Second Letter to Timothy 3

¹ You may be quite sure that in the last days there are going to be some difficult times.

² People will be self-centred and grasping; boastful, arrogant and rude; disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious;

³ heartless and unappeasable; they will be slanderers, profligates, savages and enemies of everything that is good;

⁴ they will be treacherous and reckless and demented by pride, preferring their own pleasure to God.

⁵ They will keep up the outward appearance of religion but will have rejected the inner power of it. Have nothing to do with people like that.

⁶ Of the same kind, too, are those men who insinuate themselves into families in order to get influence over silly women who are obsessed with their sins and follow one craze after another

⁷ in the attempt to educate themselves, but can never come to knowledge of the truth.

⁸ Men like this defy the truth just as Jannes and Jambres defied Moses:[*a] their minds are corrupt and their faith spurious.

⁹ But they will not be able to go on any longer: their foolishness, like that of the other two, must become obvious to everybody.

¹⁰ You know, though, what I have taught, how I have lived, what I have aimed at; you know my faith, my patience and my love; my constancy

¹¹ and the persecutions and hardships that came to me in places like Antioch, Iconium and Lystra – all the persecutions I have endured; and the Lord has rescued me from every one of them.

¹² You are well aware, then, that anybody who tries to live in devotion to Christ is certain to be attacked;

¹³ while these wicked impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving others and deceived themselves.

¹⁴ You must keep to what you have been taught and know to be true; remember who your teachers were,

¹⁵ and how, ever since you were a child, you have known the holy scriptures – from these you can learn the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

¹⁶ All scripture is inspired by God and can profitably be used for teaching, for refuting error, for guiding people’s lives and teaching them to be holy.

¹⁷ This is how the man who is dedicated to God becomes fully equipped and ready for any good work.