which has reached you as it spreads over all the world with fruit and increase. Such has been your life from the day you learned to know what God's grace really is.

so that you may lead a life that is worthy of the Lord and give him entire satisfaction. May you be fruitful and increase in the doing of all good, as you thus know God!

Also, he is the head of the Body, that is, of the church, in virtue of his primacy as the first to be born from the dead ??that gives him pre-eminence over all.

so as to set you consecrated and unblemished and irreproachable in his presence ??23 that is, if you adhere to the foundations and stability of the faith, instead of moving away from the hope you have learned in the gospel, that gospel which has been preached to every creature under heaven, and of which I Paul was made a minister.

It is His will that they should understand the glorious wealth which this secret holds for the Gentiles, in the fact of Christ's presence among you as your hope of glory.

fixed and founded in him, confirmed in the faith as you have been taught it, and overflowing with thankfulness to God.

when you were buried with him in your baptism and thereby raised with him as you believed in the power of the God who raised him from the dead.

Let no one lay down rules for you as he pleases, with regard to fasting and the cult of angels, presuming on his visions and inflated by his sensuous notions,

As you died with Christ to the Elemental spirits of the world, why live as if you still belonged to the world? Why submit to rules and regulations like

As God's own chosen, then, as consecrated and beloved, be clothed with compassion, kindliness, humility, gentleness, and good temper ??13 forbear and forgive each other in any case of complaint; as Christ forgave you, so must you forgive.

Also, let the peace of Christ be supreme within your hearts ??that is why you have been called as members of the one Body. And you must be thankful.

Whatever be your task, work at it heartily, as servants of the Lord and not of men;

and pray for me as well, that God may give me an opening for the word, to speak of the open secret of Christ for which I am in custody.

Pray that I may unfold it as I should.