from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin shall not have dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 15 What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not! 16 Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one to obey as slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, whether of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for holiness. 20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is holiness and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. 7 1 Do you not know, brethrenófor I am speaking to those who know the lawóthat the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives? 2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of her husband. 3 So then, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and though she marries another man, she is not an adulteress. 4 Likewise, my brethren, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit to God. 5 While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6 But now, by dying to what once held us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. 7 What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." 8 But sin, finding opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetous desire. For apart from the law sin lies dead. 9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. 10 The very commandment which was to bring life I found to be death to me. 11 For sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me.