We are experiencing trouble on every side, but are not crushed; we are perplexed, but not driven to despair;

we are persecuted, but not abandoned; we are knocked down, but not destroyed,

And even if I am unskilled in speaking, yet I am certainly not so in knowledge. Indeed, we have made this plain to you in everything in every way.

For we are not like so many others, hucksters who peddle the word of God for profit, but we are speaking in Christ before God as persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God.

Therefore we do not despair, but even if our physical body is wearing away, our inner person is being renewed day by day.

But until this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds,

So then, even though I wrote to you, it was not on account of the one who did wrong, or on account of the one who was wronged, but to reveal to you your eagerness on our behalf before God.

Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as if it were coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God,

But as God’s servants, we have commended ourselves in every way, with great endurance, in persecutions, in difficulties, in distresses,

But God, who encourages the downhearted, encouraged us by the arrival of Titus.

What I am saying with this boastful confidence I do not say the way the Lord would. Instead it is, as it were, foolishness.

For we do not write you anything other than what you can read and also understand. But I hope that you will understand completely

For even when we came into Macedonia, our body had no rest at all, but we were troubled in every way – struggles from the outside, fears from within.

Now I rejoice, not because you were made sad, but because you were made sad to the point of repentance. For you were made sad as God intended, so that you were not harmed in any way by us.

For I do not say this so there would be relief for others and suffering for you, but as a matter of equality.

Indeed we felt as if the sentence of death had been passed against us, so that we would not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead.

For our reason for confidence is this: the testimony of our conscience, that with pure motives and sincerity which are from God – not by human wisdom but by the grace of God – we conducted ourselves in the world, and all the more toward you.

revealing that you are a letter of Christ, delivered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on tablets of human hearts.

For we groan while we are in this tent, since we are weighed down, because we do not want to be unclothed, but clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

For if I have boasted to him about anything concerning you, I have not been embarrassed by you, but just as everything we said to you was true, so our boasting to Titus about you has proved true as well.