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“For this reason we also, from the day we heard of it, have not ceased to pray and make [special] request for you, [asking] that you may be filled with the full (deep and clear) knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom [in comprehensive insight into the ways and purposes of God] and in understanding and discernment of spiritual things–“ (v9) The apostle Paul was not only a great preacher; he was also a great prayer. Many times when writing his letters he paused to break out in extempore prayer. Extempore is spoken or done without preparation, it is always a spontaneous action. And his prayers were not rambling petitions but always bore down on particular matters. One of the things I have noticed about those who seem to have a ministry in prayer is that they lose no time in getting to specifics. Though they are careful to worship and adore God, they don’t indulge themselves in flowery phrases such as ‘O thou who gidest the heavens and settest the stars in space’. Instead they quickly get down to details and specifics. Watch how Paul does this in the verses we have read. After telling the Colossians Christians that he had prayed ceaselessly for them since the day he had heard about them, he makes the first of his petitions by asking God to fill them ‘with the knowledge of his Will and Purposes through all spiritual wisdom and understanding’. Notice the word ‘fill’. It suggests that however much the Colossian Christians had received from the Lord, there was still room for more and they should keep asking. The same applies to us too! You see, no one can ever rest and say, ‘I am now completely Christian.’ For the Holy Spirit always has more to teach us about the will of God. Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, said, ‘The eternal cry is –more.’ Whatever the Colossians and even us knew of God, there was and is still much more to discover, know and learn from God such that all our days in God becomes a school just as father Abraham said. Also significant is the phrase ‘bearing fruit in every good work’, Paul prayed that the life of God might flow through the Colossian Christians and produce substantial spiritual fruit; not fruitless suckers but fruit that the Master can enjoy –on the lowest branches the low –hanging fruit of humility and on the highest branches of the knowledge of God. These are the aims of our learning from the Colossian experience so that those of us of this generation on earth should work on our spiritual growth so that we too will be filled!

How encouraging for the Colossians to know they were remembered in Paul’s prayers. He had heard good things about them from Epaphras as seen in verse 7, “7 You so learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ in our stead and as our representative and [f]yours”, and so, whenever he prayed for them, he gave thanks to God for their faith in Christ and their love for all their fellow believers. Know that according to this verse, Epaphras is described as a faithful missionary who brought the gospel to Philemon and others in his city and he brought the news about the Church in Colossae to Paul and you can see that Colossians 4:12 suggests that Epaphras was from Colosae, he was known for his faithful prayers for his fellow Colossians believers, as Paul described him as ‘a servant of Christ Jesus’. These words link two important qualities: faith and love. The New Testament often joins these together words of faith and love; they could be ‘Scripture’s Conjoined Twins’. If you are to have an enduring selfless love for others you must first of all have faith in God because people will nearly want to throw you off balance in your God-man relationship if not for your strong faith in God knowing that it is God you look up to not man. Psychology teaches that love for other people is an integral part of good emotional health, but it has nothing to say on the need for a relationship with God. Without a relationship with God, however, love for others soon runs out of energy and all that initial emotions for the relationship all fades away and hate takes the place of love, which is why faith in God is always the glue that holds love for others firm so that when the realities of the human flaws, weak traits of character and attitude including weak behavioral patterns begins to surface, faith in God will make you to still endure! Some time ago I read about an African government agency which invested a large sum of money in a building programme designed to improve the lifestyle of a certain tribe living in grass huts on a hillside. To replace these flimsy dwellings the government built brick houses at the foot of the hill. The tribes people, however, felt uncomfortable in their new houses and, after they had lived in them for just a few days, they decided to move back into their old huts. An exasperated official said to missionaries who lived among them, ‘These ungrateful people need a lot of loving faith. I’m afraid the best we can do is to lift them; we leave it to you to love them.’ Exasperated is intensely irritated and frustrated impulses. Love that is not linked to God in faith quickly runs out of impetus and endurance, which many people are not aware of in going into relationship and that is why you see certain relationship don’t last because the love is not Conjoined with faith, as in faith and love that should always go together in other for it to last and pass the test of time. Governments can raise people’s standard of living but they can’t love them. Only when we have faith in God can we go on loving the unresponsive. No faith in God, no love like God’s. So people should be trained and taught how to love like God, Lord Jesus Christ with His Agape type of love otherwise all what humans call love is only a misuse of the word in reality! We need to be made whole with body, spirit and soul working perfecting together and hooked up with the Holy Spirit of God to be in harmony.

