4) Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud
5) or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.
6) It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.
7) Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
5) Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won’t be able to tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
6) I say this as a concession, not as a command.
7) But I wish everyone were single, just as I am. Yet each person has a special gift from God, of one kind or another.
8) So I say to those who aren’t married and to widows—it’s better to stay unmarried, just as I am.
9) But if they can’t control themselves, they should go ahead and marry. It’s better to marry than to burn with lust.
3) Then Elimelech died, and Naomi was left with her two sons.
15) “Look,” Naomi said to her, “your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods. You should do the same.”
16) But Ruth replied, “Don’t ask me to leave you and turn back. Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.
11) When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.
12) Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
13) Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
16) “For this is how God loved the world: He gaveg his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
17) God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.
4) Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.
5) You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.
6) Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to.
7) nstead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form,
8) he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.