2 Corinthians 7:3

¹¹Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians. Our heart is enlarged. ¹²You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections.

⁸Even so, affectionately longing for you, we were well pleased to impart to you not the Good News of God only, but also our own souls, because you had become very dear to us.

¹⁵I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls. If I love you more abundantly, am I loved the less?

¹⁶Ruth said, “Don’t urge me to leave you, and to return from following you, for where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God ^[+] my God. ¹⁷Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.”

²You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men,

¹²So although I wrote to you, I wrote not for his cause that did the wrong, nor for his cause that suffered the wrong, but that your earnest care for us might be revealed in you in the sight of God.

¹⁰For this cause I write these things while absent, that I may not deal sharply when present, according to the authority which the Lord gave me for building up and not for tearing down.

⁴For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears, not that you should be made to grieve, but that you might know the love that I have so abundantly for you.

⁵But if any has caused sorrow, he has caused sorrow not to me, but in part (that I not press too heavily) to you all.

¹¹Why? Because I don’t love you? God knows.

¹⁴I don’t write these things to shame you, but to admonish you as my beloved children. ¹⁵For though you have ten thousand tutors in Christ, you don’t have many fathers. For in Christ Jesus, I became your father through the Good News.