2001 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

3/18/01

Evil Within

Romans 7:7-8-1

 

3/18/01 Evil Within

 

We ended our study last week

      in the middle of a passage

            from the 6th and 7th chapters

                  of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

 

It is a passage in which Paul is explaining to his readers

      what has changed in the Christian’s relationship to God

            as a result of our faith in Christ,

and how those changes have the ability

                  to alter our relationship to sin forever.

 

Without plunging into a major reteaching

      of everything we have done in the past,

            let me just summerize it by saying

                  that taken as a whole,

      and presented in a single statement,

            this section of Romans,

                  describing the way in which God shatters the power of sin in the believer’s life,

      tells us that this work is accomplished within us

            by God creating a new heart within us,

                  freeing us from the law,

                        and joining us to Christ

resulting in our dying to the power of sin in our lives.

     

We heard Paul explain to us

      that, when we enter this world,

            we are locked under the

                  unbending authority

                        of the Moral Law of God,

forever present in our lives,

      demanding moral obedience from us,

            and condemning us when we rebelled.

 

But then Paul went on to explain

      that when we come to Christ

            we are freed from the Law

                  and joined to Christ Himself.

 

ROM 7:4 ¶ Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.

 

And we ended our time

      by my attempting to illustrate

            the difference between living under the Law

                  and living under the leadership of Christ

      by my putting some words into the mouth of the Apostle Peter

            to help us see the difference.

 

I want to share those words with you again

      because they will help us get back into our study

            and provide a foundation

                  for where Paul goes next.

 

When I look honestly at those gospel records,

      this is what I believe Peter would say

            about his relationship with Jesus Christ:

 

‟Most of all this man became my friend, a friend who knew me fully and loved me completely just the way I was.  Certainly His friendship produced profound changes in my life.  But they were not changes I attempted to paste on in order to be “a good disciple of the great Teacher”.  They were changes that gradually infiltrated my life the more I relaxed in His unconditional love and acceptance.

      I sometimes think the greatest gift the Master ever gave me was His permission to be myself.  It was a gift He gave me most of all through all the things I never heard Him say.  I look back over an endless stream of stupid things I said and did during the months I spent with Him.  Yet not once did I ever hear Him say, “Peter, you’re such a fool!”, or “Peter, you blew it again!”, or “Peter, just once would you try thinking before you speak!”, or “Peter, I’ve had it with your endless egotistical stupidity - get out of here!”.  Amazingly, he seemed well content to have me forever blundering along at His side, knowing the only thing that would transform my life was the discovery that even my worst failures would never separate me from my Master’s love.”

 

That is what Paul is talking about

      when he tells us we have been freed from the Law

            and joined to Christ.

That is the Christ we have been joined to.

      That is our God.

            And that is life with Him through the grace He seeks to pour out into our lives.

 

And that brings us up to the 7th verse of the 7th chapter of Romans.

 

But what we’ve seen so far

      still leaves some major questions unanswered.

 

The first one concerns our ongoing attitude toward the Moral Law of God.

      Given the fact that this Law

            is the very thing that inflamed my sinful passions,

      driving me into sin,

            how should I view the Law now, as a Christian?

 

Is the Law itself evil?

 

And Paul’s next words

      are written to put an end to that question.

 

He goes on to say,

ROM 7:7 ¶ What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, "You shall not covet."

ROM 7:8 But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead.

ROM 7:9 I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died;

ROM 7:10 and this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me;

ROM 7:11 for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.

ROM 7:12 So then, the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

ROM 7:13 ¶ Therefore did that which is good become a cause of death for me? May it never be! Rather it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful.

 

Simply stated,

      Paul says the problem wasn’t with the Law,

            it was with that heart of sin within us.

 

When the x-ray reveals cancer

      the x-ray isn’t evil.

 

When the temperature gauge in our car registers HOT,

      the problem is not with the gauge.

And when the moral law of God

      draws our rebellious heart to the surface

            not only is it not evil,

                  it is very, very good,

performing exactly the work for which God designed it.

 

But then, in verse 14 Paul takes up a second question,

      and one that is far closer to where most of us live.

 

It is all well and good

      for Paul to talk with us about this new heart within us,

            and us being freed from the Law

                  and joined to Christ,

but the truth is,

      any Christian who has lived

            more than a day or two in the family of God

                  has discovered that there is still

something terribly wrong within us.

