Colossians 2

We've come to an end of the Good Morning Girls study on Colossians, and now it is a week of review, a chapter a day.
So useful to get an overview.
Years ago, I was taught how to summarise at a Bible Study Fellowship seminar. (Aside: how I loved those studies! So deep, so informative, so life-changing - deeply regret leaving my notes, which weighed kilos, in Kenya when we left.) I don't remember exactly now, but I think it was a case of summarising a sentence, then another, then summarising a group of sentences, then summarising a group of a group...until the whole chapter had been squished together into a sentence or even a word.

Thought I might have a try with Colossians 2.

I began with a poem on verses 2 - 5:
May
your heart be encouraged
knit together in love (with like-minded others)
to reach the richness
of full understanding
and knowledge that you really do 'get' God's secret:
Jesus' gift to us all.
Jesus has all the wisdom and knowledge we could ever want -
the ultimate treasure.
What else would we need?
Don't listen to plausible arguments -
it is JESUS who matters.
Nothing else.

Here goes, a rather loose interpretation for the whole chapter:

Paul says that his aim is to encourage the Colossians so that they may be a united, loving church which understands how to live the Christ life. 

Jesus has everything we need to live, truly live. Yet we have to be careful how we do that, by keeping focused on him, always with hearts full of gratitude for what he has done. We should be on our guard against anything which is not based on him: because he IS God. He has supreme power.

We are new people because we have accepted him: we have new lives now, as if we had been brought back to life from the dead.  We have been forgiven by an amazing God who brought his son back from physical death and, in doing so, defeated everything which works against him.  (We call that evil.)

So we shouldn't let anyone try to put us down because of what we do, trying to make themselves more important by doing so or showing off about their spiritual experiences. We need to recognise that they are no longer grounded with other believers and may themselves have drifted away.

We don't need to restrict ourselves to human 'dos and don'ts'.  They look right, but they just address the externals, things which men and women have put into place.  Restrictions that are put on us by others don't have value in helping us achieve self-discipline in Jesus.

And my sentence for Colossians 2: LIVING FOCUSED, FORGIVEN LIVES, DEPENDING ONLY ON JESUS AND NOT ON MEN'S IDEAS.

I'm not sure this is all quite accurate - still, it was fun trying!