Jesus

the secret hidden for generations, for ages, but now made clear to the people he has set apart for himself.

To them God wanted to make known how great among the Gentiles is the glorious richness of this secret. And the secret is this: the Messiah is united with you people! In that rests your hope of glory!

We, for our part, proclaim him; we warn, confront and teach everyone in all wisdom; so that we may present everyone as having reached the goal, united with the Messiah.

It is for this that I toil, striving with all the energy that he stirs up in me so mightily.

My purpose is that they may be encouraged, that they may be joined together in love, and that they may have all the riches derived from being assured of understanding and fully knowing God’s secret truth, which is — the Messiah!

For although I am away from you physically, I am with you in spirit, rejoicing as I see the disciplined and resolute firmness of your trust in the Messiah.

Therefore, just as you received the Messiah Yeshua as Lord, keep living your life united with him.

Remain deeply rooted in him; continue being built up in him and confirmed in your trust, the way you were taught, so that you overflow in thanksgiving.

Watch out, so that no one will take you captive by means of philosophy and empty deceit, following human tradition which accords with the elemental spirits of the world but does not accord with the Messiah.

For in him, bodily, lives the fullness of all that God is.

And it is in union with him that you have been made full — he is the head of every rule and authority.

Also it was in union with him that you were circumcised with a circumcision not done by human hands, but accomplished by stripping away the old nature’s control over the body. In this circumcision done by the Messiah,

you were buried along with him by being immersed; and in union with him, you were also raised up along with him by God’s faithfulness that worked when he raised Yeshua from the dead.

You were dead because of your sins, that is, because of your “foreskin,” your old nature. But God made you alive along with the Messiah by forgiving you all your sins.

He wiped away the bill of charges against us. Because of the regulations, it stood as a testimony against us; but he removed it by nailing it to the execution-stake.

Stripping the rulers and authorities of their power, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by means of the stake.

These are a shadow of things that are coming, but the body is of the Messiah.

If, along with the Messiah, you died to the elemental spirits of the world, then why, as if you still belonged to the world, are you letting yourselves be bothered by its rules? —

So if you were raised along with the Messiah, then seek the things above, where the Messiah is sitting at the right hand of God.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with the Messiah in God.

When the Messiah, who is our life, appears, then you too will appear with him in glory!

and have put on the new self, which is continually being renewed in fuller and fuller knowledge, closer and closer to the image of its Creator.

The new self allows no room for discriminating between Gentile and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, foreigner, savage, slave, free man; on the contrary, in all, the Messiah is everything.

Bear with one another; if anyone has a complaint against someone else, forgive him. Indeed, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must forgive.

let the Word of the Messiah, in all its richness, live in you, as you teach and counsel each other in all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude to God in your hearts.