We are dead to trying to be what we already are.

How many times do you try to be good but fail?

How would your life be if you never felt discouraged by your failure to be good?

“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 that person lives?For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man. So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death.But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” (Romans 7: 1-6)

Our old life, the life we lived before Christ has died (this first husband). What was that like? It was a life of trying to be good, trying to keep the commandments of God but breaking them, trying to be someone who God is pleased with but never feeling successful. But something happened: But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.The commandments/law of God has not died, it still declares the lifestyle that pleases God, but we are dead to trying to please God by trying to live up to that lifestyle. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.We have come away from and out of that control of trying to keep what we could never keep and trying to be good when we never could.

How do we know this to be true? So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ.

Jesus Christ was born under the law of God, lived under the law and died by the law becoming a curse of sin and death. (Galatians 4) The cross of Christ has been placed on top of the law of God. The law is still relevant and Paul has many lists of do’s and do not’s in his several letters. However, our attempts of trying to be good are filtered through the death of Christ. We have died in Christ and we have been made righteous. The evidence is not our achievement but Christ’s.