Faith, Love, and Hope

Scripture: Colossians 1:1–14

Read Colossians 1:1–14 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

…since we heard about your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints. Your faith and love have arisen from the hope laid up for you in heaven.
Colossians 1:4–5

Why Start Here?

Most studies of Paul’s letter to the Colossians dive directly into the Christ-hymn of chapter one, and not without reason. The Christ-hymn is one of the great peaks of New Testament Christology, and it does much to define what the letter is doing. But the hymn does not stand alone. It is set within a longer passage that opens the letter and shapes our reading of everything that comes after. Paul does not begin with cosmic Christology. He begins with a greeting. He names himself, names a co-sender, names his readers, names his thanksgiving for them, names his prayer for them, and only then begins to develop the doctrine that will dominate the rest of the letter. To skip over this opening is to start our reading at the wrong place. The greeting is not throat-clearing. It is the apostolic frame within which everything else makes sense.

This session takes up the first fourteen verses of the letter: the address, the thanksgiving, and the prayer. By the end of the passage we will already have seen the major themes Paul will develop across the next three chapters: the supremacy of Christ, the sufficiency of his work, the new life of those who belong to him, the eschatological hope, and the faithful labor of those who pass the gospel from one set of hands to another. Everything is here, in seed form. Our task is to read carefully enough to see the seed and to recognize what it will grow into.

Paul, an Apostle of Christ Jesus

The letter opens with the standard ancient form: sender, co-sender, recipients, greeting. From Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the saints, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ, at Colossae. Grace and peace to you from God our Father! Two sentences. The whole apostolic identity in two sentences. Let us look at them slowly.

Paul calls himself an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. The word apostle (apostolos in Greek) means one who is sent. Paul has been sent. He has not chosen the office for himself, nor has it been given to him by any church council. He was given the office by the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, and the office has shaped the rest of his life. He goes where he is sent. He writes what he is given to write. The letter the Colossians hold in their hands is not the private musing of a religious teacher; it is the apostolic word, given for the building up of the Church.

By the will of God. The phrase matters. Paul is an apostle not because he wanted to be one, not because the other apostles voted him in, not because he had certain natural gifts that fitted him for the role. He is an apostle because God willed him to be one. The whole shape of his ministry, its scope, its difficulty, its destination, the chains in which he now writes, was given to him by the divine will. When the Colossians read this letter, they read it as a word given by the will of God to a man who did not choose his vocation and who is now bearing the cost of it.

The cost is real. Paul writes this letter from prison. He says so plainly at the end of the letter, where he asks his readers to pray that God may open a door for the message, so that he may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which he is in chains. He says it again at the very last line, where he writes Remember my chains. We do not know with certainty where the prison was. The most widely held view, and the one this study will follow, places Paul in Rome around AD 60–62, under house arrest with a guard, awaiting trial before Caesar. Some scholars have argued for an earlier imprisonment in Ephesus or Caesarea; the arguments are not absurd, but the traditional Roman setting fits the evidence best. What is certain is that the apostle of Christ Jesus writes from chains. The hand that holds the pen, or that dictates to the secretary, is chained. The letter we are about to study is, as Paul will name himself elsewhere, the word of an ambassador in chains.

And Timothy our brother. The co-sender is Paul’s long-time companion, the man Paul calls his beloved and faithful child in the Lord, the recipient of the two pastoral letters that bear his name. Timothy is with Paul in his imprisonment, sharing the work of correspondence and intercession. He is not a co-author in the modern sense (the letter is unmistakably Paul’s), but he is a co-sender, lending his presence and his pastoral care to what Paul is about to write. The naming of Timothy reminds us that apostolic ministry, even when it issues from one apostle’s pen, is the work of a fellowship. Paul does not labor alone. He never has.

To the Saints, the Faithful Brothers and Sisters in Christ, at Colossae

Now the recipients. To the saints, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ, at Colossae.

A word about Colossae itself. By the time Paul wrote this letter, Colossae had been a city for a long time, but it was past its peak. In earlier centuries Colossae had been one of the major cities of the Lycus valley, a region in what is now southwestern Turkey, sitting on the main east-west road through Asia Minor. By the first century its neighbors Laodicea and Hierapolis had outstripped it. Colossae had become a smaller town in the shadow of its more prosperous neighbors. Paul had never been there. So far as we know, he never visited it. The church in Colossae was not his church-plant; it was founded by Epaphras, a native of the city and very likely one of Paul’s converts, probably during Paul’s long ministry in Ephesus described in Acts 19. The Colossians knew Paul by reputation and through Epaphras. They had received the gospel he preached, but they had not heard him preach it.

