Study Desk

Sin will not be your master, because you are not under law but under God's grace.

In the past you were slaves to sin—sin controlled you. But thank God, you fully obeyed the things that you were taught.

But now you are free from sin and have become slaves of God. This brings you a life that is only for God, and this gives you life forever.

The payment for sin is death. But God gives us the free gift of life forever in Christ Jesus our Lord.

For example, a woman must stay married to her husband as long as he is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from the law of marriage.

But if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, the law says she is guilty of adultery. But if her husband dies, she is free from the law of marriage. Then if she marries another man, she is not guilty of adultery.

In the past, the law held us like prisoners, but our old selves died, and we were made free from the law. So now we serve God in a new way with the Spirit, and not in the old way with written rules.

You might think I am saying that sin and the law are the same thing. That is not true. But the law was the only way I could learn what sin meant. I would never have known what it means to want to take something belonging to someone else if the law had not said, "You must not want to take your neighbor's things."

And sin found a way to use that command and cause me to want all kinds of things I should not want. But without the law, sin has no power.

I was alive before I knew the law. But when the law's command came to me, then sin began to live,

and I died. The command was meant to bring life, but for me it brought death.

We know that the law is spiritual, but I am not spiritual since sin rules me as if I were its slave.

But I am not really the one who is doing these hated things; it is sin living in me that does them.

Yes, I know that nothing good lives in me—I mean nothing good lives in the part of me that is earthly and sinful. I want to do the things that are good, but I do not do them.

I do not do the good things I want to do, but I do the bad things I do not want to do.

But I see another law working in my body, which makes war against the law that my mind accepts. That other law working in my body is the law of sin, and it makes me its prisoner.

I thank God for saving me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So in my mind I am a slave to God's law, but in my sinful self I am a slave to the law of sin.

The law was without power, because the law was made weak by our sinful selves. But God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son to earth with the same human life that others use for sin. By sending his Son to be an offering for sin, God used a human life to destroy sin.

He did this so that we could be the kind of people the law correctly wants us to be. Now we do not live following our sinful selves, but we live following the Spirit.

Those who live following their sinful selves think only about things that their sinful selves want. But those who live following the Spirit are thinking about the things the Spirit wants them to do.