Audio Download

Faith and Love Grow From a Hope Laid Up

Colossians 1:1–8  Part One of a Study in Colossians

“Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timotheus our brother, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colosse: Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We give thanks to God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye have to all the saints, for the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, whereof ye heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel; which is come unto you, as it is in all the world; and bringeth forth fruit, as it doth also in you, since the day ye heard of it, and knew the grace of God in truth: as ye also learned of Epaphras our dear fellowservant, who is for you a faithful minister of Christ; who also declared unto us your love in the Spirit” (Colossians 1:1–8).

The Letter Before the Lesson

Before we look for anything beneath these verses, we should hear what they plainly say to the people who first received them. Colosse sat in the Lycus valley of Phrygia, near Laodicea and Hierapolis (Colossians 4:13, 16). Paul did not plant this church and had never seen it face to face—he says as much: “as many as have not seen my face in the flesh” (Colossians 2:1). The assembly was founded instead by Epaphras, a Colossian by birth (Colossians 4:12), who carried the gospel home to his own city and later carried a report of the church back to Paul in prison.

These first eight verses follow the ordinary shape of a first-century letter: sender, recipients, greeting, thanksgiving; but this thanksgiving is doing work. Before the warnings of chapter two arrive, warnings against teachers peddling philosophy, ordinances, and the worship of angels—Paul quietly certifies three things. What the Colossians received from Epaphras was “the word of the truth of the gospel,” the genuine article, needing no supplement. The man who brought it was “a faithful minister of Christ,” his credential stated before his message is ever challenged. That gospel has already done in Colosse what it does everywhere: it has borne fruit “since the day ye heard of it.” To its first hearers, then, the plain sense is commendation.

One small honesty belongs to the passage before we go further. Verse 6 says the gospel “is come unto you, as it is in all the world.” Scripture uses this manner of speaking elsewhere—“their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world” (Romans 10:18)—and Paul repeats it in this very chapter, “preached to every creature which is under heaven” (Colossians 1:23). Paul means the gospel’s reach, not a completed count.

The Soil in Which Everything Grows

Paul names himself “an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God”—a sent one whose commission begins not in himself but in God. That single phrase sets the key for everything that follows. The apostleship is received, not achieved; and the whole passage will go on to describe a life that is given rather than generated. The letter opens by placing its own authority outside the natural man.

The recipients are “saints and faithful brethren in Christ.” Two words govern the entire reading of this passage: in Christ. This is not a note about where the Colossians live but about the sphere in which they now stand before God. Paul defines that sphere plainly in the same chapter: God “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13). That verse tells us what in Christ means—a real move from one realm into another, the new ground in which everything else grows. Take away that phrase, and there is nothing left to give thanks for; the faith, the love, and the hope have no place to stand apart from it.

Why Hope Comes First

Paul names three things among them: faith, love, and hope. He sets these three together often—“and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three” (1 Corinthians 13:13); “your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope” (1 Thessalonians 1:3). That habit by itself proves nothing about this passage. What matters is the order Paul gives them here, and that order turns on a single small word.

Paul gives thanks “since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye have to all the saints, for the hope which is laid up for you in heaven.” The faith and the love are said to exist for the hope. That word “for” translates the Greek dia (G1223), and in this construction it commonly carries the force of because of. We can watch it do exactly that in two plain places: “he knew that for envy they had delivered him” (Matthew 27:18), where envy is plainly the cause of the delivering, and “many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman” (John 4:39), where the saying is plainly the cause of the believing. So verse 5 reads: faith and love exist because of the hope. Hope is not the last and least item on a list; it is named as the spring from which the other two rise.

This hope is no vague sentiment. It is “laid up for you in heaven.” The words “laid up” translate apokeimai (G606), to be stored away, deposited, kept in reserve. The word appears only a handful of times, and each one shows the same picture. A servant hands back his master’s money, “which I have kept laid up in a napkin” (Luke 19:20)—a deposit held intact and produced at the reckoning. Paul at the end of his course: “there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness… which the Lord… shall give me at that day” (2 Timothy 4:8)—stored now, given then. The hope of Colossians 1:5 is that kind of thing: not a feeling the believer works up, but a thing already banked in heaven, waiting to be disclosed.

This is why hope can be the root and not the afterthought. A hope still uncertain could ground nothing; but a hope already secured can ground everything. Hebrews states the same order plainly: “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is not the thing hoped for; it is the substance of it — the hope stands first, and faith takes firm hold of it. The order runs backward from most religious instinct. Not: believe hard enough and love well enough, and heaven may follow. Rather: the inheritance is already laid up, and out of that settled certainty the faith takes hold of Christ, and the love pours out toward the saints. Where the hope is dim, faith wavers and love cools; where the hope is stored and guaranteed, faith stands and love flows. Paul, later in the same letter, tells us finally what that stored hope is: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). The hope is not an abstraction but a Person.

