and you must stop offering to sin the parts of your bodies as instruments for wrongdoing, but you must once for all offer yourselves to God as persons raised from the dead to live on perpetually, and once for all offer the parts of your bodies to God as instruments for right-doing.

Do you not know that when you habitually offer yourselves to anyone for obedience to him, you are slaves to that one whom you are in the habit of obeying, whether it is the slavery to sin whose end is death or to obedience whose end is right-doing?

and since you have been freed from sin, you have become the slaves of right-doing.

I am speaking in familiar human terms because of the frailty of your nature. For just as you formerly offered the parts of your bodies in slavery to impurity and to ever increasing lawlessness, so now you must once for all offer them in slavery to right-doing, which leads to consecration.

For civil authorities are not a terror to the man who does right, but they are to the man who does wrong. Do you want to have no dread of the civil authorities? Then practice doing right and you will be commended for it.

But if I am always doing what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is right.

For the kingdom of God does not consist in what we eat and drink, but in doing right, in peace and joy through the Holy Spirit;

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free so far as doing right was concerned.

Indeed, I do not understand what I do, for I do not practice what I want to do, but I am always doing what I hate.

But if I do the things that I do not want to do, it is really not I that am doing these things, but it is sin which has its home within me.

For the civil authorities are God's servants to do you good. But if you practice doing wrong, you should dread them, for they do not wield the sword for nothing. Indeed, they are God's servants to inflict punishment upon people who do wrong.

But the man who has misgivings about eating, if he then eats, has already condemned himself by so doing, because he did not follow his faith, and any action that does not follow one's faith is a sin.

And you, who pose as a judge of those who practice such sins and yet continue doing the same yourself, do you for once suppose that you are going to escape the judgment of God?

What benefit did you then derive from doing the things of which you are now ashamed? None, for they end in death.