1 ARE we beginning again to recommend ourselves? Do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you?

2 You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men,

3 evidently a letter of Christ delivered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets, but on tablets that are hearts of flesh.

4 We have such confidence through Christ toward God.

5 Not that of ourselves we are fit to reason out anything as from ourselves, but our fitness is from God,

6 who has fitted us to be servants of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the spirit. For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.

7 If the service that brought death, engraved in letters on stones, came in glory, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face \'97 that fading glory \'97

8 how much more glorious will not the service of the Spirit be?

9 For if the service that brought condemnation was glory, much more will the service that brings righteousness surpass in glory.

10 For what was made so glorious is in a way no longer glorious compared with the glory that surpasses it.

11 For if what was to be ended came in glory, much more glorious must be that which is enduring.

12 With such a hope then we speak with great frankness,

13 and are not like Moses, who used to put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel might not see when the vanishing glory ended;

14 but their thinking was dulled. For to this day the same veil remains unlifted when the old covenant is read; because it is done away only in Christ.

15 To this day when Moses is read the veil lies on their hearts;

16 "but when they turn to the Lord the veil is taken away."

17 The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.

18 And we all, with unveiled face, reflecting the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same likeness from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord.