Second Letter to the Corinthians 10

¹ This is a personal matter; this is Paul himself appealing to you by the gentleness and patience of Christ – I, the man who is so humble when he is facing you, but bullies you when he is at a distance.

² I only ask that I do not have to bully you when I come, with all the confident assurance I mean to show when I come face to face with people I could name who think we go by ordinary human motives.

³ We live in the flesh, of course, but the muscles that we fight with are not flesh.

⁴ Our war is not fought with weapons of flesh, yet they are strong enough, in God’s cause, to demolish fortresses. We demolish sophistries,

⁵ and the arrogance that tries to resist the knowledge of God; every thought is our prisoner, captured to be brought into obedience to Christ.

⁶ Once you have given your complete obedience, we are prepared to punish any disobedience.

⁷ Face plain facts. Anybody who is convinced that he belongs to Christ must go on to reflect that we all belong to Christ no less than he does.

⁸ Maybe I do boast rather too much about our authority, but the Lord gave it to me for building you up and not for pulling you down, and I shall not be ashamed of it.

⁹ I do not want you to think of me as someone who only frightens you by letter.

¹⁰ Someone said, ‘He writes powerful and strongly-worded letters but when he is with you you see only half a man and no preacher at all’.

¹¹ The man who said that can remember this: whatever we are like in the words of our letters when we are absent, that is what we shall be like in our actions when we are present.

¹² We are not being so bold as to rank ourselves, or invite comparison, with certain people who write their own references. Measuring themselves against themselves, and comparing themselves to themselves, they are simply foolish.

¹³ We, on the other hand, are not going to boast without a standard to measure against: taking for our measure the yardstick which God gave us to measure with, which is long enough to reach to you.

¹⁴ We are not stretching further than we ought; otherwise we should not have reached you, as we did come all the way to you with the gospel of Christ.

¹⁵ So we are not boasting without any measure, about work that was done by other people; in fact, we trust that, as your faith grows, we shall get taller and taller, when judged by our own standard.

¹⁶ I mean, we shall be carrying the gospel to places far beyond you, without encroaching on anyone else’s field, not boasting of the work already done.

¹⁷ If anyone wants to boast, let him boast of the Lord.[*a]

¹⁸ It is not the man who commends himself that can be accepted, but the man who is commended by the Lord.