For it has reached you, and remains with you, just as it has also spread through the whole world, yielding fruit there and increasing, as it has done among you from the day when first you heard it and came really to know the grace of God,

He has now, in His human body, reconciled to God by His death, to bring you, holy and faultless and irreproachable, into His presence;

Now I can find joy amid my sufferings for you, and I fill up in my own person whatever is lacking in Christ's afflictions on behalf of His Body, the Church.

the truth which has been kept secret from all ages and generations, but has now been revealed to His people,

For I would have you know in how severe a struggle I am engaged on behalf of you and the brethren in Laodicea and of all who have not known me personally,

Therefore suffer no one to sit in judgement on you as to eating or drinking or with regard to a festival, a new moon or a sabbath.

Let no one defraud you of your prize, priding himself on his humility and on his worship of the angels, and taking his stand on the visions he has seen, and idly puffed up with his unspiritual thoughts.

But now you must rid yourselves of every kind of sin--angry and passionate outbreaks, ill-will, evil speaking, foul-mouthed abuse--so that these may never soil your lips.

and have clothed yourselves with the new self which is being remoulded into full knowledge so as to become like Him who created it.

In that new creation there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free man, but Christ is everything and is in all of us.

For you know that it is from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. Christ is the Master whose bondservants you are.

The man who perpetrates a wrong will find the wrong repaid to him; and with God there are no merely earthly distinctions.

Let your language be always seasoned with the salt of grace, so that you may know how to give every man a fitting answer.

And for this very purpose I send him to you that you may know how we are faring; and that he may cheer your hearts.