143:10 Teach me to do what pleases you, 1
for you are my God.
May your kind presence 2
lead me 3 into a level land. 4
15:30 Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, 5 through our Lord Jesus Christ and through the love of the Spirit, to join fervently with me in prayer to God on my behalf.
5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit 6 is love, 7 joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 8 5:23 gentleness, and 9 self-control. Against such things there is no law.
1 tn Or “your will.” See Ps 40:8.
2 tn Heb “your good spirit.” God’s “spirit” may refer here to his presence (see the note on the word “presence” in Ps 139:7) or to his personal Spirit (see Ps 51:10).
3 tn The prefixed verbal form is taken as a jussive. Taking the statement as a prayer fits well with the petitionary tone of vv. 7-10a.
4 sn A level land (where one can walk free of obstacles) here symbolizes divine blessing and protection. See Pss 26:12 and 27:11 for similar imagery.
5 tn Grk “brothers.” See note on the phrase “brothers and sisters” in 1:13.
6 tn That is, the fruit the Spirit produces.
7 sn Another way to punctuate this is “love” followed by a colon (love: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control). It is thus possible to read the eight characteristics following “love” as defining love.
8 tn Or “reliability”; see BDAG 818 s.v. πίστις 1.a.
9 tn “And” is supplied here as a matter of English style, which normally inserts “and” between the last two elements of a list or series.
10 tc Several
11 tn Grk “in.” The idea is that the fruit of the light is “expressed in” or “consists of.”
12 tn Grk “walk.” The NT writers often used the verb “walk” (περιπατέω, peripatew) to refer to ethical conduct (cf. Rom 8:4; Gal 5:16; Col 4:5).
13 tc A number of important witnesses have ὑμᾶς (Jumas, “you”; e.g., א* A B P 0159 81 1175 al it co as well as several fathers). Other, equally important witnesses read ἡμᾶς (Jhmas, “us”; Ì46 א2 D F G Ψ 0278 33 1739 1881 al lat sy). It is possible that ἡμᾶς was accidentally introduced via homoioarcton with the previous word (ἠγάπησεν, hgaphsen). On the other hand, ὑμᾶς may have been motivated by the preceding ὑμῖν (Jumin) in 4:32 and second person verbs in 5:1, 2. Further, the flow of argument seems to require the first person pronoun. A decision is difficult to make, but the first person pronoun has a slightly greater probability of being original.
14 tn Grk “an offering and sacrifice to God as a smell of fragrance.” The first expression, προσφορὰν καὶ θυσίαν (prosforan kai qusian), is probably a hendiadys and has been translated such that “sacrificial” modifies “offering.” The second expression, εἰς ὀσμὴν εὐωδίας (ei" osmhn euwdia", “as a smell of fragrance”) has been translated as “a fragrant offering”; see BDAG 728-29 s.v. ὀσμή 2. Putting these two together in a clear fashion in English yields the translation: “a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.”