If I am afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if I am receiving comfort, it is for your comfort?? comfort produced within you by your patient fortitude, under the same sufferings which I also am enduring.

as some indeed did recognize in part at last, that I am your cause of boasting, just as you will be mine on the Day of Jesus our Lord.

As to him who has been, and now is, causing pain, it is not I whom he has pained, but all of you??t least some of you (not to overstate the case).

Am I beginning again to "recommend" myself? Or do I need, as some do, letters of commendation either to you or from you?

Nay, their minds were made dull; for to this very day, at the public reading of the Old Testament, the same veil rests thereon, because it is not revealed to them that in Christ the veil is taken away.

And we all, with unveiled faces, reflecting like a mirror the glory of the Lord, are ourselves continually being transformed into the same likeness, from glory to glory, as by the Lord, the Spirit.

But having the same spirit of faith of which it is written, I believed, and therefore have spoken, I also believe and so I speak.

But thanks be to God who has inspired in the heart of Titus the same zeal on your behalf that I have.

Now I Paul, myself, appeal to you by the humble-heartedness and selflessness of Christ??aul who "in your presence is humble, but bold enough when he is absent"??2 I beseech you, and I say, do not make me show my boldness, when I come in the boldness with which I think I shall show my courage against some who think that I am walking on the low level of the flesh.

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

If indeed some one is coming to preach another Jesus, whom I did not preach, or you are receiving a Spirit other than you once received, or another gospel which you did not accept before, you would do well to bear with me.

I am doing and will continue to do this in order to cut away the ground from under those who wish some cause for slander; and that the ground of their boasting may appear as does mine.

I urged Titus to go, and with him I sent our brother. Did Titus make gain of you? And did I not walk in the same spirit as he did? Did I not take the very same steps?

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.