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Book of Colossians 1:9-14 The Prayer that Follows the Thanksgiving

[Study Aired August 4, 2026]

“For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness; giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:9–14).

The Prayer Joined to the Thanks

The passage opens with a hinge: “for this cause.” It looks back before it moves forward. What was the cause? The faith, love, and hope Paul had just given thanks for in verses 3–8; the fruit already borne. Because the seed had taken root, Paul now prays; the prayer rises out of the thanksgiving, not apart from it. This matters for reading the whole. Paul is not praying that dead men might come alive. He is praying that living men might grow. The people already have the life; the prayer is for its increase.

Notice the echo between the two passages. In verse 6 the gospel bore fruit “since the day ye heard of it.” In verse 9 Paul prays “since the day we heard it.”  From the day the word landed and was known, two things began at once — fruit in Colosse, and prayer in Paul’s prison. The fruit did not end the praying; it deepened it. Paul saw the seed take root and prayed the harder for its growth.

Filled With the Knowledge of His Will

The petition itself is single, though it branches: “that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.” One request — to be filled — and everything after it described that fullness. The word for “knowledge” here is epignosis (G1922), and it deserves care, because it is easy to over claim.

Epignosis is gnosis (plain knowledge) with the prefix epi fastened on. The best-attested force of that prefix here is intensive: a fuller, more thorough, more settled knowing than bare gnosis, and the standard lexical authorities read it that way. Some writers press it further and make epignosis mean specifically “knowledge gained by experience,” but that sense is not secured by the word itself and should not be leaned on. The safe and sufficient point stands without it: Paul prays not that the Colossians would acquire some knowledge, as though they had none, but that a knowledge they already possess would be filled up to the brim. This is aimed straight at the error waiting in chapter two — teachers who prized a secret, higher gnosis. Paul asks God to give the real thing, in full, so the counterfeit has nothing to offer.

The content of that knowledge is bounded: it is the knowledge “of his will.” It is not knowledge as an end in itself, not speculation about the unseen orders Paul will name in verse 16, but knowledge of what God wills — which, in this letter, means Christ and the walk that answers to Him. The two words that follow, “wisdom and spiritual understanding,” keep it from drifting into the abstract. Wisdom is knowledge applied; understanding is knowledge that discerns.“Spiritual” knowledge governs both — this is understanding produced by the spirit, not native cleverness, of a piece with the love “in the Spirit” that closed the first passage.

The Purpose: That Ye Might Walk

Here is the pivot that keeps this prayer from becoming a request for mere information. Paul does not stop at being filled with knowledge. The knowledge has an aim: “that ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.” Knowledge is for walking. The whole structure of the sentence bends toward conduct.

This is the answer to a real danger — the notion that the Christian life is chiefly a matter of knowing the right things. Paul will have none of it. The knowledge he prays for lands in the feet. “Walk” is Scripture’s ordinary figure for the whole course of a life, step after ordinary step, and “worthy of the Lord” sets the measure: not worthy in the sense of earning — verse 12 will demolish that — but worthy in the sense of fitting, a life that matches the Lord to whom it belongs, the way a weight set in a balance answers the weight on the other side.

What that walk looks like Paul spells out in four branches, and they are worth seeing as a single growing thing rather than a checklist. First, “being fruitful in every good work”— the same fruit-language as verse 6, now turned outward into deeds; and Paul elsewhere joins these very two, the walk and the works, as God’s own preparation: we are “created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Second, “increasing in the knowledge of God” — and the two feed each other: knowledge produces the walk, and the walk deepens the knowledge. One does not wait for the other to finish. You do not learn all of God and then obey; you obey, and in obeying you come to know Him further. The Lord states the loop as a rule: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine” (John 7:17) — the doing opens the knowing. Third, “strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power” — the strength is measured not by the believer’s reserves but by God’s; it is the strength perfected where the believer’s own runs out, “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Fourth, the strength is spent on a surprising object.

Strength Measured Out for Patience

One might expect “strengthened with all might” to end in something visibly mighty — great works, bold deliverances, mountains moved. Paul ends it elsewhere: “unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness.” The whole of God’s glorious power, and its issue is the capacity to endure. That is a rebuke to a certain appetite in religion — the craving for the spectacular — and it is deliberate. The hardest thing the divine strength does in a believer is hold him steady, and cheerful, under what does not move.

The two words are not idle repetition. Patience is the endurance that outlasts circumstances — the pressure that does not lift. Longsuffering is the endurance that outlasts people — the provocation that keeps coming. Over both stands “with joyfulness,” which is the true weight-test of the strength. Grim endurance any hard man can manage for a while. Endurance with joy is not native to us; it is power “according to his glorious power,” and nothing less accounts for it.

The Turn to Thanks: Made Meet

At verse 12 the prayer turns to thanksgiving — “giving thanks unto the Father” — and the ground of the thanks is a single, decisive verb: the Father “hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.” Everything the study has been circling gathers here.