 

In some way,

      at some level,

            there is still evil present within our lives,

      and present in a way that has the ability

            to exert tremendous pressure on us at times.

 

And unless we understand

      why that evil is there,

            and how God views it,

                  and how He expects us to relate to it,

      it can and will tear us apart.

 

We are going to spend

      the rest of our time together this morning

            looking at Paul’s words

                  in Romans 7:14-25.

But before we move into the passage

      I want to prepare you

            for what the truth contained in these verses

                  will equip us to do.

 

Outside of Christ

      and a correct understanding

            of the recreative work

                  He accomplishes within every person who comes to Him,

      the discovery of evil within ourselves

            forces us into one of two cages -

either we will attempt to run in terror from what we have seen,

      or we will allow what we have seen

            to define for us who we are.

 

But the truth that God shares with His people

      in the verses we will look at here in Romans

            allows the Christian to do

                  what no other thought framework  in the world

                        can equip us to do.

 

It allows us be brutally honest

      about the reality of the evil within us,

            not running away from it,

                  not denying it,

                        but facing it honestly

                              and calling it what it is,

and yet,

      at the same time,

            to live with a clear, correct, healthy concept

                  of ourselves as a new creation in Christ,

                        with a pure heart

                              that longs to please God.

 

I am convinced that the main reason

      many Christians never dare face their own inner dragons

            is because they are terrified

                  that if they acknowledge them

                        and bring them out into the light

those dragons will shatter their own frail,

      pain-filled self-concept.

 

What Paul does in these few verses

      is designed to free us forever

            from that fear.

And I need to warn you -

      as much as possible we need

            to approach these verses

                  as if we had never heard them before.

 

We need to allow them to say

      exactly and only what they really say.

 

Key Passage: Rom. 7:14-25

 

1. v. 14-15 begins where we are:

“For we know that the Law is spiritual; but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin.  For that which I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.”

 

2. v. 16-17 the beginning of hope:

Paul stops his self condemnation long enough to listen to what he’s saying:

“But if I do the very thing I do not wish to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that it is good.  So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which indwells me.”

 

The problem is not ME, but SIN w/in me...

 

An example I shared in The Grace Exchange

      will help here.

 

      I would like you to imagine a certain man who decides to build his own house. This fellow is a real perfectionist. He has no intention of just slapping up some boards. He is determined to build the best house he can possibly build. He studies for months. He reads books, he asks advice from builders he respects, he studies all of the codes involved in plumbing and framing and wiring. Then, when he has completed all of his preparation, he begins to build. He pours himself into this project like nothing else he has ever done in his life. He exceeds code requirements in every area of construction. He strengthens and blocks and reinforces far beyond normal construction techniques. Finally, his new home is completed and he moves in.

      Then one day, about three years after he moves into the house, he opens the bathroom door and it falls off the hinges. A few days later he steps into the kitchen and his foot goes right through the floor. He begins to notice that all of the door frames are sagging and some of the windows have cracked. His house is disintegrating.

      Understandably, the man is deeply depressed. He has two major problems. First, his house is falling apart. Doors won't close, windows won't open, and there are some nasty holes in the floor. But he has an even greater problem. He feels now like there is no sense in even trying to pick up a hammer to fix anything. “I'm such a lousy builder!” he says to himself. “I did the very best I knew how to do, and look at this thing! It won't even last three years.”

      Our builder then calls in an outside expert to examine the structure and tell him where he went wrong. The expert takes several hours, digging around in the basement and poking around in the attic. Then he meets with the man and says, “Sir, I have two things to tell you. First of all, this is the best-constructed house I have ever seen in my life. Second, you have the worst case of termites I have ever seen in my life.”

  How does that information affect our builder? It comes as tremendously freeing news. “Hey! The problem isn't really me. It”s the termites that dwell in me!” True, he still has a major problem. His house needs a great deal of work. But the truth enables him to face and fight the problem without the destructive self-condemnation that paralyzed him earlier.

      This is exactly what Paul is saying in this seventeenth verse. “No longer am I the one doing it, but sin which indwells me.” He is not saying the sin is no problem. But he is saying that, finally, he is freed from that paralyzing feeling of failure in his Christian life because of the continued presence of sinful impulses. He no longer has to expend all of his energy trying to deal with the self-condemnation he has heaped on himself. He now understands that he truly is a new creation in Christ, and that the real Paul is not the source of the evil.

      Paul knows how crucial it is for us to understand what he has just said, so in Romans 7:18-21 he takes us through the reasoning process one more time:

            For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the wishing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do not wish. But if I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wishes to do good.

