Romans 7:14-16 The Message
14-16 I can anticipate the response that is coming: “I know that all God’s commands are spiritual, but I’m not. Isn’t this also your experience?” Yes. I’m full of myself—after all, I’ve spent a long time in sin’s prison. What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I cannot be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes all too obvious that God’s command is necessary.
The Word of God for the Children of God.
Adeste Fideles! Laeti Triumphantes! Venite Adoremus! Dominum.
Gloria! In Excelsis Deo! Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Amen.
Okay … We Never Like To Admit We Are Sinners
OK…so we don’t like to admit it.
Still, we must.
We are all born sinners.
We’re sons of Adam and daughters of Eve (CS Lewis, Narnia Chronicles).
No one needs to teach any single one of us how to be selfish, to put what we want ahead of what others (and even God) may want – we all have our PhD’s.
Born from our mother’s womb with an immediate need to independently insist on satisfying what we want (our first milk) apart from the word and will of God.
We do not know better, we have no awareness of anything outside of ourselves.
It’s what our first parents Adam and Eve did in Genesis 3; it’s what every human being, save Only One – Jesus, has done in his/her walking days on planet earth.
When we do, inevitably tough stuff happens.
Self-inflicted tough stuff.
Self-inflicted impossibly tough stuff.
All kinds of rough and tough stuff which diminishes us and often hurts others.
Self-centered lust conceives sin, and sin birthed ends in death (James 1:13-15).
13-15 Don’t let anyone under pressure to give in to evil say, “God is trying to trip me up.” God is impervious to evil, and puts evil in no one’s way. The temptation to give in to evil comes from us and only us. We have no one to blame but the leering, seducing flare-up of our own lust. Lust gets pregnant, and has a baby: sin! Sin grows up to adulthood, and becomes a real killer. (The Message)
The good God intended in our lives inevitably fails to happen; and the bad God knows it is best to avoid, inevitably, uncontrollably, raises and takes its place.
Without Jesus’ propitiation for it, His redemption of us from it, His resurrection power to defeat it, His Spirit’s power to replace it with righteousness, we simply automatically default back into it.
Dr. Tony Evans describes older automobiles that required power-steering fluid to enable steering a car virtually effortlessly.
[But] “when your power steering fluid got low, you’d have to force the wheel to turn…to pull and tug. The pull of the wheel back to center was so strong that without power steering, when you’d take your hands off the wheel, it would snap back to neutral position”
Paul calls it sin centered, or which “dwells” in, my flesh.
Without redemption and the Holy Spirit’s power, our flesh steers us back into our sinful living, into doing what we hate.
Too much tough stuff, impossibly rough stuff, for which we all need God’s help.
Now, Our Challenges Dealing With Indwelling Sin
Colossians 3:3-8 The Message
3-4 Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life. When Christ (your real life, remember) shows up again on this earth, you’ll show up, too—the real you, the glorious you. Meanwhile, be content with obscurity, like Christ.
5-8 And that means killing off everything connected with that way of death: sexual promiscuity, impurity, lust, doing whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it, and grabbing whatever attracts your fancy. That’s a life shaped by things and feelings instead of by God. It’s because of this kind of thing that God is about to explode in anger. It wasn’t long ago that you were doing all that stuff and not knowing any better. But you know better now, so make sure it’s all gone for good: bad temper, irritability, meanness, profanity, dirty talk.
If becoming a Christian meant we no longer sinned, Paul would have been wasting ink when he wrote, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you.”
It is more than a little possible to embrace a form of externalism that makes us look really good to people on the outside when really we know that what the Bible says is true: that while we are saved children of God, we are also sinners.
How is it, then, that sin continues to wreak havoc?
It is because while we are indeed in Christ, who liberates us from the bondage of sin, we are still very much, unavoidably so) locked deep into, within, our flesh.
That’s the problem:
we each still experience “the desires of the flesh” that “are against the Spirit … for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Galatians 5:17).
