Released from the law
1Do you not know, brothers and sisters—I am speaking to people who know the law—that the law rules over a person only as long as that person lives? 2A married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives; if he dies, she is released from the law that bound her to him. 3So if she takes another man while her husband is alive, she will be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and she is no adulteress when she takes another man. 4In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you were put to death to the law through the body of the Christ, so that you might belong to another—to him who was raised from the dead—and so bear fruit for God. 5For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sin, aroused by the law, were at work in every part of us, bearing fruit for death. 6But now we have been released from the law, dead to what once held us down, so that we serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.
Sin and the commandment
7What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Never. And yet I would not have known sin except through the law. I would not have known craving if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” 8But sin, seizing its chance through the commandment, worked up in me every kind of craving; for apart from the law, sin is dead. 9Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. 10The very commandment that was meant for life turned out, in my case, to be for death. 11For sin, seizing its chance through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me. 12So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. 13Then did what is good become death to me? Never. It was sin—so that it might be exposed as sin, producing death in me through what is good; so that through the commandment sin might become sinful beyond all measure.
The war inside
14We know that the law is spiritual; but I am of flesh, sold under sin. 15I do not understand what I am doing. I do not do what I want; I do the very thing I hate. 16And if I do what I do not want, I am agreeing that the law is good. 17So now it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that lives in me. 18I know that nothing good lives in me—that is, in my flesh. The wanting is right there in me, but the doing of the good is not. 19The good I want, I do not do; the evil I do not want is what I do. 20And if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that lives in me. 21So I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there beside me. 22In my inner self I delight in the law of God, 23but I see another law at work in every part of me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work in me. 24What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then: I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh the law of sin.
