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📚✭Do we begin to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you, or recommendation from you? 2 📚✭You are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by all men. 3 📚✭For you are clearly seen to be a letter of Christ, a result of our ministry, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of flesh, of the heart.4 📚✭And we have such trust through Christ toward God. 5 📚✭Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to think anything as coming from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, 6 📚✭who indeed has made us able ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
The new covenant more glorious than the old covenant
7 📚But if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses✭, because of the glory on his countenance, which was passing away, 8 📚how will the ministry of the Spirit not be even more glorious? 9 📚For if the ministry of condemnation is glorious, much more glorious is the ministry of righteousness. 10 📚For even what was made glorious has no glory in this respect: the fact of the glory that excels it. 11 📚For if what was passing away was glorious, what lasts is much more glorious.
12 📚Therefore, since we have such a hope✭, we use great boldness of speech, 13 📚✭unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face, so that the children of Israel could not steadily look on to the finish of what was passing away. 14 📚✭But their minds were blinded, for to this day the same veil remains in place when the old covenant is read, for this veil is taken away only in Christ. 15 But even to this day, when Moses is read, the veil is on their heart. 16 📚However when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 📚✭Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty✭. 18 📚But we all, with unveiled faces, seeing✭, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same likeness from glory to glory, altogether by the Spirit of the Lord.