Bibles once again to Colossians. Last week we began to consider this man, a seemingly obscure man, an unsung prayer hero and warrior named Epaphras. And last week we read in Colossians 1 and Colossians 4. Tonight I just want to bring your attention back to Colossians 4. I'm going to read in your hearing just two verses, verses 12 and 13, and then we'll consider the second half of this message on Epaphras. So Colossians 4. Verses 12-13. The Apostle Paul says, "...Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in the will of God. For I bear him witness that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and Hierapolis." Thus far the reading of God's Word. So I just want to remind you what we know about Epaphras. Epaphras was a missionary, a pastor. He was, at some point we know from the book of Philemon, verse 23, in prison with Paul. So he was a missionary, a pastor in prison with Paul, and he prayed greatly for people. We know that Paul says that he was one of them. which means that he was a Colossian, probably after he came to Colossae, he acclimated to the culture, he acclimated to the people, he acclimated perhaps even to where their favorite restaurants were, all those types of things, but Paul says that he was one of you. And that's the theme that I wanted to touch on last week and this week tonight, that he was just a normal person. Yes, he was a pastor. Pastors are normal people too. He was just one of the Colossians, but it was one of these normal men who Paul commended for his prayerfulness. He commended him in such a way that his testimony has been enshrined in the church through the inscripturated Word of God for now these 2,000 years. We saw two relationships last week which forged his prayer life. And as you remember, circumstances are those things that serve as the anvil upon which our prayer lives are fashioned. Number one, that he was one of them. He had an intimate relationship with them. And number two, that he was a servant of Christ. And then we considered two spiritual needs which kindled and carried his prayer life in verse 12. Number one, that they would be more mature. And number two, that they would be fully assured in all the will of God, which we saw last week refers to universal obedience. That's how the Puritans would talk about it. Universal obedience, meaning obedience in every area of life. There's nothing sectioned off in our life, in our heart, in our mind, and in our soul that is off-limits, so to speak, from Jesus, from Christ. But all areas are given full access to Jesus. And he prayed that these Colossians would not only be mature, but that they would be fully assured of the will of God in every area of their life, and that they would not only know it, but seek to carry it out. Well, tonight I want to consider three characteristics which marked his prayer life, and we're going to see these mainly in verse 13. So three characteristics that marked his prayer life. Look at the first one in verse 13. Epaphras' prayer life was marked by a spirit of zealous catholicity, lowercase c. The power of his prayer life was marked by a spirit of zealous catholicity. In other words, there was a universal breadth to his praying. Look in verse 13. Paul says, I bear him witness that he has worked hard for you. and for those in Laodicea and Hierapolis." This is a man with a big heart for missions. He not only prayed about the Colossians, he was not simply one of those guys who was a member in the church, but also a pastor in the church, leading the prayer meetings, only thinking about the issues in Colossae. He was a man that not only brought to the attention of those in Colossae, but also encouraged others to do the same, the concerns for those in the church of Laodicea. those in the Church of Hierapolis. In other words, he was a lower-case c Catholic Christian. And I remember when I was a young Christian, the first time I heard in a prayer meeting that somebody brought up a prayer request for somebody outside the United States. And I mean, it kind of took me by surprise because I just thought, you know, we pray for people in the United States. But they were concerned for Christians in Zimbabwe. They were concerned for Christians in Russia. They were concerned for Christians in China who, think about it, are our brothers and sisters, though we've never seen them, never met them. But they are really closer to us than many of the pagans that we rub shoulders with at work every week. They are our brothers and sisters. And so we see with Epaphras, he was a man with a big missionary heart. He had a Catholic spirit. And what he was doing was storming God's throne of grace for the work that God was doing at Colossae and Hierapolis and Laodicea. And I think that this is instructive for us because I think no matter where your prayer life is, if you're a pathetic prayer or a prayer warrior or somewhere in between, I think that we're accustomed to just praying for the things in our immediate circle. That's