This matters for the letter. Paul is writing pastorally to a church he has never seen, to address a problem reported to him by someone else. He writes with apostolic authority, but without the relational intimacy of long acquaintance. He depends on Epaphras to know the situation, and he depends on his apostolic calling to give him the right to address it. The letter that results is striking in its theological compression. Paul does not have the time or the relational capital for a long, leisurely engagement. He writes briefly and densely. He gets to the point.

The point begins with how he names them. The saints, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ. The word saint (hagios in Greek, meaning holy or set apart) has been so flattened in modern usage that it is hard to hear what Paul is saying. In English Christian speech a saint is usually a person of extraordinary spiritual achievement. In Paul’s letters, every baptized Christian is a saint. The believer is holy not because of what he has done but because of what God has done in setting him apart through Christ and the Spirit. The Colossians are hagioi, holy ones, not on their own account but on Christ’s. And they are faithful brothers and sisters: pistoi adelphoi, believing brothers, a family word that the NET rightly opens to take in the whole household. The two terms work together. They are holy because they have been set apart in Christ; they are brothers and sisters because they have been brought into the family of God; they are faithful because the faith in which they stand is real. This is the apostolic vocabulary for the baptized.

Paul says they are saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ, at Colossae. The two locations matter. They are in Christ: that is their primary identity, their deepest belonging, the sphere within which their life now happens. They are also at Colossae: that is their geographical location, the ordinary place where the in Christ identity gets worked out. Every Christian in every age lives at both addresses. Their truer address is in Christ. Their visible address is wherever they happen to live and work and raise their families. The two addresses are not in competition; the first one shapes the second. The Colossians are the Christians of Colossae because they are first the Christians of Christ.

Grace and Peace to You

The greeting itself follows the apostolic pattern. Grace and peace to you from God our Father!

In ancient letter-writing, the standard Greek greeting was chairein, rejoice. The standard Jewish greeting was shalom, peace. Paul’s habitual practice is to combine and transform both. He greets his readers with charis (grace, the gift-word that captures the whole apostolic message) and with eirene, peace, the deep harmony with God and neighbor that the gospel creates. Grace and peace. Not the formal pleasantries of correspondence but the very substance of the gospel, pronounced over the recipients at the opening of the letter. Paul does not wish them grace and peace; he pronounces grace and peace upon them. The apostolic greeting is itself a small benediction.

And the source is named. From God our Father. Grace and peace are not natural endowments and not human achievements. They are gifts from the Father. The whole letter will press this point: everything that matters in the Christian life is a gift from God, not an attainment of the believer. The greeting sets the key signature for the letter. Grace before law. Gift before demand. Indicative before imperative. This is the music Paul will play, and he begins with the opening chord struck clearly.

The greeting completed, Paul begins the body of the letter with thanksgiving. We always give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard about your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints. Your faith and love have arisen from the hope laid up for you in heaven.

The triad of faith, love, and hope is the most familiar of Paul’s groupings. It appears at the end of First Corinthians 13: And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. It appears at the opening of First Thessalonians: your work of faith and labor of love and endurance of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. It surfaces in scattered other places. Paul reaches for it whenever he wants to characterize the whole shape of Christian life in a single breath. Faith, love, and hope are the three theological virtues, the soul’s basic orientations once the gospel has turned it toward God. Faith looks back and looks up to what Christ has done. Love looks out toward the brothers and sisters and the neighbor in need. Hope looks forward to the consummation that has not yet come.

Paul thanks God for all three in the Colossians. Their faith is in Christ Jesus: not in a system of teachings, not in their own religious capacities, but in Christ. Their love is for all the saints: not selective, not partial, not reserved for those who deserve it, but extending to the whole body of believers. And their hope is laid up for them in heaven, meaning that the object of their hope is secure, kept for them, guaranteed by the God who has stored it up. The hope is not a wish for things to go well. It is a confident expectation of what God has already prepared.

Notice the order. Faith and love have arisen from the hope. The Greek preposition behind the NET’s phrasing (dia, “because of”) gives the hope a causal role. Paul does not mean that the hope is more important than faith and love; he means that the hope is what generates them. The hope laid up in heaven is the well from which faith and love are drawn. The Christian believes and loves now because of the hope that is being kept. Cut off the hope, and faith and love wither. Lutheran theology has held this firmly. The justified believer is not first sanctified into a moral life and then given hope as a reward for endurance. The hope is given first, given in baptism, sustained in the Word and the Sacrament, and faith and love grow up around it. The hope is the root from which the rest of the Christian life is fed.

