Are you Qualified?

11 May you be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. – Colossians 1:11-12

Sometimes we need prayed for. We often need prayed for more often then we think we do.  If you are not used to it, being prayed for can feel awkward, uncomfortable, even wrong, rather than it being the breath of fresh air that is should be. That is often because we have a hard time realizing or admitting our need for God to be at work in us.  Here Paul prays for the believers living in the crossroads town of Colossae.   He asks God to grant them certain things that they (and we like them) need.  He has just previously asked that God would grant them knowledge of his will, spiritual wisdom, understanding, and the ability to walk in a manner worthy of Jesus Christ (vs 9-10).  His hope is that they bear fruit and grow.

Paul was asking God to grant those things regardless, because honestly, we need them.  Paul continues to pray for them (and in a way, us) asking that God grant the following things.  Strength:  We often hear the exasperated cry “Give me strength” when someone is trying to deal with a particularly difficult situation or person. We are shown here that it is God who is the one whom we should rely. We must be people who are empowered, strengthened not by my own strength but by God’s strength at work in us. Notice the verse again “May you be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might.” Nothing else in the world has the kind of power that God in all his glory has. God never runs out of strength.  The same glory and power that would have killed Moses had he looked directly upon it and the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that strengthens and empowers the believer in Jesus Christ. 

Next Paul asks for God to grant Endurance and Patience:  Endurance is bearing up under difficult circumstances and patience is bearing with difficult people.  To be patient or endure once is something anyone can do.  To do it over the long haul of a lifetime against the spiritual forces of this current age takes the strength of God empowering you.  How are you going to make it faithfully to the end?  Only by God granting and working in you, perseverance, endurance and his patience.  Think for a second of how patient God has been to you, especially in light of your sin. Strengthened, enduring, patient all With Joy: because even amidst the difficulty of enduring we have something within us that cannot be shaken or taken away. Jesus Christ himself and all that he has purchased for us through his death and resurrection.  That produces joy unshakable.

The result? Giving Thanks: Sometimes it is hard to be thankful.  “Tell your grandma thank you for the, um beautiful, sweater.  Thank the policeman for keeping the world safe by pulling you over.”  But if you think about what you have been given in Christ, thanksgiving ought to be the most natural thing that flows out of you. We are not by nature thankful people, until our nature and lives are transformed by Jesus Christ. Thankfulness then shifts from an obligation to what follows naturally from a heart that understands what it has been given in Christ. Giving thanks To the Father. The one who trusts Jesus Christ has someone to be thankful to.  Not some impersonal force, not a clock-maker who has left this work to spin off on its own, nor saying, “that was lucky.” We are thankful to a Father who loves his adopted children and grants them even more.

A father who Qualifies them for an Inheritance as his adopted children through our belief in Christ. We are not qualified on our own, we are disobedient sons and daughters spitting in our Father’s face. We take our inheritance to the far country and waste it on all that we wanted instead of wanting him. Or, ironically, we spit in our Father’s face by refusing to celebrate the salvation of our younger brother by grace and insisting on our religious rule keeping. Either way, our prodigal-ness is the glaring judgment against us. We are not qualified for the position of God’s sons and daughters.  But God, by his sheer grace and mercy, forgives us through his Son Jesus Christ and then qualifies us. He gives us the record of the only perfect son for free if we believe. Jesus is the only one who deserves the inheritance, yet he dies for our sins and gives it to us to be sons and daughters of God and share in the inheritance.  We who believe are now qualified.