10/25/98 Evil Within Pt. 2

10/25/98

Evil Within Part 2

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10/25/98 Evil Within Pt 2

A day will come
      in the life of every true child of God
            when we will glance into the kitchen
                  and suddenly see our own personal rats
                  crawling out from under the sink.

We will discover the existence of evil
      or the potential for evil within ourselves
            and shudder at what we see.

How we view those rats,
      how we relate to that potential for evil
            will ultimately determine
                  the course of our Christian life from then on.

The concept we will look at during the next few minutes
      is one I have taught
            and written about numerous times
                  in the past 25 years.

Obviously I consider it to be a crucial
      and essential area of understanding
            for the Christian.

The Apostle Paul was the first
      to present the concepts we will look at,
            and we will allow his writings
                  to guide us through our thinking this morning.

During the past 2000 years
      countless other believers
            have dealt with the same issues
                  and flavored their presentation of them
                        with their own unique personalities.

I will do that as well.

But the concepts are not mine.
      They are imbedded in Scripture
            and revealed to us by our Lord
                  to equip us for our life with Him.

We ended last week
      by talking about the three most common wrong responses
            to the Christian's discovery of evil within himself.

I mentioned them because
      unless we first recognize the lies we are believing
            we are sometimes unable to hear the truth.

If we attempt to paste the truth
      on top of an existing lie
            it will not stick.

Rather than driving the lie out
      we are more likely to attempt to somehow integrate the two in our thinking,
            and it will not work.

The first lie I mentioned last week
      that is a common response
            to the discovery of evil within ourselves
                  is to deny that the evil really exists.

Sometimes the horror
      or the shame we feel when we discover evil within ourselves
      is so intense that mentally we attempt
            to just run away and pretend
                  it doesn't exist.

How could a child of God
      think that
            or do that
                  or feel that?
It cannot be!

And we try to close our mind to its reality.

The problem is that
      when we deny the existence of the evil within us
            we also slam the door
                  on the healing Christ offers us that can bring us true freedom
      from the power of that evil in our lives.

We will either develop a thick protective shell around our emotions
      that keeps everything packed tight inside,
            making us insensitive both to ourselves
                  and to those around us,
or we will reach a point
      where we can no longer keep the evil
            crammed down inside
                  and it will explode and consume our life.

2. Then there are those Christians
      who handle the evil
            by proclaiming to themselves
                  and to others that it doesn't really matter.

A few rats running around the kitchen
      helps keep the floor clean.

The death of Christ paid the price
      for all my sin,
            and now it just doesn't matter.

But sin always produces slavery.
      It produces slavery in the life of the Christian
            every bit as much as it does
                  in the life of the nonchristian.

To proclaim that the evil doesn't matter
      is to live forever in the slavery
            and bondage it brings into your life.

3. And the third incorrect answer
      to the discovery of evil within us
            is to believe that the evil tells the truth about who we really are at the heart level.

We see ourselves as a miserable failure
      in our Christian walk.
We may decide the evil proves
      that we really aren't even a Christian,
            because a true Christian
                  would surely never think or feel
                        the way we do,
or we may decide that we were a Christian
      but surly God has now kicked us
            out of His family in disgust
                  because of the corruption inside us.

And if we fall victim to any of those 3 lies
      it will have a devastating effect
            on our walk with the King.

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.

(From this point on the text contained in this document is an excerpt from the book "The Grace Exchange" by Larry Huntsperger. This excerpt offers a better written presentation of the concepts presented than did the original teaching notes. "The Grace Exchange" is currently out of print, but copies can still be obtained through the author. You can contact him at huntsperger@alaska.net .)

Beginning Where We Are

      I believe Romans 7:14-25 is one of the most fascinating passages in the entire Word of God. In these verses, Paul opens our eyes to a perspective on ourselves and our battle with sin that may well revolutionize our whole concept of the Christian life.
He begins his comments in verses 14 and 15 exactly where we begin when we first find ourselves confronted with the reality of evil still present within us as Christians. "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."
      Paul begins by affirming the two things we already know. First, we know that God's law is right and good for us as His children. Second, we know that at certain points in our lives we do the very things we do not want to do.
      In these two statements, Paul expresses a wealth of the agony that deeply committed Christians have felt throughout human history. Here you are, a Christian. You love God. You love His Word. You even love and agree with His law. You, no longer playing those little mental "bad is good" games you once played, pretending that sin really isn't sin. You are not lying to yourself anymore. Yet, you sometimes still find yourself powerfully drawn to evil. You sometimes still practice the very thing you do not want to practice. You are not alone. Every sincere Christian in history has wrestled in this same way.

What Did I Just Say?

      In Romans 7:16-17, Paul takes his first major step in resolving this horrible inner tension. Up until this point, Paul, like the rest of us, has been beating himself mentally for all of his sinful impulses. Can't you hear his thoughts? "I am such a lousy Christian! I should never feel this way as God's child. I should never have those kinds of sinful impulses. I should never have those kinds of responses. I'm no good! Lord, how can You put up with someone who calls himself a Christian and yet struggles with the thoughts and things I struggle with?"
      But now, in these verses, Paul backs off from this struggle enough to listen to his own words and, in the process, makes a truly amazing and freeing discovery. "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."
      Paul is saying, "Wait a minute! Look! If I am doing the very thing I do not want to do...hey! That means I am not the source of my sin. The very fact that I so strongly object to this whole sin problem within me proves that I really am holy in heart and sin has somehow intruded into my world." In other words, Paul discovers that he, Paul, is not the source of his sin problem as a Christian.
      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

above 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 this heart drawing, 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 above. 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 above. 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 above, 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.