Second Letter to the Corinthians 5

¹ For we know that when the tent that we live in on earth is folded up, there is a house built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens.

² In this present state, it is true, we groan as we wait with longing to put on our heavenly home over the other;

³ we should like to be found wearing clothes and not without them.

⁴ Yes, we groan and find it a burden being still in this tent, not that we want to strip it off, but to put the second garment over it and to have what must die taken up into life.

⁵ This is the purpose for which God made us, and he has given us the pledge of the Spirit.

⁶ We are always full of confidence, then, when we remember that to live in the body means to be exiled from the Lord,

⁷ going as we do by faith and not by sight

⁸ -we are full of confidence, I say, and actually want to be exiled from the body and make our home with the Lord.

⁹ Whether we are living in the body or exiled from it, we are intent on pleasing him.

¹⁰ For all the truth about us will be brought out in the law court of Christ, and each of us will get what he deserves for the things he did in the body, good or bad.

¹¹ And so it is with the fear of the Lord in mind that we try to win people over. God knows us for what we really are, and I hope that in your consciences you know us too.

¹² This is not another attempt to commend ourselves to you: we are simply giving you reasons to be proud of us, so that you will have an answer ready for the people who can boast more about what they seem than what they are.

¹³ If we seemed out of our senses, it was for God; but if we are being reasonable now, it is for your sake.

¹⁴ And this is because the love of Christ overwhelms us when we reflect that if one man has died for all, then all men should be dead;

¹⁵ and the reason he died for all was so that living men should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised to life for them.

¹⁶ From now onwards, therefore, we do not judge anyone by the standards of the flesh. Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh, that is not how we know him now.

¹⁷ And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here.

¹⁸ It is all God’s work. It was God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the work of handing on this reconciliation.

¹⁹ In other words, God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men’s faults against them, and he has entrusted to us the news that they are reconciled.

²⁰ So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God.

²¹ For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God.