Sunday, January 15, 2012

Strengthened with all power

For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, for all patience and longsuffering with joy; giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light (Col 1:9-12)

"Commenting on the words 'according to' (kata), Expositors says; 'The equipment with power is proportioned not simply to the recipient's need, but to the divine supply.'  This being strengthened by God results in 'all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness.'  'Patience' is hypomone, 'longsuffering,' makrothumia.  Trench's note on these words is valuable: 'Makrothumia will be found to express patience in respect of persons, hypomone, in respect of things.  The man makrothumei, who having to do with injurious persons, does not suffer himself easily to be provoked by them, or to blaze up in anger (2 Tim 4:2).  The man hupomone, who under a great siege of trials, bears up, and does not lose heart or courage (Rom 5:3; 2 Cor 1:6).'  In another place, commenting on the word makrothumia, the same authority defines it as 'a long holding out of the mind before it gives room to action or passion — generally to passion.  'Forbearing one another in love' (Eph 4:2) beautifully expounds the meaning which attaches to the word.  Anger usually, but not universally, is the passion thus held aloof...  Still, it is not necessarily anger which is excluded or set at a distance, for when the historian of the Maccabees describes how the Romans had won the world 'by their policy and their patience,' makrothumia expresses there that Roman persistency which would never make peace under defeat.'  Commenting upon hypomone, Trench says; 'It does not mark merely endurance, or even patience, but the perseverance, the brave patience with which the Christian contends against the various hindrances, persecutions, and temptations that befall him in his conflict with the inward and outward world.'  In brief, makrothumia is patience exhibited under ill-treatment by person, hypomone, patience shown under trials, difficulties, hardships.

This patience and longsuffering is to be accompanied with joyfulness.  Expositors says; 'It (joyfulness) forms a very necessary addition, for the peculiar danger of the exercise of those qualities is that it tends to produce a certain gloominess or sourness of disposition.  The remedy is that the Christian should be so filled with joy that he is able to meet all his trials with a buoyant sense of mastery.'"  (K. Wuest)

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