30-32 I have faced the beasts in the circus before the crowd at Ephesus, I have run every risk, endured every danger, and won through them successfully — that is your boast, and the glory which you accord me for my service of the Christ; but if in this daily death of mine there is no underlying meaning, if it does not mean that even now Christ in me is fighting his victory over death, and successfully putting it under his feet and rescuing me from it, then what is the use of it all? I would rather say with the disobedient “Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we shall die” (Is. xxii. 13) for there is no longer any meaning in my struggles. Beware! Do not let sleep overtake you, and your spiritual perception be cheated and fade.
33 This is the result, as the tragic poet says, of that “bad company that doth corrupt the good.”
34 There are those in your midst who have no knowledge of God. Protect yourselves against their influence.
35 And now you ask me, How? What is that body which dies not, but comes again?
36 How can flesh and blood not perish for ever, but live on immortal? Does it seem so impossible?
37 Yet even in nature we see the seed buried in the ground, becoming a shrivelled extinct husk,
38 and out of that decay and dissolution springs the new body which the eternal power of God shapes and forms.