through labour and hardship, through many a sleepless night, through hunger and thirst, starving many a time, cold and ill-clad, and all the rest of it.
and he has further qualified me to be the minister of a new covenant — a covenant not of written law but of spirit; for the written law kills but the Spirit makes alive.
Because you have kept the word of my patient endurance, I will keep you safe through the hour of trial which is coming upon the whole world to test the dwellers on earth.
I John, your brother and your companion in the distress and realm and patient endurance which Jesus brings, found myself in the island called Patmos, for adhering to God's word and the testimony of Jesus.
Therefore, with all this host of witnesses encircling us, we must strip off every handicap, strip off sin with its clinging folds, to run our appointed course steadily,
So do not be ashamed to testify to our Lord, and do not be ashamed of a prisoner of the Lord like me; join me in bearing suffering for the gospel by the power of the God
Lay this before the brotherhood, and you will be an excellent minister of Christ Jesus, brought up on the truths of the faith and on the lessons of the good doctrine you have already followed.
I am suffering now on your behalf, but I rejoice in that; I would make up the full sum of all that Christ has to suffer in my person on behalf of the church, his Body;
Ministers of Christ? yes perhaps, but not as much as I am (I am mad to talk like this! ), with all my labours, with all my lashes, with all my time in prison — a record longer far than theirs. I have been often at the point of death;
even when I ran short, during my stay with you, I was no encumbrance to anybody, for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied my wants. Thus I kept myself, as I intend to keep myself, from being a burden to you in any way.
See what this pain divine has done for you, how serious it has made you, how keen to clear yourselves, how indignant, how alarmed, how eager for me, how determined, how relentless! You have shown in every way that you were honest in the business.
I disown those practices which very shame conceals from view; I do not go about it craftily; I do not falsify the word of God; I state the truth openly and so commend myself to every man's conscience before God.
Men of Israel, listen to my words. Jesus the Nazarene, a man accredited to you by God through miracles, wonders, and signs which God performed by him among you (as you yourselves know),
I am, for I am not like most, adulterating the word of God; like a man of sincerity, like a man of God, I speak the word in Christ before the very presence of God.
But if our iniquity thus serves to bring out the justice of God, what are we to infer? That it is unfair of God to inflict his anger on us? (I speak in a merely human way.)