 

      Here we have Paul's first solid point of rest: “I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wishes to do good.” Paul does have a heart that longs to please God. He does wish to do good. At the same time, he can honestly say that somehow evil is still present within him. Having accepted this truth, he goes on to explain why this situation exists.

 

Sin Dwells Where?

      “For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members”(Romans 7:22-23).

      Here Paul focuses on two distinct aspects of each of us: our “inner man” and “the members of my body.” Our “inner man” is our spirit-that new creation of God which is holy, pure, and in all ways good. By “the members of my body,” Paul means the literal physical body in which his spirit lives. Paul tells us that the sin we battle actually comes from our physical bodies. The body itself is not evil, but it can contain evil.

      Earlier in Romans, Paul introduced this truth when he spoke about our “body of sin” (Romans 6:6), and when he urged us to “not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts” (Romans 6:12). In 1 Corinthians 9:27, he tells us that his game plan for success in the Christian life rests on his commitment to “buffet my body and make it my slave.”

      In Romans 12:1 Paul presents his great call to the church: “I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.” He does not tell us to present our spirits to God. We have already done that. He calls us to present our bodies. In fact, every single time Paul talks about the problem of sin within us, he always traces the problem to our physical bodies.

      Why? What is it about the body that makes it a source of sinful impulses? What is Paul really trying to tell us about our battle with sin?

      To better understand what is happening here, let's look at a series of drawings. The pudgy little fellow to the left represents the little baby body each of us receives when we enter this world. This body is a magnificent creative work of God. It is a perfectly designed house through which our inner spirit and our unique personality can find expression. Our body contains a physical brain, our own personal on-board computer, that allows us to learn information, store what we have learned, and recall it months or years later. We can take this information and integrate it into highly complex reasoning processes that incorporate both new and previously learned facts into creative new concepts. Our body also contains a beautifully designed emotional system that allows us to learn and retain a wide variety of emotional responses to an endless number of different stimuli.

      What Paul is saying will make more sense as we begin to understand that the body is a highly trainable creation. We are not born preprogrammed with distinctive and inalterable instinctive behavior patterns, as is the rest of the animal kingdom. When we enter this world, our minds and emotions are very much like a new computer just out of the box.

      Some time ago I decided I needed to enter the world of home computers. I remember the day I went into the store and made my selection; I purchased the computer unit itself, the monitor, the keyboard, and even a printer. I piled all of my boxes on the counter, then turned to my salesperson and asked, “Now, once I take all of this stuff out of the box, set it up, and plug it in, what will I be able to do with it?” He looked at me, obviously awestruck by the depth of my ignorance, and said simply, “You won't be able to do anything until you install the software.” I asked him if I could at least type a letter, and he said, “No, sir. Until you install a word processing program, you can't even type a letter. We are running a special right now in our software department that may interest you....”

      Our bodies function in much the same way. During the first few years of our existence, we program our bodies, under the careful guidance of our parents, with millions of bits of information. This information provides, the operating basis for our logic and emotional mechanisms for the rest of our lives. The body is extremely versatile in the wide variety of responses and reasoning techniques it can learn. Years ago my body, and specifically my mouth, was exposed to hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream melted on top. I quickly developed a taste for this treat. My body was trained to respond positively to it. Now just the thought of that pie makes my mouth water. If I were born into a different culture, my body could have been trained to respond, in the same way to raw fish, ants, or beetles.

      Now, while our bodies are designed to train easily and quickly, they do not retrain nearly as fast. It requires conscious, deliberate effort to unlearn one reasoning process or an emotional response and relearn a new one. We can certainly learn new responses, but rarely are the old ones totally erased. In fact, these old responses often continue to exert pressure on us for the rest of our lives.

 

The Real Culprit

 

       A trainable body is not the only thing we bring into this world. We also enter this life with an inner control center in rebellion against God. We have already examined this inner rebellious spirit, but now we need to understand that all of our initial body training is under the total control of this rebellious spirit. Represented by the heart drawing to the left, this spirit programs our reasoning processes, our emotional responses, our conscious and subconscious value systems, and our appetites. It completely excludes the authority and supremacy of God in our lives. Simply put, we train ourselves to think and feel so that we keep ourselves at the center of our world. We teach ourselves need-meeting techniques that exclude any kind of submission to or dependence upon our Creator. If we want or need something, we take it upon ourselves to get it.

