Colossians 4:2-4 — Devoted to Prayer

FRANK EDWARDS: Colossians chapter four, verses two through four. Linda, read it to us before either of us says a word about it.

LINDA BROWN: Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful, as you pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. Pray that I may declare it clearly, as I should.

FRANK EDWARDS: A man in chains just asked for a door. Did you catch that? He mentions the chains once, in passing, almost like a footnote... "for which I am in chains"... and the actual request, the thing he wants a whole church praying about, is a door for the word. Not a key. A door. Welcome to Dig Deeper, glad you're with us this afternoon, because today we're in the last chapter of Colossians, right at the top of it, and Paul is telling this church what to pray for, and it is not the thing any of us would have put on the list.

LINDA BROWN: I would ask for the lock. I would ask for the lock, then for a good lawyer, then maybe for the word, if there was time left over. And I want to know whether this is Paul being extraordinarily holy, or whether something is going on here that I'm just not seeing yet. Because on a first hearing it almost sounds like he's forgotten he's a prisoner.

FRANK EDWARDS: He has not forgotten, and by the end of the passage I think you'll see the chains are actually doing more work than the door is. But Paul doesn't start with his own situation. He starts with theirs. "Devote yourselves to prayer." Calvin, in his commentary on this letter, says it like this: "Farther, as to prayer, he commends here two things; first, assiduity; secondly, alacrity, or earnest intentness." Two old words, so let me unpack them. Assiduity is just stubbornness with a schedule. You keep showing up. Alacrity is the opposite of drifting... you're leaning in, you're eager, you're awake. And that second one is where Paul gets specific, because the phrase "being watchful" is one word in Greek, grēgoreō, and it does not mean concentrate. It means stay awake. Stay roused when your body wants to close its eyes. It's a sentry word. A man on the city wall in the third watch of the night, and everything in him says just five minutes, and the whole point of his job is that he doesn't.

LINDA BROWN: That sounds like a stretch to me. Praying is praying. If I'm talking to God, I'm talking to God, whether I'm bright-eyed or I'm mumbling into the pillow. Why does it matter whether the verb is a sentry verb or a concentration verb? Isn't that just... semantics for people who like Greek?

FRANK EDWARDS: Jesus didn't think it was semantics. Go to Gethsemane. He's sweating blood, he's asked three of his closest friends to pray with him, and he comes back and finds them slumped over, asleep. And the word he uses when he wakes them is this exact verb. "Could you not keep watch with me for one hour? Watch and pray, so that you will not enter into temptation." Grēgoreō. Same word. Now, were Peter and James and John bad men? No. The spirit was willing, Jesus says so himself. But the flesh dozed, and it dozed at the precise moment prayer mattered most. That's the thing Paul knows about you and me. Prayer is the one place where the soul is most prone to drift, because nobody is watching, nothing bad happens if you stop, and your mind is already at tomorrow's inbox before you've finished the first sentence. So when Paul says pray watchfully, what do you think he's guarding against?

LINDA BROWN: Sentry. That's the word I'd underline out of everything you just said, because a sentry isn't awake for the sake of being awake, he's awake because something is coming. So the drowsiness Paul's worried about isn't the yawn, it's the falling asleep at a post while the enemy walks up the road. Or while God walks up the road, I guess, and you miss it.

FRANK EDWARDS: Vigilance, is the technical word the tradition uses, and you've just described it better than most textbooks. And you named both halves of it. Watching against, and watching for. Jesus closes his teaching on his own return in Mark thirteen with "What I say to you, I say to everyone: Keep watch!" Same verb again. So to pray this way is to pray like someone who knows the Lord is coming and the night is not the time for sleeping. And Luke eighteen tells us Jesus taught a whole parable "to show them that they should always pray and not lose heart." Always pray. Don't quit. That's Calvin's assiduity. And the reason people quit, almost every time, is that nothing seemed to happen, so the sentry sits down. Paul is drafting this little church in a bypassed town onto the wall and telling them to stand there.

LINDA BROWN: And underneath that sits the word I keep tripping over, which is "thankful." Because watchfulness I get, that's a soldier posture, that's tense. Thankful is the opposite of tense. And the man writing "be thankful" is the man with the chain on. Why would he braid those two together in the same breath?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because thanksgiving is what keeps the sentry from turning into a nervous wreck. Think about what a thankful prayer actually is. You cannot say thank you to someone you don't trust. The soul that prays with gratitude is a soul that has already decided the God it's addressing is good, before the request gets answered. First Thessalonians five gathers up the same three habits, "rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in every circumstance," and Paul treats them as the ordinary rhythm of a life turned toward God. Ordinary. Not the emergency call you make when everything else has failed. So watchful and thankful aren't fighting each other. One keeps your eyes open and the other keeps your heart steady while they're open.

FRANK EDWARDS: Now, having told them how to pray, Paul tells them what to pray, and this is where your lock question comes back. "Pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word... for which I am in chains." We talked on day one about the fact that he's writing from Roman custody, so I won't rebuild that. But I want you to see the chain itself, because it is not a metaphor. A Roman citizen awaiting trial before Caesar was often held under what they called custodia militaris. Military custody. And that meant, quite literally, a chain running from your wrist to the wrist of an imperial soldier. Shifts rotating. Around the clock. Paul rents his own lodging, Acts twenty-eight tells us, he receives visitors, he dictates letters, Tychicus carries this one down the road. But there is always a man of the praetorian guard fastened to his arm. So picture him dictating this sentence. "Pray that God may open a door for the word." And standing a foot away, chained to him, is a Roman soldier who has to listen to every word.

