“Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”
— Colossians 4:2-6
Context & Key Themes
The final chapter opens with a brief continuation of the household instructions from chapter 3 — masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven — and then turns to the whole church with three interconnected instructions on prayer, outward witness, and speech. Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. The verb for continue steadfastly (proskartereo) is the same one Luke uses in Acts 2 to describe the early church’s persistence in the apostles’ teaching and prayer. Paul is calling the Colossians to sustained prayer, not occasional prayer; alert prayer, not drowsy prayer; thankful prayer, not anxious prayer. And he asks them to include him specifically: pray for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison, that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. Even from chains, Paul’s concern is not release but clarity.
The instruction about outward witness follows immediately. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. The word for outsiders (tous exo) is literally those outside — those not yet part of the household of faith. Paul is giving the Colossians practical wisdom for living as believers among non-believers. Wisdom, not just correctness. And making the best use of the time — literally redeeming the opportunity — buying up the moment, using the occasions that present themselves rather than letting them pass. The witness is continual and contextual, shaped by the situations the believer actually finds himself in, not only in the situations where witness would be most comfortable.
Summary
The instruction about speech in verse 6 is worth sitting with for a moment: let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. Seasoned with salt is a striking phrase. Salt in the ancient world was a preservative and a flavoring — it kept food from going bad and it made food taste like food. Paul uses the image for Christian speech: not bland, not sanitized into tastelessness, but also not corrupted or decaying. Speech that has enough tang to be interesting, enough preservative quality to not go rotten, and enough graciousness that each individual hearer receives what is fitted to them — which is why Paul adds how you ought to answer each person. Not a formula delivered identically to all, but a wisdom calibrated to the person in front of you. The same gospel, the same salt, but seasoned for the specific palate of the specific hearer.
From verse 7 the letter shifts into closing greetings, and the list is denser and more revealing than it first appears. Tychicus, a beloved brother and faithful minister, is the carrier of the letter and will update the Colossians on Paul’s situation. With him travels Onesimus, described as our faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you — and this is the runaway slave whose simultaneous story Paul is telling in the letter to Philemon, traveling with the same delegation. The description of Onesimus as beloved brother and one of you is theological freight. The slave who fled his master is now being sent back as a brother in Christ, named publicly as a member of the Colossian church. Aristarchus, Paul’s fellow prisoner. Mark, the cousin of Barnabas — and Paul notes they have received instructions concerning him, possibly a reference to their earlier disagreement recorded in Acts 15 now resolved. Jesus called Justus, one of the few Jewish believers with Paul. Then Epaphras, the Colossians’ own founding pastor, who is always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God. Luke the beloved physician — the author of the third gospel and Acts, traveling with Paul. And Demas, who would later abandon Paul (2 Timothy 4:10) but at the time of this writing was still present.
Paul closes with instructions for the letter itself. The Colossians are to read it, then have it read at the nearby church in Laodicea, and in turn read the letter from Laodicea (a document now lost to history, though some scholars have speculated Ephesians may be that letter). Archippus is to be reminded to fulfill the ministry the Lord has given him. And then, in a final authenticating gesture common in ancient letter-writing, Paul signs with his own hand: I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Remember my chains. Grace be with you.
Reflection
The detail worth lingering on in the closing is the phrase our faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you attached to Onesimus. In the Roman world, a runaway slave caught and returned was typically returned for severe punishment — branding, flogging, crucifixion. Masters had full legal authority. And Onesimus had not simply run; he had, according to the letter to Philemon, also stolen from his master on the way out. By every standard of Colossae’s legal and social world, he was returning to a catastrophic reckoning. And Paul inserts him into the final greetings of this letter not as a cautionary case study, not as a problem to be managed, but as a faithful and beloved brother, one of you — asking the Colossian church, which includes his former master Philemon, to receive him with the same language Paul has used for Tychicus and Epaphras. This is the cosmic Christ of chapter 1, and the fullness that dwells bodily from chapter 2, and the putting on of compassionate hearts from chapter 3, all arriving in a single practical test: what will Colossae do with Onesimus? If the theology is real, it reaches here. If it doesn’t reach here, none of the rest of it is what it claims to be.
The letter has traveled a very long distance from its opening hymn of cosmic supremacy to this closing question of a runaway slave’s return, and yet the distance is not really a distance. The same Christ who holds the universe together is the one whose lordship makes a runaway slave a beloved brother, and the same Christ whose cross disarmed the rulers and authorities is the one whose cross has rendered the legal claims of slavery secondary to the brotherhood of the baptized. Colossae will have to decide whether it believes the letter or not. The same choice confronts every church that has inherited it. The hymn and the household and the runaway slave are all held together by one claim — that Christ is enough, that Christ is Lord, and that Christ has made his people one. Paul signs with his own hand, asks the Colossians to remember his chains, and ends where he began: with grace.