Colossians

Paul’s Letter to the Colossians

1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through God’s will, and Brother Timothy, 2 to the holy and believing brothers in Christ at Colossae: grace to you, and peace, from God our Father.

3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as we pray for you, 4 hearing of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love you cherish to all God’s people 5 because of the hope laid up for you in the heavens, about which you have already heard in the words of the truth of the gospel 6 which has arrived among you as it also is in all the world, bearing fruit and growing as it does among you too since the day that you heard and recognized God’s grace in truth 7 as you learned from our dear fellow-servant Epaphras, who is on your behalf a faithful agent of the Christ, 8 who also informed us of your love in the Spirit.

9 For this reason we on our part, since the day when we heard of it, never cease to pray for you and ask that you may be filled with awareness of his will in all spiritual wisdom and insight 10* to walk worthily of the Lord to give him all pleasure, bearing fruit in every good work and growing in awareness of God, 11* energized with all power in accordance with the mightiness of his glory for all persistence and patience, 12 joyously thanking the Father who qualified you for your share in the lot of God’s people in the light; 13 who delivered you out of the jurisdiction of darkness and transferred you into the kingdom of the Son of his love, 14 in whom we have redemption, the pardon of sins,—

15 Who is image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation, 16* because in him everything was created in the heavens and on earth, the visible and the invisible, be it thrones or lordships or governments or dominions—everything has been created through him and to come to him, 17 and before everything he is, and in him everything holds together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church, he who is the beginning, the firstborn out of the dead, in order that he may take the first place in every respect, 19 because in him all the fullness was pleased to make its home 20* and through him to reconcile everything to him, making peace through the blood of his cross, through him whether it were the things on earth or the things in the heavens, 21 and you who had once been estranged and hostile-minded in your wicked deeds, 22 but whom he has now reconciled by his fleshly body through death to present you holy and unblemished and irreproachable before him 23* if so be that you keep to your faith, standing steady on solid foundations and not shifting from the hope of the gospel you heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under the heavens; of which I Paul became an agent.

24 I rejoice now in my sufferings for you, and what stopped short of completeness in the Christ’s sufferings I am filling out in my flesh for his body, which is the church, 25 whose servitor I became in accordance with God’s charge given to me as errand to you, to present God’s word in its fullness, 26 the secret that had been hidden since the ages and the generations but has now been disclosed to his devout believers, 27 to whom God chose to make known what was the wealth of the glory of this secret design among the nations, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory; 28 whom we announce, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, in order that we may present every man complete in Christ, 29 to which same end I am toiling and struggling as befits his energy that is powerfully at work in me.