Add correct line breaks, correct capitalisation, correct punctuation, correct Australian English spelling, and correct KJV Bible verse quotations and references to my paragraphs where applicable. But do NOT — I repeat — do NOT alter or change ANY words from my paragraphs under ALL circumstances.
Continue In Prayer (Colossians 4:2-4)
Introduction Prayer life often shrinks quietly. Colossians emphasizes Christ’s sufficiency. Prayer is one response to that sufficiency.
I. The Shape Of Prayer (v.2) Continue: hold your place. Watch: stay awake, spiritually alert. With thanksgiving: gratitude woven into prayer.
II. The Content Of Prayer (v.3-4) Paul does not ask for release, but for an open door. The door belongs to God. Prayer meeting means carrying one another before God. Intercession is costly and hidden.
Hi Susanna! Just helped transcribe the sermon to use it for the video edit description :)
Tonight our topic is about continuing in prayer.
Prayer is a very familiar word to each one of us. I have, for myself, I have been a minister for some years now, and I will tell you there have been seasons where I preached about prayer far more than I actually prayed. The verses were right. The doctrine was right. But the prayer life behind them sometimes was very thin. I suspect I am not alone in that.
Just before we started our prayer meeting, I read our BP Church bulletin. I thought last week's memory verse was the same text we just read. So this text is about prayer. But sometimes we are so familiar with prayer that we even forget to practise it. Even when we read through the Bible, we know there are a lot of places reminding us that we need to come close to the Lord to pray. But sometimes in our personal life, or even in the public worship service, we are not so focused on such a practice.
More often, we simply wait while our prayer life quietly shrinks—a little less this week, a little less next month—until one day we look up and realise we used to pray more than this, and we cannot say exactly when it stopped. That quiet erosion is what Paul is writing against, which is why this prayer meeting matters. It is not just a programme. It is not an obligation, but something we were made for, as God's will for us.
So when Paul writes this letter to a church, even that church he had never visited, according to history, a church being pulled toward the idea that Jesus is not quite enough—they need Christ plus philosophy. They need Christ plus ceremony, Christ plus mystical experience. That's why Paul replied to them from the first chapter to the last verse with simply this: Christ is sufficient. He is everything.
And near the end of the letter, having established that, he turns to the practical question: If Christ is truly sufficient, is everything, what does a life shaped by that actually look like? Part of the answer is here in these three verses.
The first part is the shape of prayer. "Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving" (Colossians 4:2).
The word translated "continue" carries the sense of holding your position, staying put. It is the same word used in Acts chapter 2 verse 42, where the early church "continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts 2:42). They held their ground.
There is a difference between praying and continuing in prayer. Prayer is what most of us do. We come when we feel the need. We ask, we leave. Continuing is something else. It is the posture of someone who has already decided, before the day begins, that they belong in this place. It is like a soldier who does not leave his post because the night is long and quiet. It's a kind of worship.
Here Paul also says you have to watch, stay awake, eyes open. So all these words Paul is using at that time paint a picture of the Christian life—continue in prayer.
Even when we think of the word "watch" that he used, I think of Gethsemane. Jesus took Peter, James, and John into the garden. But they all fell asleep. Then Jesus said, "Tarry ye here, and watch with me" (Matthew 26:38). And then he came back and found them sleeping. He said, "What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation" (Matthew 26:40–41).
But a few hours later, Peter had said, with complete sincerity, although a few hours before Jesus said this, Peter first said, "Although all shall be offended, yet will not I" (Mark 14:29). But a few hours later he was denying Christ, even to a servant girl, and three times with oaths.
So I want us to see this carefully. Peter's fall was not outside God's purpose. But Jesus had already said to him, "I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not" (Luke 22:32). The Lord interceded for Peter before Peter fell. His stumbling did not catch Jesus by surprise.
But this is also true, that Peter didn't watch, and the unwatched life is a vulnerable life. Not because prayer is a charm that prevents all failure, but because God so often uses the practice of watchful prayer as the very means by which he keeps his people. His sovereignty and our responsibility do not cancel each other. They belong together.
The danger for comfortable Christians, and I say this without accusation, is that comfort is precisely the condition in which watching is hardest. When nothing threatens you, the urgency fades. You stop watching, and the enemy is patient. So it is very dangerous for Christians who stop watching.
