Romans 7

¹Or do you not know, brothers and sisters (for I am speaking to those who understand how law works), that the law exercises lordship over a person only for as long as they live? ²For a woman who is married is bound by law to her husband while he is alive; but if the husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband. ³Consequently, she will be labeled an adulteress if she belongs to another man while her husband is living. But if the husband dies, she is free from that law, so that she is not an adulteress even if she belongs to another man.

⁴In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in relation to the law through the body of the Christ, so that you might belong to another—to the one who was raised from the dead—in order that we might bear fruit for God. ⁵For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were active in our body parts to bear fruit for death. ⁶But now we have been released from the law, having died to that which once held us fast, so that we may serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the written letter.

⁷What shall we say then? Is the law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have known sin if not through the law. For I would not have recognized covetousness if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” ⁸But sin, seizing a strategic foothold through the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetousness. For apart from law, sin lies dead. ⁹I was once alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life ¹⁰and I died. The very commandment intended for life was found, in my case, to result in death. ¹¹For sin, seizing a strategic foothold through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. ¹²So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.

¹³Did that which is good, then, become death to me? May it never be! Rather, it was sin, so that it might be revealed as sin by working death in me through what is good—so that through the commandment sin might become sinful beyond measure. ¹⁴For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am made of flesh, sold into slavery under sin. ¹⁵For I do not understand what I am doing; I do not practice what I want to do, but I do the very thing I hate. ¹⁶Now if I do what I do not want to do, I am in agreement with the law—conceding that it is noble. ¹⁷So now it is no longer I who am doing it, but the sin dwelling within me. ¹⁸For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do good is close at hand, but the actual doing of the noble thing is not. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep practicing. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who am doing it, but the sin dwelling within me.

²¹I find then this principle: when I want to do what is noble, evil is sitting right next to me. ²²For I delight in the law of God in my inner self, ²³but I see a different law in my body parts, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin that exists in my body parts. ²⁴Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.