7. How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring
good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, "Your God
reigns!"
8. Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices; together they shout for
joy. When the LORD returns to Zion, they will see it with their own eyes.
9. Burst into songs of joy together, you ruins of Jerusalem, for the LORD
has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem.
10. The LORD will lay bare his holy arm in the sight of all the nations,
and all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God.
2. You yourselves are our
letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody.
3. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry,
written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets
of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
4. Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God.
5. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves,
but our competence comes from God.
6. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the
letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
17. Therefore, if anyone is
in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
18. All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ
and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:
19. that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting
men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
20. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his
appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to
God.
21. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might
become the righteousness of God.