Reaffirm Your Love

1For I judged this within myself, not to come to you again in grief. 2For if I grieve you again, who is making me glad, except the one being grieved by me? 3And I wrote this same thing, so that having come, I might not have grief from those of whom it behooves me to rejoice, trusting in you all, that my joy is shared by all of you. 4For out of much affliction and anguish of heart, I wrote to you through many tears, not that you might be grieved, but that you might know the love that I have more abundantly toward you.

5But if anyone has caused grief, he not grieved me, but—in part, that I might not put it too severely—you all. 6The punishment which is by the majority is sufficient to such a one, 7so that on the contrary, rather for you to forgive and to comfort him, lest perhaps such a one should be overwhelmed by more abundant sorrow. 8Therefore I exhort you to confirm your love toward him.

9For this indeed also did I write, so that I might know the proof of you, whether you are obedient to everything. 10Now to whomever you forgive anything, I also do; and indeed to whom I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, it is for the sake of you, in the person of Christ, 11so that we should not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his schemes.

Triumph in Christ

12Now having come to Troas for the gospel of Christ, a door also having been opened to me in the Lord, 13I had no rest in my spirit, in my not finding Titus my brother. Instead, having taken leave of them, I went out to Macedonia.

14But thanks be to God, the One always leading us in triumph in Christ, and through us in every place making manifest the fragrance of the knowledge of Him. 15For we are a sweet perfume of Christ to God in those being saved and in those perishing: 16to one indeed an odor from death to death, and to the other a fragrance from life to life. And who is sufficient for these things?

17For we are not like the many, peddling the word of God, but as of sincerity, but as of God, we speak before God in Christ.