Why must we obey the ten commandments if Jesus died for our sins? I was told that you must please God if you want to have paradise after life, therefore you should follow the Ten Commandments, but then what does that mean about Jesus? I realized he died for our sins but I thought you had to follow the Ten Commandments? I'm really confused so if someone could please help me thanks.
I think your answer lies in The Threefold Uses of the Law, and more specifically, Romans 7:1,11,24


  1 Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." ... 11 For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. ... 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!


In brief, the Law was meant to show us our sin. While it is required that you obey The Law, you are, by your nature, unable to (Romans 8:7). This is the hopeless estate of man. Jesus saves us by accomplishing two things:


He perfectly obeys the Law, providing obedience that we are missing and
He suffers the penalty for our sin.


That is termed Christ's active and passive obedience, active obedience being obeying the whole moral law of God (not only the Ten Commandments) and passive obedience being his obedient suffering on the cross.

The natural reaction, as was the reaction of Erasmus to Luther, is, if we are saved by Christ's work, and need not obey the Ten Commandments, then do we not then give license to evil behaviour? This is the argument in Romans 6:1, and the answer is, "By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?"

What Paul says in Romans 6:2 is that if we are truly changed by Holy Spirit, we have spiritually died with Christ and been raised to new life in Christ, then our nature (that nature which causes us to sin) will remain in our flesh but replaced in our spirit, and so we are regenerate and changed, still struggling with sin, but hating sin. We see this in Romans 7:25.

May I say, you've touched on the heart of the Gospel, but provoked some of the deeper theological nuances surrounding it. May I encourage you to find someone you can sit with in a coffee shop and do a study of Romans? Maybe pick up Martin Luther's commentary on Romans?