- Romans 6:13
Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. - Romans 6:16
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? - Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 7:5
For 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.
Paul’s letter to the Romans is littered with sin and death. Those who he is writing this message to came from a society filled with hedonistic pleasures. His comment about those passions being aroused by the law meant something different to them at that time because they were not Jews.
I would venture that the majority of my readers do not come from a Jewish background and what we know about the law has been taught to us on two levels, moral and spiritual. If we consider those are influences that help us define sin then we might see it leads to varied and confusing practices in identifying what is right and just.
Moral laws are societal, and are regulated by governing bodies. That varies from state to state and country to country. Spiritual laws are defined by God and are absolute. How we control sin in living in Christ affects our behavior and our relationship with God and each other.
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.
That same principle is applied across all levels of worship, none more closely than those who do not know or love Jesus Christ. Religious laws are not spiritual, they are moral laws controlled by society.
Jesus died to set us free from the law of sin. That means it is important to know what sin is according to God’s righteous standard and not what mankind calls it.