4For we speak as messengers approved by God to be entrusted with the Good News. Our purpose is to please God, not people. He alone examines the motives of our hearts.

5Never once did we try to win you with flattery, as you well know. And God is our witness that we were not pretending to be your friends just to get your money!

6As for human praise, we have never sought it from you or anyone else.

7As apostles of Christ we certainly had a right to make some demands of you, but instead we were like children2:7 Some manuscripts read we were gentle. among you. Or we were like a mother feeding and caring for her own children.

8We loved you so much that we shared with you not only God’s Good News but our own lives, too.

9Don’t you remember, dear brothers and sisters, how hard we worked among you? Night and day we toiled to earn a living so that we would not be a burden to any of you as we preached God’s Good News to you.

10You yourselves are our witnesses—and so is God—that we were devout and honest and faultless toward all of you believers.

11And you know that we treated each of you as a father treats his own children.

12We pleaded with you, encouraged you, and urged you to live your lives in a way that God would consider worthy. For he called you to share in his Kingdom and glory.

13Therefore, we never stop thanking God that when you received his message from us, you didn’t think of our words as mere human ideas. You accepted what we said as the very word of God—which, of course, it is. And this word continues to work in you who believe.

14And then, dear brothers and sisters, you suffered persecution from your own countrymen. In this way, you imitated the believers in God’s churches in Judea who, because of their belief in Christ Jesus, suffered from their own people, the Jews.

15For some of the Jews killed the prophets, and some even killed the Lord Jesus. Now they have persecuted us, too. They fail to please God and work against all humanity

16as they try to keep us from preaching the Good News of salvation to the Gentiles. By doing this, they continue to pile up their sins. But the anger of God has caught up with them at last.