For what I am writing you is nothing more than what you can read and understand, and I hope that you will understand it perfectly, just as some of you have come to understand me partially;

that is, to go by you on my way to Macedonia, and then to come back to you from Macedonia, and have you send me on to Judea.

This is the very thing I wrote you, that when I did come I might not be made sad by the very people who ought to make me glad, for I had confidence in you all that my gladness would be gladness to you all.

Not that I am myself qualified to consider anything as coming from me myself. No, my qualification comes from God, for

And all of us, with faces uncovered, because we continue to reflect like mirrors the splendor of the Lord, are being transformed into likeness to Him, from one degree of splendor to another, since it comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

For I know that if this earthly tent in which I live is taken down, I have a building in heaven which comes from God, a house not built by human hands but eternal.

For if anybody is in union with Christ, he is the work of a new creation; the old condition has passed away, a new condition has come.

He made Him who personally knew nothing of sin to be a sin-offering for us, so that through union with Him we might come into right standing with God.

Therefore: "'Come out of company with them, and separate from them,' the Lord has said, 'And stop touching what is unclean; then I will welcome you,

For the sorrow that comes in accordance with the will of God results in repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regrets, but the sorrow the world produces results in death.

to keep me -- not to mention you -- from being humiliated for having such confidence in you, if some Macedonians come with me and find that you are not ready.

For if anybody comes along and preaches another Jesus than the one I preached, or you receive another spirit different from the one you did receive or a glad message different from the one you did accept, you listen to it all right!

It is now the third time that I have been ready to come to see you, and I will never ask you for financial support, for it is not your money but you yourselves that I want; for children are not by duty bound to lay up money for their parents, but parents for their children.

Are you thinking all this time that I am defending myself to you? It is in the very presence of God and as one who is in union with Christ that I am speaking. And it is all for building you up, beloved, for I am apprehensive that, somehow or other, when I come I shall find you not as I want to find you, and that you may find me not as you want to find me.

and that when I come back my God may humiliate me before you, and I may have to mourn over some of those who formerly have committed shocking sins, and have not repented for them -- their impurity, sexual immorality, and sensuality, which once they practiced.

I have already warned those who formerly committed shocking sins, and all the rest, and though so far away I warn them now, as I did on my second visit, that if I come back I will not spare them,

This is why I am writing this while far away from you, that when I do come, I may not have to deal harshly with you in accordance with the authority which the Lord has given me, for building you up, not for tearing you down.