Colossians 4:12-13 — Epaphras Prays

LINDA: Here is the question I actually have before we go one word further. If Epaphras is a couple hundred miles away, locked up with Paul, no phone, no roads he can walk, no meeting room he can stand in... what is he even doing for these people? Because the passage says he's working hard for them. And I want to know what that work looks like when your hands can't reach anybody.

FRANK: The work is on his knees. That's the whole surprise of these two verses, and it's why I love them. Paul says Epaphras is "always striving for you in his prayers," and that word "striving" is where everything opens up. Welcome to Dig Deeper, by the way, I'm glad you're here with us today.

LINDA: Colossians four, at the letter's end, right? We're basically in the goodbyes.

FRANK: We are, and that's what makes it so easy to skim. It reads like a name in the greetings line. But this particular greeting is one of the richest little windows into prayer anywhere in the New Testament, and it's hiding at the very bottom of the page. Colossians four, twelve and thirteen. Let me read it for us.

FRANK: "Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, salutes you, always striving for you in his prayers, that you may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God. For I testify about him that he has great zeal for you, and for those in Laodicea, and for those in Hierapolis."

LINDA: "Striving in his prayers." Okay, so I'll be honest, "striving" sounds a little churchy to me. Like a word we use to make prayer sound more heroic than it is. Sell me on it. Why is that the word that changes everything?

FRANK: Because in Greek it isn't a churchy word at all. It's a sweaty one. The word is agōnizomai. You can hear our word "agony" sitting right inside it. And in that world it was a fighter's word, an athlete's word. Picture the games. Every one of these towns lived and breathed the gymnasium. Wrestlers oiled up and grappled in the dust until one of them couldn't get off the ground. A runner spent the very last of himself at the line. That whole scene of straining, exhausted effort—what image would Paul draw on to describe a man praying?

LINDA: A man in the dust, burned out from effort. That's what a first-century person in Colossae heard when this was read out loud. Not a guy with his head bowed nicely before bed.

FRANK: Not remotely. They heard the roar of the arena in it. They pictured muscle-tearing labor. And here's the thing the image does that a nicer word never could, prayer stops being the passive, half-asleep thing we tend to make it. Epaphras has no crowd. No opponent he can see. His arena is a prison cell. And his contest, the thing he's spending himself against, is to hold three churches before God until they stand. Paul underlines it in the next breath, "he has worked hard for you." That's the language of a man who ends the day wrung out. But doesn't that sound exhausting? Grim, even?

LINDA: Part of me hears "prayer is agonizing labor" and thinks the whole thing through. Why would God want prayer to be hard? Why not make it easy?

FRANK: Now the harder question, and it's the right one. It isn't that God wants prayer difficult for its own sake. It's that love, real love, for real people, is costly, and prayer is where that cost gets paid when nothing else can be. Think about who Epaphras is praying for. Paul tells us in verse thirteen, three towns, Colossae, Laodicea, Hierapolis, all clustered in that little valley. And in verse twelve there's this phrase we fly right past, "who is one of you." These are his own people. His hometown. The church he planted.

LINDA: The church he planted, the one we talked about back at the start of all this.

FRANK: The very same. So this isn't a missionary praying for a mission field on a map. This is a man praying for the people who know his faults and whose faults he knows. And that's harder, not easier. Praying with real labor for strangers is one thing. Praying like that for the people you've lived with, been let down by, gotten tired of, that takes something out of you. Familiarity makes us shrug. Epaphras refuses to shrug. He wears himself out for the very people it would be easiest to give up on. What's the hard part, really?

LINDA: The hard part of his prayer isn't the distance. It's that these are his people. He can't cash in on liking them from far away. He knows exactly who they are and he's still on the floor for them. Which means what, applied to us right now?

FRANK: The pressure point of the whole passage lands on us. There is a name, right now, for most of us, a person in our own church whose face makes us tighten a little. Someone we've quietly stopped carrying before God. Not out of hatred. Out of that low-grade familiarity that curdles into indifference. This text makes that indifference impossible to keep. Epaphras will not let a single one of his people go unrepresented before God, even the ones who wore him out.

LINDA: There's a name on my mind right now, and I really don't want to pray for him. That's the honest truth. Muted the group text and everything.

FRANK: We all have him. And what's beautiful is that Epaphras isn't inventing this instinct. He stands in a line that runs way back. Abraham standing before God bargaining for Sodom, "will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?", pressing his case down from fifty souls to ten, refusing to let a doomed city go unpleaded for. Moses throwing himself between God's anger and a people who'd just built a golden calf. Samuel calling it flat-out sin to stop praying for people, "far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD in ceasing to pray for you." From the very beginning God keeps raising up people who plant themselves between others and heaven. Do you see the pattern?

