²¹ Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behaviour. 

We are worthy of the life of God Himself but Scripture always does not forget to add what we were before – not to shame us but because remembering this is essentially to our benefit. To have been ‘alienated from God’ – a crucial concept in understanding the nature of our ‘sin’ – quite different from the ordinary definition of it.

²² But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation – 

Christ represented that ‘alienated-ness’ in the physical body and by putting it to death eliminated the cause of (secretly) desiring to be alienated from God and have nothing to do with him.

²³ if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.

What looks like a conditional phrase, is not a condition. In fact ‘continuing in faith’ is the evidence Christ has done the work for you mentioned in v.22 and the Holy Spirit has applied it to you. Paul is called to proclaim that this is true for you!  

²⁴ Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. 

If his fleshly body represented the human’s secret desire (though his own was free from it!), Christ’s ‘spiritual’ body is the church, the ‘body’ of believers. What does it lack? It lacks but one thing – knowing God and his sent one ever so fully. For the job of letting this be known to all who God calls Paul goes through ‘suffering’.

²⁵ I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness – 

Paul chosen to preach this message so that God, his heart for us, and his putting it into action may be fully known to us, not in part.

²⁶ the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. 

This was only partly known in the Old Testament age, but now Christ has been, God’s message and intention is fully uncovered. It is known mystery.

²⁷ To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Just as God called Abraham out of Babylon, called Adam out of dust, God has called us from nothing, from worshipping whatever, esp. my own ‘belly’ (Phil 3:19), to knowing him, the Creator, the Father who made me. This is called ‘Creation’.  

²⁸ He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. 

Therefore being ‘mature in Christ’ has nothing to do with becoming great me or realising myself! It has everything to do with knowing, and therefore ‘being filled’ with such God, who loved, planned, and did all these for you and me. This is truly who you are.

²⁹ To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.

‘Energy’ sounds like a new-age thing, but here it is but the power God raised Jesus’ body that is just like ours from death back to ‘life’ (of knowing him!). That is what ‘power’ is always associated with.

We thought how possibly we might ‘walk before me faithfully and be blameless’ (God’s command to Abraham, Gen 17:1). But it was God’s promise that he would do it through Christ for us so that we are not far away from God anymore but close to God, so close that we are in him, as intended at first. Thinking these releases us from daily nitty-gritty but sets us in the right gear so that we are driven by the right source.

Lord, thank you is a too small and inadequate word. But I still thank you for being there and know for sure what is going on. When confused and dragged down by all sorts of heavy bags of body and mind, let me be able to remember you even just for a minute and be lifted to know that I am your child who is in you.