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.]
May the God of peace consecrate you through and through! Spirit, soul, and body, may you be kept without break or blame till the arrival of our Lord Jesus Christ!
This is not 'recommending myself to you again'; it is giving you an incentive to be proud of me, which you can use against men who are proud of externals instead of the inward reality.
If a certain individual has been causing pain, he has been causing pain not so much to me as to all of you — at anyrate (for I am not going to overstate the case) to a section of you.
To prevent you from being self-conceited, brothers, I would like you to understand this secret: it is only a partial insensibility that has come over Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in.
I know how willing you are, I am proud of it, I have boasted of you to the Macedonians: "Achaia," I tell them, "was all ready last year." And your zeal has been a stimulus to the majority of them.