A marriage illustration
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📚✭Do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the Law), that the Law has authority over a man as long as he lives? 2 📚✭For the woman who has a husband is bound to her husband, by the Law, as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is freed from the law regarding the husband. 3 📚✭So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still living, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband is dead, she is freed from that law, so that even though she gets married to another man, she is not an adulteress.4 📚Therefore, my brethren, you also have died to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be married to another, to him who was raised from the dead, that we might bear fruit to God. 5 📚✭For when we were in the flesh✭, the sinful passions aroused by the Law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death. 6 📚✭But now we have been delivered from the Law, having died to what held us, so that we might serve in newness of spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
Paul experienced his sinful nature
7 📚✭What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? Absolutely not! Indeed, I would not have known sin except through the Law, for I would not have known what it means to covet unless the Law had said, “You shall not covet”. 8 📚✭But sin, taking the opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of craving. For apart from the Law sin was dead. 9 📚✭For once I was alive apart from the Law. But when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. 10 📚✭And the commandment, which was to lead to life, I found to lead to death. 11 📚✭For sin, taking the opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me. 12 📚✭Therefore, the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy, and just, and good.
13 📚✭Then, did that which is good become death to me? Absolutely not! But sin, so that it might appear as sin, was producing death in me through that which is good, so that sin, through the commandment, might become exceedingly sinful.
The power of the sinful nature in believers
14 📚✭For we know that the Law is spiritual. But I am fleshly, sold under sin. 15 📚✭For I do not understand what I do; for I do not do what I intend to do, but do what I hate✭. 16 📚If, then, I do what I do not intend to do, I agree with the Law, that it is good. 17 📚✭So then it is no longer I who do it, but sin that lives in me. 18 📚✭For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) no good thing lives. For the ability to choose is present with me, but I do not see how to perform what is good. 19 📚✭For I do not do the good that I choose to do, but the evil that I do not choose, that I do. 20 📚Now if I do what I do not choose, it is no longer I who does it, but sin that lives in me.
21 📚I find, then, a law✭: When I choose to do good, evil is present with me. 22 📚✭For I delight in the Law of God in the person I am inwardly. 23 📚But I see another law✭ in my bodily members, making war against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 24 📚✭O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death✭? 25 📚✭I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, with the mind I myself serve the Law of God, but with the flesh serve the law of sin.