no, God has attested our fitness to be entrusted with the gospel, and so we tell the gospel not to satisfy men but to satisfy the God who tests our hearts.

fain, in our yearning affection for you, to impart not only the gospel of God to you but our very souls as well ??you had so won our love.

Brothers, you recollect our hard labour and toil, how we worked at our trade night and day, when we preached the gospel to you, so as not to be a burden to any of you.

You are witnesses, and so is God, to our behaviour among you believers, how pious and upright and blameless it was,

by hindering us from speaking words of salvation to the Gentiles. So they would fill up the measure of their sins to the last drop! But the Wrath is on them to the bitter end!

Brothers, when we were bereft of you for a little while (out of sight, not out of mind), we were the more eager to see you. We had a keen longing for you.

So, unable to bear it any longer, I made up my mind to be left behind at Athens all alone;

for we told you beforehand, when we were with you, that "we Christians are to have trouble" ??and, as you know, it has been so.)

But when Timotheus reached me a moment ago, on his return from you, bringing me the good news of your faith and love and of how you always remember me kindly, longing to see me as I long to see you,

Night and day I pray specially that I may see your faces and supply what is defective in your faith.

so as to strengthen your hearts and make them blameless in holiness before our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones. [Amen.]

Finally, brothers, we beg and beseech you in the Lord Jesus to follow our instructions about the way you are to live so as to satisfy God; you are leading that life, but you are to excel in it still further.

It is God's will that you should be consecrated, that you abstain from sexual vice,

so that your life may be correct in the eyes of the outside world and self-supporting.

then we the living, who survive, will be caught up along with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall be with the Lord for ever.

when 'all's well' and 'all is safe' are on the lips of men, then all of a sudden Destruction is upon them, like pangs on a pregnant woman ??escape there is none.

see that none of you pays back evil for evil, but always aim at what is kind to one another and to all the world;