Rescued and Brought Over

Paul has just finished thanking God for these people. Now he tells them what he actually prays, and it is not what most of us would ask for a church we were worried about.

we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may walk in a manner worthy of the Lord and may please Him in every way

He asks that they know what God wants. Not that their circumstances improve, and not that they be spared anything. He asks that they understand, and then he says what understanding is for. It is so they can live in a way that matches who they now belong to.

Four things come out of that, and they are worth going slowly over, because they are the sort of list a family can measure itself against. Bearing fruit in every good work. Growing in the knowledge of God. Being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might. And then the fourth one lands somewhere nobody expects.

All that power, and what it produces is endurance and patience. Not a breakthrough, and not the strength to change the situation. The strength to stay in it, with joy, and to keep giving thanks. That is a strange thing to ask glorious might for, and Paul asks for it without apology.

Then he explains what there is to give thanks about, and the sentence moves.

He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Two verbs, and both of them are God's. Rescued out of one place and brought into another. It is the language of a population being moved, not of individuals improving. Nobody in that sentence walks themselves across.

And the destination is named as a person rather than a policy. Not brought into better circumstances or a higher standard, but into the kingdom of his beloved Son, Jesus Christ, where the thing we have is redemption and the forgiveness of sins. Paul has been writing about knowledge and wisdom and understanding, and when he says what it all rests on, it turns out to rest on a rescue that already happened.

There is one word in verse 12 that the rest of the prayer hangs on, and it is easy to read straight past on the way to the rescue in the verse after. The word is qualified, and the prayer does not ask that they be made fit to share in the inheritance. It has them giving thanks that they already have been.