Anyone who serves the Lord must not be difficult to get along with. Instead, they must be kind to everyone, able to teach, and not hold anything against anybody.
Because a church leader takes care of God’s family, he must be blameless. He must not push people around, or get angry easily, or get drunk, or try to get money by cheating people.
He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught. Then he’ll be able to comfort others and build them up with the true teaching, and he’ll be able to prove that people who oppose it are wrong.
I appeal to you by the humbleness and gentleness of Christ—I, Paul, the one you think is timid when I’m face to face with you, but bold when I’m away from you.
The next day Moses saw two Israelites fighting, and he tried to make peace between them. ‘Men, you are both Israelites,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to hurt each other?’
You want something, but you don’t have it, so you kill. You want what others have, but you can’t get what you want, so you argue and fight. You don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God.
Dear friends, I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share. But I felt that I had to write and urge you to stand up for the faith that God’s holy people have been trusted with once and for all time.
They were all shouting loudly. Some of the teachers of the law who were Pharisees stood up and argued sharply. “We find nothing wrong with this man,” they said. “What if a spirit or an angel spoke to him?”
From Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ. God sent me to help his chosen people deepen their faith and understand even better the truth that leads to godly living.
Paul and Barnabas didn’t agree with this and they argued sharply with them. So the group sent Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem with some other believers to ask the apostles and elders about this question.