These practices indeed have the appearance [that popularly passes as that] of wisdom in self-made religion and mock humility and severe treatment of the body (asceticism), but are of no value against sinful indulgence [because they do not honor God].

yet Christ has now reconciled you [to God] in His physical body through death, in order to present you before the Father holy and blameless and beyond reproach—

In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, but by the [spiritual] circumcision of Christ in the stripping off of the body of the flesh [the sinful carnal nature],

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh (worldliness, manner of life), God made you alive together with Christ, having [freely] forgiven us all our sins,

I now rejoice in sufferings for you, and make complete in my flesh things lacking of the afflictions of the Christ for his body, which is the church.

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have about you, and those at Laodicea, and as many as have not seen my face in flesh.

For even though I am absent in the flesh, yet I am with you in the spirit, rejoicing and seeing your orderliness, and the steadfastness of your faith for Christ.

Let no man umpire against you insisting on self-mortification, and worship of the heavenly agents, intruding in things that he has not seen, vainly puffed up by the mind of his flesh,

Bondmen, obey in all things those masters according to flesh, not in eye-service as men-pleasers, but in simplicity of heart, fearing God.

Then put to death your bodies which are of the earth; wrong use of the flesh, unclean things, passion, evil desires and envy, which is the worship of strange gods;