Colossians 2

₁I want you to know how hard I work and suffer to help you and the believers in the town of Laodicea and all the people that I have not yet met. ₂I want to tell everyone that they must keep on loving each other and make very sure that they know everything about God's message of Christ. God wants you to know Christ and his message that no one knew before. ₃Christ has all the knowledge and wisdom, but until now people have not known it. ₄I am telling this to you because I do not want people to deceive you. Some people tell you things that seem to be right, but they are wrong. ₅I am far away from you, but it feels as if I am there with you. I am glad to know that you live as God wants and that you really believe in Christ with all your heart.

₆They have told you that Jesus Christ is Lord and you believe in Him. Now you must live like people who belong to Him. ₇Christ makes your faith strong, like the roots of a tree make a tree strong and the foundation of a house makes a house strong. You must continue to believe the things that you have learned and you must always thank God for everything.

₈Do not listen to people who think they say clever things and to people who want you to believe things that are not_true. They have learned those things from other people, not from Christ. The things they say come from this world, from the people or spirits who think they are strong and they can rule the world. ₉Those people do not speak the truth because Christ, the Son who became Man, is God and He is as strong as God. ₁₀You belong to Christ. Christ has saved you and you are completely like He wants you to be. Christ is stronger than everyone and everything that wants to rule the world.

₁₁You belong to Christ and He has taken away sin's power over you. He has cut it off like someone who is circumcised. This is the circumcision that Christ does. ₁₂He circumcised you when you were baptised. You have been baptised and this means that you were buried with Christ. It also means that God has raised you to live with Christ. This is because you believe in God, who is strong and who made Christ live again. ₁₃You sinned a lot before and therefore you were spiritually_dead. You had not been circumcised which means: God had not yet cut off your sinful lives and all the bad things that you always wanted to do. But God made Christ live again and He also made you live again when He forgave all your sins.

₁₄Long ago, God wrote all our sins in a book because we did not do what his laws say. But God sent Christ to die on the cross and that is how He forgave all our sins that He had written in his book. Yes, He forgave us and took all of our sins out of his book. ₁₅When Christ died on the cross, God took away the weapons from everyone and everything that wanted to rule the world. They became his prisoners and He showed everyone that He has defeated them.

₁₆That is why no one must say that you are wrong when you do not eat or drink the same things as they eat and drink, or if you do not celebrate the feasts like the New-moon-feast and the Sabbath day. ₁₇All those laws and feasts are like shadows. They are not important anymore. They showed only that the One who is really important is coming, and that One is Christ. ₁₈There are people with you who say they are humble, but they lie. They worship angels and they boast and say God showed them visions, but it is not_true. They are proud of the bad things that they think. You must not think that they know more than you and that you are wrong. ₁₉False_teachers like that are not part of Christ. Christ is the Head of the church and the church is his body. He loves the church and He holds all the body-parts together as the muscles of a person's body make the body strong and hold it together. Christ makes the church stronger and that is how God makes the church grow.

₂₀Christ died and you died with Him and your old sinful life stopped living. Why do you want to do what the laws and spirits of this world, which think that they are strong enough to rule this world, want you to do? The people of this world have religious laws, but you do not have to listen to those laws. ₂₁I am talking about the laws that say: ‘Do not pick up this thing, or do not eat that food, or do not touch that thing.’ ₂₂These are laws about things like food and things on earth that will be useless later. These are only laws of people and things that they want you to do. ₂₃Those laws may seem to people to be right and wise. It may seem as if those laws help people to serve God better, and not to be proud and to do the right things with their bodies. But this is not_true. Those laws do not help the people. They do not help people to stop doing the bad things that they like to do.