Romans 7 (NMV)
1 Or do you not know, brothers and sisters, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law has authority over someone only as long as they live?
2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning her husband.
3 So then, if she is joined to another man while her husband is still alive, she will be called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and she is not an adulteress if she marries another man.
4 In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to the one who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.
5 For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions awakened by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death.
6 But now we have been released from the law, having died to what held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
7 What then shall we say? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known what it means to desire more than what God has provided, especially what belongs to someone else, if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.'
8 But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me every kind of desire for more than what God has provided. For apart from the law, sin is dead.
9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.
10 I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.
11 For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.
12 So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
13 Did what is good, then, become death to me? Absolutely not! But sin, so that it might be shown to be sin, produced death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment sin might be recognized as utterly sinful.
14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am fleshly, sold as a slave to sin.
15 For I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do; but what I hate, that is what I do.
16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.
17 But now it is no longer I who do it, but sin living in me.
18 For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is right is present with me, but the ability to carry it out is not.
19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing.
20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that lives in me.
21 So I find this principle at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.
22 For in my inner being I delight in the law of God.
23 But I see a different law at work in my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin that is at work within me.
24 What a miserable person I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?
25 Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I serve the law of God, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.