one of the reasons why we put out prayer requests on the listserv every single week because we want you to know there are Christians internationally that we can be and should be praying for. We should have a heart for the universal church. And this is what he did. There's a wonderful story about Robert Murray McShane. Some of you know Robert Murray McShane. He was a minister in Scotland. He's one of my favorite ministers. I've devoured his sermons. I love them. He's a man with a heart of flame for Christ. But he became a missionary in Israel for many, many years. So he left his congregation in Dundee and a man named William Burns took over. And I can't remember how many years Robert Murray McShane was gone. It may have been five, seven years. But all that time that he was gone and William Burns was the interim pastor supply, God sent a revival to Dundee under the leadership of William Burns and the elders there, of course. And when Robert Murray McShane got back and he saw that a number of people who when he left were pagans and when he got back were Christians, and a number of people who when he left were just kind of, you know, had a mediocre heart for Jesus, but when he got back they were the ones on the front line sharing the gospel. Many of those who, when he was there, were not coming to prayer meetings and didn't care about praying for and lifting up the prayer petitions and thanksgivings of the saints at prayer meetings, when he got back, were the ones on the front row giving reports about how people could be praying for them and others. How do you think he felt? Well, this is what he said. He said, I am just as happy with what I see as if I myself had been the human instrument. How is that possible? because he was preeminently concerned with the glory of God and not himself. He was preeminently concerned with the wellness of souls. And that's what we see in Epaphras here. He is praying for Laodicea, for Hierapolis, and for Colossae because he's a man who has a broad Christian heart. And I think that this is one of those things that in our congregation, again, I never want to squash in any way shape or form those physical concerns that we have for our brothers and our sisters and our aunts and our uncles and our neighbors, best friends, roommates, cat, but at the same time, There are spiritual concerns about the church internationally that it would be good for us, it would be good for us to be giving ourselves over to, and not only in prayer meeting, but also throughout the week. So listen again to Paul's testimony about Epaphras in verse 13. For I bear him witness that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and Hierapolis. Zeal, zeal, zeal. The kind of zeal that David speaks of in the Psalms, zeal for your house has consumed me. It's a zeal that takes hold in our lives so that we have a passion for whom we speak of before the throne of grace. So first off, we see this broad, lowercase C, Catholic card, and I keep saying that because uppercase C is the Roman Catholic Church, that's not what I'm talking about, but we don't want to Give the Roman Catholics over that word. That's that's Christianity's word. Okay, so I'm gonna keep that word All right, but we'll just say lowercase C, but it just means universal having a heart for the universal Church But secondly, I want you to notice a second characteristic about his prayer. We see this in verse 12 There was an abundant constancy an abundant constancy. He says in verse 12 listen Always struggling on your behalf in his prayers now I think it's possible that Paul could be given over to hyperbole. Everybody know what hyperbole is? Hyperbole is when you talk about never in the world was something as great as this, was the greatest thing that ever happened in the history of mankind, okay? Since sliced bread or whatever. Sometimes people are given over to hyperbole. Maybe Paul was given over to hyperbole when he says that he was always struggling on his behalf, in his prayers on your behalf. But maybe he wasn't. Maybe one of the reasons he was in scripturating this in the book of Colossians was to put before the people of God an Example that we should be striving after all as well in our praying I've gotten into a custom in my life that when I'm gonna tell somebody I'm gonna pray for them Okay, I used to say I'll be praying for you. I don't say that anymore because you know what I make myself out to be a what I a liar, because I don't actually continue to pray for them. If I pray for them at all, I might pray for them once. So I learned this thing from this very holy man in college. It almost comes off as offensive to people, because they're like, huh? But he would tell people, he'd say, I promise to pray for you once. Because he's being honest. He's not gonna tell you he's gonna be praying for you, you know, without ceasing, when in reality he's probably not. So he wants to be honest. He says, I will pray for you once. But we see Epaphras here is always