Colaians chapter 4 verses 2 through 6

continue steadfastly in prayer being watchful in it with thanks. And pray also for us that God may open to us a door for

the word to declare the mystery of Christ on account of which I am in prison, that I may make it clear as I ought to speak.

Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time.

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you

may know how you ought to answer everyone.

My hope is that before we're done this morning you will feel a refreshing wind blowing through this text because as I read it

Paul has a really positive and happy angle on personal evangelism in these several verses.

If you were listening carefully now to the text, it falls falls doesn't it into two halves.

The first three verses, verses two through four, two, three and four, are what you might call our involvement indirectly in somebody else's

evangelism through prayer.

And the second half of the text, verses five and six, would be perhaps summed up as our direct involvement ourselves as we rub shoulders with

unbelievers. So I want to break it down into those two halves and deal with the

two halves one at a time.

Let's look at verses 2 through 4, first of all.

Now if you've been around Bethlehem a little while you might have picked up that one of my favorite analogies of prayer is a wartime walkie-talkie and I like to contrast the wartime walkie-talkie of prayer

with the domestic intercom.

And what I like to say is, one of the reasons that prayer malfunctions is because people take a wartime walkie-talkie and try to turn it into a domestic intercom in which they ring up the

butler to please bring another pillow to the den. Prayer was designed for the battlefield as a wartime walkie-talkie not to increase the pad of the Saints through a domestic intercom.

Now keep that image in your mind as I read these verses again and then I want to paint a picture for you of the situation

that looks to me like Paul is in.

Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with Thanksgiving, pray for us also that

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