The Message of Truth, the Gospel

Paul continues by naming where the hope has come from. The hope is something which you have heard about in the message of truth, the gospel that has come to you. Just as in the entire world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, so it has also been bearing fruit and growing among you from the first day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

The gospel is the means by which the hope reaches the believer. Notice how Paul describes the gospel. It is the message of truth: the trustworthy word, the word about reality, the word that does not lie. It is something that has come to the Colossians. They did not invent it, did not work their way up to it, did not produce it from their own resources. It came to them. And it has not stopped. It is bearing fruit and growing, in the entire world, and also among them.

This is one of the most important sentences in the New Testament about how the gospel works. The gospel is not static information that the hearer either accepts or rejects and then files away. The gospel is a living word that bears fruit. When the gospel comes, it does something. It increases. It grows. It takes hold in the soul of the hearer and reshapes that soul over time. The Colossians did not just hear the gospel; they were entered by it, and it has been bearing fruit in them since the day they heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

Lutheran preaching has always understood the gospel this way. The Word of God is means of grace: not merely descriptive of grace but actually conveying it. When the gospel is preached, grace is given. When the absolution is pronounced, sins are forgiven. When the Sacrament is administered, Christ is truly present. The Word does what it says. This is not magic; it is the way God has chosen to work. He works through his Word (the Word preached, the Word in the water, the Word in the bread and the cup), and what the Word announces, the Word accomplishes. The Colossians know this from their own experience. They have heard the gospel; the gospel has come to them; it has been bearing fruit ever since. They are living proof of what Paul is saying.

Epaphras, Our Dear Fellow Slave

The means by which the gospel reached Colossae has a name. Paul names him here, briefly, and will name him again at the close of the letter. You learned the gospel from Epaphras, our dear fellow slave—a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf— who also told us of your love in the Spirit.

We know a few things about Epaphras. He was from Colossae himself; in chapter four Paul will call him one of you. He was probably converted during Paul’s three-year ministry in Ephesus, where Paul taught in the hall of Tyrannus and from which, Luke tells us, all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord. Epaphras heard the word, was converted, and was then sent (or chose to go) back to his home region of the Lycus valley, where he founded the church at Colossae and possibly also the churches at Laodicea and Hierapolis. He is now with Paul in his imprisonment, having come to report on the situation at Colossae and likely to ask for Paul’s apostolic intervention. Paul will say at the end of the letter that Epaphras is always struggling in prayer on the Colossians’ behalf, so that they may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.

What Paul says of him here is striking. He is a dear fellow slave, a faithful minister of Christ. Paul’s word is syndoulos, fellow slave, built on doulos, slave, the word Paul uses elsewhere of himself and Timothy (Philippians 1:1). At the close of this letter he will call Epaphras a doulos of Christ outright (4:12). Epaphras stands in the same line. He has the same Lord, the same calling, the same dignity. He is not Paul’s subordinate in any worldly sense. He is a fellow slave of the one Lord.

This is the way the gospel travels. Not through the lecture halls of the famous or the political networks of the powerful, but through faithful servants who have heard the word, received it, gone home with it, and built churches in places no apostle would visit. Epaphras is the unsung hero of the letter to the Colossians. Without him, no church at Colossae, no letter to the Colossians, no Christ-hymn of chapter one. The history of the Church is full of Epaphrases: faithful ministers in small places who carried the gospel where it had not yet been heard and who built up the body of Christ in conditions the more famous apostles never saw. Their names will be in the book of life. Most of them will not be in our textbooks.

Paul’s Prayer for the Colossians

Having given thanks, Paul now reports the prayer that follows the thanksgiving. For this reason we also, from the day we heard about you, have not ceased praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may live worthily of the Lord and please him in all respects—bearing fruit in every good deed, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for the display of all patience and steadfastness.

The prayer is a single complex sentence with a clear structure. Paul asks first that God would fill you with the knowledge of his will. The Greek word translated knowledge is epignosis, a fuller and more personal knowing than the simple word for information. It is not the knowledge of someone who has read about a friend; it is the knowledge of someone who has lived with the friend. Paul wants the Colossians to know God’s will in this deeper way: not as a set of teachings filed in the memory but as a living comprehension that orders the soul.