And the third word Paul uses is thanksgiving. He said, "with thanksgiving", not after prayer. Thanksgiving in prayer.
Prayer without gratitude slowly changes shape. It becomes a transaction. It's like, "Give me this, I will do that. Fix this, I will trust you more." That kind of praying is exhausting, and it never produces peace because it is fundamentally an argument with the Lord.
But when you come already conscious of what you have been given—forgiveness you never earned, a future secured entirely by Jesus' death and resurrection—the posture changes. You are not presenting an invoice. You are a child returning to a Father who was generous long before you came through the door.
There's something in the original language worth thinking about. The word for grace and the word for thanksgiving share the same root. To give thanks is to say, "I see what you did. I see the grace, and I will not pretend it came from somewhere else."
Romans 1 tells us that ingratitude is not simply impolite. It is one of the first steps in the human drift away from God. So Paul writes all of this from prison, a man in chains telling the church to be thankful, which means the thankfulness he has in mind is not dependent on circumstance. It is anchored in the Lord's will, in the Lord's promise.
I heard a sister pray at a church gathering not long ago. She said, "We give thanks because Christ already came. We give thanks because Christ will come again. That is the anchor. The first coming is a fixed fact. The cross happened. The resurrection happened. The forgiveness is real and permanent. The second coming is a certain promise. In between those two immovable realities is where we live, and in between there is always something to be thankful for."
So, when did your prayer life last feel like this? What would it take this week to come back to it?
Sometimes Christians today, no matter whether regarding our personal prayer or public prayer, are just like we forgot. We may pray sometimes, but the importance of prayer in today's Reformed Christian life seems like it has been put in the corner. So we see this verse that Paul used for reminding the Christians in Colossians, "Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving" (Colossians 4:2). But these words are from a man who was in prison at that time, from the man who needed to ask prayer from others, who needed people to pray that he could be delivered from his own circumstance.
But we see the following verse regarding the content of prayer. What Paul says may surprise us. "Withal praying also for us" (Colossians 4:3). He really asked the people to pray for them, "That God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds: That I may make it manifest, as I ought to speak" (Colossians 4:3–4).
Paul is a prisoner as he writes this, chained to a soldier, and he writes to people he has never met, and he says, pray for us. Then he tells them what to pray for. Not for his release, not his comfort, not that things would ease. He asks for a door of utterance, an opening for the Word. That is quietly astonishing.
My honest instinct in that situation would be, pray that I get out. And there is nothing wrong with bringing our requests before God. But Paul has learned something most of our prayer meetings have not quite learned. The most important thing is not our situation. It is the Word. It's the message.
The grammar that we have to notice is that Paul said that God would open unto us a door. The door is in God's hands entirely. Paul can look for it. He can be ready. But the opening is God's sovereign act. Only God can open.
He knows even in such a situation he still serves as a servant of the Word, to be ready to wait for God to open the door even for himself. He believed that the door surely would be opened. So we see here Paul's faith regardless of his situation. Only God's will be done. God's Word will be preached no matter where he is, whatever kind of situation he is facing.
So we need to think about a question from Paul's content of prayer: What a prayer meeting actually is. Paul says, "praying also for us." The us matters. He's not requesting a quiet mention in someone's private time. He's pulling the whole church into the work. These people's prayers in this little gathering are part of how the door gets opened. That is what he believes.
Someone said to me, "If you have never knelt before God for the same person two weeks in a row, day after day, you may not yet know what intercession is." Two weeks, one person every day. That is not just a name on a list. That is carrying someone.
I heard it put another way. May you become the kind of person who weeps for someone else. It's like Mary poured out something she could not recover at the feet of Jesus without calculating the return. Real intercession looks like that, pouring out your time, your attention, your needs on behalf of someone who may never know you did it.
Which brings me to what I believe about the church. Of course, it's not a whole different definition, but Paul's vision of the church is this: somewhere in this room there is a person who has been kneeling before God day after day carrying your name, and you have no idea. That invisible network is what makes this gathering something more than a meeting. Not just a prayer meeting service or Sunday service, but the fact that someone here is holding you before God when you are completely unaware.
We are not just come here to pray for ourselves. We pray for others. We pray for someone in our hearts.
So what I believe a prayer meeting is for is two kinds of people. If your private prayer life is strong, it's deep, you need to come here and bring that. Let what God gives you in secret fit what you do together. That is private prayer becoming public ministry.
