For this very purpose also I wrote you (before), that I might test you, to see if you were obedient in every respect.

Since all can see that you are a letter of Christ transcribed by men, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts as tablets.

while I am gazing not at things seen, but at things unseen; for things seen are temporal, but things unseen are eternal.

Now then, as you excel in everything, in faith and utterance and knowledge and all zeal and in your love to me, see to it that you excel in this grace also.

He who ever supplies seed to the sower, and bread for the food of man, will supply and make plentous your seed, and increase the harvest springing up from your almsgiving.

Let it not seem as if I were overawing you with my letters.

If I should choose to continue boasting I should not be foolish, for I should be speaking the truth. But I refrain, lest by the stupendous grandeur of the revelation any one should estimate me beyond what he sees in me, or hears from me.

Examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith; put your own selves to the proof. Or do you not know, your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you, unless indeed you fail to abide the proof?

And my prayer to God is that you may do no evil; not in order that I may appear approved, but that you may do what is noble, though I should seem unable to abide the proof.