¹Therefore, since we ourselves also have so great a cloud of witnesses encompassing us, having laid aside every weight and the easily entangling sin, let us run with endurance the race lying before us,

²looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our trust, who, in view of the joy lying before Him, endured the cross, having despised its shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

³For consider fully the One who endured such great hostility from the sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary, fainting in your souls.

⁴Not yet unto blood have you resisted, struggling against the sin.

⁵And you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as to sons: My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when reproved by Him.

⁶For whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.

⁷Endure as discipline; God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?

⁸But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.

⁹Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh as correctors, and we were respecting them; will we not much more be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live?

¹⁰For they indeed were disciplining us during a few days according to what was seeming good to them, but He for our benefiting, in order to share His holiness.

¹¹Now all discipline indeed for those present seems not to be of joy but of grief; however, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those trained through it.

¹²Therefore lift up the drooped hands and the enfeebled knees,

¹³and make straight paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather may be healed.

¹⁴Pursue peace with all, and the holiness, without which no one will behold the Lord;

¹⁵observing lest any be failing of the favor of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up may trouble you, and through this the many may be defiled;

¹⁶lest there be any fornicator or profane person as Esau, who for one meal sold his birthright.

¹⁷For you know that even afterward, wishing to inherit the blessing, he was rejected; for he found no place of change of heart, although he earnestly sought it with tears.

¹⁸For you have not come to that mountain being touched and kindled with fire, and to darkness and to gloom and to storm,

¹⁹and to the sound of a trumpet and to a voice of words, which those who heard excused themselves, asking that the word not be addressed to them;

²⁰for they were not able to bear what was being commanded: If even a beast shall touch the mountain, it will be stoned or shot down with an arrow.

²¹And so fearful was the thing appearing that Moses said, I am greatly afraid and trembling;

²²but you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem and to myriads of messengers,

²³and to the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in the heavens, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous perfected,

²⁴and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling speaking a better thing than that of Abel.

²⁵Take heed lest you refuse the One speaking; for if they did not escape, having refused the One divinely instructing them on the earth, much less we ourselves, turning away from the One from the heavens,

²⁶whose voice shook the earth at that time, but now He has promised, saying: Yet once more I myself will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.

²⁷Now this, Yet once more, signifies the removing of the things being shaken, as created, so that the things not being shaken may remain.

²⁸Therefore, receiving a kingdom not to be shaken, we may have favor, through which we may serve God well-pleasingly with reverence and fear;

²⁹for also our God is a consuming fire.