Chapter 8

¹So there is no condemnation any more for those who are in union with Christ Jesus. ²For the life-giving law of the Spirit through Christ Jesus has freed you from the Law of sin and death. ³For though it was impossible for the Law to do it, hampered as it was by our physical limitations, God, by sending his own Son in our sinful physical form, as a sin-offering, put his condemnation upon sin through his physical nature, ⁴so that the requirement of the Law might be fully met in our case, since we live not on the physical but on the spiritual plane. ⁵People who are controlled by the physical think of what is physical, and people who are controlled by the spiritual think of what is spiritual. ⁶For to be physically minded means death, but to be spiritually minded means life and peace. ⁷For to be physically minded means hostility to God, for it refuses to obey God’s law, indeed it cannot obey it. ⁸Those who are physical cannot please God. ⁹But you are not physical but spiritual, if God’s Spirit has really taken possession of you; for unless a man has Christ’s spirit, he does not belong to Christ. ¹⁰But if Christ is in your hearts, though your bodies are dead in consequence of sin, your spirits have life in consequence of uprightness. ¹¹If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead has taken possession of you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give your mortal bodies life through his Spirit that has taken possession of you.

¹²So, brothers, we are under obligations, but not to the physical nature, to live under its control, ¹³for if you live under the control of the physical you will die, but if, by means of the Spirit, you put the body’s doings to death, you will live. ¹⁴For all who are guided by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. ¹⁵It is not a consciousness of servitude that has been imparted to you, to fill you with fear again, but the consciousness of adoption as sons, which makes us cry, “Abba!” that is, Father. ¹⁶The Spirit itself testifies with our spirits that we are God’s children, ¹⁷and if children, heirs also; heirs of God, and fellow-heirs with Christ, if we really share his sufferings in order to share his glory too.

¹⁸For I consider what we suffer now not to be compared with the glory that is to burst upon us. ¹⁹For creation is waiting with eager longing for the sons of God to be disclosed. ²⁰For it was not the fault of creation that it was frustrated; it was by the will of him who condemned it to that, and in the hope ²¹that creation itself would be set free from its bondage to decay, and have the glorious freedom of the children of God. ²²We know that all creation has been groaning in agony together until now. ²³More than that, we ourselves, though we have in the Spirit a foretaste of the future, groan to ourselves as we wait to be declared God’s sons, through the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴It was in this hope that we were saved. But a hope that can be seen is not a hope, for who hopes for what he sees? ²⁵But when we hope for something that we do not see, we wait persistently for it.

²⁶In the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit itself pleads for us with inexpressible yearnings, ²⁷and he who searches our hearts knows what the Spirit means, for it pleads for God’s people in accordance with his will. ²⁸We know that in everything God works with those who love him, whom he has called in accordance with his purpose, to bring about what is good. ²⁹For those whom he had marked out from the first he predestined to be made like his Son, so that he should be the eldest of many brothers; ³⁰and those whom he has predestined he calls, and those whom he calls he makes upright, and those whom he makes upright he glorifies.

³¹Then what shall we conclude from this? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³²Will not he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, with that gift give us everything? ³³Who can bring any accusation against those whom God has chosen? God pronounces them upright; ³⁴who can condemn them? Christ Jesus who died, or rather who was raised from the dead, is at God’s right hand, and actually pleads for us. ³⁵Who can separate us from Christ’s love? Can trouble or misfortune or persecution or hunger or destitution or danger or the sword? ³⁶As the Scripture says,

“For your sake we are being put to death all day long,

We are treated like sheep to be slaughtered.”

³⁷But in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor their hierarchies nor the present nor the future ³⁹nor any supernatural forces either of height or depth will be able to separate us from the love God has shown in Christ Jesus our Lord!