1 Are we beginning again to commend ourselves? Or do we need, as some do, letters of commendation to you or letters of commendation from you?
2 You are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by all people,
3 since you are plainly shown to be a letter of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on fleshly tablets of the heart.
4 And such confidence we have through Christ toward God;
5 not that we are sufficient of ourselves to reckon anything as coming from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God,
6 who also made us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit makes alive.
7 But if the ministry of death, engraved in letters on stones, came with glory, so that the children of Israel could not gaze at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, a glory that was being done away,
8 how will the ministry of the Spirit not be all the more with glory?
9 For if the ministry of condemnation was glory, much more does the ministry of righteousness overflow with glory.
10 Indeed, what once had glory has no glory at all in this respect, because of the glory that so far outshines it.
11 For if what was being done away came with glory, much more does what remains abide in glory.
12 Having, then, such hope, we use much plainness of speech,
13 and we are not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel might not gaze at the end of what was being done away.
14 But their minds were hardened; for until this day the same veil remains unlifted at the reading of the old covenant, the veil that is done away in Christ.
15 But to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart.
16 But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.
17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
18 And all of us, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.