Colossians 1:9-23 - Prayer For Maturity Based On Christ's Preeminence

⁹ And therefore we, from the very day that we heard this, have never ceased praying for you, or asking that you may possess that deeper knowledge of the will of God, which comes through all true spiritual wisdom and insight. ¹⁰ Then you will live lives worthy of the Master, and so please God in every way. Your lives will be fruitful in every kind of good action, and your characters will grow through a fuller knowledge of God; ¹¹ You will be made strong at all points with a strength worthy of the power manifested in his Glory--strong to endure with patience, and even with gladness, whatever may befall you; ¹² And you will give thanks to the Father who made you fit to share the lot which awaits Christ's People in the realms of Light. ¹³ For God has rescued us from the tyranny of Darkness, and has removed us into the Kingdom of his Son, who is the embodiment of his love, ¹⁴ And through whom we have found deliverance in the forgiveness of our sins.

¹⁵ For Christ is the very incarnation of the invisible God-- First-born and Head of all creation; ¹⁶ For in him was created all that is in Heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible--Angels and Archangels and all the Powers of Heaven. ¹⁷ All has been created through him and for him. He was before all things, and all things unite in him; ¹⁸ And he is the Head of the Church, which is his Body. The First-born from the dead, he is to the Church the Source of its Life, that he, in all things, may stand first. ¹⁹ For it pleased the Father that in him the divine nature in all its fulness should dwell, ²⁰ And through him to reconcile all things to himself (making peace by the shedding of Christ's blood offered upon the cross)-- whether on earth or in Heaven.

²¹ And it pleased God that you, once estranged from him and hostile towards him in your thoughts, intent only on wickedness-- ²² But now he has reconciled you to himself by the sacrifice of Christ's earthly body in death--it has pleased God that you should stand in his presence holy, pure, and blameless, ²³ If only you remain true to your Faith, firm and immovable, never abandoning the hope held out in the Good News to which you listened, which has been proclaimed among all created things under Heaven, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister.