“Keep your Bibles open. My job is to preach the text; your job is to make sure what I’m saying is really there,” my pastor said to begin his Easter morning sermon. Liam was appropriately preaching out of John 20, so I slipped out my Greek New Testament and tried to follow along in it. In doing so…
How can we please God? Colossians 1:9-12 is a complex passage with lots of participles and prepositional phrases. One could translate each clause and read it well enough, but analyzing the paragraph as a whole enables us to see what the major idea of the passage is and how Paul develops that idea. After Paul tells his readers that he always thanks God for their faith, hope, and love, he continues on that basis (Διὰ τοῦτο, “because of this”) to say that he never ceases praying and asking “that you might be filled” (ἵνα πληρωθῆτε) with the knowledge of God’s will….
Εὐχαριστοῦμεν τῷ θεῷ πατρὶ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ πάντοτε περὶ ὑμῶν προσευχόμενοι, ἀκούσαντες τὴν πίστιν ὑμῶν ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ καὶ τὴν ἀγάπην ἣν ἔχετε εἰς πάντας τοὺς ἁγίους 5 διὰ τὴν ἐλπίδα τὴν ἀποκειμένην ὑμῖν ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, ἣν προηκούσατε ἐν τῷ λόγῳ τῆς ἀληθείας τοῦ εὐαγγελίου
(Colossians 1:3-5)
In Colossians 1:3-5 we see Paul’s triad of faith, hope, and love. By sorting out what a particular prepositional phrase modifies, we discover something unique about Christian hope. The main idea of this section is the first verb, “We give thanks.” Paul then explains the reason why he and his co-workers give thanks: ἀκούσαντες (because we have heard) of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints….