Many careful readers have felt an uncomfortable jolt moving through Paul’s letter to the Romans. In chapter 6 he says, “the one who has died has been set free from sin” (6:7). In chapter 7 he cries out, “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (7:15). In chapter 8 he exults, “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1). Many are confused, unclear about the truth of their condition. Some conclude Paul is unclear too, or that Bible translators have muddied the waters. Yet the problem is not in Paul, nor in Scripture’s original clarity. The problem is that the gospel is more glorious than our training via the experiences of life has prepared us for. From the cradle, our habits of thought are conditioned in a different direction: we are told that if we behave in a certain way, good will follow, and if we behave badly, punishment will come. It is carrot and stick, reward and penalty, all the way through, and we cannot escape that frame of thinking. We are also taught that if something looks too good to be true, then it probably is. But the gospel is exactly that — too good to be true, except that it is true.
This ingrained way of thinking colours everything, even translation. It is not that our English Bibles are deliberately misleading, but that translators, like us, have inherited this system of cause-and-effect reasoning. When they choose how to render Paul’s Greek, they sometimes reach instinctively for words that fit the “carrot and stick” pattern, because that is how we all think. Other words could have been chosen, words that might have expressed Paul’s absolutes more starkly and more clearly. But instead we often read versions shaded by our own interpretive habits, and this makes Paul sound conflicted when he is not. It is not dishonesty. It is the human condition, interpreting the glorious freedom of the gospel through a lens trained from birth to expect conditions, penalties, and bargains.
The heart of Paul’s argument is union with Christ. We were “baptized into his death” so that, as Christ was raised, we too might walk in newness of life (6:3–4). When Paul writes, “the one who has died has been set free from sin” (6:7), he uses a word that means “has been justified” or “acquitted” from sin. He is speaking the language of the courtroom before he is describing the texture of our feelings. Through the cross, the guilt-bearing power of sin has been answered and its legal claim has been nullified. Think of it this way: if I am a thief, Christ has shouldered my sentence and gone to prison in my place; I am released, not because my record never existed, but because justice has been satisfied. I am no longer a convict in law. I have been transferred into a different lawful standing before the court. And in this new standing, under this new jurisdiction, sin is still truly recognised for what it is, but it is dealt with differently. It is not punished with a death sentence, for that has already been borne by Christ. Instead, it is dealt with according to the promise of 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Yet this does not mean my old tendencies are simply erased. Though my nature has been made new in Christ, the habits of my old self remain, and they still pull at me. To stay with the picture: I may still feel like a thief and even be tempted to act like one. If I give in, earthly consequences remain — in this world, if I steal again, I may well go to prison. But heaven passes a different judgment. Under law, I would be condemned eternally as a thief; under grace, I am dealt with as a forgiven child who must be disciplined, cleansed, and transformed. My sin is not excused, but it is treated as something already paid for and being actively put to death by the Spirit within me.
It is at precisely this point that Paul cries out, “What then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? Certainly not!” (Romans 6:1–2). Too many have heard this as a hammer-blow, sealing their doom because they still feel sin’s pull and even fall into it. They read the words as if Paul were saying, “How dare you. Now you’re finished!” But Paul’s shout is not condemnation — it is astonishment. He is saying, “Don’t you see? Grace is so glorious, so transforming, that to keep on in sin makes no sense at all.” Sin still has attraction; it still works like an addiction in the flesh, and that is why people continue as they were, despite their best struggles not to, and then feel crushed by shame. But Paul’s point is that once you grasp the new jurisdiction, the glory of the gospel melts the chains of sin. Its power fades in the light of a greater power. The question is not, “Will you now sin with impunity?” but, “Why would you want to, when grace has brought you into life?”
This transfer of legal and lawful standing is what Paul means when he says we are “not under law but under grace” (6:14). “Under law” is not merely a posture of trying hard; it is a jurisdiction, a realm in which sin is counted against me and must be paid. “Under grace” is a different jurisdiction altogether, a realm in which sin is fully recognized as sin yet is no longer charged to my account because it has already been charged to Christ. The judge has rendered a verdict, and the verdict stands: no condemnation.
Why then does Romans 7 sound like a struggle? Because Paul has not leapt from legal acquittal to the immediate erasure of sinful desire. He refuses both sentimental make-believe and despairing cynicism. In chapter 7 he describes the honest, sometimes agonizing experience of a believer who delights in God’s law in the inner person and yet feels another law warring in his members. The key is to hear this not as contradiction but as overlap. The new jurisdiction is real and final—grace reigns—but we still live for a time within mortal bodies in which old patterns have momentum and the flesh resists the Spirit. Sin no longer reigns, but it does still remain. It cannot condemn, but it can contest. Hence Paul’s double insistence in the very same section: “So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (7:25), and yet immediately, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1). The verdict is secure even while the battle continues.
And yet, because we have not understood this glorious gospel in all its wonder, we often condemn ourselves — or, more sharply, we let the devil condemn us. We fall so far short of the glory of God, and though we know we are saved, our assurance trembles. Romans 8 declares “no condemnation,” but we look at our failings and doubt it. We begin to suspect that we are only carrying on the habits of Christian living by force of routine, not by conviction, and we fear that what we have done — or what we thought, or what we would have done if only we could — has put us beyond the pale. I know a man who once said to me that his life felt like “an unflushed lavatory,” and I knew what he meant. The stench of guilt clings. But here is where this teaching liberates us. The gospel says, “That is not how your Father looks at you.” The Lord does not look at your life through the lens of your shame, or even through the relentless tally of the law. He looks at you in Christ, and in Christ there is no condemnation. You may wish you had never done it, and rightly so, but Christ has borne it. You are free in Him, and free indeed.
