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Janet: Carol, I am just reading this.  So sorry for your loss, glad your beloved Don knew the Lord and you have the assurance of his eternity  and that you WILL see him again.  Much love to you.  Janet 2022-06-18, 08:49:36

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Your Day in Romans 7:1-25

Started by Al Moak, November 25, 2004, 10:22:35 AM

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Al Moak

The Tenth Sermon
Romans 7
Be Aware – It's A Real Struggle!


Chapters four and five of the Roman letter have told us all about justification by faith.  Then the sixth chapter informed us that, with the help of the Spirit of the living Christ, all Christians can also experience real sanctification.  The next – the seventh chapter - is one of the hard places in the Bible!  In it we're going to see that the process of sanctification can be a real struggle.  When we come to the eighth chapter,though, we'll see again how it's actually possible to succeed.

Paul approaches the subject of the struggle by way of his own experience.  In the first 13 verses he testifies that when he was under old-covenant law, he came under great conviction of sin.   It was an extreme problem to him because he could not rid himself of it, try as he might.  He thanks God, though, in the last verse where he points the way to victory, both for himself and for us!  What we see in this chapter, then, are three stages of relationship to God that you and I might experience.

The first stage is that of being under the dominion of God's law. Before we can really understand what that means to those of us who aren't the Jews to whom the law was given, we need to be aware of two things.  We need first to understand that all of us, even thought we aren't Israelites, actually are governed by God's holy law.  And secondly, we then need to think about what it means to be under it's "dominion."

Actually, Paul already referred to the relationship Gentiles have to the law in the first and second chapters of the letter.  He told us that we all (Jew and Gentile alike) know the law.  We either know it because we were born under it and were taught it all our lives, or we know it by the light of nature. The fact is that either way we're guilty of repeatedly breaking it.  And because it's a holy law, and because God obligated all of us as His creatures to keep it, we're therefore condemned as lawbreakers.  We're condemned to eternal death as those who have rebelled against God in disobeying it.  That's what is meant by being under its "dominion."

Paul says it's like the marriage relationship.  In that relationship each spouse is bound to the other "for as long as they both shall live."  If one spouse dies, the other is free to remarry.  Our relationship to the law is like that - We can be freed from it only through death.  But there's wonderful news!  As Paul puts it, "Therefore my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another - to Him Who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God!"

He just means that if we're represented in Jesus Christ, then we're freed from the law's dominion because He has already experienced its condemnation to death on our behalf.  That's the second stage in our relationship to God.  If we're joined to Christ, then instead of the certainty of eternal death, we have the certainty of eternal life.  And then there's a third stage: we actually have the additional promise of being able to bear unto God the fruit of real righteousness (law keeping) in our present lives!

To fully appreciate a change like that we have to compare it to our previous condition.  Paul makes that comparison for us.  He says, "For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death.  But now we have been delivered from the (dominion of) the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter."

Being "in the flesh," for Paul, just meant being his natural self with no help from God – being an unrescued descendant of Adam who is still an uncaring lawbreaker.  In that part of Paul's life, he was actually very religious. He was a Pharisee - one who tried to see how rigorously he could keep the commandments of God and the traditions of the elders.

But he had an awful problem.  Every time he read the law, every time it told him what he should or should not do, his natural self wanted to do the opposite.  In fact, his natural anti-law passions were aroused by the very law itself!  So the good commands of God were just enslaving him to their opposites and condemning him to eternal death!

It's like the little boy whose mother says to him, "Don't eat any of that desert ahead of time!"  Having heard that, guess what the boy wants to do!  His mouth begins watering, his eyes get bigger, and pretty soon some of the desert is missing!  The commandment aroused his passions.  He didn't like the spanking he got for doing it, and he wished he hadn't given in, but he couldn't help himself.  (or should we say that he DID help himself?!)

Paul knew he was in a helpless condition, and he knew we would be helpless in ours.  Our natural inclination is to give in to every temptation.  In fact, in our natural condition, we can't do otherwise.  We need deliverance from ourselves by means of a power outside ourselves.  And we need, as Paul puts it here, to be delivered from the law's dominion because, in our natural state, it can only condemns us.