The purpose of this knowledge follows. So that you may live worthily of the Lord and please him in all respects. The NET says live; Paul’s verb is literally walk (peripatēsai). The knowledge is for the walking. The Christian life is repeatedly described in Scripture as a walk, a daily, ordinary, step-by-step progression through ordinary life. Walking takes balance, direction, persistence. It is not dramatic; it is sustained. Paul wants the Colossians to walk worthily of the Lord, meaning in a way consistent with who their Lord is and what he has done for them. The walk corresponds to the calling.

The walking is then described more specifically. The Christian walks bearing fruit in every good deed. Paul has just said that the gospel bears fruit in the world; now he says the Christian bears fruit too. The fruit of the gospel in the soul becomes the fruit of the soul in the world. And the Christian walks growing in the knowledge of God: the knowledge that began with hearing the gospel grows as the walking continues. Knowledge and walking feed each other. The more the Christian knows God, the better the Christian walks. The better the Christian walks, the more the Christian knows God.

And undergirding all of it, Paul prays for power. Being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for the display of all patience and steadfastness. The Christian life requires power. It requires patience, the steadiness to keep going under pressure (Paul’s word is hypomonē, a remaining under the load). It requires steadfastness, the long-suffering willingness to wait when waiting is hard (makrothymia). And then comes joy. The Greek phrase meta charas, “with joy,” stands at the seam between this clause and the next, and it can be read with what precedes or with what follows: some translations attach it to the endurance, while the NET attaches it to the thanksgiving (joyfully giving thanks to the Father). Either way the point holds. The joy is not a separate item on the list; it is the manner in which the Christian endures and the manner in which he gives thanks. The Christian endures with joy. The Christian waits with joy. The Christian thanks the Father with joy. This joy is not natural; it is supernatural. It comes from being strengthened with all power, according to God’s glorious might. This is what Paul prays for the Colossians. It is what he would pray for any Christian congregation in any age. It is, in fact, a good prayer to pray for ourselves.

He Has Qualified Us, Delivered Us, Transferred Us

The prayer’s last phrase shifts into a summary of what God has already done. …joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (1:12–14)

Five phrases of accomplished salvation in a row: three decisive past-tense verbs and a present possession. Qualified. Delivered. Transferred. We have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The first three verbs are aorists in Greek (hikanōsanti, errysato, metestēsen), each naming a completed act. The fourth, we have (echomen), is present: it names what the believer now holds. And what he holds is named by two nouns, redemption and the forgiveness of sins. All of these refer to what has already happened to the believer or what has already been given to him. None of them name something the believer must still achieve. They name what God has already accomplished, on the basis of which the believer now stands.

He has qualified you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. The believer is qualified (fit, prepared, made worthy) to share in the inheritance. The qualifying is God’s work, not the believer’s. The believer brings no qualification to the inheritance. God has supplied the qualification by an act of his own. The inheritance itself is the saints’ inheritance in the light: the inheritance that belongs to God’s set-apart people in the realm where God’s light shines without shadow. This is the inheritance the Colossians’ hope is laid up for.

He delivered us from the power of darkness. The verb is decisive: a rescue, a deliverance, a snatching out. The believer was under the power of darkness, the realm of the prince of this world, the kingdom of sin and death, and has been pulled out of it. This is not a process the believer participated in; it is an act done to the believer by another hand.

And transferred us to the kingdom of the Son he loves. The verb is again decisive. The Greek word means to move from one place to another, the way an empire might relocate a population from one region to another. The believer has been moved. He no longer lives under the power of darkness; he lives in the kingdom of the Son the Father loves. The address has been changed. The believer’s papers say he lives in Colossae, but his deeper papers say he lives in the kingdom of Christ.

In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And in this kingdom, in this beloved Son, what the believer has is redemption (the technical term for the buying back of a slave) and the forgiveness of sins (the lifting of the charges, the canceling of the debt). The two phrases name the same reality from different angles. Redemption looks at the cost; forgiveness looks at the result. The slave has been bought; the debts have been wiped clean. The believer stands free in the kingdom of the beloved Son.

This is the apostolic gospel in compact form. Qualified, delivered, transferred, having redemption, forgiveness of sins. All accomplished. All gift. All located in the beloved Son. Apology IV, the great Lutheran treatise on justification, builds its argument again and again from this kind of language: language in which the acts are finished and the agent is God, in which the believer receives what has already been done for him in Christ. The Colossians are about to read, in chapter one and again in chapter two, the Christological foundations for all of this. But Paul has already given them the gospel. He has given it in five short phrases, and the phrases are enough.

