Romans 7. July 28th 2024.
So here’s the question I want to ask: why is it so hard to please God?
Why is it that sometimes doing the right thing, pleasing God, feels almost impossible? Pride, lust, laziness, gossip, and anger can feel like overwhelming forces. Saying no to them can be like swimming upstream or cycling uphill. Why is that?
Why is it that doing good—serving, being patient, generous, and blessing others—feels impossibly hard sometimes?
And we don’t want it to be hard, do we? I do not want to be jealous of the success of others. I don’t want to be insecure when a new colleague is appointed at work. I don’t want to be stingy with the things that God has given me. I don’t want to snap at my kids when they’re naughty. I don’t want to be fearful when I have a wide-open door for an evangelistic opportunity. I don’t want to moan and discourage other people when I talk to them.
I want to be famous for being open-handed, generous, kind, caring, joyful, humble, and courageous. So why is it so hard?
Just a bit of context: the main thesis Paul has been teaching in Romans is that humanity is acceptable before God only on the basis of the Lord Jesus.
A word cloud of the Entire Letter of Romans.
He has argued persuasively that if you put your trust in Jesus, Jesus shares with you his resurrection verdict. You are justified by faith.
So, while many other religions say that you’ll need to wait until the final day, the day of judgment, to know your verdict, Paul says you can know it now if you trust in Jesus.
But that brings an objection: “Paul, are you saying that Christians can just continue to sin? Is grace a license for sin?”
Paul deals with that objection in chapter 6 of Romans. “God forbid,” he says. “Absolutely not!”
He says, remember who you are: you have died with Christ and you will be raised with him. In other words, you have been transformed. You stand on resurrection ground—count yourself dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
He also says, remember you are not just freed from the slavery of sin; you have a new master—you are now a slave of God. The implication is that we are called to obey God.
Romans 6:14: “For sin shall not be your master because you are not under law but under grace.”
Which is a beautiful line for your social media: #slavesofgrace
And today, in chapter 7, he continues with that argument but with a different illustration: from slavery to marriage.
The point is we now have a new marriage. #marriedtoChrist
He says your old husband was the law, but you have been freed from that marriage contract by death. And so now you are not bound to the law; you are bound to your new husband—Christ.
And that leads to the same conclusion: something so radical has happened to you. You can’t just continue with your old life if you are a Christian.
Shall we go on sinning because we are saved by grace and not by works? Of course not! God forbid!
But why do we find it so hard? If everything wonderful that Paul has said about Christians so far is true, why is it still so hard? Where’s the problem?
Answer:
Romans 7:24: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
See, the problem is me. The problem is this body.
Three things to see and then I’ll have three implications.
1. Our bodies are bodies of death.
You might say our bodies are dying. Our bodies are mortal. Our bodies are corruptible.
This is something that Paul emphasizes in Romans chapters 6 to 8.
Romans 6:12: “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body…”
Romans 7:24: “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
Romans 8:10: “Your body is dead because of sin.”
Romans 8:11: “He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies…”
There are a few more references to the body in Romans chapters 6 to 8, but the thing that comes through again and again is that whatever these bodies are, they are dying.
And of course, on its own, that ought to be uncontroversial. Every one of us in this room is getting older. Every one of us is getting slower, or you’re approaching the day when you will. Every one of us is getting sicker, or again, you’re approaching the day when you will.
Our bodies are dying. Your body is dying. Until God does something radical about it, these bodies of ours are all slowly falling into the grave. That ought to be uncontroversial. Our bodies are bodies of death.
2. Our death, that death, is spiritual.
Romans 7:24: “What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
See, the point is not just that we’re physically sick; it is that we are wretched.
In Romans 7, you get to see that up close.
Romans 7:18: “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”
Now, maybe you don’t recognize that, but I know that my son Khesed would definitely recognize it.
You know what you’re doing is wrong, but you won’t stop. You know what you should do, but you can’t because sin dwells within you. Sin is in your DNA. Sin is in your bones.
In fact, Paul says that sin is so firmly lodged in my bones that when God’s good law reaches my members, it becomes the law of sin. It produces death.
Which is striking because reading through Romans, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Paul is very negative about the law and he hates the commandments. Not true.
Romans 7:11: “For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good.”
So, the law is good. The law is not the problem.
But the good law, when it meets spiritually dead members of my body, results in sin and death.
The problem is our bodies.
And it’s a striking thought, isn’t it? These bodies die. It’s just what they do. And these bodies sin. It is just what they do. In fact, it’s a body of sin.
Firstly, our bodies are dying. Secondly, that death is spiritual.
3. Christians are still in the body.
Now, this is important because you might think that Romans chapter 7 is a description of what we used to be. Many more intelligent Bible teachers think that. The key commentary I’m using for these talks thinks that.
I think that is approximately half right. When Paul talks about the flesh and bodies of death and wretched humanity, he is talking about the human condition before Jesus. He is talking about our Adam nature.
We’ll see next week that the Gospel does give us some new answers when we put our trust in Jesus: the Spirit, life, and peace.
But we’ll also see next week that we still have the same bodies.
And so unless you’re not trying to be clever, I think it’s obvious that we still have the same bodies.
