Yes, your obedience has been told to everybody; so I am delighted about you, but I want you to be wise about what is good and innocent about what is bad.

Brothers, stop being children in intelligence, but as to evil keep on being babies; and yet as to intelligence be men of maturity.

But I am apprehensive that, somehow or other, as the serpent by his cunning deceived Eve, your thoughts may be turned aside from single-hearted devotion to Christ.

So you must be very careful how you live, not thoughtlessly but thoughtfully,

This is why, ever since I heard of it, I have never ceased praying for you and asking God to fill you, through full wisdom and spiritual insight, with a clear knowledge of His will,

Practice living prudently in your relations with outsiders, making the most of your opportunities.

Harmless

For such men are really not serving our Lord Christ but their own base appetites, and by their fair and flattering talk they are deceiving the hearts of unsuspecting people.

For my boast is this, to which my conscience testifies, that before the world, but especially before you, I have acted from pure motives and in sincerity before God, not depending on worldly wisdom but on God's unmerited favor.

I am arranging it so that no one can blame me in the matter of this munificent fund that is being handled by me.

But I am apprehensive that, somehow or other, as the serpent by his cunning deceived Eve, your thoughts may be turned aside from single-hearted devotion to Christ.

so that you may prove to be blameless and spotless, faultless children of God in a crooked and perverted age, in which you shine as light-bearers in the world as you continue

You can testify, and God too, with what pure, upright, and irreproachable motives I dealt with you who believed;

Continue to abstain from every sort of evil.