11 So, because I know the fear of God, I "persuade men." What I am is manifest to God, and I hope manifest also to your conscience.
12 I am not "commending myself to you again," but I am giving you an occasion of boasting on my behalf, so that you may have an answer ready for those who boast in externals, and not in the heart.
13 For if I was "beside myself," it was to God; of if I am now "of sound mind," it is for you.
14 For the love of Christ overmasters me; because I thus judge that if One has died for all, then all have died;
15 and that he died for all in order that the living may live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again for them.
16 Therefore henceforth I know no one simply as a man - even if I have known Christ as a man, yet now I do so no longer.
17 So there is a new creation when any man is in Christ. The old life has passed away, behold, the new is come.
18 And all this is from God, who through Christ reconciled me to himself, and gave me the ministry of reconciliation;
19 how that God was in Christ reconciling a world to himself, not reckoning to men their trespasses; and that to me he has entrusted the message of that reconciliation.
20 On Christs behalf, then, I come as ambassador. It is as though God was entreating you, through me, on Christs behalf I beg you to be reconciled to God.
21 Him who knew no sin, in our behalf he has made to be sin; so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.