¹ What should we say then? Should we remain in sin so that grace may be given the more fully?

² Out of the question! We have died to sin; how could we go on living in it?

³ You cannot have forgotten that all of us, when we were baptised into Christ Jesus, were baptised into his death.

⁴ So by our baptism into his death we were buried with him, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father's glorious power, we too should begin living a new life.

⁵ If we have been joined to him by dying a death like his, so we shall be by a resurrection like his;

⁶ realising that our former self was crucified with him, so that the self which belonged to sin should be destroyed and we should be freed from the slavery of sin.

⁷ Someone who has died, of course, no longer has to answer for sin.

⁸ But we believe that, if we died with Christ, then we shall live with him too.

⁹ We know that Christ has been raised from the dead and will never die again. Death has no power over him any more.

¹⁰ For by dying, he is dead to sin once and for all, and now the life that he lives is life with God.

¹¹ In the same way, you must see yourselves as being dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus.

¹² That is why you must not allow sin to reign over your mortal bodies and make you obey their desires;

¹³ or give any parts of your bodies over to sin to be used as instruments of evil. Instead, give yourselves to God, as people brought to life from the dead, and give every part of your bodies to God to be instruments of uprightness;

¹⁴ and then sin will no longer have any power over you -- you are living not under law, but under grace.

¹⁵ What is the implication? That we are free to sin, now that we are not under law but under grace? Out of the question!

¹⁶ You know well that if you undertake to be somebody's slave and obey him, you are the slave of him you obey: you can be the slave either of sin which leads to death, or of obedience which leads to saving justice.

¹⁷ Once you were slaves of sin, but thank God you have given whole-hearted obedience to the pattern of teaching to which you were introduced;

¹⁸ and so, being freed from serving sin, you took uprightness as your master.

¹⁹ I am putting it in human terms because you are still weak human beings: as once you surrendered yourselves as servants to immorality and to a lawlessness which results in more lawlessness, now you have to surrender yourselves to uprightness which is to result in sanctification.

²⁰ When you were the servants of sin, you felt no obligation to uprightness,

²¹ and what did you gain from living like that? Experiences of which you are now ashamed, for that sort of behaviour ends in death.

²² But, now you are set free from sin and bound to the service of God, your gain will be sanctification and the end will be eternal life.

²³ For the wage paid by sin is death; the gift freely given by God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.