Colossians 2:2 - All we need is love. And Jesus.

"...in order that their hearts should be encouraged, having been brought together in love and unto all wealth of the full assurance of understanding, unto a full knowledge of the mystery of God, of Christ..." 

-So the goal, the desired outcome of Paul’s agonizing and praying is for believers to be encouraged.  The word is parakaleo, to comfort, console, encourage, urge on, implore, exhort.  The gist is that people are helped to follow through or keep going as a result of someone bringing this parakaleo to bear in their lives.  Paul wants to help these believers to keep going, for them to continue in the faith and to be following hard after Jesus wherever He leads for the rest of their lives (Acts 14.22, 16.40, 20.1-2, 1Thessalonians 2.11).  In fact, this is what Paul does - the consummate encourager (and of course he had a great teacher, cf Acts 4.36, 9.27).  Parakaleo appears over and over throughout his letters - he is constantly exhorting and encouraging people to keep going, doing whatever he can towards that end, laboring in prayer leading by example, and then he urges others to be doing the same (Ephesians 6.22, 1Thessalonians 3.2, 5.11). 

-Now, do you know what is fundamentally needed in order for people to keep going?  Love.  That’s what Paul says here.  And it is not Paul’s love for them, but rather the experience of God’s love in community - the amazing everlasting love of God that is found within and through the fellowship of God’s people.  God - no doubt by His Spirit - joins the hearts of His people together with the love that He has for them and gives them that same love for one another.  It’s the experience of this sacrificial giving love that helps them keep going no matter what form of opposition or hardship they might be enduring.

-The other thing that helps them keep going is growing in their understanding of Jesus.  These believers were actually being confronted with some of the teachings of gnosticism, a movement which claimed to pursue and to have found hidden knowledge about the mysterious things of God.  Paul’s letter is an attempt in part to counter this claim of hidden knowledge, and to affirm that the beginning and the end of the Christian life (and everything in between) is Jesus.  To be sure, God is a mystery to some, but He has shown Himself to the world through Jesus Christ, and reveals everything we need to know about Him through the Word of Christ and the Spirit of Christ, Who lives inside every true believer.  No hidden knowledge here, but buried treasure awaits, an inexhaustible supply of life-changing world-changing truth ready to be gleaned by those who make it their goal to know and understand Jesus.

"...to live is Christ... More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings..." -Paul in Philippians 1.21, 3.8-10