Letter to the Romans 7

¹ Brothers, those of you who have studied law will know that laws affect a person only during his lifetime.

² A married woman, for instance, has legal obligations to her husband while he is alive, but all these obligations come to an end if the husband dies.

³ So if she gives herself to another man while her husband is still alive, she is legally an adulteress; but after her husband is dead her legal obligations come to an end, and she can marry someone else without becoming an adulteress.

⁴ That is why you, my brothers, who through the body of Christ are now dead to the Law, can now give yourselves to another husband, to him who rose from the dead to make us productive for God.

⁵ Before our conversion[*a] our sinful passions, quite unsubdued by the Law, fertilised our bodies to make them give birth to death.

⁶ But now we are rid of the Law, freed by death from our imprisonment, free to serve in the new spiritual way and not the old way of a written law.

⁷ Does it follow that the Law itself is sin? Of course not. What I mean is that I should not have known what sin was except for the Law. I should not for instance have known what it means to covet if the Law had not said You shall not covet.

⁸ But it was this commandment that sin took advantage of to produce all kinds of covetousness in me, for when there is no Law, sin is dead.

⁹ Once, when there was no Law, I[*b] was alive; but when the commandment came, sin came to life

¹⁰ and I died: the commandment was meant to lead me to life but it turned out to mean death for me,

¹¹ because sin took advantage of the commandment to mislead me, and so sin, through that commandment, killed me.

¹² The Law is sacred, and what it commands is sacred, just and good.

¹³ Does that mean that something good killed me? Of course not. But sin, to show itself in its true colours, used that good thing to kill me; and thus sin, thanks to the commandment, was able to exercise all its sinful power.

¹⁴ The Law, of course, as we all know, is spiritual; but I am unspiritual; I have been sold as a slave to sin.

¹⁵ I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.

¹⁶ When I act against my own will, that means I have a self that acknowledges that the Law is good,

¹⁷ and so the thing behaving in that way is not my self but sin living in me.

¹⁸ The fact is, I know of nothing good living in me – living, that is, in my unspiritual self – for though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not,

¹⁹ with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want.

²⁰ When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me.

²¹ In fact, this seems to be the rule, that every single time I want to do good it is something evil that comes to hand.

²² In my inmost self I dearly love God’s Law, but

²³ I can see that my body follows a different law that battles against the law which my reason dictates. This is what makes me a prisoner of that law of sin which lives inside my body.

²⁴ What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?

²⁵ Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! In short, it is I who with my reason serve the Law of God, and no less I who serve in my unspiritual self the law of sin’.