struggling on your behalf in his prayers. Always struggling on your behalf in his prayers. He was a man laboring fervently for God's people around the globe. And you see, when this is not the case, we become dwarfed Christians. You know, when we don't constantly labor at the throne of grace, when we take vacations from laboring in prayer as if that's a thing at the throne of grace, when we take vacations from laboring prayer at the throne of grace, God God doesn't receive the glory that he should, and the people that need to be prayed for don't receive prayers. God has tied the spiritual health of a true Christian together with a sense of abundant constancy. This is intercessory prayer. Show me a man who does not pray for other Christians, and I will show you a man who in his spiritual life is dwarfed. But show me a man. Show me a man who wrestles at the throne of grace with abundant constancy, and I will show you a man whose heart is beating for God and who is fully alive to God. That is the men and women that we want to be. So number one, he had a broad Catholic heart. Number two, he has an abundant constancy in prayer. But now number three, Epaphras has a prayer life that conveys a spirit of wrestling agony. Same verse, verse 12. Always struggling, he says. The word for struggling is agonizo, and the noun form, the cognate, is agonia. And you can hear the English word in that, can't you? Agony. He's agonizing in prayer. This word is used of those who are engaged in athletic contests. It's used of the one who puts forth strenuous effort, the one who fights, the one who wrestles, who's stretching forth every fiber of their muscle to accomplish the task before them. It's the word that Jesus used in John 18-36 when he said, My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting. Agonizami. It's the word that Jesus uses in Luke 13-24 when he says, Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. You can hear, as I said, the English word agony here, and this is exactly the word that is used of Jesus in Luke 22, 44, when He was in Gethsemane. It says, and being in agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. And you see, it's when we see the secret of our prayer life in the intercessory example of Jesus Christ that we come to understand what it means to agonize in prayer and wrestle with God Almighty. This word doesn't mean I just work a little bit. This word means to agonize. And I don't think Paul here is being hyperbolic. I think Paul is talking about, listen, listen to me. I think Paul is describing the kind of prayer that Jesus was in constantly throughout his ministry. And especially in the Garden of Gethsemane, I mean, that man was stressing in his prayer. He was stressing his petitions before the Lord. He was going before the Lord on behalf of his disciples, on behalf of his church, on behalf of you. And when I think about that, I think, what comes to mind? Here's what comes to mind. The blessed doctrine of union with Jesus Christ. I am in union with Jesus Christ. You are in union with Jesus Christ, and that extends even to our prayer life. And so just as Jesus was agonizing in the Garden of Gethsemane, so we, as His people who are united to Him through faith, should be wrestling with God, wrestling with God that He would do wondrous things in us and through us and in our families and in our congregation and in congregation after congregation and in this nation. I'm gonna say something that you've heard before, but we need to hear it. Let us not complain and bicker and moan about what's going on politically in this country if we're not on our knees asking that God would break through all the malaise of political stalemates and do something miraculous. Let us be people who are on our knees because I know that sometimes it seems like what can I do politically? What can I do to end abortion? And let's be honest. I mean, we're one person. Let's not be grandiose. There's not, I mean, there is in some sense a limit to what we can do, but we have a God who has no limitations, and we have access to Him through prayer, and that's why we here at Grace Covenant Church make so much about prayer, because we have endless possibilities through the sovereignty of our God, and we need but only come before Him in prayer. You see, Epaphras has a prayer life that, in which he is acutely aware that he is in union with Christ, and so we should as well. So let me end tonight with four applications, very brief, four applications for thinking about Epaphras, this normal everyday Joe in his prayer life. Number one, to persevere in true prayer is both our calling, if we're true believers, and the gift of the Holy Spirit at the same time. So it's a calling and it's a gift. I would say it's a duty and it's a privilege, okay? And there's nothing wrong with those two things. They live in the same world. Now, of course, this is just true for believers. If you're not a Christian this morning, this is not for you. And I have a question