Colossians 4: Paul Asks for Prayers on How He Speaks

A coworker named Terrence stopped at my desk on Wednesday with a sign-up sheet for Friday's lunch order and asked, "You're a no on the Thai place, right? Is that a thing for you?" I told him it wasn't a thing, and then I kept going, through Kirtland and the council of high priests and 1833 and the part about "adapted to the capacity of the weak," until I noticed he'd clicked his pen twice and was looking at the next desk.

"So that's a no on the pad thai," he said, and wrote it down.

He'd have taken the no on the pad thai and been glad of it. I gave him about ninety seconds on a question that wanted one word, and when I opened Colossians 4 on Sunday morning, verse 6 was sitting there waiting for me.

What Paul says about answering

Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.
(Colossians 4:6)

The verb is answer, and you can't answer until somebody has asked. The verse before it sets up the same thing: "Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time" (Colossians 4:5). Without is the old word for outside, and Paul used it in 1 Corinthians 5:12 as well, where he asks what he has to do with judging "them also that are without."

So the picture is a person from outside the church and a question, and then a member who has to decide how much of himself goes into the answer.

Paul doesn't say which job of salt he means. It keeps food and it flavors food, and a pinch is the right amount of either one. Nobody sits down to a spoonful. Leviticus 2:13 says every meat offering was to be seasoned with salt, "the salt of the covenant of thy God," so for a Colossian who knew the law the word may already have sounded like the altar and not the kitchen.

Grace comes first in the verse, ahead of the salt.

He asks for prayers about his own speaking

The verses just ahead of that one are easy to read past, and they changed how I heard verse 6.

Withal praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds:
That I may make it manifest, as I ought to speak.
(Colossians 4:3-4)

Paul is in prison when he says this, and if I were in his place and a church asked what I needed, I'd say a lawyer or a different emperor. He asks for a door instead, and it isn't the cell door. A door of utterance means a chance to speak, and what he wants once it opens is to say it clearly.

Paul wants to speak "as I ought to speak," and two verses later the Colossians get "how ye ought to answer." It's the same small word, ought, and the man dictating this letter is asking for prayers that he'll get his own speaking right, and then he turns around and tells the Colossians to work on theirs, and I'd guess the Colossians noticed that.

Verse 2 is the setup for all of it: "Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving." Watch is a good word to put next to prayer, because the thing you watch for is the question that's actually being asked.

The names at the end, and the two Paul handles differently

Most of the second half of the chapter is greetings, which is the kind of list a reader skims the way he skims credits, and two of the names are worth stopping on.

The first is Marcus, and verse 10 gives him a parenthesis: "Marcus, sister's son to Barnabas, (touching whom ye received commandments: if he come unto you, receive him;)". Paul is taking a minute there, since somebody had already told the Colossians something about Marcus, and he doesn't say who or what. But in Acts 15:37-39 there's a Barnabas who wants to take John, "whose surname was Mark," and a Paul who "thought not good to take him," and the contention gets so sharp the two of them part ways. Most readers take this to be the same man, and so do I. Later, in 2 Timothy 4:11, Paul writes, "Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry."

Whatever happened between the two men, Paul is the one here asking a church to receive Marcus.

The second name is Demas. Verse 14 reads "Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas, greet you." Luke gets a title and a little warmth while Demas gets a name and a verb, and Philemon 24 lists him among Paul's "fellowlabourers" in the same breath as Marcus and Luke. Then 2 Timothy 4:10: "Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world."

Marcus was once the man Paul wouldn't travel with, and Demas is a friend here who later left. The greetings treat the two of them alike and in the same breath, and what happens next to each of them is in other letters.

Epaphras, a few verses later, and still a man of prayer, is the one who gets "always labouring fervently for you in prayers" (Colossians 4:12). He's also the man the Colossians learned from in the first place, according to Colossians 1:7, which I touched on in Colossians 1 Doesn't End at Verse 20.

Archippus gets told in front of everyone

The last instruction in the chapter is a strange one, and it reads "And say to Archippus, Take heed to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord, that thou fulfil it" (Colossians 4:17). Paul isn't writing to Archippus. He writes to the whole church and asks them to pass the message along, and the letter is going to be read aloud (verse 16) with Archippus somewhere in the congregation, as far as anyone can tell.

I read it as help more than rebuke. A church that hears a man's name read aloud with his assignment attached knows what he's supposed to be doing, and it can see whether he's getting any. The chapter never says what the ministry was.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "them that are without" mean in Colossians 4:5?

It means people outside the church, and Paul uses the same phrase in 1 Corinthians 5:12-13 when he's sorting out whose conduct is the church's business to judge, so it's his regular word for the neighbors. I don't read it as a warning to keep away from them, and the verse goes wrong if you hear it that way.

What does "seasoned with salt" mean?

Paul doesn't say, and since salt keeps things and also flavors them, I'd leave both on the table. Jesus told the disciples in Mark 9:50 to "have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another." I take the Colossians verse as speech that has some taste to it and enough grace to be eaten. A very bland answer and a very salty one both fail.

Is Colossians 4:6 about missionary work?

I wouldn't say so, because the verse says answer and an answer starts from a question somebody else asked. Compare 1 Peter 3:15, "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear." Both of them wait for the asking.

Why would a letter end with a list of names?

Because the letter was going to be read aloud, and verse 16 says it will be read "among you" and then passed to Laodicea, so the Colossians would hear Nymphas and the church in his house (verse 15) named, and Nymphas would hear the rest of the names once the letter reached him. A name in a letter like that was a way of saying someone had been thought about in Rome.

One more question for you

Has someone outside the church ever asked you something small that you answered badly, and are you still thinking about it? I'd like to hear what the question was.

— D.