A Church to Thank God For

Colossians 1:3-8

After nearly 20 years of ministry preaching the gospel of Christ and planting churches all over the eastern Mediterranean, the apostle Paul sat imprisoned in Rome. From there, he wrote his “prison epistles”. One of these he sent to the church at Colosse—a church he only knew secondhand, and yet, as we will see in our passage today, a church for which Paul was truly grateful to God. But it was also a church that was facing heretical attacks on the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ. This type of heresy would later become known as Gnosticism, emphasizing an elite, special knowledge (gnosis), and denying the deity and saving work of Jesus.

Thus, the theme of Colossians is the preeminence and all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ. Paul’s intention was that by “warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus,” (Col. 1:28). He said wanted them to understand that “Christ is all and in all,” (Col. 3:11) and that “you are complete in Him” (Col. 2:10).

Last time, we saw how Paul opened the letter by greeting the church, emphasizing the authority of his apostleship by the will of God and the identity of the church as saints and faithful brethren in Christ (Col. 1:1-2). Now, in the first part of the body of the letter, Paul begins where he so often begins in his letters—with a word of thanksgiving to God (Col. 1:3-8)