⁹ This is why, ever since I heard of it, I have never ceased praying for you and asking God to fill you, through full wisdom and spiritual insight, with a clear knowledge of His will, ¹⁰ so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord to His full satisfaction, by perennially bearing fruit in every good enterprise and by a steady growth in fuller knowledge of God; ¹¹ then you will be perfectly empowered by His glorious might for every sort of joyous endurance and forbearance, ¹² and you will always be thanking the Father who has qualified you to share the lot of His people in the realm of light. ¹³ It is God who has delivered us out of the dominion of darkness and has transferred us into the kingdom of His dearly loved Son, ¹⁴ by whom we possess the ransom from captivity, which means the forgiveness of our sins.

¹⁵ Yes, He is the exact likeness of the unseen God, His first-born Son who existed before any created thing, ¹⁶ for it was through Him that everything was created in heaven and on earth, the seen and the unseen, thrones, dominions, principalities, authorities; all things have been created through Him and for Him. ¹⁷ So He existed before all things, and through Him all things are held together. ¹⁸ Yes, He is the Head of the church as His body. For He is the beginning, the first-born among the dead, so that He alone should stand first in everything. ¹⁹ It is so because it was the divine choice that all the divine fullness should dwell in Him, ²⁰ and that through Him He might reconcile to Himself all things on earth or in heaven, making this peace through the blood He shed On His cross.

²¹ So you, who were once estranged from Him, and hostile in disposition as shown by your wrongdoings, He has now reconciled ²² by His death in His human body, so as to present you consecrated, faultless, and blameless in His presence, ²³ if indeed you continue well grounded and firm in faith and never shift from the hope inspired by the good news you heard, which has been preached all over the world, and of which I, Paul, have been made a minister.