2 Corinthians 4:12 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

So then death worketh in us, but life in you. — “Life” is here clearly used in its higher spiritual sense, as in the preceding verse. We trace in the words something of the same pathos as in 1 Corinthians 4:8-13, without the irony which is there perceptible. “You,” he seems to say, “reap the fruit of my sufferings. The ‘dying’ is all my own; you know nothing of that conflict with pain and weakness; but the ‘life’ which is the result of that experience works in you as well as in me, and finds in you the chief sphere of its operation.”