Not that it's the law's fault - it absolutely is not!  Paul makes that extremely clear.  In verse 7, he says, "May it never be!!"  The law is opposed to sin and convicts us of sin.  When Paul says he was alive apart from the law once, he doesn't mean he wasn't breaking it, but he means he was blithely unaware of his sin and the law's dominion. 

But then, he points out, along came the commandments, and he died.  He just means that when he began to understand what the law was really all about, then he suddenly discovered that he couldn't keep it and that, in fact, trying just made it worse!  "The law," he says, "is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good" - but, because of it, he became even more sinful, more unable to keep it.

As he says in vs. 14, "For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin."  It's an awful thing to say about himself.  But Paul could also say that a power outside himself - the Savior - worked a change in Paul that he never could have imagined!  Very suddenly, when he had met Jesus on the Damascus road, he had a change in his heart (where the change was really needed!), and now, newly loving that old but righteous law, he nevertheless has to say, "what I will to do that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do."  Paul hadn't hated sin before he met the Lord. He was frustrated because he couldn't keep the law as well as he thought he should sometimes, but he didn't really even understand its meaning. In fact, as it turns out, all he thought he had to keep was the letter of it.  When the law said, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," then he thought it meant the actual act – and nothing more.

But, having met Jesus, , he actually began to appreciate what the law really meant, and he began to hate himself when he broke it.  Not only so, but he began to see how terribly hard it was to stop breaking it.  He had to say, in fact, ". . . for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find."

Dear ones, I hope all of us sometimes feel that way!  I hope all of us really do want to please God.  I hope there's at least a little frustration at not being able to do so.  In other words, I hope there's at least been a change of heart!  If so, then what Paul says about himself here is true of us as well.  He says, "For I delight in the law of God according to my inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members."

Dear brothers and sisters!  If Jesus Christ has begun to work in your heart, if He's brought you to love Him and to desire to please Him, then there are times when the warfare is intense, times when you say with Paul, "O wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?"  There are times when you despair of doing anything at all that pleases God!

It's just at that point, dear ones, that you and I need the answer Paul himself expressed at the end of the chapter.  After asking how he could possibly be delivered from himself, he answers his own question – resoundingly.  He says, "I thank my God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!"  The answer to our frustration is a Person - the same Person Who awakened us to see our wretched condition in the first place - our Lord Jesus Christ.  As we're going to see in chapter 8, He has the answer for us, and we can be delivered!

Once again, then - before really loving Jesus Christ - we were uncaring and unable to keep the law of God - and we were condemned by it.  But having met Him and having come to love Him, we began to care - and to discover that we were entirely unable to keep His law.  We began to hate our sin and to seek deliverance from it.  Then, finally, we've also seen that the  answer is Jesus Christ our Lord!

What's your relationship to God?  Is it one of fear because you know you're condemned?  Or, possibly, is it one of frustration, because you love and want to serve Christ?  Or, hopefully, are you coming to Him daily, knowing that He can deliver you from both the  condemnation and the power of sin?

The question for us as we read this chapter, then, is a question about our deepest frustrations - frustrations we absolutely must have if we are truly alive to God.  Have you at least come to the place of having a little of the awful frustration Paul expresses here?  As you see how holy God is, and as you see the holiness He requires, do you find yourself trying to be holy but failing over and over again?

The natural man never experiences that frustration, because he doesn't care.  Do you?  Thanks be to God if you do!  And thanks be to God that there's an answer for it - an answer to Paul's cry, "O wretched man that I am!  Who shall deliver me from this body of death?"  The answer is Jesus Christ, and you're able to practically shout with Paul, "I thank my God!  Through Jesus Christ my Lord!" 


Chris & Margit Saunders

Praise God for that great day, when He removed that heart of stone, and gave us that heart of flesh!
Ezekiel ch. 36 v 26.
Divorced from the law married to Christ.