1 As God's fellow-worker, I appeal to you, too, not to accept the favor of God and then waste it.
2 For he says, "I have listened to you at a welcome time, And helped you on a day of deliverance!" Now the welcome time has come! This is the day of deliverance!
3 I put no obstacles in anyone's path, so that no fault may be found with my work.
4 On the contrary, as a servant of God I try in every way to commend myself to them, through my great endurance in troubles, difficulties, hardships,
5 beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger,
6 through my purity of life, my knowledge, my patience, my kindness, my holiness of spirit, my genuine love,
7 the truth of my teaching, and the power of God; with the weapons of uprightness for the right hand and the left,
8 in honor or dishonor, in praise or blame; considered an imposter, when I am true,
9 obscure, when I am well known, at the point of death, yet here I am alive, punished, but not dead yet,
10 pained, when I am always glad, poor, when I make many others rich, penniless, when really I own everything.
11 I have kept nothing back from you, men of Corinth; I have opened my heart to you.
12 It is not that I am cramping you, it is your own affections.
13 To pay me back, I tell you, my children, you must open your hearts too.
14 Do not get into close and incongruous relations with unbelievers. What partnership can uprightness have with iniquity, or what can light have to do with darkness?
15 How can Christ agree with Belial? Or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever?
16 What bargain can a temple of God make with idols? For we are a temple of the living God, just as God said, "I will live in them and move among them, And I will be their God and they will be my people."
17 Therefore, "Come out from them, And separate from them, says the Lord, And touch nothing that is unclean. Then I will welcome you,
18 I will become a father to you, And you shall become my sons and daughters, Says the Lord Almighty."