1For I would have you know how great a contest I am waging for you and the brethren in Laodicea, and for all who have never seen my face. 2May their hearts be comforted! May they be knit together in love! May they gain in all its riches the full assurance of their understanding! May they come to a perfect knowledge of the secret truth of God, which is Christ himself. 3In Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge! 4And this I say, lest any one should mislead you with enticing words. 5For though I am absent from you in body, I am with you in spirit, happy to note your discipline and the solid front of your faith in Christ. 6As then you have received Jesus Christ, your Lord, in him live your lives; 7since you are rooted in him, and in him continually built up. Be firmly established in the faith as you were taught it, and continually abound in it with thanksgiving. 8Take care lest any man drag you away captive by his philosophy which is a vain deceit, following the traditions of men and the worlds crude notions, and not Christ. 9For it is in Christ that all the fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10and in him you have your fulness, and he is the Lord of all the principalities and powers. 11In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands; even in putting off your sensual nature in Christs own circumcision, 12when you were buried with him in baptism. In baptism also you were raised with him, through your faith in the energy of that God who raised him from the dead. 13And you also, at one time dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your sensual nature, he has made alive together with himself. For he forgave us all our transgressions, 14blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that stood against us and was hostile to us, and took it out of our way, nailing it to his cross. 15Principalities and powers he disarmed, and openly displayed them as his trophies, when he triumphed over them in the cross. 16Therefore do not permit any one to sit in judgment on you in regard to what you may eat or drink, or in regard to feast-days or new moons or sabbaths. 17These were a shadow of things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18Let no man at his will defraud you of your prize through his false humility and worship of the angels, taking his stand on the visions he has seen, and vainly puffed up by his material mind; 19instead of keeping connection with the Head from the whole body draws nourishment for all its needs by the joints which bind it; and is knit together, and grows with a divine growth. 20If you died with Christ to the worlds rudimentary notions, why, as if you still lived in the world, do you submit yourselves to dogmatisms found on teachings and doctrines of men - 21such as "Do not handle this," "You must not taste that," "Do not touch this" - 22all things which are intended to perish in the using? 23For these precepts, although they have a show of wisdom with their self-imposed devotions and fastings and bodily austerities, are of no real value against the indulgence of the carnal appetites.