I.
In our Scripture for this week Paul sets his focus on “the law.”

As you spend time with this passage, set your own focus on what says about “the law.” Pay attention to what he might say about the positive and negative aspects of “the law.”

II.
Romans 7:1-12 (NRSVue)

Or do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only during that person’s lifetime? Thus a married woman is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning the husband. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she belongs to another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she belongs to another man, she is not an adulteress.

In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are enslaved in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the written code.

What then are we to say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.

III.
As you read Paul’s words about “the law,” did you notice that he said, “you have died to the law … so that you may belong to another.”

In part I want to ask myself “What is the law to me, if I am dead to it?”

But then I want to ask myself, “Who do I belong to?” And “What difference might it make?”

charles
{ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est}