A Word That Bears Its Own Fruit

Where did this faith, love, and hope come from? Not from the Colossians’ natural religiousness, but from a word that came to them from outside—“the word of the truth of the gospel… which is come unto you.” The word is a seed. The Lord Himself makes the definition: “Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God” (Luke 8:11). And the sequence in Colossians matches the parable term for term. The good-ground hearer “heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit” (Matthew 13:23)—heard, understood, bearing fruit—and Colossians 1:6 runs in the same three stages: the Colossians “heard of it, and knew the grace of God in truth,” and the gospel “bringeth forth fruit.” The word for that “bringeth forth fruit” is karpophoreo (G2592), the very verb used of the good-ground hearer in the Lord’s parable.

Two more witnesses stand entirely outside the parables, so that the point does not hang from a single context. Peter: we are “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever” (1 Peter 1:23). James, using Paul’s exact phrase from this passage: “Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth” (James 1:18). Beneath them both lies the old promise in Isaiah: “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please” (Isaiah 55:11). The word is a living seed that does its own work. The Colossians’ faith and love were not their contribution to the gospel; they were its harvest.

It is worth being careful here, for Scripture does not use the figure of “seed” in only one way. In the very next parable the Lord says, “the good seed are the children of the kingdom” (Matthew 13:38), and Paul can make the seed to be Christ Himself (Galatians 3:16) “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” Scripture scopes its symbols by their setting. So we do not claim that seed always means the word. We claim only what the texts above actually show: where the figure is seed sown, heard, and bearing fruit in hearers, Scripture repeatedly names that seed as the word—and Colossians 1:6 wears exactly that figure.

The fruit is the word’s own doing, not the sower’s. The Lord pictures a man who casts seed and then sleeps and rises, “and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself” (Mark 4:27–28). This is why Paul, who never saw the Colossians’ faces, thanks God rather than congratulating the farmers. Epaphras was a sower, not a source. That is not to say the word works apart from God—Paul is clear elsewhere that “neither is he that planteth anything… but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:7). The word works of itself as against the preacher’s power, not against God’s. Epaphras made nothing grow; God did, through His own living word.

Heard, and Then Known

There is a phrase easy to pass over: the gospel bears fruit “since the day ye heard of it, and knew the grace of God in truth.” Two things are joined—hearing and knowing—and they are not the same. There is a hearing that stays on the surface, and a knowing that becomes inward possession. The Lord marked the difference: “If ye continue in my word… ye shall know the truth” (John 8:31–32). This is the difference between the seed on the trodden path and the seed in good ground. The same word falls on both, but only in the second does it grow roots and bear. A man may hear for years and remain barren. The day of knowing is the day the seed enters the honest heart and life begins—which is why Paul dates the fruit from that day, “the day ye… knew the grace of God in truth.”

A Word Carried, a Love in the Spirit

The passage closes with Epaphras, “a faithful minister of Christ,” through whom the Colossians “learned” the gospel, and who “declared unto us your love in the Spirit.” We need not dig for a hidden meaning in a greeting; the plain fact is instruction enough. It shows how the word of truth travels—not as a bare idea floating into the air, but through a fellow-servant who himself stands in Christ and carries the seed to others. The word that begets is a word ministered.

Notice the last phrase of all: the love Epaphras reports is love “in the Spirit.” This is the quiet key to the whole thanksgiving. The love among the Colossians is not the natural affection of the old man polished up, but a love produced by the spirit of God—for “the fruit of the Spirit is love” (Galatians 5:22), and “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:5). Two witnesses settle it. The love among these brethren is not human warmth refined; it is the Christ’s own life flowing out through them.

What These Eight Verses Establish

Read together, the passage traces the whole shape of a new life—with hope at its root, where Paul places it. A word comes from outside the natural man, the word of truth, and is not merely heard but known, striking root as the day of grace dawns. That word plants a hope already laid up and secured in heaven, and out of that settled hope faith lays hold of Christ and love pours out toward the saints. The whole of it is the Christ’s work, carried by faithful servants, so that even the love among believers is love “in the Spirit” and not the affection of the flesh. This is not the old man improved. It is the appearance of a life that was not there before, rooted in a hope the old man never possessed.

This is why these eight verses stand at the very head of the letter. Chapter two will confront teachers offering supplements—philosophy, ordinances, rule-keeping, the worship of angels. Paul’s opening move is to establish that the word the Colossians already received is a living seed that has already borne fruit, and a hope already banked in heaven. A seed needs cultivation, not additives. A deposit needs faith, not further payments. The argument of the whole epistle is planted in its first eight verses.

There is one question worth naming before we close, even though we will not settle it yet. Verse 5 puts the hope in heaven, laid up and waiting; but later in the chapter Paul says the hope is “Christ in you” (Colossians 1:27). Is our hope kept above us, or does it dwell within us? Paul says both, in the same breath of the same letter. Rather than smoothing that over quickly, we will let it wait, since Colossians 1:27 needs its own study before we can hold the two together. We will come back to it.

Next study: (Colossians 1:9–14) For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness; Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins: