Paul recognizes that the power of sin is still active in the world of the believers, so that Christians are confronted with the real peril of falling back into the submission to sin that will result in the Christians’ following the baser instincts of human existence rather than God’s will and leadership. In one sense Paul is telling the Romans that God has already rescued the Christians out of the mud and cleaned them off through the bath of baptism, so that Paul admonishes these same believers to stay out of the mud, to resist any subsequent urge to return to the mud-bath from which they have already been rescued.

More importantly, however, than the real need to resist returning to the mud is the positive dimension of Paul’s teaching–that having been “brought from death to life,” the Christians have the opportunity to give themselves to God and to live according to God’s righteousness, i.e., God’s will, God’s power, God’s action in the world for salvation, God’s purposes.

Verse 14 forms both an admonition and a promise. Here Paul tells his readers that they are truly freed from the power of sin and that they are secure in their freedom because God’s grace is the source of their liberty and security. The contrast in this verse between “law” and “grace” brings up a point long debated in Christian circles. What Paul is saying, however, is that in one way of living there is freedom–grace is God’s power at work liberating the believers from their involvements with sin; whereas in another way of forming life, the attempt to live life rightly through the observance of the law, one is left essentially on one’s own without God’s liberating power. For as Paul the Christian sees it, the law (holy, just, and good as it is) is impotent to resolve the dilemma humanity faces in relation to sin, while grace is God’s power per se at work doing for the Christians what they cannot do for themselves.