Romans 6:14
Romans 6:1414For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Jehovah's Witnesses acknowledge but interpret "not under law" as referring only to the Mosaic Law, which they agree Christians are not bound by. They then maintain that believers are still under "Jehovah's laws" and "Christian principles" — meeting attendance, field service quotas, organisational loyalty, and compliance with the Governing Body's direction. The Watchtower framework is fundamentally law-based: here are Jehovah's standards, now meet them. More compliance equals more spiritual standing. The organisation teaches that the Holy Spirit indwells only the 144,000 anointed, which means the vast majority of Jehovah's Witnesses — the "other sheep" — are doctrinally locked into a law-based striving pattern without access to the Spirit-empowered freedom that Romans 6-8 describes.
directly names law-compliance as the mechanism that keeps sin dominant and grace as the mechanism that defeats it. Paul says "sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace." This is the exact inverse of the Watchtower's framework. The verse establishes that the confidence of freedom from sin's power is grounded in what believers have received, not what they have produced. Paul's point is not specifically about the Mosaic Law — it is about the principle of law-based righteousness versus grace-based righteousness. makes the same case: "If a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come from the law." Law as a mechanism for righteousness does not work, whether Mosaic law or any other rule system. explains why: "What the law was powerless to do... God did by sending his own Son... so that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." The law could not do it. The Spirit can. This creates a pastoral opening: most sincere JWs recognise the struggle Paul describes in Romans 7 but are denied access to Romans 8's solution by their own theology.
NWT renders hypo charin as "under undeserved kindness" rather than "under grace" — the systemic NWT charis → "undeserved kindness" pattern (compare , , ). Particularly diagnostic here because Paul is using charis as a theological sphere of reign ("under grace" in parallel to "under law"). "Under undeserved kindness" preserves the structural contrast but loses the technical category-weight of grace as the new-covenant sphere. The Protestant reading leans on charis as dominion-concept ("grace now reigns where law reigned"); the NWT renders this more as a preferential relational status, softening Paul's claim about the mechanism of freedom from sin's mastery.