If your private prayer life is weak, come here especially. Let the prayers of others carry you. Let the gathered amen hold you up.
You have no words of your own. So this is the church, that we practise the Lord's will among us, to pray for one another and pray for the Lord's will to be done in the life of each one of us.
So, is there someone you wish were carrying you, or is there one person you are carrying before God this week?
Even Paul is such a strong-faith apostle. He asked people to pray for him, pray for them. But he is not just asking them to pray for his situation. He gave the content. Don't worry about my situation. Even I was chained. Even I was chained. I was treated like a prisoner. But I know I'm free in truth. As long as the Lord's will can be carried out, that's my will.
Paul said, "For which I am also in bonds" (Colossians 4:3). He didn't say that I am in bonds, but I am coping. He didn't say I am in bonds and it is very hard. He says I am in bonds because of this mystery, and because of this mystery I am asking you to pray that the door stays open. The gospel can be preached, can be made manifest, can be seen by others.
So notice what his suffering does not produce. It does not produce self-pity. It does not produce a prayer request about his circumstances. It produces a prayer request about the gospel. That is only possible when your eyes are fixed on something larger than the suffering itself.
If your eyes drop to the suffering, all you will find there is the suffering. But if your eyes are on the gospel, on the open door, on the mystery of Christ, on the people who have not yet heard, then the suffering becomes something else entirely. It becomes evidence that the message is real. It becomes the very thing through which the door opens for them.
Here it seems like Paul doesn't want to get out of his chains. He wants the Word to get out through them.
Maybe it's hard for us to understand Paul's situation because we are so free to worship. We are so free to come to prayer meetings. We can freely come to church. But a few years ago, I was preaching from this passage at a church in China. Normally, we call it the house church or underground church.
Halfway through the sermon, I said something like this because at that time there were persecutions starting in China. So I always encouraged the congregation to be prepared. I used this verse to encourage people. See, when there is no opportunity to preach, when there is no preaching, just prepare to preach. You have to be always ready to preach.
When there is no need to move, you prepare to move because we have to move. In the situation of persecution, normally the government, they don't want you to stay in their district. They want to chase you out. So, you have to be ready to move, house by house.
The third one is when you are not yet in prison, but you have to be prepared to go to prison because any time they may catch you and put you into prison.
I said those words, and while the words were still in the air, the police walked into our congregation.
What happened after that? I will share in more detail in the fellowship tomorrow. But tonight I will only say this. What followed was, in its own small way, exactly what Paul describes here. Not a prayer for release, but a discovery that the door was still open. Even then, even there.
I do not tell you this to impress you. I tell you because I had preached those words before. But in that room, something shifted from my head to somewhere deeper. I understood in a bodily way what Paul means when he says, "For which I am in bonds" (Colossians 4:3).
When your eyes are on the gospel, suffering has a value you cannot calculate in advance.
I think in Australia people may find it hard to understand. So, in China, for the Christians who come to church, what they worry about is not so much like maybe what you worry about. You may be concerned about what you are going to wear today. Maybe your keys may fail today, or something else.
But for Christians in China, if they come to church this morning, they may not see their wife and children tonight, but they still have a heart to come to church.
Okay, I tell you the truth. In China, we gathered in such a way that we would be safe because there were not so many people. The government would never worry then, because people may not suffer by being put into prison, because the will of the government is that you stop gathering.
If we want to have an easy life, we just stop gathering. We stop the prayer meeting. We have our online worship service. There will be no persecution in China. There will be no pastors and elders in prison.
So may the Lord have mercy on us. When your eyes drop to your own interests, or we can say your own suffering, all you produce is self-pity. Actually, what you think, what your actions are, only follow your own interests, your own benefit.
Many of you have built good lives here. I believe that is a gift, and I mean that without any agenda. No one lives tonight in danger. But let me offer you three postures to carry, not as obligations, but as a kind of readiness.
When there is no opportunity to speak of Christ, you are preparing to speak of Christ. I think this is for every Christian.
When there is no reason to uproot your life for the gospel, prepare to uproot, prepare even to uproot your life for the gospel.
