Filled With Knowledge
My fellow travelers,
As we continue journeying through Colossians, let today’s passage warm your heart as surely as your morning tea does. We will see today the heart of the Apostle Paul as he prays for fellow believers.
Beloved, there is a kind of prayer that does not hurry. Paul had never walked the streets of Colossae, yet from the day Epaphras told him of their faith and love, he had not ceased to pray for them. And the prayer he prayed is the one we still need. Listen to Paul’s heart as we read the passage.
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 may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, 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 youto share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light.
Paul asks that they would be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. Not a thin acquaintance with religious ideas, but a knowledge that fills the whole of a person—the kind that comes when the Spirit opens the mind and heart to what the Father actually desires. The verb “filled” carries the sense of being brought to fullness, not merely informed. The knowledge he seeks is epignōsis—a personal, precise acquaintance with what God wants, not a stock of religious facts. Wisdom here is the skill of living under Christ’s lordship; understanding is the quiet ability to see how the pieces of an ordinary day fit together with his purposes. Paul is not asking for them to become clever. He is asking that the Colossians would know God’s mind so thoroughly that their choices begin to look like his.
That knowledge is given for a walk. “so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way”. The Christian life is not a set of moments when we feel spiritual; it is the long habit of ordinary conduct—work, speech, patience with people, the use of money and time—lived at a pitch that fits the One who has called us. Worthy does not mean we earn his smile. It means our steps start to match the gift we have already received. And the marks of that walk are simple and searching: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. Fruit and knowledge grow on the same branch. Obedience makes the face of God clearer; a clearer sight of God makes obedience more natural and more wide. Fruit and knowledge grow together. Good works are not a substitute for knowing God, nor is knowing God an excuse for barrenness. Each feeds the other. As obedience deepens, the knowledge of God becomes clearer; as the knowledge of God grows, the range of good work expands.
Such a walk needs strength we do not carry in ourselves. So Paul asks that they would be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy. The power is measured by God’s own might, not by our reserves. It is given for the long obedience—endurance when the pressure does not lift, patience when we are wronged and the impulse is to answer in kind—and both are to be carried with joy. Joy is not the absence of weight. It is the atmosphere of people who know the Father has already acted.
And he has. The prayer ends where every true prayer begins: giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has made us fit. He has rendered us sufficient for a share we could never have secured. The inheritance is not a prize at the end of a successful life; it is the gift already sealed in Christ, the reason we can give thanks even while we are still learning endurance.
This is the pastoral heart of the passage. God does not leave his people to piece together a worthy life from their own insight or strength. He fills them with the knowledge of his will, he supplies power equal to his own might, and he does both because he has already qualified them for glory. The prayer Paul prayed for the Colossians is the prayer the Spirit still loves to answer.
Take a few quiet minutes with these questions:
Where do you most need to be filled with the knowledge of his will, and what would it mean to ask for spiritual wisdom rather than simply a change in circumstances?
In the ordinary paths of this week, what would a walk fully pleasing to the Lord look like—and where is fruit or a growing knowledge of God currently thin?
What pressure is asking for endurance and patience, and how does the Father’s qualifying work give you reason for joy inside it?
When you give thanks, can you thank him not only for gifts he has placed in your hands, but for the deeper mercy that he has already made you fit to share the inheritance of the saints in light?
Beloved, rejoice that the Lord who has begun a good work in you will be faithful to complete it. Rejoice in knowing you are deeply loved by the Father.
You fellow sheep
