1 Listen, Jesus Christ has set us free, and we are properly free. So be strong and stay free. Don’t let anyone make you follow that law again. If you do, it’s like they make you a prisoner again, because they say you have to do everything that law says.

2 Listen. This is me, Paul, writing this, and I’m telling you straight. If you try to be friends with God by having a young man operation, then you are not trusting Jesus Christ, so he will not help you at all. 3 I’m telling you again. If you let somebody do that operation on you, to make you like a Jewish man, then you have to do everything else that is in the Jewish law. 4 And if you are following the Jewish law to get God to say that you are all right, that shows that you turned away from Jesus Christ, and that you forgot that he is the one that gets God to be good to you. 5 But listen, we trust Jesus to make us properly good, and the Holy Spirit tells us for sure that Jesus will do that. So we are waiting for him to do it, and we know he will. 6 You see, if people belong to Jesus Christ, it doesn’t matter if they have a young man operation or not. The only thing that matters is that they trust Jesus, and if they do that, they will love God, and they will love other people.

7 You mob were following Jesus really good, like you were running in a race and were nearly winning it. But then somebody got in your way, so now you are not winning. Somebody stopped you from believing the true story, and you stopped living the right way. 8 That wrong message did not come from God. No, God is the one that picked you to be his people.

9 I’ll use a picture story about cooking damper. If you put a little bit of baking powder into a big lot of flour, it will make it all swell up. Well just like that, somebody told a few of you the wrong message, and now a lot of you are going wrong.* 1 Corinthians 5:6 10 But I’m trusting God to help you. I reckon you will stop following that wrong way and you will follow my words. And, as for that man that is getting you all mixed up, I don’t know who he is, but I know that God will punish him.

11 Listen, my Christian friends, some people reckon that I still tell people to have a young man operation, but that’s not right. I teach people that Jesus Christ died on the cross to save them. And those Jews that don’t like Jesus, they are always giving me a lot of trouble. That shows you that I don’t tell anyone to have a young man operation. If I did tell them to do that, then that Jewish mob wouldn’t get angry and give me trouble.

12 Do you know what I think about those people that are getting you all mixed up? I wish they will cut their own bodies, not yours.

13 You see, my Christian friends, God picked you to be people that are free from the Jewish law. But you have to be free in the right way. You can’t just do anything you like, anything that makes you feel good. Instead of that, you have to love each other and do things to help each other. 14 Just think about that Jewish law. You will follow all of it if you do this, “Love other people just like you love yourself.”* Leviticus 19:18 15 Don’t be like wild animals. They fight each other and eat each other all the time. If you don’t love each other, you are just like them. So be careful. If you fight each other, you might properly finish each other.

16 So this is what I’m telling you, let God’s spirit control your lives, and you will not do any of those bad things that make you feel good. 17 You see, it is like this. We all have a bad part in us that makes us want to do bad things, to make us feel good. And we also have God’s spirit in us, and he makes us want to do good things. Those 2 are both in you, and they both want to control you, so they are fighting each other inside you all the time. Whenever you listen to God’s spirit and try to do good things, that bad part in you tries to stop you, so you don’t do what you really want to do.* Romans 7:15-23 18 But if you let God’s spirit control you, you will do good things, and you will not need to have the Jewish law as your boss.

19 You see, everybody knows about the bad things that people do to make themselves feel good. They sleep with people that are not their own wives or husbands, and they do what married people do together. They think about dirty things, and then they do those bad things. They don’t try to control their bad thoughts. 20 They respect the spirits that are not God. They try to get bad spirits to hurt other people. They hate other people, and they fight other people. They want to be like some other person, and if they can’t be, they hate that other person. They get very angry. They want to be more important than everybody else. They will not agree with other people, so they split off into separate groups. 21 They want things that belong to other people. They get drunk. They have wild parties and do all sorts of bad things. Listen, I’m telling you again what I told you before. People that keep on doing those bad things will never be in God’s family. They will never get the good things that God will give to the people in his family.

22 But if God’s spirit controls people, he gets them to do good things. You know that a good fruit tree always gets good fruit on it. Well, like that, a person with God’s spirit does good things. If you let God’s spirit lead you, he will get you to love God and to love other people. And you will be happy. And you will feel good and quiet inside yourself so that you will not fight with other people. God’s spirit inside you will help you be good to people and not get angry, even if they give you trouble. And he will get you to be friendly to other people, and he will get you to do good things. He will make you the sort of person that other people can trust. 23 He will stop you from thinking you are too important, and he will help you to control yourself. And there is no law to stop anybody doing any of those good things.

24 You see, sometimes doing bad things makes people feel good. But people that belong to Jesus Christ stop doing those bad things. That bad part inside them might make them feel like doing those bad things, but they don’t take any notice of it any more. It is like they nailed it to a cross and killed it.

25 So you and me, we have to live like that too. We live with God’s spirit in us now, so we have to do what God’s spirit tells us to do. We have to let him control us. 26 We can’t reckon we are better than anyone else. We can’t do things that make other people angry, so that we start fighting each other. And we can’t wish we are like somebody else, and then hate that other person.