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Be good to each other
1 My Christian friends, if you catch one of your own mob doing something bad, the rest of you that listen properly to God’s spirit, you have to get that person to stop. Make sure you talk to that person in a good and easy way. Remember, Satan tries to get you to do bad things too, so be careful.
2 You have to do this to help each other be strong. You have to help other Christians that have problems. If you do that, you will be doing what Jesus Christ told you to do.
3 Don’t think that you are too important to help other Christians. If you are not very important, but you reckon you are really important, then you are just tricking yourself.
4 Each one of you has to think about the things that you do, and see if those things are good, or not good. And if they are good, then you can be happy and feel good about yourself. Don’t look at other people and think, “Am I better than them?”
5 Each of you have to live your own life the right way. If you go wrong, you can’t blame anyone else.
6 By the way, remember this too. If somebody teaches you God’s word, you have to share your money, and food, and other good things with that teacher.
7 Listen, you’ve got to understand this properly. Nobody can ever trick God, so don’t ever think you can do that. I’ll tell you a picture story about seeds. A gardener plants different sorts of seeds in his garden, then later he gets the food from the plants that grow from those seeds. Whatever sort of seed he plants, that’s the sort of food he gets.
8 Well, it is like that with us people. Some people do good things, like a gardener that plants the seeds of good plants. And some people do bad things, like a gardener that plants rubbish seeds. Some people only think about what will make them feel good, so they do bad things. Later God will pay them with something bad. They will die. But other people listen to God’s spirit and do good things. Later God will do something good for them. God’s spirit will let them live with him for ever.
9 So we have to keep going the right way. Don’t get tired of doing good things, and later, God will give you lots of good things.
10 You see, every time we can do something good for somebody, we have to do it. If that person believes in Jesus, they belong to the same family as us, so we really have to do good things for them.
Jesus is the great one
11 Look. I am writing these words with my own hand. See how big my writing is. This message is very important.
12 Some Jewish Christians are trying to force you to have that young man operation. They want the other Jews to think that you follow the Jewish law. You see, those other Jews will make trouble for anyone that believes that Jesus died on the cross to save them, and the Jewish Christians don’t want to get that trouble.
13 But, you know, even the Jews don’t follow the Jewish law properly themselves. Those Jewish Christians only want you to get that operation, and be like Jews, so they can tell everybody that they got you to be Jewish. They want to use your bodies like that, to get the other Jews to say they are good.
14 But I never want to say anything to get other people to say I am good. The only good one for me is Jesus Christ. He died for me on the cross. And when I think about him, the things of this world mean nothing to me, and I am nothing to this world.
God changed each of you into a new person
15 You see, it doesn’t matter if somebody did a young man operation on you, or not. The most important thing is this. God changed you into a new person.
16 So I’m asking God to be good to all the people that say that the young man operation doesn’t matter. I’m asking God to make them happy and quiet inside themselves. I’m asking this for all the people that God picked to be his own, like he picked the Israel people a long time ago.
17 I hope nobody gives me any more trouble after this. I’ve got scars on my body from stones and whips, and these scars show everyone that I belong to Jesus.
18 My Christian friends, I pray that our leader, Jesus Christ, will be very good to you, and that he will be with you and help you spiritually.
From Paul