Principals For Prayer From Paul

What this episode covers

01/18/2026 Blank Outline 01/18/2026 Filled in Outline 01/18/2026 Bible Verses Scroll to 22:45 for beginning of sermon Colossians 1:3-13 We’re going to read some Scripture, and this is part of Paul’s prayer for the Colossian believers, and we’re going to unpack that in a little bit. But I’m just going to read the last five verses of his prayer. This is Colossians 1, 9-14. This is Paul writing to the believers at Colossae, For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you might live a life worthy of the Lord, and please Him in every way, bearing fruit in good work and growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to His glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of His holy people in the kingdom of light, for He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness, and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins. Well, we’re going to look at the book of Colossians. So, I love to get into book studies, and we introduced this last week. And I’ll always ask a bunch of questions at the beginning of studying a book that kind of set the introduction and the background. And so, we looked at five of them last week. I’m going to go over that really quickly, and then we’re going to jump into this passage. So, the first question we ask is, who wrote the book? And of course this is from the Apostle Paul, who wrote many of the letters in the New Testament, either to individuals or mostly to churches. What’s interesting about the book of Colossians is that Paul had never been there. There’s no record in the Bible that Paul visited Colossae, but one of his friends, converts by the name of Epaphras, came to know Christ, went back to his hometown of Colossae, and started a church. So, Paul wrote the book, and he wrote it to the Colossian church that got established through Epaphras. And when was it written? That’s another question that we ask. And this was written about 61 A.D., and Paul wrote it from Rome. He’s under house arrest. He’s awaiting trial. And Epaphras makes an almost 1,200-mile journey from Colossae to Rome to visit Paul. Why did he make that long journey that would have taken him probably a couple of months? Because this is the purpose of the book. There was false teachers that came in and were teaching false doctrine and leading those believers astray. And so Epaphras is concerned about the church and the stability of the church, and so he makes a trip to Paul in Rome, and he visits him, and he tells Paul about what’s going on, and then Paul sends this letter back to the Colossian believers. And then we also looked at the outline of the book. So, with that having said, we’re going to jump into the section here, Principles for Prayer from Paul. So, a couple weeks ago on our first message of the year for 2026, we had a message entitled, 525,600 minutes. That’s how many minutes there are in a year. And the challenge was, how can we invest our time to make a difference with the 525,600 minutes that God gives us? And so, we came up with three Ps. We talked about being more intentional in prayer, how vital prayer is in our life. We talked about parenting and really discipleship, how important it is to put God’s Word into the lives of the next generation, and that they’ll come to know Jesus and learn what it means to walk with Him. And then lastly, proselytizing, which is a fancy word for being intentional in sharing our faith. So, this morning, we’re going to come back to one of those challenges about prayer and look at three principles for prayer from Paul. And so, here’s the first thing, a definition of pray

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