LINDA BROWN: The soldier hears the gospel because Rome chained him to it. That's the consequence, and it follows from the empire trying to contain Paul. They bound him to a guard so he couldn't get out, and what they actually did was hand him a captive audience that rotates every few hours. The door he's praying for... it's already ajar. It's on his wrist.

FRANK EDWARDS: Philippians is the evidence that makes your point stronger than you made it. Same imprisonment, same season, and he reports, "the things which happened to me have turned out rather to the advancement of the Good News, so that it became evident to the whole praetorian guard that my bonds are in Christ." The whole guard. Not one sympathetic soldier. The barracks are talking. The chain became the pulpit, and the guards were the congregation the door admitted. And this is not new with Paul. Go back to Genesis thirty-nine, Joseph thrown into prison, and the text says "the LORD was with Joseph... and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison." God's man locked away, and the Lord's purpose walking freely through the bars. Bound Joseph, bound Paul, and a gospel that will not stay bound. So back to your first question. Is Paul just extraordinarily holy? Or has he noticed something about how God actually works?

LINDA BROWN: He's noticed. He's noticed the door is a person and not a hallway. Which brings me to the part I honestly find a little off-putting, and I think a listener might too. "The mystery of Christ." Colossae was full of mystery religions, we've said that in this series, secret knowledge for the initiated, the inner circle gets the real stuff. And now Paul's using their word. Doesn't that make Christianity sound like one more secret club?

FRANK EDWARDS: It's the opposite of a club, and the word is doing something sharp. Mystērion. Now, if I tell you that means "mystery," I've told you nothing, that's just the same word walking through Latin into English. What the Greek communicates is this: a thing that was once shut up inside God's own counsel, unknown to anyone because he hadn't spoken it yet, and has now been announced. Not solved. Announced. And Paul already defined it for these people back in chapter one, verse twenty-six. "Hidden for ages and generations, now revealed to his saints... Christ in you, the hope of glory." And notice who the "you" is. Gentiles. Pagans in a Phrygian river town. The secret of the ages turns out to be that a crucified Jew is Savior of the whole world, Jew and Greek in one body, and that Abraham's promise, "in your seed all nations will be blessed," is spilling out of a bound man's mouth into Rome itself. The mystery cults sold a secret to the few. Paul is standing in the street shouting the secret to everyone. That's the door he wants. Not an unlocked cell. A receptive heart and a clear moment to say it.

LINDA BROWN: That opens up the last line for me, though, because it's stranger than the door line. "Pray that I may declare it clearly, as I should." This is Paul. He's written half the New Testament. Why is the man asking for help with clarity? I'd expect him to ask for courage, or for the audience, or for the soldier to have a soft heart. Not "help me say it well."

FRANK EDWARDS: Ephesians, written from this same chain, asks for both. "Pray that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains." Boldly there, clearly here, and I don't think they're really different requests. Ask yourself what makes a person muddy when they talk about Jesus. It's almost never lack of information. It's fear. You hedge, you soften, you bury the one true sentence under six qualifiers so that nobody can be offended by it, and by the time you're done nobody could tell you what you believe. Muddiness is usually cowardice wearing a nicer coat. So when the man who has more to lose than anyone in that room asks for prayer that he'd be clear, he's confessing that even he feels the pull to mumble. That should be enormously freeing to hear.

FRANK EDWARDS: And it exposes the cost that's buried in this passage. Because praying "open a door for the word" is a dangerous prayer. God might open it in front of the exact person you've been careful never to talk to about Jesus. There's a coworker whose good opinion you actually want. Lunch, ordinary lunch, and the conversation drifts somewhere real... a hard year, a comment about church, a question about whether any of this means anything. And there it is. A door. And the thing that rises up in that half-second isn't a theological objection. It's, what if this makes it awkward. What if they think less of me. The cost in this passage was never the length of your prayers. It's your name, with someone you want to keep.

LINDA BROWN: [short pause] Which is why I think a lot of us pray the door prayer and secretly hope God says no. Because "Lord, open a door" is a very spiritual way to put the whole thing off onto him. If he doesn't open it, well, I prayed. And if I'm honest, the version of that lunch you just described costs me the thing I protect most carefully, which is being the reasonable one at the table. Paul's paying with a wrist. I'm not willing to pay with a reputation.

FRANK EDWARDS: Christ was named among criminals and did not clutch his reputation. That's where the passage finally rests, and it's the only place it can. The one who kept watch in Gethsemane while his friends slept, the one who walked open-eyed to a cross while everyone who loved him scattered... he already secured your standing before God. Fully. So the reasonable-one-at-the-table version of you has nothing left to protect, because the only verdict that could ruin you has already come back, and it came back in your favor. Obedience at that lunch is not a sermon. It's one honest sentence, said clearly, and then you let it sit. "I actually pray about this kind of thing, and it's held me up." That is declaring it clearly, as you should. And the word will do what the word does. It ran free from a chained wrist in Rome. It can run free from your table.

LINDA BROWN: The word of Christ can't be chained. Only its messengers can. I want that to be the sentence that walks out the door with people today, because it rearranges what I'm afraid of. The messenger can absolutely get stuck, or embarrassed, or tethered to something. The message isn't stuck. It never was.

FRANK EDWARDS: Let it work on you. Not as an idea, but as a pair of eyes. Paul's own words are the charge today, and I won't improve on them: devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. So stand your watch this evening with one name on it. The person you've been praying a door open for while quietly hoping it stays shut. Pray it honestly this time, eyes open, and if the door so much as cracks, one clear sentence. That's all he asked for himself.

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