Old/New Testament

6 Son, if you endorse a note for someone you hardly know, guaranteeing his debt, you are in serious trouble. ² You may have trapped yourself by your agreement. ³ Quick! Get out of it if you possibly can! Swallow your pride; don’t let embarrassment stand in the way. Go and beg to have your name erased. ⁴ Don’t put it off. Do it now. Don’t rest until you do. ⁵ If you can get out of this trap you have saved yourself like a deer that escapes from a hunter or a bird from the net.

⁶ Take a lesson from the ants, you lazy fellow. Learn from their ways and be wise! ⁷ For though they have no king to make them work, ⁸ yet they labor hard all summer, gathering food for the winter. ⁹ But you—all you do is sleep. When will you wake up? ¹⁰ “Let me sleep a little longer!” Sure, just a little more! ¹¹ And as you sleep, poverty creeps upon you like a robber and destroys you; want attacks you in full armor.

^12-13 Let me describe for you a worthless and a wicked man; first, he is a constant liar; he signals his true intentions to his friends with eyes and feet and fingers. ¹⁴ He is always thinking up new schemes to swindle people. He stirs up trouble everywhere. ¹⁵ But he will be destroyed suddenly, broken beyond hope of healing.

^16-19 For there are six things the Lord hates—no, seven: haughtiness, lying, murdering, plotting evil, eagerness to do wrong, a false witness, sowing discord among brothers.

²⁰ Young man, obey your father and your mother. ²¹ Take to heart all of their advice; keep in mind everything they tell you. ²² Every day and all night long their counsel will lead you and save you from harm; when you wake up in the morning, let their instructions guide you into the new day. ²³ For their advice is a beam of light directed into the dark corners of your mind to warn you of danger and to give you a good life. ²⁴ Their counsel will keep you far away from prostitutes, with all their flatteries, and unfaithful wives of other men.

²⁵ Don’t lust for their beauty. Don’t let their coyness seduce you. ²⁶ For a prostitute will bring a man to poverty, and an adulteress may cost him his very life. ²⁷ Can a man hold fire against his chest and not be burned? ²⁸ Can he walk on hot coals and not blister his feet? ²⁹ So it is with the man who commits adultery with another’s wife. He shall not go unpunished for this sin. ³⁰ Excuses might even be found for a thief if he steals when he is starving! ³¹ But even so, he is fined seven times as much as he stole, though it may mean selling everything in his house to pay it back.

³² But the man who commits adultery is an utter fool, for he destroys his own soul. ³³ Wounds and constant disgrace are his lot, ³⁴ for the woman’s husband will be furious in his jealousy, and he will have no mercy on you in his day of vengeance. ³⁵ You won’t be able to buy him off no matter what you offer.

7 Follow my advice, my son; always keep it in mind and stick to it. ² Obey me and live! Guard my words as your most precious possession. ³ Write them down,^[a] and also keep them deep within your heart. ⁴ Love wisdom like a sweetheart; make her a beloved member of your family. ⁵ Let her hold you back from affairs with other women—from listening to their flattery.

⁶ I was looking out the window of my house one day ⁷ and saw a simpleminded lad, a young man lacking common sense, ^8-9 walking at twilight down the street to the house of this wayward girl, a prostitute. ¹⁰ She approached him, saucy and pert, and dressed seductively. ^11-12 She was the brash, coarse type, seen often in the streets and markets, soliciting at every corner for men to be her lovers.

¹³ She put her arms around him and kissed him, and with a saucy look she said, “I was just coming to look for you and here you are! ^14-17 Come home with me, and I’ll fix you a wonderful dinner,^[b] and after that—well, my bed is spread with lovely, colored sheets of finest linen imported from Egypt, perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. ¹⁸ Come on, let’s take our fill of love until morning, ¹⁹ for my husband is away on a long trip. ²⁰ He has taken a wallet full of money with him and won’t return for several days.”

²¹ So she seduced him with her pretty speech, her coaxing and her wheedling, until he yielded to her. He couldn’t resist her flattery. ²² He followed her as an ox going to the butcher or as a stag that is trapped, ²³ waiting to be killed with an arrow through its heart. He was as a bird flying into a snare, not knowing the fate awaiting it there.

²⁴ Listen to me, young men, and not only listen but obey; ²⁵ don’t let your desires get out of hand; don’t let yourself think about her. Don’t go near her; stay away from where she walks, lest she tempt you and seduce you. ²⁶ For she has been the ruin of multitudes—a vast host of men have been her victims. ²⁷ If you want to find the road to hell, look for her house.

2 “No,” I said to myself, “I won’t do it. I’ll not make them unhappy with another painful visit.” ² For if I make you sad, who is going to make me happy? You are the ones to do it, and how can you if I cause you pain? ³ That is why I wrote as I did in my last letter, so that you will get things straightened out before I come.^[a] Then, when I do come, I will not be made sad by the very ones who ought to give me greatest joy. I felt sure that your happiness was so bound up in mine that you would not be happy either unless I came with joy.

⁴ Oh, how I hated to write that letter! It almost broke my heart, and I tell you honestly that I cried over it. I didn’t want to hurt you, but I had to show you how very much I loved you and cared about what was happening to you.

^5-6 Remember that the man I wrote about, who caused all the trouble, has not caused sorrow to me as much as to all the rest of you—though I certainly have my share in it too. I don’t want to be harder on him than I should. He has been punished enough by your united disapproval. ⁷ Now it is time to forgive him and comfort him. Otherwise he may become so bitter and discouraged that he won’t be able to recover. ⁸ Please show him now that you still do love him very much.

⁹ I wrote to you as I did so that I could find out how far you would go in obeying me. ¹⁰ When you forgive anyone, I do too. And whatever I have forgiven (to the extent that this affected me too) has been by Christ’s authority, and for your good. ¹¹ A further reason for forgiveness is to keep from being outsmarted by Satan, for we know what he is trying to do.

¹² Well, when I got as far as the city of Troas, the Lord gave me tremendous opportunities to preach the Gospel. ¹³ But Titus, my dear brother, wasn’t there to meet me and I couldn’t rest, wondering where he was and what had happened to him. So I said good-bye and went right on to Macedonia to try to find him.

¹⁴ But thanks be to God! For through what Christ has done, he has triumphed over us so that now wherever we go he uses us to tell others about the Lord and to spread the Gospel like a sweet perfume. ¹⁵ As far as God is concerned there is a sweet, wholesome fragrance in our lives. It is the fragrance of Christ within us, an aroma to both the saved and the unsaved all around us. ¹⁶ To those who are not being saved, we seem a fearful smell of death and doom, while to those who know Christ we are a life-giving perfume. But who is adequate for such a task as this? ¹⁷ Only those who, like ourselves, are men of integrity, sent by God, speaking with Christ’s power, with God’s eye upon us. We are not like those hucksters—and there are many of them—whose idea in getting out the Gospel is to make a good living out of it.