Chapter 5

¹For I know that if this earthly tent that I live in is taken down, God will provide me a building in heaven to live in, not built by human hands but eternal. ²This makes me sigh with longing to put on my heavenly dwelling, ³for if I do, I shall never find myself disembodied. ⁴For I who am still in my tent sigh with anxiety, because I do not want to be stripped of it, but to put on the other over it, so that what is only mortal may be absorbed in life. ⁵It is God himself who has prepared me for this change, and he has given me the Spirit as his guaranty.

⁶So I am confident. I know well that as long as I am at home in the body I am away from the Lord ⁷(for I have to guide my steps by faith, not by what is seen)— ⁸yet I am confident, and I prefer to leave my home in the body and make my home with the Lord. ⁹So whether I am at home or away from it, it is my ambition to please him. ¹⁰For we must all appear in our true characters before the tribunal of the Christ, each to be repaid with good or evil for the life he has lived in the body.

¹¹It is with this knowledge of what the fear of the Lord means that I appeal to men. My true character is perfectly plain to God, and I hope to your consciences too. ¹²I am not trying to recommend myself to you again. I am giving you cause to be proud of me, to use in answering men who pride themselves on external advantages and not on sincerity of heart. ¹³For if I was out of my senses, as they say, it was between God and me; and if I am in my right mind, it is for your good. ¹⁴It is Christ’s love that controls me, for I have become convinced that as one has died for all, all have died, ¹⁵and he died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again.

¹⁶So from that time on, I have estimated nobody at what he seemed to be outwardly; even though I once estimated Christ in that way, I no longer do so. ¹⁷So if anyone is in union with Christ, he is a new being; the old state of things has passed away; there is a new state of things. ¹⁸All this comes from God, who through Christ has reconciled me to himself, and has commissioned me to proclaim this reconciliation— ¹⁹how God through Christ reconciled the world to himself, refusing to count men’s offenses against them, and intrusted me with the message of reconciliation.

²⁰It is for Christ, therefore, that I am an envoy, seeing that God makes his appeal through me. On Christ’s behalf I beg you to be reconciled to God. ²¹He made him who knew nothing of sin to be sin, for our sake, so that through union with him we might become God’s uprightness.