, a doctor, or something else, but those are worldly vocations.
Our true calling is to bring the Lord back. That is the true purpose for our being saved. It is nothing less than that. Nothing less than that.
Then Paul says that we are to be strengthened. What are we being strengthened for? We are strengthened for all patience and longsuffering.
Paul is saying, “I am praying for you because the ride is not going to be smooth.” Do not expect a smooth ride. There are bumps along the road.
It is like an unpaved mountain road. Have you ever driven one of those? They are so cool because you are bouncing all around. But the thing is, it is not going to be smooth.
Those of us who are parents know this. How many fathers have had no problems being a father? Mac, really? That is interesting. I will talk to your wife afterwards.
All of life has problems. We are not going to have a road that is smooth. There are parts of it that will be smooth, but other parts will be rocky.
We speak about Psalm 23. We like green pastures and still waters. That is cool. But what about the part where He leads you through the valley of the shadow of death? Who put that in the psalm? God did.
He knows that there is an enemy who does not want this big purpose to happen. The enemy is out to stop it. He will not succeed, but he is out to stop it and wreak havoc.
Even the Germans in World War II and the Japanese toward the end of the war knew they were losing. Did they just give up? No. Some of them fought even harder.
Consider Okinawa. It took months to take that island because those men held on tooth and nail in caves and everywhere else. Think also of Stalingrad. The city had to be taken building by building and room by room.
What makes us think that it will be easy for us?
Not all of us are in the same place. Some are just being trained in this way; some have more experience. And when we are young, we often think we know everything. “I will show you how this is done.”
We have to wait for one another, until someone comes to say, “You know something? I was wrong. You were right, brother. Let’s go on.” There is an enemy against this purpose. There is an adversary.
You have to learn to find Christ in the bumpy road. Where do you find Christ? We say, “In the Word, Jim.” Yes, of course. But you also find Christ in your brothers and sisters.
When you are going through bumpy roads and you are in that unit fighting, you look for hope and help in other people. You find Christ in others, and you are meant to be looking for Christ in others.
Where is Christ? Where is He? Where is that word from Christ? “Oh, it is coming from him.” Ah, but I smell Christ. I may not like the brother, but what he just said—that is Christ. You know what I mean?
We are not merely left with the idea that the road will be bumpy. Paul says that we are strengthened for all patience and longsuffering with joy.
We are strengthened with His might, but we are also strengthened with joy. The joy of the Lord is my strength.
We are able to go on because we have a joy that cannot be taken away from us. We know that the victory is ours in the end. The victory is ours.
We must look forward to that victory. I do not want to say “name it and claim it,” but sometimes we must look and say, “Lord, it is Yours.”
Now, in closing, we look at this and ask, “Who is able to do this?” We come to see this great thing, and we ask, “Who is going to do this?”
That is where we look at Colossians 1:13:
Who delivered us out of the power of darkness,
and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love;
in Whom we have our redemption,
the forgiveness of our sins.
Once we see what this big purpose is and what we are called to, we may begin to shrink back because we do not think we have what it takes. But Paul turns us right to Christ.
The first thing he says is that He has qualified you. You are not 4-F.
I was disqualified from the draft. Do you know why? Too good-looking. No, no, no. No one wants to see a good-looking guy killed. No. I have a crooked back. I cannot stand for long periods with a twenty-pound pack on, and I cannot march twenty miles carrying it.
But the thing is, He has qualified us. How has He qualified us? First of all, by forgiving our sins. There is nothing against us.
It is like going into a physical examination and passing completely. There is nothing wrong. Your eyesight is good, your hearing is good, and you do not have flat feet. Everything is working properly because Christ is in you.
That is the other thing. You ask, “How can I do these things?” Look at Colossians 1:27:
To whom God was pleased to make known
what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles,
which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
This is the whole thing in a nutshell. How can we bring Christ back? The only way we can do it is if the new Man lives in us. That is the only way.
We should rejoice because He has put Christ in us. Not only have we been put in Christ, but Christ has been put in us. Why? To live, so that He can bring back the throne to God.
Brothers and sisters, when we look at Paul’s prayer, it is not that he is satisfied simply by saying, “These people have all they need.” He says, “I want to bring them higher.”
“I want you to see the height of these things.” When you see the height of them, and you see that you have nothing in yourself, but you also see what has been provided for you, it ennobles you.
Watch any child who makes a team. He may have thought, “I am not very good.” But you give him a uniform, and watch: his chest puffs out. There is an ennobling that comes from knowing you are called to something great.
All you do is come back to God, humbly bow before Him, and say, “O Lord, thank You. Thy will be done.”
It is like Mary. When she was told that she would have the Christ, she asked, “How can these things be? I have never known a man.” The answer was: the Spirit of God.
Then what did she say?
Behold, the handmaid of the Lord;
be it unto me according to Thy word.
That is what we should say when we see ourselves brought into this great purpose.
Let us shrink back only because we see that in ourselves there is nothing there. But having seen that, let us come forward to the throne of grace and receive grace for this time of need.
May His will be done. May He be brought back to His throne. May all things be given back to Christ, and may Christ give them all back to God.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we just want to thank You that You have brought us into something great. Lord, I know we shrink from it. We say, “No, I cannot do this. I cannot do this.”
But Lord, I am asking that You, by the Word of God and by the Spirit of God, would give us from that Word the word that gives us faith to say yes.
“I do not see it in me, but yes, Lord, You said that I have been called into this purpose. I have been called into the fellowship of Your Son for all these purposes.”
Lord, I want to be in the ranks of the redeemed in this way. I ask that You will do this for all of us, in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.