Don’t offer any part of yourself to serve sin and do what’s wrong. Instead, offer yourselves to God as people who have been brought from death to life. Offer every part of yourself to God to do what’s right.
You’re also like living stones. As you come to Christ, you’re being built into a house for worship. There you will be holy priests and offer spiritual sacrifices that God will accept because of what Jesus Christ has done.
He did that to show for all time the riches of his grace, which can’t be compared with anything else. He demonstrated his grace by being kind to us because of what Christ Jesus has done.
But these signs have been written down so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name.
If anyone speaks, they should do it as someone who’s speaking God’s own words. If anyone serves, they should do it with the strength that God provides. That way God will be praised in all things through Jesus Christ. May he receive the glory and power for ever and ever. Amen.
When you worked for sin, the pay you got from it was death. But now you’re working for God because you’ve gotten a gift: eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.
My brothers and sisters, when Christ died, you also died, and so you were no longer “married” to the law. Then it became possible for you to belong to Christ instead. He was raised from the dead so that our lives could produce what God wanted.
But now we have died to what used to control us, and we have been set free from the law. We serve in the new way of the Holy Spirit, not in the old way of the written law.
Some people still follow the basic spiritual powers of the world. But you died with Christ as far as those powers are concerned. So why do you act as if you still belonged to the world? You’re following rules such as,