1 Paul, by God's will an apostle of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, to the church of God that is at Corinth, and all God's people all over Greece;
2 God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ bless you and give you peace.
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the merciful Father, and the God always ready to comfort!
4 He comforts me in all my trouble, so that I can comfort people who are in any trouble with the comfort with which I myself am comforted by God.
5 For if I have a liberal share of Christ's sufferings, through Christ I have a liberal share of comfort too.
6 If I am in trouble, it is to bring you comfort and salvation, and if I am comforted, it is for the sake of the comfort which you experience when you steadfastly endure such sufferings as I also have to bear.
7 My hopes for you are unshaken. For I know that just as surely as you share my sufferings, just so surely you will share my comfort.
8 For I do not want you, brothers, to misunderstand the distress that I experienced in Asia, for I was so utterly and unendurably crushed, that I actually despaired of life itself.
9 Why, I felt in my heart that the end must be death. That was to keep me from relying on myself instead of on God, who can even raise the dead.
10 So deadly was the peril from which he saved me, as he will save me again! It is on him that I have set my hope that he will save me again.
11 You must help me by your prayers, so that many will give thanks to God on my behalf for the blessing granted me in answer to many prayers.
12 For my boast is what my conscience tells me, that my relations to the world and still more to you have been marked by pure motives and godly sincerity, not by worldly shrewdness but by the favor of God.
13 For what I am writing to you is only what you can read and understand, and I hope that you will understand it fully,
14 as some of you have come to understand me, and that you will understand that you have a right to be proud of me, as I have of you, on the Day of our Lord Jesus.
15 It was because I was sure of this that I wanted to come to see you before going anywhere else, to give you a double pleasure;
16 I was going to visit you on my way to Macedonia, and then to come back to you from Macedonia and have you see me off for Judea.
17 Was it vacillating of me to want to do that? Do I make my plans like a worldly man, ready to say "Yes" and "No" in the same breath?
18 As surely as God can be relied on, there has been no equivocation about our message to you.
19 The Son of God, Christ Jesus, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus, Timothy, and I, you have not found wavering between "Yes" and "No." With him it has always been "Yes,"
20 for to all the promises of God he supplies the "Yes" that confirms them. That is why we utter the "Amen" through him, when we give glory to God.
21 But it is God who guarantees us and you to Christ; he has anointed us
22 and put his seal upon us and given us his Spirit in our hearts, as earnest-money.