In accordance with His will He made us His children by the message of truth, that we might be a kind of first fruits among His creatures.

These are the men who have not been defiled by relations with women, for they are as pure as virgins, These are the men who follow the Lamb wherever He goes. These have been redeemed from among men as the first fruits for God and the Lamb,

which reached you, and since it is bearing fruit and growing among you, just as it is all over the world, from the day you first heard of God's favor and in reality came to know it,

So any healthy tree bears good fruit and a sickly tree bears poor fruit.

A healthy tree cannot bear poor fruit, and a sickly tree cannot bear good fruit.

"For there never is a healthy tree that bears poor fruit, nor a sickly tree that bears good fruit.

He cuts away any branch on me that stops bearing fruit, and He repeatedly prunes every branch that continues to bear fruit, to make it bear more.

You have not chosen me; I have chosen you, and appointed you to go and bear fruit, that your fruit may remain too, so that the Father may grant you, as bearers of my name, whatever you ask Him for.

"You must either make the tree healthy and its fruits healthy or make the tree sickly and its fruits sickly, for a tree is judged by its fruit.

Now I will give you my opinion on this matter. For this is for your interest, because you were not only the first to do anything about it, but the first to want to do so; you started it a year ago.

Yes, He is the Head of the church as His body. For He is the beginning, the first-born among the dead, so that He alone should stand first in everything.

But many who are first now will be last then, and many who are last now will be first then."

He exercises the full authority of the first wild beast in his presence; he makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first wild beast, whose mortal wound had been healed.

So those who are last now will be first then, and those first will be last."

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

But many who are first now will be last then, and last now who will be first then."

Now after He had risen, early on the first day of the week, He appeared first to Mary of Magdala, out of whom He had driven seven demons.

And so there are those now last who will be first then, and there are those now first who will then be last."