¹⁵ Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.^(A)

² Preach^(A) the word;^(B) be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke^(C) and encourage^(D)—with great patience and careful instruction. ³ For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine.^(E) Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.^{(F) 4} They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.^(G)

¹⁵ Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience^(A) means salvation,^(B) just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.^{(C) 16} He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable^(D) people distort,^(E) as they do the other Scriptures,^(F) to their own destruction.