Study Desk

because we are members of his body.

"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."

Only you also, each one of you, must thus love his own wife as himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Finally, become strong in the Lord and in the might of his strength.

For the one at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure, is God.

But you know his proven character, that like a child with a father he served with me for the gospel.

because on account of the work of Christ he came near to the point of death, risking his life in order that he might make up for your inability to serve me.

so that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death,

who will transform our humble body to be conformed to his glorious body, in accordance with the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

And my God will fulfill your every need according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

Because of this also we, from the day we heard about it, did not cease praying for you, and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual insight,

enabled with all power, according to his glorious might, for all steadfastness and patience with joy,

and through him to reconcile all things to himself, by making peace through the blood of his cross, through him, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

but now you have been reconciled by his physical body through death, to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,

Now I rejoice in my sufferings on behalf of you, and I fill up in my flesh what is lacking of the afflictions of Christ, on behalf of his body which is the church,

the mystery which has been hidden from the ages and from the generations, but has now been revealed to his saints,

for which purpose also I labor, striving according to his working which is at work powerfully in me.

Let no one condemn you, taking pleasure in humility and the worship of angels, going into detail about the things which he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind,

Do not lie to one another, because you have taken off the old man together with his deeds,

Epaphras, who is one of you, greets you, a slave of Christ always struggling on behalf of you in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.