5 So now, since we have been made right in God’s sight by faith in his promises, we can have real peace with him because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us. ² For because of our faith, he has brought us into this place of highest privilege where we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to actually becoming all that God has had in mind for us to be.

³ We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they are good for us—they help us learn to be patient. ⁴ And patience develops strength of character in us and helps us trust God more each time we use it until finally our hope and faith are strong and steady. ⁵ Then, when that happens, we are able to hold our heads high no matter what happens and know that all is well, for we know how dearly God loves us, and we feel this warm love everywhere within us because God has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.

⁶ When we were utterly helpless, with no way of escape, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners who had no use for him. ⁷ Even if we were good, we really wouldn’t expect anyone to die for us, though, of course, that might be barely possible. ⁸ But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. ⁹ And since by his blood he did all this for us as sinners, how much more will he do for us now that he has declared us not guilty? Now he will save us from all of God’s wrath to come. ¹⁰ And since, when we were his enemies, we were brought back to God by the death of his Son, what blessings he must have for us now that we are his friends and he is living within us!

¹¹ Now we rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God—all because of what our Lord Jesus Christ has done in dying for our sins—making us friends of God.

¹² When Adam sinned, sin entered the entire human race. His sin spread death throughout all the world, so everything began to grow old and die,^[a] for all sinned. ¹³ We know that it was Adam’s sin that caused this^[b] because although, of course, people were sinning from the time of Adam until Moses, God did not in those days judge them guilty of death for breaking his laws—because he had not yet given his laws to them nor told them what he wanted them to do. ¹⁴ So when their bodies died it was not for their own sins^[c] since they themselves had never disobeyed God’s special law against eating the forbidden fruit, as Adam had.

What a contrast between Adam and Christ who was yet to come! ¹⁵ And what a difference between man’s sin and God’s forgiveness!

For this one man, Adam, brought death to many through his sin. But this one man, Jesus Christ, brought forgiveness to many through God’s mercy. ¹⁶ Adam’s one sin brought the penalty of death to many, while Christ freely takes away many sins and gives glorious life instead. ¹⁷ The sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to be king over all, but all who will take God’s gift of forgiveness and acquittal are kings of life^[d] because of this one man, Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ Yes, Adam’s sin brought punishment to all, but Christ’s righteousness makes men right with God, so that they can live. ¹⁹ Adam caused many to be sinners because he disobeyed God, and Christ caused many to be made acceptable to God because he obeyed.

²⁰ The Ten Commandments were given so that all could see the extent of their failure to obey God’s laws. But the more we see our sinfulness, the more we see God’s abounding grace forgiving us. ²¹ Before, sin ruled over all men and brought them to death, but now God’s kindness rules instead, giving us right standing with God and resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

6 Well then, shall we keep on sinning so that God can keep on showing us more and more kindness and forgiveness?

^2-3 Of course not! Should we keep on sinning when we don’t have to? For sin’s power over us was broken when we became Christians and were baptized to become a part of Jesus Christ; through his death the power of your sinful nature was shattered. ⁴ Your old sin-loving nature was buried with him by baptism when he died; and when God the Father, with glorious power, brought him back to life again, you were given his wonderful new life to enjoy.

⁵ For you have become a part of him, and so you died with him, so to speak, when he died;^[e] and now you share his new life and shall rise as he did. ⁶ Your old evil desires were nailed to the cross with him; that part of you that loves to sin was crushed and fatally wounded, so that your sin-loving body is no longer under sin’s control, no longer needs to be a slave to sin; ⁷ for when you are deadened to sin you are freed from all its allure and its power over you. ⁸ And since your old sin-loving nature “died” with Christ, we know that you will share his new life. ⁹ Christ rose from the dead and will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him. ¹⁰ He died once for all to end sin’s power, but now he lives forever in unbroken fellowship with God. ¹¹ So look upon your old sin nature as dead and unresponsive to sin, and instead be alive to God, alert to him, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

¹² Do not let sin control your puny body any longer; do not give in to its sinful desires. ¹³ Do not let any part of your bodies become tools of wickedness, to be used for sinning; but give yourselves completely to God—every part of you—for you are back from death and you want to be tools in the hands of God, to be used for his good purposes. ¹⁴ Sin need never again be your master,^[f] for now you are no longer tied to the law where sin enslaves you, but you are free under God’s favor and mercy.

¹⁵ Does this mean that now we can go ahead and sin and not worry about it? (For our salvation does not depend on keeping the law but on receiving God’s grace!) Of course not!

¹⁶ Don’t you realize that you can choose your own master? You can choose sin (with death) or else obedience (with acquittal). The one to whom you offer yourself—he will take you and be your master, and you will be his slave. ¹⁷ Thank God that though you once chose to be slaves of sin, now you have obeyed with all your heart the teaching to which God has committed you. ¹⁸ And now you are free from your old master, sin; and you have become slaves to your new master, righteousness.

¹⁹ I speak this way, using the illustration of slaves and masters, because it is easy to understand: just as you used to be slaves to all kinds of sin, so now you must let yourselves be slaves to all that is right and holy.

²⁰ In those days when you were slaves of sin you didn’t bother much with goodness. ²¹ And what was the result? Evidently not good, since you are ashamed now even to think about those things you used to do, for all of them end in eternal doom. ²² But now you are free from the power of sin and are slaves of God, and his benefits to you include holiness and everlasting life. ²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

7 Don’t you understand yet, dear Jewish brothers^[g] in Christ, that when a person dies the law no longer holds him in its power?

² Let me illustrate: when a woman marries, the law binds her to her husband as long as he is alive. But if he dies, she is no longer bound to him; the laws of marriage no longer apply to her. ³ Then she can marry someone else if she wants to. That would be wrong while he was alive, but it is perfectly all right after he dies.

⁴ Your “husband,” your master, used to be the Jewish law; but you “died,” as it were, with Christ on the cross; and since you are “dead,” you are no longer “married to the law,” and it has no more control over you. Then you came back to life again when Christ did and are a new person. And now you are “married,” so to speak, to the one who rose from the dead, so that you can produce good fruit, that is, good deeds for God. ⁵ When your old nature was still active, sinful desires were at work within you, making you want to do whatever God said not to and producing sinful deeds, the rotting fruit of death. ⁶ But now you need no longer worry about the Jewish laws and customs^[h] because you “died” while in their captivity, and now you can really serve God; not in the old way, mechanically obeying a set of rules, but in the new way, with all of your hearts and minds.

⁷ Well then, am I suggesting that these laws of God are evil? Of course not! No, the law is not sinful, but it was the law that showed me my sin. I would never have known the sin in my heart—the evil desires that are hidden there—if the law had not said, “You must not have evil desires in your heart.” ⁸ But sin used this law against evil desires by reminding me that such desires are wrong, and arousing all kinds of forbidden desires within me! Only if there were no laws to break would there be no sinning.

⁹ That is why I felt fine so long as I did not understand what the law really demanded. But when I learned the truth, I realized that I had broken the law and was a sinner, doomed to die. ¹⁰ So as far as I was concerned, the good law which was supposed to show me the way of life resulted instead in my being given the death penalty. ¹¹ Sin fooled me by taking the good laws of God and using them to make me guilty of death. ¹² But still, you see, the law itself was wholly right and good.

¹³ But how can that be? Didn’t the law cause my doom? How then can it be good? No, it was sin, devilish stuff that it is, that used what was good to bring about my condemnation. So you can see how cunning and deadly and damnable it is. For it uses God’s good laws for its own evil purposes.

¹⁴ The law is good, then, and the trouble is not there but with me because I am sold into slavery with Sin as my owner.

¹⁵ I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I can’t. I do what I don’t want to—what I hate. ¹⁶ I know perfectly well that what I am doing is wrong, and my bad conscience proves that I agree with these laws I am breaking. ¹⁷ But I can’t help myself because I’m no longer doing it. It is sin inside me that is stronger than I am that makes me do these evil things.

