<p>7:6&nbsp;<i>But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were held</i>- &ldquo;Discharged&rdquo; is the same Greek word translated &ldquo;loosed&rdquo; in 7:2:&nbsp; the woman is loosed from the law of her husband. The suggestion is that Paul&rsquo;s audience had been married to the Law and now remarried to Christ because the Law had as it were died. This confirms our suggestion see on 7:8 that Romans 7 is aimed at Jews who had once been associated with the Law but were now in Christ. The death of the Law is made parallel with the death of Christ, in that He nailed it to the cross, in the sense that He embodied the Law by perfectly obeying and fulfilling it. The intention of the Law was that if fully obeyed, it would lead to a perfect man- the Lord Jesus. In this sense it was &ldquo;ordained to life&rdquo;. In this sense &ldquo;the Law&rdquo; and the person of Christ can be legitimately presented in parallel as they are by Paul here.</p><p><i><br /></i><i>So that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter</i>- Spirit&hellip; letter are likewise contrasted in Rom. 2:29 and 2 Cor. 3:6. It can be that we perceive even our service of God as the same old scene- the same round of daily Bible reading (although, why not try reading from another version or in another language?), the same cycle of church meetings and Bible schools. The same faces, the same issues. But our experience of grace means &ldquo;that we should serve in&nbsp;<i>newness</i>&nbsp;of spirit and not in the oldness of the letter&rdquo; (Rom. 7:6). We don&rsquo;t&nbsp;<i>have</i>&nbsp;to serve God in the sense that He grants us salvation by pure grace, not by works. But just because we don&rsquo;t&nbsp;<i>have</i>&nbsp;to do it, we do. This is the power of grace; it doesn&rsquo;t force us to monotonous service, but should be a wellspring of fresh motivation, to do perhaps the same things with an ever fresh spirit. The pure&nbsp;<i>wonder</i>&nbsp;of it all needs to be felt- that&nbsp;<i>for nothing but pure faith</i>&nbsp;the Lord will grant us eternal redemption for the sake of the Lord&rsquo;s death and resurrection. Which is why Rom. 6:4 says that because of this, and our appropriation of it in baptism, we therefore live in&nbsp;<i>newness</i>&nbsp;of life, a quality of life that is ever new. Through His death, a new and living way is opened (Heb. 10:20). We share the ever fresh life which the Lord lived from His resurrection. It does us good to try to imagine that scene- the Son of God, coming out of the grave at daybreak. He would have seen the lights of Jerusalem shimmering away in the distance, a few kms. away, as everyone woke up and went back to work, the first day after the long holiday. Getting the children ready, caring for the animals&hellip; it was back to the same old scene. But as they did so, the Son of God was rising to newness of life, standing alone in the fresh morning air, with a life that was ever new, with a joy and dynamism that was to know no end&hellip; His feelings are beyond us, but all the same, distorted by our nature, by our spiritual dysfunction, into&nbsp;<i>our&nbsp;</i>lives&nbsp;<i>His&nbsp;</i>life breaks through.</p>