so that you may be able to choose what is best and be pure and blameless until the day when the Messiah returns,

Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has actually caused the gospel to advance.

But so what? Just this that in every way, whether by false or true motives, the Messiah is being proclaimed. Because of this, I rejoice and will continue to rejoice.

For it is God who is producing in you both the desire and the ability to do what pleases him.

because he came close to death for the work of the Messiah by risking his life to complete what remained unfinished in your service to me.

What is more, I continue to consider all these things to be a loss for the sake of what is far more valuable, knowing the Messiah Jesus, my Lord. It is because of him that I have experienced the loss of all those things. Indeed, I consider them rubbish in order to gain the Messiah

I want to know the Messiah what his resurrection power is like and what it means to share in his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,

Brothers, I do not consider myself to have embraced it yet. But this one thing I do: Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,

However, we should live up to what we have achieved so far.

Likewise, keep practicing these things: what you have learned, received, heard, and seen in me. Then the God of peace will be with you.

I have been paid in full and have more than enough. I am fully supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus what you sent a fragrant aroma, a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God.