Romans
Chapter 7
1 Don’t you know, friends, (because I am talking to those who understand law,) that the law has authority over a person as long as they are alive?
2 A married woman is legally tied to her husband while he is alive, but if he dies, she is free from her husband’s laws.
3 If her husband is alive and she marries another man, she will be called an adulteress. But if her husband is dead, she is not breaking the law and is not an adulteress, even if she marries another man.
4 So, my friends, you too have died to the law through Christ’s body, so that you can belong to another, the one who was raised from the dead, so that we can produce good results for God.
5 When we lived following our human nature, our sins, stirred up by the law, were active in our bodies, leading to death.
6 But now we are free from the law, which we were bound by when it was in effect; so we can serve in a new and spiritual way, not in the old way of following the written rules.
7 What should we say, then? Is the law wrong? Absolutely not. Indeed, I would not have recognized sin if it weren’t for the law; I wouldn’t have known what desire was if the law hadn’t said, “Do not want what others have.”
8 Sin used the command to produce all kinds of wrong desires in me. Without the law, sin is powerless.
9 Before I knew the law, I was alive; but when I learned the commandment, sin came back to life, and I died.
10 The rule that was meant to give life, I discovered leads to death.
11 Sin used the command to trick me, and through it killed me.
12 So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, right, and good.
13 Did the good thing cause my death? No way! But it was sin, using the good thing, that caused death in me. This was to show sin as truly sinful through the commandment.
14 We know that the law is spiritual, but I am human, trapped by sin.
15 I don’t understand why I do the things I do: I don’t do what I know is right, instead I do the things I hate.
16 If I do what I don’t want to do, I agree that the law is good.
17 Now it’s not me doing it, but the sin that lives in me.
18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my body. I want to do what is right, but I can’t do it.
19 I don’t do the good I want to do, but I do the bad I don’t want to do.
20 If I do what I don’t want to, it’s not really me doing it, but the sin that lives in me.
21 I discover a rule: when I want to do good, evil is there with me.
22 I enjoy following God’s laws with my heart.
23 I notice another rule in my body fighting against my mind’s rule, making me a prisoner to the rule of sin in my body.
24 I am a miserable person! Who will rescue me from this body that brings death?
25 I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. I serve God’s law with my mind, but with my body, I follow the law of sin.