For if, indeed, the one coming proclaims another Jesus, whom we have not proclaimed, or if you receive another spirit which you have not received, or another gospel which you never accepted, you might well endure these.
Because it is God who said, “Out of darkness Light shall shine,” the One who shone in our hearts to give the illumination of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Isa. 42:6, 7, 16
it being made known that you are Christ’s letter, ministered by us, not having been inscribed by ink, but by the Spirit of the living God, not in tablets of stone, but in fleshly tablets of the heart.
For out of much affliction and distress of heart I wrote to you, through many tears, not that you be grieved, but that you know the love which I have especially toward you.
And they come to you as peoples come, and they sit before you as My people. And they hear your words, but they do not do them. For they produce much love with their mouth, but their heart goes after their unjust gain.
And she said to him, How can you say, I love you, and your heart is not with me. These three times you have trifled with me, and have not told me where your great strength lies.
Having purified your souls in the obedience of the truth through the Spirit to unpretended brotherly love, love one another fervently out of a pure heart,
in power of miraculous signs and wonders, in power of the Spirit of God, so as for me to have fulfilled the preaching of the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem and in a circle as far as Illyricum.
To whom it was revealed that not to themselves, but to us they ministered the same things, which now were proclaimed to you through the ones having preached the gospel to you in the Holy Spirit having been sent from Heaven; into which things angels long to look into.
Because of this, I write these things while absent, that being present I may not deal severelywith you according to the authority which the Lord gave me for building up and not for destruction.