Colossians 1

¹ From Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and from our brother Timothy

² to the saints in Colossae, our faithful brothers in Christ: Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

³ We have never failed to remember you in our prayers and to give thanks for you to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

⁴ ever since we heard about your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you show towards all the saints

⁵ because of the hope which is stored up for you in heaven. It is only recently that you heard of this, when it was announced in the message of the truth. The Good News

⁶ which has reached you is spreading all over the world and producing the same results as it has among you ever since the day when you heard about God’s grace and understood what this really is.

⁷ Epaphras, who taught you, is one of our closest fellow workers and a faithful deputy for us as Christ’s servant,

⁸ and it was he who told us all about your love in the Spirit.

⁹ That will explain why, ever since the day he told us, we have never failed to pray for you, and what we ask God is that through perfect wisdom and spiritual understanding you should reach the fullest knowledge of his will.

¹⁰ So you will be able to lead the kind of life which the Lord expects of you, a life acceptable to him in all its aspects; showing the results in all the good actions you do and increasing your knowledge of God.

¹¹ You will have in you the strength, based on his own glorious power, never to give in, but to bear anything joyfully,

¹² thanking the Father who has made it possible for you to join the saints and with them to inherit the light.

¹³ Because that is what he has done: he has taken us out of the power of darkness and created a place for us in the kingdom of the Son that he loves,

¹⁴ and in him, we gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins.

¹⁵ He is the image of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation,

¹⁶ for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and everything invisible, Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers – all things were created through him and for him.

¹⁷ Before anything was created, he existed, and he holds all things in unity. Now the Church is his body, he is its head.

¹⁸ As he is the Beginning, he was first to be born from the dead, so that he should be first in every way;

¹⁹ because God wanted all perfection to be found in him

²⁰ and all things to be reconciled through him and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross.

²¹ Not long ago, you were foreigners and enemies, in the way that you used to think and the evil things that you did;

²² but now he has reconciled you, by his death and in that mortal body. Now you are able to appear before him holy, pure and blameless –

²³ as long as you persevere and stand firm on the solid base of the faith, never letting yourselves drift away from the hope promised by the Good News, which you have heard, which has been preached to the whole human race, and of which I, Paul, have become the servant.

²⁴ It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am suffering now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that has still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of his body, the Church.

²⁵ I became the servant of the Church when God made me responsible for delivering God’s message to you,

²⁶ the message which was a mystery hidden for generations and centuries and has now been revealed to his saints.

²⁷ It was God’s purpose to reveal it to them and to show all the rich glory of this mystery to pagans. The mystery is Christ among you, your hope of glory:

²⁸ this is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone, to make them all perfect in Christ.

²⁹ It is for this I struggle wearily on, helped only by his power driving me irresistibly.