That is why Paul commands us to “reckon” or “consider” ourselves “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11). He is not telling us to conjure a feeling or pretend a fiction. He is urging us to think in line with the truth God has established. Reckoning is the mind’s daily alignment with reality: Christ died, therefore in him I died; Christ rose, therefore in him I live; sin’s claim to condemn me has been cancelled, therefore I refuse to live as if its condemnation still stands. This is not merely “mental assent” in the thin, modern sense of positive thinking; it is faith’s sober accounting of what God has done, and on that basis presenting our bodies “as instruments of righteousness” (6:13). The order matters. We do not reckon ourselves dead so that God will acquit us; we reckon ourselves dead because God has already acquitted us in Christ.
Here, too, we must clear away another stumbling block. Many earnest believers, questing after holiness and finding themselves still weak, hear the words, “Without holiness no one will see the Lord,” and “Be holy, for I am holy,” and they feel crushed. They measure themselves and despair. But these verses are not bars raised higher than we can reach; they are windows into the life we already possess in Christ. The only holiness that counts before God is Christ’s holiness, given to us and lived in us by His Spirit. If Christ is in us, and we are in Him, how could we be anything but holy in the eyes of God? Our calling is to let that holiness work its way outward in practice, but its root is already planted. Holiness is not a prize we must attain; it is the gift of Christ’s own life within us.
And while God has, in His mercy, sometimes so filled His servants that particular sins lost all their hold — think of names such as Brengle, Finney, or Wesley, for those who know them — we must not make a doctrine out of those extraordinary testimonies, nor feed them back into Scripture as though they were conditions for holiness. If you don’t know the names, it does not matter at all; the point is simply this: whatever transformations the Lord works in individuals, the foundation is always the same. We are holy in Christ, not in ourselves. And here is what so many miss: if you long to be holy, and you yearn to be like those who seem to have gone further, you must understand that you are already holy in Christ. If the Lord, in His kindness, chooses to do some special cleansing work in you, He will. But you will not be any more holy than you already are in Him. What you will know is more freedom, more joy, and perhaps more usefulness in His service — but your holiness, your standing before God, is complete already. Christ is the guarantee of our sanctification which is the one area of salvation where we fall short because of our behaviour. But He’s got it covered. “We have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” Hebrews 10:10.
Here the language of “jurisdiction” helps. Imagine two realms: in the first, every failure is tallied and punishment is inevitable; in the second, the same failures are exposed as truly wrong but are dealt with through a sacrifice already offered, with a Spirit already given, and with a future already secured. Moving from the first realm to the second does not make temptation evaporate. It changes what temptation can do to you. Under law, sin accuses and the accusation stands. Under grace, sin accuses but its case cannot be heard, because the court has already entered the judgment—paid in full.
This also explains the pastoral distress many Christians feel. We read “freed from sin” and we instinctively hear “sinless.” Then, meeting our actual weakness, we either conclude that Paul overpromised or that we ourselves are impostors. But Paul has promised something different and deeper. He has promised freedom from sin’s penalty now, growing freedom from sin’s power by the Spirit, and certain freedom from sin’s presence when Christ returns. Romans 6 announces the broken dominion of sin; Romans 7 describes the contested ground of daily obedience; Romans 8 opens the windows to the clear air of our status—no condemnation—and the Spirit’s liberating work: “the law of the Spirit of life has set you free” (8:2). The three chapters do not cancel one another; they complete one another.
What then of Bible translations and the nuanced language referred to earlier? English (or any other language other than Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic) renderings are not deliberately misleading; translators are servants of the church. Yet our languages carry baggage. A phrase like “set free from sin” can be heard as “made incapable of sinning,” when in fact, Paul’s Greek in Romans 6:7 leans into the courtroom – it means “acquitted from sin.” Likewise “reckon” in Romans 6:11 can sound like a tentative guess or trying to convince ourselves, when Paul’s term actually means “to make a settled calculation based on established fact.” Our minds, trained from childhood in “if-then” moral arithmetic—“if you do this, then you get that”—easily import conditions into Paul’s absolutes. The gospel outstrips that calculus. Christ has done it, for “it is finished,” (John 19:30), and therefore you are “it”. Only then does Paul say, “so now, walk.”
How should we live, practically, in this new jurisdiction? Paul gives us a quiet pattern. First, keep hearing the verdict: no condemnation. Bring your mind back there as often as the Accuser drags you elsewhere. Second, present yourself—again and again—to God as one alive from the dead. Yield your members, not to the old habits that once claimed you, but to righteousness (6:13). Third, walk by the Spirit, who indwells you precisely to empower the life that grace has declared over you (8:4, 8:13). None of this is triumphal denial of struggle. It is simply learning to breathe the air of the realm to which you now belong.
If you need one image to carry with you, take this: a prisoner’s chains have been struck off, the cell door stands open, and the royal pardon is in his hand. He may still shuffle when he walks because he remembers the weight that once dragged at his ankles, and he may still, out of unhappy habit, glance toward the prison yard at dusk. But he is not a prisoner anymore. The king’s word is final. If he hears iron clink, it is not the sound of his chains returning; it is the echo of old footsteps fading as he learns to walk in the freedom he already possesses.
The supposed contradictions, then, of Romans 6, 7 and 8, dissolve into a single, coherent truth. You are under a new jurisdiction – the jurisdiction of grace within the constitution of the New Covenant. On Earth, the jurisdictions live side by side, but you must know with absolute certainty which one you belong to. Sin may harass you but it cannot condemn you; it may tempt you but it can no longer own you. Reckon this to be so because God has said it is so. And as you reckon, you will find that the life of the Spirit steadily conforms your experience to your status, until the day when even the presence of sin is gone and what you have long believed you will finally and fully see.