The future heavenly condition of believers
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📚✭For we know✭ that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 📚For in this one we groan✭, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our dwelling which is from heaven, 3 📚✭since, then being clothed, we will not be found naked. 4 📚✭For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened; not that we want to be unclothed, but clothed, so that mortality may be swallowed up by life. 5 📚✭Now he who has made us for this very thing is God, who has also given us the Spirit as a pledge✭.6 📚✭Therefore we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord. 7 📚For we walk by faith, not by sight. 8 📚We are confident, I say, and prefer to be absent from the body and present with the Lord.
Paul’s goal: To please Christ
9 📚✭Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be pleasing to him.
Believers before Christ’s judgment seat
10 📚✭For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that everyone may receive according to the things he has done in the body, whether good or bad.
Reconciliation: God’s part and man’s part
11 📚Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord✭, we persuade men. But we are clearly known to God, and, I trust, are also clearly known to your consciences. 12 📚✭For we are not commending ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to be proud of us, so that you may have some answer for those who take pride in appearances, and not in things of the heart. 13 📚✭For if we are out of our mind, it is for God. If we are of sound mind, it is for you. 14 📚✭For the love of Christ constrains✭ us, because we judge that if one died for all✭, then all died, 15 📚✭and he died for all, so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them, and rose again.
16 📚✭Therefore, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh. Indeed, though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer so regard him. 17 📚✭Therefore, if anyone is in Christ✭, that person is a new creation. Old things have passed away. See, all things have become new! 18 📚And all these things are of God✭, who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation✭; 19 📚✭namely, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 📚✭Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us. We beg people on Christ’s behalf to be reconciled to God. 21 📚✭For he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.