1Brothers and sisters, do you not know (for I am speaking to people who know the law) that the law rules over a person only as long as that person lives?
2A married woman is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is set free from the law that bound her to him.
3So 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. Then she is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man.
4So, my brothers and sisters, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ. Now you belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, so that we may bear fruit for God.
5For when we lived in the flesh, the sinful desires stirred up by the law were at work in our bodies, and they bore fruit for death.
6But now we are set free from the law. We have died to what held us, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
7What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not. No, I would not have known sin except through the law. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet."
8But sin found its chance through the commandment, and stirred up in me every kind of wrong desire. For without the law sin is dead.
9Once I was alive without the law. But when the commandment came, sin came to life, and I died.
10The commandment that was meant to bring life, I found to bring death.
11For sin found its chance through the commandment. It deceived me, and by the commandment it killed me.
12So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.
13Did that which is good then become death to me? Certainly not. But sin did, so that it might be seen as sin, working death in me through what is good. In this way sin, through the commandment, became utterly sinful.
14For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am made of flesh, sold as a slave to sin.
15I do not understand what I do. For I do not do what I want to do, but I do the very thing I hate.
16And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good.
17So it is no longer I who do it, but sin that lives in me.
18For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good lives. I have the will to do what is good, but I do not find the power to carry it out.
19For the good that I want to do, I do not do. But the evil that I do not want to do, that is what I do.
20Now if I do what I do not want to do, 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 good, evil is there with me.
22For in my inner self I delight in the law of God.
23But I see another law at work in my body, fighting against the law of my mind. It makes me a prisoner of the law of sin that is in my body.
24What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?
25I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, with my mind I myself serve the law of God, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.