for you tonight. If you are not converted, maybe there's nobody here, but imagine there is, does it make you jealous that you do not have this gift of persevering in prayer? Have you ever think about that? I wonder if unbelievers are jealous of the gift and privilege and duty that we have as Christians to persevere in prayer. We were talking to our home groups this week, and we were talking about the sermon last week. I think it was in home group. Maybe it was just the guys in home group. But we broached the topic of stress and anxiety, and I know everybody to some degree wrestles with that. But I told them, I said, one of the things I've found in my life as a Christian is that one of the things that helps me most to combat anxiety is actually prayer. It's the thing that the Lord uses in my life as a means of grace more than anything to combat anxiety. Because what I have to do is I have to, among other things, stop feeding myself false prophecies. And I have to recognize what is at the root of those false prophecies, which is a lack of authority. Whenever anxiety is telling me what's going to happen tomorrow, what's going to happen in two seconds, what's going to happen in five minutes, what's not going to happen. And I have to call those things for what they are, false prophecies. And then, you know, you can never leave something in a vacuum. I have to fill it with something else. And what do I fill it with? I fill it with real prophecies. I fill it with real promises. I fill it with real authority that comes from the lips of our Lord in these 66 books of the Word of God. And so I take out and I put in and I do all of that through the process of prayer. And sometimes what I'm doing in prayers is sitting quietly and saying, God, calm my heart, calm my heart. Give me that peace, that calmness that that baby has when it is being weaned by its mother or fed by its mother. And I think this is something that some unconverted people are jealous of. Sometimes there are single people who will tell you that they notice a married couple and they can see and feel the closeness and the love that they have and they say, I'm jealous of that. I wish I had that. You could see how they care for one another. You could see the intimate communication. And I would say that that's the way that every unconverted person should feel about Christians. There is an intimate communication with God. You sense it as a Christian speaks what he does with his time. You could tell he has a secret life with God, and that is possible only by the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit takes the believer and puts him firmly in union with Jesus Christ, and it's out of that union, the soil of that union, that prayerfulness takes root. So do we need workers in the church? Yeah, we need workers. We need nursery workers. We need people to set up and tear down for fellowship meal. We need all those things. But you know what we need more than that? We need prayer warriors. We need prayer warriors. Spurgeon once said, one true wrestling child of God in the congregation is worth a hundred workers. Will you not ask the Lord this evening to make you more like this common everyday Joe named Epaphras? that the Lord would grant us a richer measure of the Holy Spirit, and may I be a greater blessing to this church and to this family. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, and He can give it to you. But you say, I'm too busy. You know who else was busy? Daniel was busy. Daniel was busy. He was like, in the cabinet of the king of Babylon. He was a very busy man, always being called upon to give counsel and advice, always being called upon to do this, that, and the other thing, and yet he made it a priority to pray three times a day. Luther, Martin Luther, he was a busy man. He was at the forefront of the Reformation. Nobody had more to do in any given day than Luther, and he once told a friend, I'm very busy today, so I'm gonna pray an extra hour. How many of you have done that? I'm busy today so I'm going to pray an extra hour. We just don't do that. But I think he got it right. I think he got it right. Because I'm going to be more busy today, because I might even have more temptation today, I need to pray an extra hour. Don't pay so much attention to the hour as much as I need to pray extra. I need to be more on my knees, more on my face, more groveling before the Lord so that I can behold His glory from this position of lowliness and see Christ in all His splendor, so that all those temptations and all that stress and all that anxiety can fall to the wayside as I'm reminded that the Lord is sovereign and on His throne. Well, what about us? For many of us, prayer becomes an appendix to the day, at best after work, but for Luther, prayer was his work. And if we're truly going to prosper as a congregation or individually as Christians, we need to understand that persevering prayer is a gift. It's a gift. Let me say that again. It's a gift of the