So I have thought it necessary to urge these brothers to visit you ahead of me and get your promised love-offering ready beforehand, so as to have it ready as a real love-offering, not as one grasped and grudgingly given.

for I know how ready you are, and am always boasting about you to the Macedonians, telling them that Greece has been ready for a year past; and your zeal has been a spur to the majority of them.

And {we are ready} to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is completed.

Behold, this third [time] I am ready to come to you, and I will not be a burden [to you]. For I am not seeking your possessions, but you. For children are not obligated to save up for their parents, but parents for their children.

Now therefore compleat the work, that as there was a ready will, so there may be also a performance, in proportion to what ye have.

For if there be first a ready mind, a man is accepted, according to what he hath, not according to what he hath not.

and for the declaration of our ready mind) Avoiding this, lest any one should blame us in this abundance, which is administred by us.

Yet I have sent the brethren, lest our boasting of you on this head should be made vain, that, as I said, ye may be ready;

yet still within our province, abundantly, So as to preach the gospel in the regions beyond you, not to boast in another's province of things made ready to our hand.

For unto their power, I bear them witness, and above their power, they were voluntarily ready [to give]:

For he received in deed the exhortation, but being more diligent, of his own ready mind he went unto you.

and not only so, but who was chosen by the churches as my fellow-traveller with this charity, ministered by us to the glory of the same Lord, and [to shew] your ready mind.

See what great earnestness godly sorrow has produced in you! How ready you are to clear yourselves, how indignant, how alarmed, how full of longing and enthusiasm, how eager to seek justice! In every way you have demonstrated that you are innocent in this matter.

Otherwise, if any Macedonians come with me and find out that you are not ready, we would be humiliated to say nothing of you in this undertaking.

So then, was I indecisive or capricious when I was [originally] planning this? Or the things I plan, do I plan in a self-serving way like a worldly man, ready to say, “Yes, yes” and “No, no” [at the same time]?