¹⁸ I know I am rotten through and through so far as my old sinful nature is concerned. No matter which way I turn I can’t make myself do right. I want to but I can’t. ¹⁹ When I want to do good, I don’t; and when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway. ²⁰ Now if I am doing what I don’t want to, it is plain where the trouble is: sin still has me in its evil grasp.

²¹ It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. ²² I love to do God’s will so far as my new nature is concerned; ^23-25 but there is something else deep within me, in my lower nature, that is at war with my mind and wins the fight and makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. In my mind I want to be God’s willing servant, but instead I find myself still enslaved to sin.

So you see how it is: my new life tells me to do right, but the old nature that is still inside me loves to sin. Oh, what a terrible predicament I’m in! Who will free me from my slavery to this deadly lower nature? Thank God! It has been done^[i] by Jesus Christ our Lord. He has set me free.

8 So there is now no condemnation awaiting those who belong to Christ Jesus. ² For the power of the life-giving Spirit—and this power is mine through Christ Jesus—has freed me from the vicious circle of sin and death. ³ We aren’t saved from sin’s grasp by knowing the commandments of God because we can’t and don’t keep them, but God put into effect a different plan to save us. He sent his own Son in a human body like ours—except that ours are sinful—and destroyed sin’s control over us by giving himself as a sacrifice for our sins. ⁴ So now we can obey God’s laws if we follow after the Holy Spirit and no longer obey the old evil nature within us.

⁵ Those who let themselves be controlled by their lower natures live only to please themselves, but those who follow after the Holy Spirit find themselves doing those things that please God. ⁶ Following after the Holy Spirit leads to life and peace, but following after the old nature leads to death ⁷ because the old sinful nature within us is against God. It never did obey God’s laws and it never will. ⁸ That’s why those who are still under the control of their old sinful selves, bent on following their old evil desires, can never please God.

⁹ But you are not like that. You are controlled by your new nature if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And remember that if anyone doesn’t have the Spirit of Christ living in him, he is not a Christian at all.) ¹⁰ Yet, even though Christ lives within you, your body will die because of sin; but your spirit will live, for Christ has pardoned it.^{[j] 11} And if the Spirit of God, who raised up Jesus from the dead, lives in you, he will make your dying bodies live again after you die, by means of this same Holy Spirit living within you.

¹² So, dear brothers, you have no obligations whatever to your old sinful nature to do what it begs you to do. ¹³ For if you keep on following it you are lost and will perish, but if through the power of the Holy Spirit you crush it and its evil deeds, you shall live. ¹⁴ For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

¹⁵ And so we should not be like cringing, fearful slaves, but we should behave like God’s very own children, adopted into the bosom of his family, and calling to him, “Father, Father.” ¹⁶ For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we really are God’s children. ¹⁷ And since we are his children, we will share his treasures—for all God gives to his Son Jesus is now ours too. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering.

¹⁸ Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will give us later. ¹⁹ For all creation is waiting patiently and hopefully for that future day^[k] when God will resurrect his children. ^20-21 For on that day thorns and thistles, sin, death, and decay^[l]—the things that overcame the world against its will at God’s command—will all disappear, and the world around us will share in the glorious freedom from sin which God’s children enjoy.

²² For we know that even the things of nature, like animals and plants, suffer in sickness and death as they await this great event.^{[m] 23} And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering. We, too, wait anxiously for that day when God will give us our full rights as his children, including the new bodies he has promised us—bodies that will never be sick again and will never die.

²⁴ We are saved by trusting. And trusting means looking forward to getting something we don’t yet have—for a man who already has something doesn’t need to hope and trust that he will get it. ²⁵ But if we must keep trusting God for something that hasn’t happened yet, it teaches us to wait patiently and confidently.

²⁶ And in the same way—by our faith^[n]—the Holy Spirit helps us with our daily problems and in our praying. For we don’t even know what we should pray for nor how to pray as we should, but the Holy Spirit prays for us with such feeling that it cannot be expressed in words. ²⁷ And the Father who knows all hearts knows, of course, what the Spirit is saying as he pleads for us in harmony with God’s own will. ²⁸ And we know that all that happens to us is working for our good if we love God and are fitting into his plans.

