I HARDLY EVER write an actual letter anymore; most of my communication is by email. I suspect the same is true of you. Many of my messages have to do with asking or answering questions, requesting or giving information. But even with something that straightforward and mundane, there are still social conventions to follow.

Recently, for example, a student (whom I’ll call Jane) was registered for a class I was teaching, and had a question to ask about the requirements. I’m using the word “teaching” quite broadly here, because there was no lecturing or classroom time involved. This was what we call a “directed study” course. Students would read a list of books I assigned, write summaries of them, then integrate what they had learned into a term paper. I typically do directed studies for a few students at a time to enable them to spend their elective credit on a topic of interest to them. This isn’t part of my teaching load; I do it as a favor to the students, and they’re usually happy for the opportunity.

In her request for information, Jane began her email like this: “Dear Professor Lee — hope you are well. Thank you for graciously opening up this elective as an independent study class.” Then she asked a couple of simple questions. In response, I began my email this way: “Hi, Jane. Thanks for reaching out.”

I can’t speak entirely for Jane, but she and I both come from cultures that are highly sensitive to rules of etiquette in communication. Even as the professor, if I don’t start my own messages with “Hi, hope you’re well” or some word of thanks or gratitude, I feel like I’m being rude. I won’t do that for the whole email thread, of course, or it would sound strange — but it’s important to begin the thread well, on the right social footing.

And again, something similar can be said of the Greco-Roman letter-writing conventions of Paul’s day. In previous posts, we’ve seen in detail how Paul both follows and transforms such conventions, loading them with theological significance. He could have opened his letter to the Colossians with “Paul and Timothy, to the church in Colossae — Greetings.” Simple. But instead, he identifies himself as an apostle of Jesus the Messiah. He identifies them as saints. And in something of a trademark play on words, he takes traditional greetings from the Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures and combines them into a prayer for God’s grace and peace to be with the Colossians.

After the opening sender, recipient, and greeting, letters also typically included a word of thanks and/or a prayer. The sender might say something to wish the recipient well or voice a word of thanks, as Jane and I did in our email exchange. In Paul’s cultural context, this could take the form of a prayer to the gods for the recipient.

Thus, when Paul turns to speaking about how he prays for the Colossians, he is again both following and transforming convention. He doesn’t quite say what he prays, but he does say why, and what he says is instructive. Here are his words again, but this time, from the Common English Bible:

We always give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you. We’ve done this since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all God’s people. You have this faith and love because of the hope reserved for you in heaven. You previously heard about this hope through the true message, the good news, which has come to you. This message has been bearing fruit and growing among you since the day you heard and truly understood God’s grace, in the same way that it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world. You learned it from Epaphras, who is the fellow slave we love and Christ’s faithful minister for your sake. He informed us of your love in the Spirit. (Col 1:3-8)

Most of the time, in his other letters, Paul speaks of his own individual thanks and prayers for the churches. But here, he says, “We always give thanks…when we pray for you.” This could be yet another sign of Timothy’s role. He and Timothy pray regularly for the church in Colossae, even if they don’t know them personally. Why? Because nothing matters more than the progress of the gospel, and Paul is encouraged by what he hears from Epaphras. The gospel is bearing fruit throughout the empire, and bearing fruit among the Colossians in particular. We’ll explore that idea further in the next post.

But for now, consider how Paul describes that fruit in the lives of the Colossians. Epaphras has told Paul of their faith, hope, and especially their love. In the history of the church, these three have been known collectively as the “theological virtues.” Perhaps the most memorable expression of them together comes at the end of Paul’s so-called “love chapter” in 1 Corinthians 13: “Now faith, hope, and love remain — these three things — and the greatest of these is love” (vs. 13). There are other places in Paul’s letters where the three are mentioned in the same context, so for him, they formed a tightly knit trio.

But whereas in 1 Corinthians 13 Paul speaks of them in the abstract, in this letter Paul speaks of them as actual attributes of the saints in Colossae. They have faith in Jesus, which at the most basic level means that they believed the gospel message Epaphras preached. But in the New Testament, faith is more than this, more than just believing in your mind that a statement or story is true. Going further, it’s the willingness to trust in that truth, to give yourself to the God whose story the gospel tells.

The gospel, rightly preached, is also a story of hope. The New Testament doesn’t just speak of hope as an emotion. For a Christian who lives in faith, hope has an object; our hope is in the future that has been promised by God. That’s why Paul can speak of it as “the hope reserved for you in heaven.” In 1 Peter 1:4, this is spoken of as an “inheritance that is presently kept safe in heaven”; it’s the hope of resurrection, a hope grounded in the resurrection of Jesus himself.

But as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, of faith, hope, and love, the greatest is love. Paul mentions it twice: he speaks of the Colossians’ “love for all God’s people,” a love that is “in the Spirit.” Their mutual love is a sign of their spiritual growth, and Paul is grateful for it. Unlike his letter to the Galatians, Paul doesn’t immediately launch into correcting their false beliefs; he begins with reminding them how the Holy Spirit is already at work among them in their love. And that, as we’ll see, is one way the gospel is bearing fruit in Colossae.