1 Understand this: in the last days hard times will set in.
2 For people will be self-loving, money-loving, boastful, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, irreverent,
3 without family affection, irreconcilable, slanderers, lacking self-mastery, fierce, hostile to the good,
4 betrayers, headstrong, blinded by conceit, fond of pleasure rather than fond of God,
5 keeping up an outward show of godliness but having rejected its power. Turn away from people like these.
6 Among them are the ones who slip into households and take captive weak women weighed down with sins and driven by all sorts of desires,
7 who are forever learning and yet can never arrive at the knowledge of the truth.
8 In the same way that Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, these men also resist the truth—men corrupted in mind, worthless with regard to the faith.
9 Yet they will advance no further, for their senselessness will be obvious to all, just as that of those men was.
10 But you have followed closely my teaching, my conduct, my purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, steadfastness,
11 the persecutions and sufferings that came upon me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra—such persecutions I bore! And from all of them the Lord delivered me.
12 And all who are resolved to live in godliness in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution,
13 but evil men and charlatans will advance only in what is worse, deceiving others and deceived themselves.
14 You, though, must abide in the things you learned and were assured of, knowing from whom you learned them,
15 and that since you were a small child you have known the sacred writings, which have power to make you wise toward salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
16 All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for discipline in righteousness,
17 so that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly furnished for every good work.