“Made meet” translates hikanoo (G2427), from hikanos, sufficient or adequate. It means to make fit, to render competent, to qualify. Paul does not say the Father is making us fit, gradually, as we improve. He says the Father made us fit, at the moment of grace. The fitness for the inheritance is not the finish line of the Christian walk; it is the starting gun.

Weigh this against verses 9–11. Paul has just prayed for knowledge, worthy walking, fruit, strength, patience — all of it real, all of it commanded. A careless reader might conclude the walk is how one becomes fit for the inheritance. Verse 12 forecloses that reading in one stroke. Before a single step of the worthy walk is taken, the believer has already been “made meet.” The walk does not qualify us; it flows from those already qualified. Paul says it outright later in the same letter: “ye are complete in him” (Colossians 2:10) — not becoming complete, but complete already, in Him. This is the same order the first study found in verses 3–5, where faith and love grew because of a hope already laid up. 

One difficulty remains, the kind the first study named at verse 6. “Made meet” is spoken of people who are plainly not yet perfect — the very people Paul is praying would grow in knowledge and endurance. So the fitness is not a fitness of attainment; they have not attained. It is a fitness of standing — the same “in Christ” standing the first study leaned its whole weight on. We are fit for the inheritance, not because our character is finished but because we have been placed in the One who is the inheritance. Take away that standing, and the word “meet” is a lie about people who are visibly unfinished. Keep it, and it is the plainest truth in the passage.

Three Verbs of Rescue

The thanksgiving does not stop at hikanoo. It unfolds the gift in three acts, and they belong together: the Father “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.” Delivered, translated, redeemed. Read them as one motion.

Delivered — rescued, drawn out — “from the power of darkness.” Not merely from darkness as a place but from its power, its authority, its dominion. The believer was not a tourist in that realm but a subject under its jurisdiction, and the first act of grace is a rescue out from under a governing power. This is not self-improvement in the old country; it is extraction.

Translated — the same verb the first study met in verse 13, here in its own place — “into the kingdom of his dear Son.” The word carries the sense of a whole population moved from one realm to another, the way a conqueror would transplant a people across a border. Rescue from is only half; there is a rescue into. The believer is not left standing in no-man’s-land between two kingdoms but is set down inside another one, under a new King. Note who does the moving in every verb: the Father. The subject never changes. We are delivered, we are translated, we are made meet — always the object, never the agent.

Redeemed — “in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.” Here the passage names the price of the whole transaction it has been describing. The rescue was not a costless decree. Redemption is a purchase-word; it assumes a bondage that had to be bought out of, and the coin is named exactly: “through his blood.” Lest anyone spiritualize redemption into a vague uplift, Paul defines it with a plain apposition — “even the forgiveness of sins.” That is what the blood bought. Not primarily an escape from circumstance or a promotion in knowledge, but the cancelling of guilt. The whole soaring paragraph — knowledge, walk, strength, inheritance, kingdom — finally rests its foot on this: sins forgiven, at the price of blood.

What These Verses Establish

Read whole, the passage moves in a single arc with the cross at its foot. Paul prays that a people already alive would be filled — with a knowledge of God’s will that is not speculation but the ground of a walk. That walk is worthy in the sense of fitting, and it grows in a loop: knowledge feeding conduct, conduct deepening knowledge, the whole of it carried by a strength measured out not for spectacle but for joyful endurance. Then the prayer turns to thanks, and the thanks names the reason any of it is possible: the Father made us fit — a finished act, done to us, not by us — delivering us out of one kingdom, translating us into another, redeeming us by blood unto the forgiveness of sins.

The shape matches the first study exactly, and deliberately. There, faith and love grew because of a hope already secured. Here, the worthy walk grows out of a fitness already granted. Both refuse the religious instinct that would make the walk the cause of the standing. In Colossians the standing is always first and the walk always second, and the whole argument of the letter turns on keeping that order. The teachers of chapter two will reverse it — do this, keep that, know the secret, and then you will be complete. Paul has already answered them before they speak: you are complete, made meet, delivered, translated, redeemed; now walk as those who are. It is God’s settled way to speak of the finished thing before it is seen. Already He has “raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6) — the seat plainly future in experience, yet named in the past tense as a thing accomplished; and “whom he justified, them he also glorified” (Romans 8:30) — the glory still ahead, yet already spoken as done.

A Thread Held for Later

The first study left a question hanging on purpose: is our hope kept above us in heaven (1:5), or does it dwell within us as “Christ in you” (1:27)? This passage does not resolve it, but it tightens the knot in a useful way. Verse 12 speaks of an inheritance “of the saints in light” — plainly future, plainly ahead, a portion not yet entered. Yet verse 13 says we have already been translated into the kingdom — present, accomplished, done. So the same tension the first study noticed in the hope runs straight through the kingdom: an inheritance still awaited, and a kingdom already entered. Paul is unbothered by holding both. We will let it stand until 1:27 forces the matter, and we take it up then.

Next study: (Colossians 1:15–20) Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.