      When one toddler wants another toddler's toy, he will try to take it away. Most parents do their best to teach their children how to meet their needs within certain socially acceptable boundaries. But whether the toddler clonks his playmate on the head, then grabs the toy and runs, or whether he walks up and says politely, “Can I play with that now?” the underlying goals and attitudes are identical. The rebellious spirit is in control.

      We live the entire first phase of our life like the drawing to the left. All of our initial body training is done under the careful leadership of a spirit that is in open rebellion to Christ. The end result is a severely mistrained physical house. It is a house that has developed all of its reasoning processes and emotional responses on the firm conviction that we have both the right and the ability to function as the center of our world.

      This mistraining is unavoidable even if a person comes to the Lord at a relatively early age. This is because we learn most of our basic life attitudes and need-meeting techniques during the first few months or years of life.

      When we come to Christ, a tremendous change does take place. That old rebellious spirit is replaced by a new, holy heart that loves God and longs to please Him, as pictured by the heart on the left. If this new heart would have free rein, it would give only perfect, holy, righteous direction to our life.

      But there is a problem. Our old rebellious spirit was allowed to take over a totally untrained physical house. Our new spirit, however, as pictured to the left, takes up residence in a body already trained under the leadership of an inner spirit that was hostile to God.

      Paul describes this situation in Romans 7:22-23: “For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members.”                         

      Paul then cries out in frustration-the same frustration we also feel when faced with the reality of this evil within us. “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death?” Romans 7:24). He then gives us just a glimpse of the answer to that frustration: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” His final statement in the chapter summarizes this battle with sin. “So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin”(Romans 7:25).

      The Greek word translated as “mind” in both verses 23 and 25 does not refer to our actual physical brain, but rather to the God-given reasoning ability that allows man to make moral judgments. When Paul says, “I myself,” he means the real Paul agrees totally with God's moral judgments and teachings. No matter what battles may rage in his life, and no matter how he must wrestle with the pull toward sin, he knows with absolute certainty that his inner spirit is and always will be in complete harmony with his Creator. Only this knowledge can free him to then squarely face the truth that his “flesh,” his physical body, is a product of the training of his former self and strongly inclined to serve “the law of sin.”

      In the chapters that follow, we will focus on developing biblical strategies for relating to this tension between our holy inner spirit and our mistrained flesh. But it will help us here to understand God's perspective on our present situation and then to see His final answer to our struggle.

 

God's Perspective

 

      It is regrettable that those responsible for dividing Paul's letter into chapters and verses chose to end chapter seven where they did, because Romans 8:1 is an essential part of everything Paul is saying. In this verse, Paul offers us a clear statement of how God views the battle between flesh and spirit: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Paul assures us that our Lord understands our struggle perfectly. He knows the power of the sin within our members. He knows, too, the purity of our new heart. Certainly, God is committed to teaching us how to bring our body under the leadership of our new heart. But He wants us to understand from the very beginning that He will never condemn us for the evil that continues to dwell in our members. We can face it, bring it out, and look at it honestly, with no fear of God ever rejecting us because of it. On the contrary, He understands and shares our hurt and frustration, and He is totally committed to leading us into the freedom for which we long.

 

The Final Victory

 

      The first great calling our Lord gives each of us is that of allowing Him to lead us through the process of “buffeting our body and making it our slave (1 Corinthians 9:27)-that is, allowing Christ to show us how to reshape our physical body into a serviceable tool for the expression of our new heart. During the years, we are called to live in our present physical body we can make substantial progress in undoing what our old spirit has done. But even in the best situations, our present body is often only a marginally cooperative “slave.” It may encourage you, however, to know that our King has also designed a permanent and perfect solution to this problem.

      In Romans 8:23, Paul expresses a feeling that every true believer experiences from time to time: “We ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.” The “first fruits of the Spirit” is a reference to that new inner self in which the Spirit of God dwells. Having tasted of true holiness in our spirits, we long to experience the perfect reality of that holiness in our bodies as well.

      That time will come! In the future, each Christian will receive a new body (1 Corinthians 15:35-49). This new one, though, will not have been programmed by a rebellious spirit. Our new heart will be allowed to start over with no past impulses to war against us. Then, at last, our redemption will be complete.

      Scripture says nothing about nonbelievers receiving another body. The reason is obvious: They would simply mistrain it as they did the first one. For the Christian, through, our new body will be our ultimate victory.