Gathering the Threads

Paul has opened his letter in fourteen verses that carry, in compact form, almost everything the letter will develop in detail. He has named himself as an apostle by the will of God, writing in chains. He has named Timothy as his brother and co-sender. He has named the Colossians as the saints, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ, at Colossae, holding two addresses at once: the deeper one in Christ, the visible one in the city of their natural birth. He has pronounced grace and peace upon them from God the Father. He has thanked God for their faith, love, and hope. He has named the gospel as a living word that bears fruit wherever it comes. He has named Epaphras as the faithful fellow slave through whom the gospel reached them. He has prayed for their growth in knowledge, walking, and power. And he has given them, in five phrases of accomplished salvation, the apostolic gospel in compact form.

For the Lutheran reader, this opening is deeply familiar territory. The grace-and-peace greeting is the apostolic benediction that the Church has spoken over its assemblies for two thousand years. The faith-love-hope triad matches the order the Confessions insist on: faith first, and love and good works following as its fruit (AC VI; AC XX). The naming of the gospel as the word that bears fruit is the basis on which Lutheran theology has insisted that the Word of God is the means through which God works, not merely the report about what God does elsewhere. The prayer for knowledge issuing in worthy walking is the shape of Lutheran sanctification: sanctification grounded in knowledge of what God has done in Christ. And the three decisive past-tense verbs and the present possession at the end of the prayer are the heart of justification as the Confessions confess it. Qualified, delivered, transferred, having redemption, forgiveness of sins. All accomplished. All gift. All in Christ. The letter has barely begun, and the Lutheran reader is already at home. The reading that follows will only deepen the recognition.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

Paul writes this letter from prison, by the will of God. How does it shape your reading of the letter to remember that the apostle who wrote it was in chains? Have you read it with that frame before?
The Colossians knew Paul only by reputation; their church was founded by Epaphras, an ordinary Christian from their own city. Where in your life and congregation have you seen the gospel travel through ordinary, unnamed faithfulness? What does it mean for you that the New Testament names Epaphras alongside the apostle Paul?
Paul addresses the Colossians as the saints, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ, at Colossae: both in Christ and at Colossae. How do these two addresses operate in your own life? Where do you feel the tension between them most acutely?
Paul thanks God for the Colossians’ faith, love, and hope, with the hope grounding the other two: their faith and love have arisen from the hope. How would your faith and love change if your hope of what is laid up in heaven became more vivid to you?
Paul says the gospel is bearing fruit and growing. Where have you seen the gospel doing this work in your own life, visibly producing fruit and growth, over the past year, or the past ten years?
The five phrases of accomplished salvation at the end of the prayer (qualified, delivered, transferred, having redemption, forgiveness of sins) describe what God has already accomplished for the believer. Which of these do you find hardest to actually believe is true of you? What would change if you did believe it?

Looking Ahead

Next session we move from the address and thanksgiving into the great Christ-hymn of the letter, Colossians 1:15–23. This is the passage that gives the letter its theological floor. Paul will name the Son of God as the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, the one in whom, through whom, and for whom all things were created, the head of the body, the church, the firstborn from the dead, the one in whom God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell. This is one of the highest peaks of New Testament Christology, and it deserves slow walking.

Before next session, read Colossians 1:15–23 at least twice. The first reading should be done aloud if possible, the way the early Church would have heard the passage. Pay attention to the rhythm of the verses; many scholars believe Paul is borrowing and shaping a hymn that the early Christians were already singing. Notice the repeated phrases (in him, through him, for him), the great verbs (created, held together, reconcile), and the climactic statements (he is, he is, he is). The passage will reward careful, patient attention.

Closing Prayer

Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we give You thanks, for in Your Son You have qualified us to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light, delivered us from the power of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of the Son You love. Where our faith is small, increase it. Where our love is selective, broaden it. Where our hope is dim, make it bright. Let the gospel that has come to us continue to bear fruit and grow, that we may live worthily of the Lord and please You in all respects, bearing fruit in every good deed and growing in the knowledge of God. Strengthen us with all power according to Your glorious might for the display of all patience and steadfastness, and let us give You thanks joyfully. And bring us at last into the inheritance You have prepared for Your saints, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Amen.