The document discusses how Jesus canceled the charges against humanity and nailed them to the cross. It says the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. It encourages the reader to not be misled by persuasive arguments but to walk with Christ as they have received him.

1. He canceled the record of the charges
against us and took it away by nailing it to
the cross.

3. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift
of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

4. Separated Salutation

5. For I want you to know how great a struggle I
have on your behalf and for those who are at
Laodicea, and for all those who have not
personally seen my face,

6. that their hearts may be encouraged, having
been knit together in love, and attaining to all
the wealth that comes from the full assurance of
understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of
God's mystery, that is, Christ Himself,

7. FALSE INFORMATION

8. in whom are hidden all the treasures of
wisdom and knowledge.
I say this so that no one will delude you with
persuasive argument.

9. POSITIVE
EVALUATION

10. For even though I am absent in body,
nevertheless I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to
see your good discipline and the stability of
your faith in Christ.

11. Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus
the Lord, so walk in Him, 7 having been firmly
rooted and now being built up in Him and
established in your faith, just as you were
instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.

12. APPRECIATION

13. SPIRTUAL
AFFIRMATION

14. See to it that no one takes you captive through
philosophy and empty deception, according to
the tradition of men, according to the
elementary principles of the world, rather than
according to Christ.

15. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in
bodily form,
and in Him you have been made complete,
and He is the head over all rule and authority;

16. and in Him you were also circumcised with a
circumcision made without hands, in the
removal of the body of the flesh by the
circumcision of Christ;

17. having been buried with Him in baptism, in
which you were also raised up with Him
through faith in the working of God, who raised
Him from the dead.

18. When you were dead in your transgressions
and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made
you alive together with Him, having forgiven us
all our transgressions,

19. having canceled out the certificate of debt
consisting of decrees against us, which was
hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the
way, having nailed it to the cross.

20. This makes it clear, doesn't it, that whatever is
written in these Scriptures is not what God says
about others but to us to whom these Scriptures
were addressed in the first place! And it's clear
enough, isn't it, that we're sinners, every one of
us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else?

21. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life
in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently
cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime
of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

22. God went for the jugular when he sent his
own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as
something remote and unimportant. In his
Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human
condition, entered the disordered mess of

23. struggling humanity in order to set it right once
and for all. The law code, weakened as it always
was by fractured human nature, could never
have done that.

24. And now what the law code asked for but we
couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead
of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace
what the Spirit is doing in us.

25. Those who think they can do it on their own
end up obsessed with measuring their own
moral muscle but never get around to
exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's
action in them find that God's Spirit is in them -
living and breathing God!

26. Obsession with self in these matters is a dead
end; attention to God leads us out into the
open, into a spacious, free life.
Focusing on the self is the opposite of
focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed
in self ignores God, ends up thinking more

27. about self than God. That person ignores who
God is and what he is doing.
And God isn't pleased at being ignored.
But if God himself has taken up residence in
your life, you can hardly be thinking more of
yourself than of him.

28. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this
invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of
Christ, won't know what we're talking about.
But for you who welcome him, in whom he
dwells - even though you still experience all the
limitations of sin - you yourself experience life

29. on God's terms.
It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-
and-present God who raised Jesus from the
dead moves into your life, he'll do the same
thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you
alive to himself? When God lives and breathes

30. in you (and he does, as surely as he did in
Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life.
With his Spirit living in you, your body will be
as alive as Christ's!
So don't you see that we don't owe this old
do-it-yourself life one red cent.

31. There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all.
The best thing to do is give it a decent burial
and get on with your new life.
God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do
and places to go!

32. In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers
and authorities. He shamed them publicly by
his victory over them on the cross.