²⁹ For from the very beginning God decided that those who came to him—and all along he knew who would—should become like his Son, so that his Son would be the First, with many brothers. ³⁰ And having chosen us, he called us to come to him; and when we came, he declared us “not guilty,” filled us with Christ’s goodness, gave us right standing with himself, and promised us his glory.

³¹ What can we ever say to such wonderful things as these? If God is on our side, who can ever be against us? ³² Since he did not spare even his own Son for us but gave him up for us all, won’t he also surely give us everything else?

³³ Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? Will God? No! He is the one who has forgiven us and given us right standing with himself.

³⁴ Who then will condemn us? Will Christ? No! For he is the one who died for us and came back to life again for us and is sitting at the place of highest honor next to God, pleading for us there in heaven.

³⁵ Who then can ever keep Christ’s love from us? When we have trouble or calamity, when we are hunted down or destroyed, is it because he doesn’t love us anymore? And if we are hungry or penniless or in danger or threatened with death, has God deserted us?

³⁶ No, for the Scriptures tell us that for his sake we must be ready to face death at every moment of the day—we are like sheep awaiting slaughter; ³⁷ but despite all this, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ who loved us enough to die for us. ³⁸ For I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can’t, and life can’t. The angels won’t, and all the powers of hell itself cannot keep God’s love away. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, ³⁹ or where we are—high above the sky, or in the deepest ocean—nothing will ever be able to separate us from the love of God demonstrated by our Lord Jesus Christ when he died for us.

12 And so, dear brothers, I plead with you to give your bodies to God. Let them be a living sacrifice, holy—the kind he can accept. When you think of what he has done for you, is this too much to ask? ² Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but be a new and different person with a fresh newness in all you do and think. Then you will learn from your own experience how his ways will really satisfy you.

³ As God’s messenger I give each of you God’s warning: Be honest in your estimate of yourselves, measuring your value by how much faith God has given you. ^4-5 Just as there are many parts to our bodies, so it is with Christ’s body. We are all parts of it, and it takes every one of us to make it complete, for we each have different work to do. So we belong to each other, and each needs all the others.

⁶ God has given each of us the ability to do certain things well. So if God has given you the ability to prophesy, then prophesy whenever you can—as often as your faith is strong enough to receive a message from God. ⁷ If your gift is that of serving others, serve them well. If you are a teacher, do a good job of teaching. ⁸ If you are a preacher, see to it that your sermons are strong and helpful. If God has given you money, be generous in helping others with it. If God has given you administrative ability and put you in charge of the work of others, take the responsibility seriously. Those who offer comfort to the sorrowing should do so with Christian cheer.

⁹ Don’t just pretend that you love others: really love them. Hate what is wrong. Stand on the side of the good. ¹⁰ Love each other with brotherly affection and take delight in honoring each other. ¹¹ Never be lazy in your work, but serve the Lord enthusiastically.

¹² Be glad for all God is planning for you. Be patient in trouble, and prayerful always. ¹³ When God’s children are in need, you be the one to help them out. And get into the habit of inviting guests home for dinner or, if they need lodging, for the night.

¹⁴ If someone mistreats you because you are a Christian, don’t curse him; pray that God will bless him. ¹⁵ When others are happy, be happy with them. If they are sad, share their sorrow. ¹⁶ Work happily together. Don’t try to act big. Don’t try to get into the good graces of important people, but enjoy the company of ordinary folks. And don’t think you know it all!

¹⁷ Never pay back evil for evil. Do things in such a way that everyone can see you are honest clear through. ¹⁸ Don’t quarrel with anyone. Be at peace with everyone, just as much as possible.

¹⁹ Dear friends, never avenge yourselves. Leave that to God, for he has said that he will repay those who deserve it. Don’t take the law into your own hands.^{[a] 20} Instead, feed your enemy if he is hungry. If he is thirsty give him something to drink and you will be “heaping coals of fire on his head.” In other words, he will feel ashamed of himself for what he has done to you. ²¹ Don’t let evil get the upper hand, but conquer evil by doing good.