Letters to the Churches

Do not present the parts of your body to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and present the parts of your body to Him as instruments of righteousness.

For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law, but under grace? Certainly not!

Do you not know that when you offer yourselves as obedient slaves, you are slaves to the one you obey, whether you are slaves to sin leading to death, or to obedience leading to righteousness?

But thanks be to God that, though you once were slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were committed.

You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to escalating wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness.

For when you were slaves to sin, you were free of obligation to righteousness.

What fruit did you reap at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? The outcome of those things is death.

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the fruit you reap leads to holiness, and the outcome is eternal life.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Do you not know, brothers (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives?

For instance, a married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage.

So then, if she is joined to another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law and is not an adulteress, even if she marries another man.

Therefore, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God.

For when we lived according to the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, bearing fruit for death.

But now, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

What then shall we say? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed, I would not have been mindful of sin if not for the law. For I would not have been aware of coveting if the law had not said, “Do not covet.”

But sin, seizing its opportunity through the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from the law, sin is dead.

Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.

So I discovered that the very commandment that was meant to bring life actually brought death.

For sin, seizing its opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through the commandment put me to death.

So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good.

Did that which is good, then, become death to me? Certainly not! But in order that sin might be exposed as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.