So to us Christians, maybe we like to hear the gospel, but actually the gospel is not only the good news to tell us how God saved us. At the same time, the gospel has to shape our life, which means that the way of the gospel is a way of life. How Jesus denied himself and came down to save us, and even died on the cross. This is how we serve him also. This is how we live our life also.
When following Jesus costs you nothing, prepare for the day when it does. Not because suffering is a goal, but because a Christian prepared for the worst prays differently, lives differently, and holds things differently.
Sometimes we have to be reminded of this. In many Christians' hearts, they don't want to bear their own cross. They don't want to follow the way that the world treated Jesus Christ.
But there may be a reason the world does not treat you the way the world treated Christ. Maybe the reason is we are not so much like Christ. We have to be always ready. The persecutions of the world may come in different forms, but there will be persecutions.
Actually, the persecution in reality is ourselves, is our old flesh. We don't want to follow the will of the Lord, the Word of God. The persecution comes.
So we see that even Paul, in such a bad situation that we all think it is, never lost his focus. His focus is still on the Word that can be preached.
Even Paul's posture, Paul's situation, how he entered into Rome, it was not like a victorious way that he came to Rome. He came to Rome as a prisoner. But that's how the gospel came to Rome, through such a prisoner. That is Paul in chains. He's still asking for an open door. Let the Word get through. Eyes on the mystery of Christ. Eyes on the people who have not yet heard. Eyes on the God who opens doors, and no one can shut.
Perhaps you came tonight not struggling with comfort, but with failure. Your prayer life has not gradually drifted. It collapsed. You have tried to rebuild it more times than you can count. And every time someone preaches about prayer, the weight of it lands on you, and you leave carrying more guilt than when you arrived.
I want to say something directly to you.
Paul writes in Romans 8, "Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered" (Romans 8:26).
We do not know what we should pray for as we ought. Paul is not describing a spiritual failure. He's describing the normal condition of the Christian. We do not know. We groan. And in that groaning, in that wordlessness, the Spirit is already at work.
There is someone praying for you right now who never tires, never loses concentration, never forgets your name. The reason? Christ, at the right hand of the Father, is interceding for you at this very moment. Not because of how well you prayed this week, but because of who he is.
The passage is not asking you to earn your way back into God's hearing. In Christ, you are already heard. What Paul is inviting you into is not a performance. It is a return to a table you were always welcome at. Actually, we come to the prayer meeting, or we come to the Lord for any form of prayer, not to earn God's favour, but because of God's grace, because God has given us his favour. That's our motivation.
So we are not coming to the prayer meeting just for maybe people can pray for me. I got some problems to be prayed for. Sometimes it's because you want to give thanks, and you want to pray for others. You want to be a testimony to encourage others to continue to follow God, follow God's Word.
Paul is in chains not despite the gospel, but because of it. And from those chains, he writes to strangers and does not say, "Pray that I get out." He says, "Pray that God opens a door. Pray that the word get through." May the Lord help us to see this. Our eyes on the mystery of Christ. Our prayer can please God, not offend, not sin against God.
We are not just come to the Lord and say something else in our heart. Of course, the Lord knows your heart. But if it's full of evil in your heart, then what you pray is just to give your lust to the Lord. That may be offence to the Lord. But we learn how to pray, and we learn what to pray, and we also learn why we need to pray.
We are living in between those two certainties, which is Christ has already come and Christ will come again. That's why we have a lot of things come to the Lord to give thanks and to pray for. May the Lord help us come awake, come continuing, come with thanksgiving, and ask the God who holds every key to open a door. Not open your own door, but open the door for the gospel, for the souls to fill all the seats, not only for Sunday worship service, also for the prayer meeting.
The prayer meeting is a backbone of the church ministry. May the Lord open our eyes and help us to encourage all other members can come to church to join the worship, join the prayer meeting, and to pray for one another. At the same time, we are pursuing that the Lord have mercy and grace through us to this city to gain more souls.
Let's pray.
Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we come before thee tonight with thanksgiving, not for our own worthiness, but for thy grace. We thank thee, O Lord, that Christ has already come and that he will come again. We pray that, while we live in this season of waiting for the return of Christ, thou would open unto us a door of utterance, that we may speak the mystery of Christ with clarity, with courage.
Bless our prayer this night, not a work to earn thy favour, but as a return to thy love. For Christ alone is our righteousness, our high priest who maketh intercession for us. Help us to continue watching in our prayers. We pray and give thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.