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Our Lives Demonstrate That We Are God’s Servants

We don’t give people any opportunity to find fault with how we serve. Instead, our lives demonstrate that we are God’s servants. We have endured many things: suffering, distress, anxiety, beatings, imprisonments, riots, hard work, sleepless nights, and lack of food. ⌞People can see⌟ our purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit’s presence ⌞in our lives⌟, our sincere love, truthfulness, and the presence of God’s power. We demonstrate that we are God’s servants as we are praised and dishonored, as we are slandered and honored, and as we use what is right to attack what is wrong and to defend the truth.[a] We are treated as dishonest although we are honest, as unknown although we are well-known, as dying although, as you see, we go on living. We are punished, but we are not killed. 10 People think we are sad although we’re always glad, that we’re beggars although we make many people spiritually rich, that we have nothing although we possess everything.

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Footnotes

  1. 6:8 The last part of verse 7 (in Greek) has been moved to verse 8 to express the complex Greek sentence structure more clearly in English.

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