Romans 7:1-11

¹Brothers and sisters, (I'm speaking here to people who know the law), don't you see that the law has authority over someone only while they're alive?

²For example, a married woman is bound by the law to her husband while he's alive, but if he dies, she's released from this legal obligation to him.

³So if she lives with another man while her husband is alive, she would be committing adultery. However, if her husband dies and then she marries another man, she wouldn't be guilty of adultery.

⁴In the same way, my friends, you've become dead to the law through the body of Christ, and so now you belong to someone else—Christ, who was raised from the dead so that we could live a productive life for God.

⁵While we were controlled by old nature, our sinful desires (as revealed by the law) were at work within us and resulted in death.

⁶But now we've been set free from the law, and have died to what kept us in chains, so that we can serve in the newness of the spirit and not the old letter of the law.

⁷So what do we conclude? That the law is sin? Of course not! I wouldn't have known what sin was unless the law defined it. I wouldn't have realized that wanting to have other people's things for myself was wrong without the law that says, “Don't desire for yourself what belongs to someone else.”

⁸But through this commandment sin found a way to stir up in me all kinds of selfish desires—for without law, sin is dead.

⁹I used to live without realizing what the law really meant, but when I understood the implications of that commandment, then sin came back to life, and I died.

¹⁰I discovered that the very commandment that was meant to bring life brought death instead,

¹¹because sin found a way through the commandment to deceive me, and used the commandment to kill me!