1. Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? We don’t need letters of recommendation to you or from you as some other people do, do we?
2. You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone,
3. revealing that you are a letter of Christ, delivered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on tablets of human hearts.
4. Now we have such confidence in God through Christ.
5. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as if it were coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God,
6. who made us adequate to be servants of a new covenant not based on the letter but on the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
7. But if the ministry that produced death – carved in letters on stone tablets – came with glory, so that the Israelites could not keep their eyes fixed on the face of Moses because of the glory of his face (a glory which was made ineffective),
8. how much more glorious will the ministry of the Spirit be?