New Testament in a Year

15 Now let me remind you, brothers, of what the Gospel really is, for it has not changed—it is the same Good News I preached to you before. You welcomed it then and still do now, for your faith is squarely built upon this wonderful message; ² and it is this Good News that saves you if you still firmly believe it, unless of course you never really believed it in the first place.

³ I passed on to you right from the first what had been told to me, that Christ died for our sins just as the Scriptures said he would, ⁴ and that he was buried, and that three days afterwards he arose from the grave just as the prophets foretold. ⁵ He was seen by Peter and later by the rest of “the Twelve.”^{[a] 6} After that he was seen by more than five hundred Christian brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died by now. ⁷ Then James saw him, and later all the apostles. ⁸ Last of all I saw him too, long after the others, as though I had been born almost too late for this. ⁹ For I am the least worthy of all the apostles, and I shouldn’t even be called an apostle at all after the way I treated the church of God.

¹⁰ But whatever I am now it is all because God poured out such kindness and grace upon me—and not without results: for I have worked harder than all the other apostles, yet actually I wasn’t doing it, but God working in me, to bless me. ¹¹ It makes no difference who worked the hardest, I or they; the important thing is that we preached the Gospel to you and you believed it.

¹² But tell me this! Since you believe what we preach, that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying that dead people will never come back to life again? ¹³ For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ must still be dead. ¹⁴ And if he is still dead, then all our preaching is useless and your trust in God is empty, worthless, hopeless; ¹⁵ and we apostles are all liars because we have said that God raised Christ from the grave, and of course that isn’t true if the dead do not come back to life again. ¹⁶ If they don’t, then Christ is still dead, ¹⁷ and you are very foolish to keep on trusting God to save you, and you are still under condemnation for your sins; ¹⁸ in that case, all Christians who have died are lost! ¹⁹ And if being a Christian is of value to us only now in this life, we are the most miserable of creatures.

²⁰ But the fact is that Christ did actually rise from the dead and has become the first of millions^[b] who will come back to life again someday.

²¹ Death came into the world because of what one man (Adam) did, and it is because of what this other man (Christ) has done that now there is the resurrection from the dead. ²² Everyone dies because all of us are related to Adam, being members of his sinful race, and wherever there is sin, death results. But all who are related to Christ will rise again. ²³ Each, however, in his own turn: Christ rose first; then when Christ comes back, all his people will become alive again.

²⁴ After that the end will come when he will turn the Kingdom over to God the Father, having put down all enemies of every kind. ²⁵ For Christ will be King until he has defeated all his enemies, ²⁶ including the last enemy—death. This too must be defeated and ended. ²⁷ For the rule and authority over all things has been given to Christ by his Father; except, of course, Christ does not rule over the Father himself, who gave him this power to rule. ²⁸ When Christ has finally won the battle against all his enemies, then he, the Son of God, will put himself also under his Father’s orders, so that God who has given him the victory over everything else will be utterly supreme.