The War Within Series

Scripture

The second half of Romans 7 is one of the most difficult sections in the entire Bible to understand. Last week I drew your attention to Romans 7:14-20. In that section I showed you that Paul is talking of himself as a growing, maturing Christian struggling with sin. In our study today, Paul continues with that same theme.

So, let us read Romans 7:21-25:

"21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin." (Romans 7:21-25)

Introduction

Dr. Ligon Duncan, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS, and also a professor at Reformed Theological Seminary, tells the story of a famous and godly man who climbed up the steps to the pulpit of a Bible College chapel. He began to preach a sermon in which he promoted to the students the view that Christians ought to live a higher life, a victorious life, in which they got victory over sin, which set them free from conscious sin.

In the course of his sermon, he said to this gathered assembly of students, “I have not sinned in three years.”

In the group of the people attending that particular chapel were two young students. They had just been married for about a year. They had met at the Bible College. They were both committed to the Lord. They both wanted to go into missions. Both of them had come to that desire before they ever met one another.

But like many Christians, they were struggling with sin—sin from their past, sin that was impacting their relationship and giving them enormous struggles.

As they sat there and heard this man say that he had not sinned in three years, they heard him go on to say this, “And if you’re still struggling with sin, it is because you don’t have enough faith. If you only had enough faith, you would have victory over sin, and you could live the higher life, the blessed life, and experience perfect love.”

They asked some friends who heard the same message, “Have you experienced this higher life? Have you found victory over sin?”

“Oh, yes,” they were assured by their friends around them.

So they began to wonder, “Is there something wrong with us? Are we the only people struggling on this mundane plane with sin? Have we failed to achieve the higher life—just because of a lack of faith?”

That is the impression they got from the preacher and from their classmates.

After Bible College, the couple went to Reformed Theological Seminary under enormous emotional and psychological pressure from the sense that they were somehow failing God, because they were continuing to struggle with sin in their lives.

While at Seminary, however, they were greatly relieved to find that the teaching they had heard was not in accord with the Scriptures, and that the Scriptures’ teaching actually liberated them from their false guilt in order to deal with the real guilt with which they needed to deal.

And so, I hope you can see how an understanding of the ongoing struggle with sin in the Christian’s life is far from an academic question. We are not going off to the Ivory Tower of the theologians today to dabble in theological mumbo jumbo. Today’s teaching is something that hits all of us where we are everyday.

Lesson

To that end, then, I want to suggest five practical implications of what Paul is saying in Romans 7:21-25. Now you will need to keep your Bibles handy, because we’re going to rub our noses right back in the text of Scripture so that you will be certain that what I am saying is actually what Paul is saying. But my concern is to drive home these very practical truths.

I. Christians Still Sin (7:21, 23, 24, 25)

The first practical truth is this: Christians still sin.

It is fascinating to note that Paul says or implies that Christians still sin in every verse from verse 13 through verse 25, except in verse 22. Let me simply draw your attention to what he says in the section before us.

Paul says in verse 21, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.”