New Testament in a Year

11 I hope you will be patient with me as I keep on talking like a fool. Do bear with me and let me say what is on my heart. ² I am anxious for you with the deep concern of God himself—anxious that your love should be for Christ alone, just as a pure maiden saves her love for one man only, for the one who will be her husband. ³ But I am frightened, fearing that in some way you will be led away from your pure and simple devotion to our Lord, just as Eve was deceived by Satan in the Garden of Eden. ⁴ You seem so gullible: you believe whatever anyone tells you even if he is preaching about another Jesus than the one we preach, or a different spirit than the Holy Spirit you received, or shows you a different way to be saved. You swallow it all.

⁵ Yet I don’t feel that these marvelous “messengers from God,” as they call themselves, are any better than I am. ⁶ If I am a poor speaker, at least I know what I am talking about, as I think you realize by now, for we have proved it again and again.

⁷ Did I do wrong and cheapen myself and make you look down on me because I preached God’s Good News to you without charging you anything? ^8-9 Instead I “robbed” other churches by taking what they sent me and using it up while I was with you so that I could serve you without cost. And when that was gone^[a] and I was getting hungry, I still didn’t ask you for anything, for the Christians from Macedonia brought me another gift. I have never yet asked you for one cent, and I never will. ¹⁰ I promise this with every ounce of truth I possess—that I will tell everyone in Greece about it! ¹¹ Why? Because I don’t love you? God knows I do. ¹² But I will do it to cut out the ground from under the feet of those who boast that they are doing God’s work in just the same way we are.

¹³ God never sent those men at all; they are “phonies” who have fooled you into thinking they are Christ’s apostles. ¹⁴ Yet I am not surprised! Satan can change himself into an angel of light, ¹⁵ so it is no wonder his servants can do it too, and seem like godly ministers. In the end they will get every bit of punishment their wicked deeds deserve.