A Living Letter

3:1 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?1 3:2 You yourselves are our letter,2 written on our hearts, known and read by everyone, 3:3 revealing3 that you are a letter of Christ, delivered by us,4 written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets5 but on tablets of human hearts.

3:4 Now we have such confidence in God through Christ. 3:5 Not that we are adequate6 in ourselves to consider anything as if it were coming from ourselves, but our adequacy7 is from God, 3:6 who made us adequate8 to be servants of a new covenant9 not based on the letter but on the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.