2 Corinthians 4:1-18
4 * For this reason, having this service to perform as mercy was granted to us, we do not give up trying,
2 * but have renounced the concealments of shame, not walking in trickery nor adulterating God’s word, but by giving publicity to the truth commending ourselves to every human conscience before God.
3 And if our gospel be veiled, it is veiled in the case of those who are being lost,
4 in whose case the god of this world has blinded unbelievers’ senses so that they should not eye the refulgence of the gospel of the glory of the Christ, who is image of God.
5 For we are not preaching ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves servants to you on Jesus’s account,
6 because it was God, he who said “Light shall shine out of darkness,” that shone in our hearts to produce the refulgence of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ.
7 * But we have this treasure in earthen jars, in order that the surpassing power may be God’s and not out of us:
8 every way hard pressed but not cornered, perplexed but not baffled,
9 persecuted but not deserted, felled but not ended,
10 always carrying about in our body Jesus’s deadness in order that Jesus’s life too may be made visible in our body.
11 For we who are alive are all the time being sent to death on Jesus’s account, in order that Jesus’s life too may be made visible in our mortal flesh,
12 so that death is at work in us but life in you.
13 And, having the same spirit of faith, in accordance with the written words “I believed, for that reason I spoke,” we too believe and it is for that reason we speak,
14 * knowing that he who raised Jesus will raise us too with Jesus and present us together with you.
15 For everything is on your account, in order that the grace, growing vaster by the greater number, may make thanksgiving the more abundant to the glory of God.
16 * Wherefore we do not give up trying, but though our outer man be perishing our inner is renewed day by day,
17 * for the light pressure of our present distress is producing for us in unparalleled richness an unequaled weight of eternal glory;
18 while we look not to the seen but to the unseen, for what is seen is temporary but what is unseen is eternal.
Footnotes
^ 4:1 Lit. having this service as mercy was
^ 4:2 Lit. the hidden things of
^ 4:7 Lit. the surpassingness of power
^ 4:14 Var. raised the Lord Jesus
^ 4:16 Var. Which is why it is that we do not
^ 4:17 Lit. eternal weight of glory