How encouraging for the Colossians to know they were remembered in Paul’s prayers. He had heard good things about them from Epaphras as seen in verse 7, “7 You so learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ in our stead and as our representative and [f]yours”, and so, whenever he prayed for them, he gave thanks to God for their faith in Christ and their love for all their fellow believers. Know that according to this verse, Epaphras is described as a faithful missionary who brought the gospel to Philemon and others in his city and he brought the news about the Church in Colossae to Paul and you can see that Colossians 4:12 suggests that Epaphras was from Colosae, he was known for his faithful prayers for his fellow Colossians believers, as Paul described him as ‘a servant of Christ Jesus’. These words link two important qualities: faith and love. The New Testament often joins these together words of faith and love; they could be ‘Scripture’s Conjoined Twins’. If you are to have an enduring selfless love for others you must first of all have faith in God because people will nearly want to throw you off balance in your God-man relationship if not for your strong faith in God knowing that it is God you look up to not man. Psychology teaches that love for other people is an integral part of good emotional health, but it has nothing to say on the need for a relationship with God. Without a relationship with God, however, love for others soon runs out of energy and all that initial emotions for the relationship all fades away and hate takes the place of love, which is why faith in God is always the glue that holds love for others firm so that when the realities of the human flaws, weak traits of character and attitude including weak behavioral patterns begins to surface, faith in God will make you to still endure! Some time ago I read about an African government agency which invested a large sum of money in a building programme designed to improve the lifestyle of a certain tribe living in grass huts on a hillside. To replace these flimsy dwellings the government built brick houses at the foot of the hill. The tribes people, however, felt uncomfortable in their new houses and, after they had lived in them for just a few days, they decided to move back into their old huts. An exasperated official said to missionaries who lived among them, ‘These ungrateful people need a lot of loving faith. I’m afraid the best we can do is to lift them; we leave it to you to love them.’ Exasperated is intensely irritated and frustrated impulses. Love that is not linked to God in faith quickly runs out of impetus and endurance, which many people are not aware of in going into relationship and that is why you see certain relationship don’t last because the love is not Conjoined with faith, as in faith and love that should always go together in other for it to last and pass the test of time. Governments can raise people’s standard of living but they can’t love them. Only when we have faith in God can we go on loving the unresponsive. No faith in God, no love like God’s. So people should be trained and taught how to love like God, Lord Jesus Christ with His Agape type of love otherwise all what humans call love is only a misuse of the word in reality! We need to be made whole with body, spirit and soul working perfecting together and hooked up with the Holy Spirit of God to be in harmony.

We come now to our final day together in meditating on the magnificent phrases of what someone has described as ‘the sweetest religious song ever written –the Twenty-third Psalm’. It began with a positive note of assurance: ‘The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want’, and it ends in the same exciting and exhilarating way: ‘I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.’ This Psalm, as we have seen, pictures sheep so fully satisfied, so utterly content and so much ‘at home’ with their shepherd that there is not the slightest desire for change. Conversely, of course, on the shepherd’s side, such a relationship has developed that he would never think of parting with one of his sheep. So strong are the bonds between the shepherd and his sheep that nothing can separate them –ever. As I conclude these meditations, there comes to mind a memory from the days when I first entered the ministry in the scenic farming country of Carmarthenshire in West Wales said a narrator. Many of the farmers in the area were deeply caring of their sheep, but there was one who was notorious for his neglect. When one looked at his thin and scraggy sheep, bunched together in the corner of the field, one could almost see in the eyes of these abused and neglected creatures a longing to find themselves under the care of a good and gracious shepherd. My dear friend –aren’t you glad you don’t belong to a shepherd like the one who was notorious for his neglect in the scenic farming country of Carmarthenshire in West Wales? You belong to the Good Shepherd –the one true God Lord Jesus Christ. Rest in that fact! His care for you is not just for now; it will last into eternity also. You will dwell forever … for ever …in the constant Care and Loving Presence of the Lord. This is the Assurance He promised us!

