Daily Bible Reading 24th May 2025 // Colossians 1:3-12
3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, 5 because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, 6 which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, 7 just as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf 8 and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.
9 And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. 11 May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.
As we read what Paul writes in response to Epaphras' report, it becomes evident that these false teachers, wittingly or unwittingly, were raising questions as to whether or not Epaphras had given the Colossians the whole truth/the whole gospel: this in turn, inevitably, raised painful doubts within the believers themselves as to whether they were fully/truly Christian. The pedlars of this new spirituality, (often called 'Gnostics' with the same syncretistic approach as 'New Age Spirituality' gathering ideas from here, there and everywhere) it seems, offered a spiritual 'fullness' not previously experienced: 'Mere Christianity' was not enough. There was, they suggested, a fuller experience, a greater liberation than so far enjoyed. So they offered to complete and perfect the simple and elementary faith to which the Colossians had been introduced by Epaphras. Can you sense the desolation, the uncertainty, the painful questioning and the introspection that would have been engendered in Colossae? 'I wonder if I am really a Christian?' 'Perhaps there is something more that I need?' There are today, sadly, groups within the Church of Jesus Christ, who while they might not he advocating 'hollow and deceptive (Gnostic or New Age) philosophies', are nearer to the Colossian heresy than they might realise. By offering Christians new liberty, new power, deliverance and freedom in the Spirit (and that seems to have been exactly what the Colossian believers were offered), the effect, intentional or not, is to cast doubt upon the adequacy of the work of Christ and to imply that there is something more that is necessary; the effect is to raise painful doubts over one's standing in Christ and to belittle that Gospel which has been heard and embraced in the past.