Romans 7

1Or do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over a person as long as that person lives?

2For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning her husband.

3So then, if she marries another man while her husband is alive, she will be called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, so that she is not an adulteress if she marries another man.

4So, my brothers and sisters, you also were put to death to the law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to him 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 stirred up through the law were at work in the parts of our body to bear fruit for death.

6But now we have been released from the law, having died to what held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

7What then are we to say? Is the law sin? By no means! Yet I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting is if the law had not said, “Do not covet.”

8But sin, seizing the opportunity given by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin is dead.

9I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life, and I died.

10The very commandment that was meant to bring life turned out to bring death for me.

11For sin, seizing the opportunity given by the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.

12So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good.

13Did what is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Rather, it was sin, producing death in me through what is good, so that sin might be shown to be sin, and so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

14For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave to 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 agree with the law that it is good.

17But in that case it is no longer I who do it, but sin that lives in me.

18For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For wanting to do what is good is within my reach, but doing it is not.

19For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I practice.

20Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that lives in me.

21So I find this law at work: when I want to do what is good, evil is right there with me.

22For in my inner being I delight in the law of God,

23but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me captive to the law of sin that is in the parts of my body.

24What a wretched man 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.