This second letter to the Corinthian church is in response to reports that Paul has had from trusted leaders in the church. At the end of his last letter in chapters 15 and 16 he has had to correct the confused perspective that many of the people in the church had of the resurrection. Many had believed that the resurrection had already happened and that they were already in their resurrected state. Paul had corrected this strange perception of theirs by appealing to the words of Jesus himself and had also explained the plan of God that described the necessity of our mortal and perishable bodies to be given a transformed supernatural body at the return of Christ. Paul begins this letter by reiterating his experiences of physical danger and emotional pressure as being more than compensated for by the experience of a shared life with Jesus, and the receiving of comfort and hope through he comforter, The Holy Spirit. He describes this supernatural comfort as a ‘flow of life’ that has not only encouraged and sustained his faith, but was also something that flowed on to their lives as comfort and encouragement through the ministry of The Spirit. He indicates that this was being released through his faith in his partnership with Jesus by the power of the love of God to him and through him.

Paul then extends this comforting and sustaining ministry of The Spirit as being something that they share in not only as recipients of this grace, but also as participants in the faith process. He says in vs. 7; ‘We can have this confident expectation for you, that just as you share with us in this special kind of pain, you will also share with us in this special kind of gain.’

He finishes by urging them to share his conclusion, that all of this pressure and the ‘death sentence’ that he continually faced in his ministry was to teach him (and them) that they were not expected to rust in their own strength, but to trust totally in God, who was able to raise the dead back to life. He adds a further uplifting exhortation regarding their faith partnership with him in this process in the final verse; vs.11 ‘You shared in what God was doing through the gift of your prayers for us, and that prayer which was given by so many of you will cause many others to give thanks to God.’

2 CORINTHIANS CHAPTER 1 - CONTEMPORARY ALIGNED VERSION (SPIRITCODE)

SPIRITCODE

1. From Paul, commissioned by God to proclaim the message of a shared life with Jesus, and fro Timothy our brother in Christ, to God’s church in Corinth and to all the Christians in the region of Achaia.

2. I desire for you the blessing of the goodness of God and your oneness with him and our Lord Jesus Christ.

3. We give praise to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father who is full of mercy towards us, and the God of reassurance and encouragement.

4. Who reassures and encourages us in all the hard times we go through, so that we are able to reassure and encourage all those who are going through any kind of trouble. We can do this because of the reassurance and encouragement we get from God.

5. Just as we see and feel with Jesus the same grief and anguish of life that he did, we also see and feel through Jesus the same reassurance and encouragement that he has.

6. And when we go through this kind of pain it results in your security and wellbeing which then helps you to endure the same grief and anguish of life that we do, and of course when we get the reassurance and encouragement that also works out for your security and wellbeing.

7. We can have this confident expectation for you, that just as you share with us in this special kind of pain, you will also share with us in this special kind of gain.

8. We want you to know what kind of pressure we came under when we were in Asia, which was so much above and beyond anything we had ever experienced and so much more than we could endure that we didn’t think we would ever survive.

9. But this death sentence that was over us was only to teach us that we were not expected to trust in our own strength but to trust in God, who is able to raise the dead back to life.

10. He rescued us from certain death and he will keep rescuing us, causing us to put our trust in him to always come to our rescue.

11. You shared in what God was doing through the gift of your prayer for us, and that prayer which was given by so many of you will cause many others to give thanks to God.

12. So there is something that we can be joyful about, and that is the evidence of our own conscience, that we have been sincere and acted with integrity towards you, with no human agendas driving us, but only the goodness of God. This is how we live before people in the world and it is especially evident in how we act towards you.

13. For what you read in our letters is what you see in our behavior, not saying one thing and doing another, and I trust this is the way it will always be with you.

14. And some of you have testified to this that you are happy and blessed to know us, just as we will be happy and blessed to know you when we stand before the Lord together.

15. Because I was confident about you concerning this I decided to come to you twice, to make it a double blessing

16. To come to you on my way to Macedonia and to come back to you after I had been to Macedonia, and then to be sent off by you with a blessing as I go to Judea.

17. When I decided on this plan do you think I was just toying with some ‘maybe’ kind of an idea, so that with me there is always a maybe yes and a maybe no?

18. But as God is my witness, our word to you was not maybe yes and maybe no

19. For the preaching of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, that we gave to you, Silvanus and Timothy and myself, was not maybe yes and maybe no but always a definite yes.

20. For every promise about God through Jesus Christ is always Yes and Amen (utterly reliable), to the glory of God.

21. The one who confirms who we really are before you and who you are in Christ is God, who anoints us for this purpose.

22. And he has authenticated us and commissioned us through the deposit of The Holy Spirit in our hearts.

23. I also call God to be my witness that the reason I have not yet come to visit you at Corinth was to show mercy to you

24. Not that we are dictators over you concerning your faith, but we want to share with you the joy of your life of faith, because it by this kind of faith that we live our lives.