We are justified in Christ; all of the guilt that attaches to our lives is dealt with in our Savior Jesus.
We have died to sin in Christ so that it no longer has a tyrannical rule in our lives.
But although sin no longer reigns, it still remains and rages.
It no longer defines us, but it still clings to us like our skin does.
We therefore need to learn how to admit to ourselves, to learn to not to ever underestimate the presence and the catastrophically nature, the seriousness of sin; instead, we must be disciplined to watch out for its subtleties, insinuations.
To fight the good fight against sin, we must come, through our reading, studies, praying through the Word of God, to understand its addictive, enslaving power.
As the saying goes,
“Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.”
Sin, then, must be attacked at the point of entry before it takes root within our hearts.
The only way to tackle sin is recognize we need to kill it, without compromise, so as to prevent all future damage, seen or unseen.
We will only be able to overcome sin when we are authentically motivated to “turn our eyes to Jesus, look into His face” and take strong measures against it.
Yet we will still sin, we will still make a serious mistake if we think we are the ones who can overcome sin’s indwelling power.
Since Christ “is our life,” our battle against sin is not to be faced in our own strength but in God’s mighty power; and since Christ “is your life,” your battle against sin is not a battle for salvation, for He has already secured that for you.
So now we need to commit to putting our sin to death, and we need to ask the Holy Spirit to overwhelm us with His wonderful love and fullness so as to create within us the deeper desire to do that which God’s word calls us to do: to seek out, find, and kill off all that “is earthly in you.”
Rethinking Sin
Romans 7:21-25 The Message
21-23 It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
24 I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?
25 The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.
Many, if not actually all of us will still tend to think of sin in all -or- nothing terms: we either are sinners, or we are not.
Our problem is that while God does change us, we still carry that lifelong tug toward temptation around our waists and our ankles like a prison ball, chain.
Even the most experienced Christians are still tempted every single day to covet and lust and dishonor God and others—and lots more – which is kept private.
So what’s missing?
The 12 step recovery movement helps us in looking at this struggle.
Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12 step recovery groups have helped millions of people come to terms with addictions that won’t go away.
The idea is simple: while addicts won’t ever be completely done with their addictions in this life, they can still choose to work to become free from it.
From a Christian perspective, addicts learn to let God lead them into a new life so they are no longer at the mercy of their addiction.
A recovering alcoholic will say that while they are still an alcoholic, they have not had a drink in a decade, they still introduce themselves, admit to being an alcoholic, but a much healthier one – a “more aware alcoholic,” one might say.
What if we decidedly looked at the stories of sinners in the Bible that way?
What if the sins of David and other believers were somehow part of a process of God allowing us to hit bottom, finally turn to his almighty power to be set free?
What if we reframed our thinking, viewed the Christian community as, say a network of small to medium sized fellowship “sinners anonymous” groups?
How would such “bible study, prayer meeting fellowships” change our thinking and our daily approach to our dealing with the scourge called “indwelling sin?”
In the name of God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit,
Let us Pray,
Lord, though we often pretend we can master our sin struggles, we really need to be mastered by you. Surprise us into a deeper mercy than we might expect. My Heavenly Father, keep me ever mindful of the truth that there is an internal war with sin that is seeking to wound me, draw me back into my former fleshly ways. Thanks be to God, Who delivers me from this inner conflict, through Jesus Christ my Lord, my Savior.
Adeste Fideles! Laeti Triumphantes! Venite Adoremus! Dominum.
Gloria! In Excelsis Deo! Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Amen.
Loving God, Living God, Loving Hope, Living Hope, Loving Living Life His Way! "Many things are possible for the person who has hope. Even more is possible for the person who has faith. And still more is possible for the person who knows how to love. But everything is possible for the person who practices all three virtues." - Brother Lawrence (1605-1691), Practicing the Presence of God (1692). 