Romans 6:12: “Let not sin therefore reign,” he says to Christians, “in your mortal bodies.”
Romans 8:10: “Your body is dead because of sin.”
So, the point is not that you no longer have a mortal body. It is that you have a new mind, a gospel mind.
You’ve come to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. And Jesus shares his merits with you. By faith, we stand on resurrection ground.
But your body, this body, is still on the way to the grave.
This body, it still loves death. It’s still drawn to death. It still clings to the dust. And it’s still finely tuned to bear fruit for death.
I suppose it’s a bit like trying to run new software on an old PC. You’ve upgraded the operating system. Sure, you might have a new program. But at the end of the day, the hardware still needs replacing. It’s never going to run properly until you get a new machine.
Well, welcome to the Christian life.
You have a new heart, full of resurrection life. You have a new heart trusting the gospel. You have a new heart that lifts Jesus high. You have a new heart longing to walk with him. A new heart that stands on resurrection ground, but you still have this mortal body, this old machine made for Adam and shaped by Adam to do what Adam does best: sin and die.
And until Jesus comes back, that is the body that you will continue to have.
So why is it so hard to obey God?
Well, number one, our bodies are dead. Number two, that death is spiritual. It’s all bound up with sin. And number three, we still have those bodies.
And Paul wants these Christians to have a realistic expectation of what the Christian life will look like. Wrong expectations always result in disappointment.
So, three reasons why I think it really matters that we have realistic expectations:
- It protects us from disappointment.
It is tempting to think that the Christian life should be a life of consistent joyful triumph, always full of joy, full of life, just sauntering around, blessing and blessed, allelluia.
And if that’s what you expect, well let me tell you, you’ll have some good days, but you will spend a lot of time wondering why it is so hard. Why does it feel as though nothing has really changed?
Is it because nothing has happened? Is it because you’re not really a Christian? Or being a Christian doesn’t really make a difference?
No. A miracle has happened. The Spirit has given you a whole new mind. You believe that Jesus is Lord. You believe that God raised him from the dead and that he is saving humanity into a whole new world. Your mind, what you believe, your convictions, they’re already gone through into resurrection grounds, the new creation.
But not yet your body. You’ve still got a dead body. One day you won’t. But for now, you’re just as dead, as you ever were.
And so don’t be surprised don’t be disappointed when you find it hard to obey God.
A story is told of a conversation between a younger Christian man and an older Christian man, and the younger man was forlorn and frustrated and asked the older Christian man
When will I be free from my battle with sin?
The older Christian man replied, ah I don’t know. I wouldn’t trust myself until I’ve been dead for at least 3 days
- It protects us from liars.
Because there are liars, and they will try to pretend that they have found the secret to a new, spiritual, empowered life where obedience is easy, and where it comes naturally.
And Paul wanted to protect the Romans from liars who wanted to pretend that the law would be the way to easily produce fruit for God. But there are people around now who want to pretend that their new spirituality will do the same thing. 10 tips to a victorious Christian life. The secret to…. Extrabiblical rules and traditions. And this sort of thing is all over
And unless they have resurrection bodies, they are lying.
Here is the test. If someone comes to you and tells you there’s a whole new way, to find it easy to be fruitful for God, just ask this question. Are they dazzling white so you have to avert your eyes when you look at them? And can they walk through closed doors? And if the answer to those questions is yes, then you should give them a hearing and listen to what they say.
But if not, But they still have mortal bodies, and obedience is still hard, and if they try to tell you anything else, they’re lying.
The famous English preacher, Charles Spurgeon is said to have encountered a man who kept going and going about how for a long time he had been sinless; and was enjoying a perfect Christian life.
So Spurgeon took him home with him to continue with the conversation and the man continued with this assertion: constant victory over sin.
Eventually, Spurgeon’s patience wore thin and he took the glass of water that he was drinking and splashed it on the man’s face. The man acted angrily using language that no Christian should use, and Spurgeon in a cool, calm collected way said to him, ahh you see, the old man was within you, not dead. He had simply fainted and could be revived by a glass of cold water.
We are never sinless in the Christian life. We will keep fighting with it until the day we die.
Firstly, it protects you from disappointment, secondly from liars, but thirdly
- It points us to the Spirit
You see this is realism is not defeatism.
We can bear fruit for God, but we don’t bear fruit for God by just trying harder to keep the law, and we don’t bear fruit for God by letting our body do what it wants to do.
We bear fruit for God by walking by faith, like Abraham. You look at your mortal body, your body of death, and you believe in the God who raises the dead by his Spirit. And you reckon that you belong to him and that you stand on resurrection ground.
Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?
v.25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Death is in your bones. But God has spoken the words and these bones will live. And so even now. You stand on resurrection ground and you live by faith in the God who raises the dead.
The other way he says this is that we have the Spirit. Yes we have dead bodies, but we also have the spirit. And so we can bear fruit for God by walking in the Spirit.
8:10 But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness.
So the realism is that we still have a sinful nature. The wonderful news is that we now have a Spirit nature. And the normal Christian life is to constantly say, I will not obey the flesh, I will not follow my body. I will follow the Spirit.
Obedience is hard, but it is possible because you’ve got the gospel and you walk by faith and you live according to the Spirit.