Chapter 6

¹As God’s fellow-worker, I appeal to you, too, not to accept the favor of God and then waste it. ²For he says,

“I have listened to you at a welcome time,

And helped you on a day of deliverance!”

Now the welcome time has come! This is the day of deliverance! ³I put no obstacles in anyone’s path, so that no fault may be found with my work. ⁴On the contrary, as a servant of God I try in every way to commend myself to them, through my great endurance in troubles, difficulties, hardships, ⁵beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger, ⁶through my purity of life, my knowledge, my patience, my kindness, my holiness of spirit, my genuine love, ⁷the truth of my teaching, and the power of God; with the weapons of uprightness for the right hand and the left, ⁸in honor or dishonor, in praise or blame; considered an imposter, when I am true, ⁹obscure, when I am well known, at the point of death, yet here I am alive, punished, but not dead yet, ¹⁰pained, when I am always glad, poor, when I make many others rich, penniless, when really I own everything.

¹¹I have kept nothing back from you, men of Corinth; I have opened my heart to you. ¹²It is not that I am cramping you, it is your own affections. ¹³To pay me back, I tell you, my children, you must open your hearts too.

¹⁴Do not get into close and incongruous relations with unbelievers. What partnership can uprightness have with iniquity, or what can light have to do with darkness? ¹⁵How can Christ agree with Belial? Or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? ¹⁶What bargain can a temple of God make with idols? For we are a temple of the living God, just as God said,

“I will live in them and move among them,

And I will be their God and they will be my people.”

¹⁷Therefore,

“Come out from them,

And separate from them, says the Lord,

And touch nothing that is unclean.

Then I will welcome you,

¹⁸I will become a father to you,

And you shall become my sons and daughters,

Says the Lord Almighty.”