I Have A Body On My Back
Rom 7:24 O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
Rom 7:25 I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.
It was the custom of some ancient tyrants, when they wished to put men to the most fearful punishments, to tie a dead body to them, placing the two back to back; and there was the living man, with a dead body closely strapped to him, rotting, putrid, corrupting, and this he must drag with him wherever he went. Now, this is just what the Christian has to do. He has within him the new life; he has a living and undying principle, which the Holy Spirit has put within him, but he feels that every day he has to drag about with him this dead body, this body of death, a thing as loathsome, as hideous, as abominable to his new life, as a dead stinking carcass would be to a living man.”
And so paul is describing the battle that he was fighting against his flesh and sin
And he describes his fight as a condemned man
A man that has been sentenced to a slow death painful frustrating irritating
Rotting stinking horrible and putrid
This sentence would be imposed and right there at the place of judgement if for instance the offender was found guilt of murder they would chain the body right on him right there
And he would walk out of the court room with a body chained to him
All of humanities problems come from the law of sin and death
It states that if you yield your body to sin you become the servant/slave of sin
It began in the garden adam and eve ate of the forbidden fruit
Because the enemy got eve listening and thinking and looking
It brought spiritual death
Then cains jealousy of abel brought death
Sin always brings death
Our problems come from flesh yielding to sin
And so the individual would immediately experience the weight of this dead body on his back
It is hard to leap for joy w/ a dead man on your back
It is hard to love your family with a dead man on your back
It is hard to be positive and fun to be around with a dead man on your back
After just 24 hours you begin to smell the flesh rotting away
The begins to bloat because of the gases inside
Fluids leak through the eyes mouth and nose
Decomposition brings bugs and soon the live man is infected with desease and begins to welcome death himself
And so now nobody wants to be around him and he doesn’t want to be around anyone else
Everywhere they goes there is a big stink
Whether it is at church at school or on the job they are always stinking up the place
No matter where they are it stinks
It is near impossible to send a sweet aroma of prayer and worship when your body is overwhelmed with a stinking rotten corpse
You cant have a good fulfilling marriage you cant have a blessed ministry you cant have close friends with a body on your back
It weighs you down it gets you to seeing pain and death and filth
Having this body of death on your back affects everybody around you it affects your church it affects husbands wives and children parents grandparents cousins aunts and uncles
And paul pleaded who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
He cried out I am so sick of this life I am so tired of these issues dogging me
I am fed up with this weight always on my back
This sentence is upon every human being from the president to the pauper
It seems because of the intensity and ferocious nature of this battle that it is bigger than we are
And it would also seem that we must just learn how to deal with certain failure and
Spiritual death
In Rom 7:24 paul says O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
And then just 2 verses later he says
Rom 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation [ sentence to prison/death] to them which are in [ primary prep. Denoting a fixed position] Christ Jesus, who walk [to tread all arounddeport oneself, follow go, be occupied with, walk (about).] not after the flesh, [ human nature]but after the Spirit.
Rom 8:2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.