Holy Spirit. We should ask the Lord to expand in our lives. Second application. If you are a true wrestler, you will receive a great deal of opposition. If you are a true wrestler in prayer, like this normal everyday Joe named Epaphras, you will receive a great deal of opposition. From God? No, not from God. From man? Probably. From Satan? Probably, or his hordes. Horatius Bonar said, Satan's orders to his demons are fight not with small or great, but only fight with the praying people. History demonstrates that opposition to the church is strongest during times of revival than in times without revival. What does that make you want to do? Does that make you wanna not pray? I mean, think about that for a second. If Satan and his hordes aren't going to attack when we don't pray, maybe we shouldn't pray. Well, when you don't pray, things don't happen, right? But when you are praying, you're praying for conversions, you're praying for growth, you're praying for risk, you're praying for zeal, you're praying for evangelistic opportunities, it's the Lord who opens those things up, who expands, who deepens, who broadens. There's a sense in which we want opposition, not for opposition's sake, but if there's opposition, that means we're doing something right, right? If there's opposition, that means that Satan and his whores can't stand that the kingdom is growing and expanding because the Lord is using us as his instruments. When the church is doing what it should be, the world perks up and takes notice and is infuriated. So if you ask God to make you a Paphras, you may meet opposition. Third, third application, prayer is a lifetime calling, no matter what circumstances we are in. Epaphras prayed in times of affliction and in times of prosperity. He would never say that his prison was a tiresome place. He always had work to do, even in prison, with Paul. They probably prayed, and so do we. No matter what circumstances we're in, we need to give ourselves to prayer. And finally tonight, our greatest need in the church is for wrestlers, petitioners, and those who won't leave the Lord alone. You know, we don't know much about Epaphras. There's two traditions concerning what happened with him. One of them is that he got out of prison and he went back to being a pastor at Colossae and he stayed there until he died. The other one, the other tradition is that he returned to Colossae and he was captured and he died a martyr's death in Rome. But perhaps it's good that we don't know. But this we do know, this was a man who wrestled in prayer to the very end. May the Lord be pleased to make us wrestlers with God in prayer. May the Lord be pleased to keep us as wrestlers in God with prayer. Then we would know, in the words of the poet, Pray much for that gift, like a poet. Of all thine gifts we ask but one. Give us the constant power to pray. Indulge us, Lord, in this request. Thou canst not then deny the rest. Lord, teach us how to pray. May the Lord do that for us. And can I just say one last thing before we end? I know that for some of us, this is a lot of law, okay? Because you're thinking, I just don't pray, Josh. I just don't pray like I want to. I want to pray, but I don't pray. Let me say two things. Number one, if you want to pray, That's half the battle, right? Because the one who doesn't pray and doesn't care that he's not praying, that's a problem. But the one who doesn't pray, but he desires to pray because he does desire to manifest and showcase his union with Jesus Christ, as Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, he wants to be praying as his Lord was praying, that is a beautiful thing. That is the work of the Spirit in your life. But secondly, let me say this. One of the reasons we make so much of the means of grace, and prayer being one of them, and that being primarily corporate, is that maybe you don't pray a lot individually, and yes, you should and all those things, but you know what, if you can get yourself here on Sunday night like you've done tonight, then it's like you're trapped, if I could put it this way, okay, you're here for an hour, and you're gonna hear prayer, you're gonna hear how to be a better prayer, you're even gonna contribute to praying, and I guarantee you'll be happy you did. Just get here. Just get here. It's the same thing I tell people who don't read their Bible normally. Just get here on Sunday and you'll hear the Bible. Just get here and you'll hear the preaching of the word. You'll hear the voice of the son of God thundering through the ministry of the word. So get here for the ministry of the word. Get here for prayer. Get here for the sacraments. Be here for the corporate consumption of these means of grace and the Lord will grow you through them. He's grown me, he's growing me, he's grown many of you, and this is a corporate exercise. So come to this time of corporate exercise and prayer, enter the school of prayer, and realize, once again, your union with Jesus Christ. All right.