LINDA: Epaphras is the latest guy in a very old job. Standing in the gap.

FRANK: The latest, and not the last, and not the greatest. Because every one of them, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Epaphras, is a small echo of the one Mediator. Hebrews says of Christ that he "always lives to make intercession" for those who come to God through him. And that's the thing that should steady you. Epaphras can only strain in prayer because someone at the Father's right hand is praying without ceasing and never once gets tired. Your maturity is being prayed for by better lips than yours right now. Christ is interceding for you tonight, and he does not grow weary the way Epaphras does.

LINDA: Let me stay on the ground for a second, though, because you said something I want to catch. What is Epaphras actually asking for? When he's sweating it out on the floor for these people, what's the request?

FRANK: This is my favorite turn in the whole passage. He does not pray for their comfort. He does not pray that life gets easier, or that the hard season lifts, or that the bills get paid. Look at verse twelve, "that you may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God." That's the entire burden of it. The Greek word is plērophoreō. What does that do in English?

LINDA: "Complete" to me just sounds like "done," like a checklist.

FRANK: It's richer than "done." It's the idea of being brought to fullness, filled up to the point where nothing more needs to be added, and then, crucially, settled there. Paul uses the same word for Abraham, that he was "fully assured that what God had promised, he was also able to perform." Fully assured. Not wobbling. To be "complete in all the will of God" isn't mainly about behaving correctly. It's about standing rooted, without a tremor, fully persuaded, fully at rest in what God wills for you. That's what Epaphras is actually praying for his friends.

LINDA: He wants them to be the kind of people who can stand in a storm and not fall over. Unshakable assurance. Which means the prayer has to be costly, doesn't it?

FRANK: It has to be labor. You can't conjure that kind of settled faith in an afternoon. A deep, storm-proof assurance gets worked into a soul over years, and the intercessor pleads it into being, request after request, week after week. And notice what it tells you about the shape of real love. It wants your holiness more than your happiness. It aims at your maturity, not your ease. That's exactly how Christ loves his church, and it's how he prays for her still. There's an old line from Maclaren I've never shaken, that "Epaphras is for us the type of the highest service which love can render."

LINDA: The highest service love can render. Not doing something for them. Praying for them.

FRANK: When you can't do anything else, and often when you can, that's the highest thing love has. Which is convicting, because we treat prayer as the thing we say we'll do when we've run out of real help. What does a person actually do with this on a Thursday when they're tired?

LINDA: I can nod at all of it and change nothing. And honestly, "pray harder" is not a plan.

FRANK: It's not, so let's make it a person, not a program. Not "God bless my friends." One name. Pick a single person today and pray one specific thing about their walk with God, courage in a decision they're dreading, freedom from a habit that's been dragging on them for years. Something particular. Then send that person a text they didn't ask for. No advice, no agenda. Just, "I prayed for you today." Epaphras carried people who never saw him doing it. You can let one person feel carried. But what's the hard version of that?

LINDA: Make it the name you don't want to pick. The muted-group-text guy. Because if I only pray for the friends I already like, I've kind of skipped the whole point of what you just said about "one of you." How do I even begin?

FRANK: Pray for the exact person whose face makes you tighten. Ask God to make them stand perfect and complete, the same thing Epaphras asked for the people who'd worn him out. And here's the only reason any of us can do that. Christ prayed for the very people who failed him. He interceded for us while we were still his enemies. So when you pray for someone you'd rather forget, you're not gritting your teeth into thin air. That same intercession lives in you by his Spirit. But here's the honest question underneath all this.

LINDA: Answers don't come the first time. They don't come the second time either. Striving is the word for it. So when I pray for that person and nothing's different by Sunday?

FRANK: You pray again. That's the very essence of discipline hiding in one word. Faithful, repeated, unglamorous praying for one person is how Epaphras loved an entire city. So here's what I'd leave you with. Do something with that today. Pick the name. Not the easy one. Say the specific prayer, send the text, and then set a reminder to do it again next week, because you won't feel like it, and doing it anyway is the striving.

LINDA: Someone, somewhere, grew in their faith because a believer they may never meet would not stop praying for them. This week, quietly, out of everyone's sight, go be that person for one name.

FRANK: Christ is praying for your completeness right now, and he will not leave the work half-finished. Go and pray like someone who believes that.

LINDA: This one's part of the Dig Deeper app, so if you haven't got it yet, look up Dig Deeper wherever you download your apps.