It is often the misunderstanding idea which people attributes to the rightful understanding of the Scripture and the Gospel as set out by God Himself that is the greatest problem of mankind today and even before, and if this situation is allowed to be without an effective effort to correct it, our true understanding of exactly what God wants us to know with regard to God’s Aims, Plans and Purpose for the New--Man and the New--Earth is surely going to be with us in this generation just as it was with the generation of our Lord’s first advent and the current old earth thus just like in the first advent when true God—Man relationship was first introduced to man nobody is actually going to know real things the way that our Lord God Almighty wants us to know the things that belongs to our peace; just in similar way that prompted our Lord Jesus to tell the people of that time, ‘if you know what belong to your peace…’! For example do you know that much of what the combined Scripture and the Gospel teaches us in preparation for the Second Advent is all about Confident and Hopeful Expectant Courage that prepares or make us live a life fit to be ushered into the bliss of Heaven, that place that our Lord Jesus Christ said that He is going to prepare for us so that where He is there we too will be! So in essence what the Scripture and the Gospel do is to stir up in us the right heaven’s nostalgia because people are always afraid when they start getting close to the point of transition (via death process) that ushers us into this bliss. Nostalgia is a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition. Christians –that is, true followers of Lord Jesus Christ–not only have an assurance that when they die they will go to heaven, but they also have a divine nostalgia, which is a true yearning for a return to heaven. The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from two Greek words: ‘nostos’, meaning ‘return home’; and ‘algos’, meaning ‘pain’. Combing the two Greek words meant, originally, an incurable homesickness –incurable by anything, except, of course, by home, by an actual return home! The whole idea is liken to a situation whereby a Creator created a blissful home for His creatures and after which He realized that His creatures does not know the Actual Precious Worth/Value of the Blissful Home He created for them as expressed in their Bad/Wrong Usage of the Blissful Home; so He decides to temporally remove them from the bliss by transferring them to a temporally designed painful home so that they will Realize the Worth/Value of their blissful home and develop a true and sincere longing--Nostalgia with an in-built readiness to value and correctly handle their Blissful Home once their Creator returns them back there Being Fit. An old legend of the Western Isles tells of a mythical sea king – a Neptune-type figure –who desired the company of human being. One day he heard, from his cavern/chamber under the sea, a baby’s cry –and he rose to the surface, to discover a tiny infant in an abandoned boat. Just as he was about to make for the vessel, a rescue party intervened –and he lost his prize. But, so the legend goes, as the boat was towed away, the sea king threw into the heart of the child a little salt wave, saying as he submerged: ‘The child is mine. When he grows, the salt sea will call him and he will come home.’ Before we continue with our inspirational learning, let us first of all know the story teller used the word: used the word ‘call him’, which is a spiritual call; a Neptune-type figure –who desired the company of a human being. Remember that Neptune is one of the planets, it is said to be very massive and spiritually inspirational in essence and it brings beauty to a higher, more spiritual level than other planets especially the earth. So this Neptune--type figure or being, is likely Giant looking, Beautiful, Highly Spiritual Being and probably Highly Intelligent with some kinds of powers since it can ‘say’ and it be. So with all of this knowledge about the essence/beauty of other planets, is it still surprising that our good Lord and Savior Jesus Christ longs to give us a New Earth and a New Heaven to be inhabited with a New Body. Our Lord God Almighty longs to give us the Best! Have in mind that this story is only a legend (a traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated), of course, but the story underlines the timeless truth that when God (Holy Spirit) comes into our lives (our heart/mind) like the little salt wave that the sea king threw into the heart of the child, we have not only the assurance that we belong to Him God, but a deep, insatiable longing for Home where He God is. One Church leader claims there are two things you notice about a Christian who is head over heels in love with Lord Jesus: you notice first how natural and ‘at home’ he/she is, and the next thing you say to yourself is, ‘This man/woman is an exile; he/she doesn’t belong here at all.’ Have you ever felt this way in life, that is feel the people you find yourself in their midst does not have the same characteristics/attributes/values as you do, does not behave the way you do, are not truthful and godly to a large extent, are not Christly neither do they have love for Christly things, does not have the same divine longing as you do, does not think and does not have the same thinking and reasoning pattern as you do, their spiritual content is very different from yours, theirs are so tied to this world than have any thought/likening or love for the heavenly. Have you ever observed all/some of these truths in some of the people around you assuming you are very watchful and observant! You can observe this in the life of Apostle Paul: how busy and concerned he was for our Lord Jesus’ affairs on earth (love for Christ and Christly things), and yet he sighs, as in our text today, and longs to be ‘at home with the Lord.’ Whether consciously or not this is the truth about all true sons and daughters of our true God! But just like the issue of the Israelites and Canaan, our God kept us here on this current old earth like He kept the Israelites in the wilderness so as to Sieve out the True Wheat from the Tares, and know that this exercise is spiritual because what went wrong during Creation is spiritual whereby the wrong spirit was mixed with the right spirit and the mixer (Lucifer via serpent/Eve) intends to immortalize this evil mixture of good and bad in one contrary to God’s Will of good and bad remaining separate for easy divine separation at the due time; in order for it not to spell Dome for the Entire Universe if allowed but God has been at Work Separating (the mixture) and Restoring Back His entire Good Divine Creation to as they were in the beginning meeting up His aimed divine performance and accountability in us as explained in all the first underlines of our reading passage below: For we know that if the tent which is our earthly home is destroyed (dissolved), we have from God a building, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 Here indeed, in this [present abode, body], we sigh and groan inwardly, because we yearn to be clothed over [we yearn to put on our celestial body like a garment, to be fitted out] with our heavenly dwelling, 3 So that by putting it on we may not be found naked (without a body). 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan under the burden and sigh deeply (weighed down, depressed, oppressed)—not that we want to put off the body (the clothing of the spirit), but rather that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal (our dying body) may be swallowed up by life [[a]after the resurrection]. 5 Now He Who has fashioned us [preparing and making us fit] for this very thing is God, Who also has given us the [Holy] Spirit as a guarantee [of the fulfillment of His promise]. 6 So then, we are always full of good and hopeful and confident courage; (2 Corinthians 5:1-5) Can you now fully understand all what we have been talking about that has to do with our good divine expectation and hopeful and confident courage being in Christ knowing that our present old earth life is likened to the wilderness life of the Israelites where we are under preparation to be made fit to enter heaven that is like the combine Canaan part of earth given to God’s people: remember that we have Canaan of the first advent that serves and is still serving as figure and we are expecting the emergent of the Canaan of the second advent that is really flowing with Milk and Honey that will serve the reality of the figure any time from now! Both Canaan will serve for God a place where humans will be truly prepared for heaven’s journey in Christ, using it to teach the whole world how humans are to live their life in order to be fit for heaven’s requirement before the End, only God knows when but it will be when God feels He has given mankind enough time with enough divine education to be made fit! Always guard the purity of your spirit so that it will always help you to be in union with the Holy Spirit of God because this is the only thing that helps us in this divine preparation for heavenly fitness!