You know that I’ve been called to serve the God of my fathers with a clean conscience. Night and day I pray constantly for you, building a memorial for you with my prayers.
O Israel, my Jewish family, I feel such great sorrow and heartache for you that never leaves me! God knows these deep feelings within me as I long for you to come to faith in the Anointed One. My conscience will not let me speak anything but the truth.
Now, I call upon this faithful God as a witness against me if I’m not telling you the absolute truth. It was because I hold you in my heart that I decided not to return to Corinth, in order to spare you the humiliation of my rebuke.
For we have already experienced “heart-circumcision,” and we worship God in the power and freedom of the Holy Spirit, not in laws and religious duties. We are those who boast in what Jesus Christ has done, and not in what we can accomplish in our own strength.
Paul had it in his heart to go to Jerusalem and, on his way there, to revisit the places in Greece where he had ministered. “After that,” he said, “I have to go to Rome also.”
“But I do confess this to you: I worship the God of our Jewish ancestors as a follower of the Way, which they call a sect. For I believe everything that is written in the Law and the Prophets.