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It Is Written

Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven & Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

Eric Flickinger

Clinton Wahlen

01 Persecuted but Not Forsaken

02 Reasons for Thanksgiving and Prayer

♪ Welcome to Sabbath School brought to you by It Is Written.

We are taking a look at some fascinating books in the New Testament.

We're looking at uniting heaven and earth and finding Christ in the books of Philippians and Colossians, a fascinating study.

And this week we are looking at lesson number 2, Reasons for Thanksgiving and Prayer.

Father, we're grateful to be here today as we continue to learn more about Christ through the writings of Paul in the books of Philippians and Colossians.

We ask that you'll bless us today as we learn more about him and more about your desire to have a close relationship with us as well.

Well, we're also glad in addition to having you with us, to have the author of this quarter's Sabbath school lesson with us as well, and that is Dr.

He is an associate director of the Biblical Research Institute.

His expertise is in the areas of New Testament and hermeneutics.

This is lesson number 2 of 13 that we're going to be doing together, looking at Philippians and Colossians.

And this week we're looking at reasons for thanksgiving and prayer.

It's interesting when you take a look at Paul's letters, he often begins his letters with a greeting.

Let's kind of unpack that greeting a little bit and see if it can help us understand thanksgiving and prayer for this week's lesson.

All right, well, of course, Philippians 1, verse 2 says, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

And it's interesting, Eric, that this greeting, as Paul's greetings generally do, combine ideas that we find in the Greek world and also in the world of Israel of the first century and even far beyond that.

Grace was a typical greeting, when they would say kaira in Greek, that would be like hello or greetings.

And that's the word Paul uses here in Greek.

And in a Hebrew environment, in Israel, shalom, even today, is a common greeting, and that means peace.

So he combines greetings that the Greeks would be familiar with, and Jews would be familiar with, and already it's a reminder that the church is a combination of everyone.

Gentiles, Jews, everyone, and it's for everyone.

And so just in the introductory verses of this, we're seeing this theme that we're exploring throughout the quarter here in Philippians and Colossians, of course, as you said, in Paul's other writings as well.

There's an interesting passage here in Philippians chapter 1, just a little bit beyond where what we were just talking about, in verses 3 through 8.

And I want to read those verses because Paul expresses some, his thankfulness for many things.

And his thankfulness might be a little different than some of the things we find ourselves thankful for on a regular basis, but maybe there's something we can we can learn from this.

So let me read Philippians 1 verses 3 through 8.

He says, I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making request for you all with joy.

For your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this very thing, that he who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.

Just as it is right for me to think this of you all, because I have you in my heart, inasmuch as both in my chains and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers with me of grace.

For God is my witness, how greatly I long for you all with the affection of Jesus Christ." So he's thankful for a lot of things.

Walk us through some of these things that he's thankful for.

Well, the first thing is that he's thankful for the Philippians.

You know, he established the church in Philippi.

They were close to his heart, as he reminds us right here, as were all the churches to which he wrote.

Even Colossia, which he never visited in person.

And that's so important for Paul and for the church being established and really also today.

You know, the fellowship that he refers to here, or koinonia in Greek, in verse 5, your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now.

You know, this talks about the common bond that we have with, through Jesus, that the differences that we have melt away as we are 1 in Christ, and that's so important.

And it's interesting to me that he focuses not on himself, although at the very end he does talk about his chains, and yet it's almost like he's thanking God for his chains because he's able to, and we'll get into this more as we look further at the book of Philippians, but he's looking to the defense and confirmation of the gospel that he has opportunity to do even in as a prisoner in Rome.

So these are things that I'll speak on your behalf for the sake of argument.

If we found ourselves in prison, if we found ourselves in difficulty, the natural response would probably not be, oh, thank you that I'm in these change, in these difficulty, in this prison.

That's not the natural human response to trials and difficulties and tribulations.

And yet Paul seems to be able to find, even in those challenges, things to be thankful for.

And you might recall that, you know, when they were in Philippi, Paul and Silas, they were put in prison there.

And instead of complaining, as many of the other prisoners no doubt did, and arguing and fighting, Paul and Silas are singing hymns of praise to God.

So much so that, so different of course, that the jailer, his attention was arrested and eventually He was converted to the faith of the gospel and faith in Christ.

So this is actually a vivid example of what it means where Jesus is uniting heaven and earth.

That he is through us, he is imparting to the people around us an idea of what heaven is like and what he wants our life to be like.

And so we've got a key whole view of it here, just, and these are the introductory statements or comments that Paul makes in this book.

And already this idea, like you said, of uniting heaven and earth, they're coming together for us to understand.

He continues with his prayer in verses 9 through 11.

And he kind of, he dwells on something similar and yet a little bit different.

Verse 9, he says, And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory and the praise of God." So what are some takeaways that you think Paul wanted us to walk away with as he's writing, of course he's writing to the church in Philippi, but by extension to us, lessons for us to learn.

What does he want us to learn from those verses?

Well, again, Erekat is imbued with the love of Jesus, what it is like to walk with him.

So he talks about their love, which of course comes from God.

Everything we know about love on earth has nothing really connection with God necessarily because love can mean many different things to different people.

And so this is something that they experienced, and Paul wants them to experience even more.

I like that because we will never get enough of God's love.

Even once we are in heaven and face-to-face with the Lord, we will still understand more deeply, more profoundly, through the ages of eternity, what God's love means.

And so this prayer is asking that that grow, but notice that it is to grow in a special sense, in knowledge and in all discernment.

It's not just a vague, vacuous kind of, you know, feeling of love, but it actually has to do with the knowledge of God.

That's how we know what love is, how he has dealt with us.

I have to say, you know, that I learned more about what it means to be a father, being a father of 2 children from God than from any earthly father, because how he's treated me.

You know, we may not know a father that is a Christian.

You know, many may not have a Christian father, may not have a Christian example, model, but we have a wonderful model through our heavenly father.

And so Paul tells us that we need to know him, to know Jesus, and through that, we also would understand discernment, that we would know and be able to distinguish what is harmful from what is spiritually helpful.

Of course, we learn that most of all, most clearly, through God's Word.

And you look at the world around us today, and there is a wide range of understandings of what is right and what is wrong.

And to a great extent, people are making those decisions based on their own ideas, rather than having an objective standard, which obviously the Bible would be that standard that we should go by, but not everybody does.

A beautiful picture here of God wanting us to know Him better and Christ better through His words so that we can have that discernment.

Clinton, we're looking right now at reasons for thanksgiving and prayer.

And the lesson study is fantastic, it goes through a lot of things.

But there's more to this than what we've been able to, or what you've been able to get in the lesson study.

So there is a companion book to this quarter Sabbath school lesson.

Why might somebody want to pick that companion book up?

What's in chapter 2 that goes along with our lesson number 2 that would help us to understand reasons for thanksgiving and prayer a little bit more clearly and thoroughly?

Well, of course, Eric, there's a lot more in the book than can be covered in the lesson in such a short space.

And so in connection with prayer, there are actually scientific studies that have been done about the benefits of prayer.

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Series

Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2026: Uniting Heaven & Earth: Christ in Philippians and Colossians

02 Reasons for Thanksgiving and Prayer

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Other Teachings in Series

01 Persecuted but Not Forsaken

28m

02 Reasons for Thanksgiving and Prayer

28m

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