God

For his death was a unique event that need not be repeated; but his life, he keeps on living for God.

In the same way, consider yourselves to be dead to sin but alive for God, by your union with the Messiah Yeshua.

and do not offer any part of yourselves to sin as an instrument for wickedness. On the contrary, offer yourselves to God as people alive from the dead, and your various parts to God as instruments for righteousness.

Therefore, what conclusion should we reach? “Let’s go on sinning, because we’re not under legalism but under grace”? Heaven forbid!

By God’s grace, you, who were once slaves to sin, obeyed from your heart the pattern of teaching to which you were exposed;

However, now, freed from sin and enslaved to God, you do get the benefit — it consists in being made holy, set apart for God, and its end result is eternal life.

For what one earns from sin is death; but eternal life is what one receives as a free gift from God, in union with the Messiah Yeshua, our Lord.

Thus, my brothers, you have been made dead with regard to the Torah through the Messiah’s body, so that you may belong to someone else, namely, the one who has been raised from the dead, in order for us to bear fruit for God.

Therefore, what are we to say? That the Torah is sinful? Heaven forbid! Rather, the function of the Torah was that without it, I would not have known what sin is. For example, I would not have become conscious of what greed is if the Torah had not said, “Thou shalt not covet.”

Then did something good become for me the source of death? Heaven forbid! Rather, it was sin working death in me through something good, so that sin might be clearly exposed as sin, so that sin through the commandment might come to be experienced as sinful beyond measure.

For in my inner self I completely agree with God’s Torah;

Thanks be to God [, he will]! — through Yeshua the Messiah, our Lord! To sum up: with my mind, I am a slave of God’s Torah; but with my old nature, I am a slave of sin’s “Torah.”

For what the Torah could not do by itself, because it lacked the power to make the old nature cooperate, God did by sending his own Son as a human being with a nature like our own sinful one [but without sin]. God did this in order to deal with sin, and in so doing he executed the punishment against sin in human nature,

For the mind controlled by the old nature is hostile to God, because it does not submit itself to God’s Torah — indeed, it cannot.

Thus, those who identify with their old nature cannot please God.

But you, you do not identify with your old nature but with the Spirit — provided the Spirit of God is living inside you, for anyone who doesn’t have the Spirit of the Messiah doesn’t belong to him.

All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons.

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to bring you back again into fear; on the contrary, you received the Spirit, who makes us sons and by whose power we cry out, “Abba!” (that is, “Dear Father!”).

The Spirit himself bears witness with our own spirits that we are children of God;

and if we are children, then we are also heirs, heirs of God and joint-heirs with the Messiah — provided we are suffering with him in order also to be glorified with him.

The creation waits eagerly for the sons of God to be revealed;

that it too would be set free from its bondage to decay and would enjoy the freedom accompanying the glory that God’s children will have.

and the one who searches hearts knows exactly what the Spirit is thinking, because his pleadings for God’s people accord with God’s will.

Furthermore, we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called in accordance with his purpose;

What, then, are we to say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?