2 Corinthians 3

1Are we starting to recommend ourselves all over again? Or do we need letters of introduction to you or from you, the way some people do? Surely not! 2Our letter is you yourselves. It is written in our hearts, and everyone can recognize it and read it. 3Plainly you are a letter from Christ, produced through our service. It was written not in ink but by the Spirit of the living God, and not on stone tablets but on tablets of flesh, on human hearts.

4This is the confidence we have before God, and it comes through Christ. 5Not that we are fit for this by our own resources, as if we could count anything as our own doing. Our fitness comes from God. 6He has made us fit to be servants of a new covenant, a covenant not of the written letter but of the Spirit. For the written letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

7The ministry of death, cut in letters into stone, still came with glory, so bright that the Israelites could not fix their eyes on Moses’ face because of the glory shining there, a glory that was being done away with. 8How much more, then, will the ministry of the Spirit come with glory! 9For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness overflows with far more glory. 10Indeed, in this respect what was once glorified has no glory at all, outshone as it is by a glory far greater. 11For if what was being done away with had its glory, what remains has glory far greater still.

12So, since this is our hope, we speak with great openness, 13not as Moses did when he kept covering his face with a veil, so that the Israelites would not fix their eyes on the end of what was being done away with. 14Their minds, however, were made hard. Right up to the present day, the same veil stays in place when they hear the old covenant read, and it is not lifted, since it is in Christ that it is done away with. 15And still today, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts. 16But the veil is lifted away whenever a person turns to the Lord. 17Now this Lord is the Spirit, and freedom is found wherever the Spirit of the Lord is. 18But all of us, our faces uncovered, look upon the Lord’s glory as in a mirror, and we are being changed into the same image we see, from glory to ever greater glory. That is how the Lord, who is the Spirit, works.