One of my things as a pastor is that I try to be as transparent as I can be. I tend to share stories that show my faults as much as my strengths. It’s kind of like the pastor who was told by his church, “Preacher, we’ve always heard our pastors say they were sinners just like us, but you are the first one we have believed.” So when I preach, much of what I preach comes from the struggles in my own life, which I bet is very similar to the struggles in your life as well. Which is why I have chosen for tonight one of my favorite passages from the bible. Because it’s about an honest struggle. (Read text)
A few weeks back, I made the decision to go on a diet. Now this diet was a simple one, don’t eat what looks good and only eat what’s taste bad. No, that’s not really how it went, but I told myself I was going to eat more fruit and vegetables, lay off of the sweets, and learn to do the heave ho from the table. The one big one, which has always been a weakness of mine, is that I would quit my late night snacks. Now this is a pretty simple diet. It wasn’t complicated, not a long list of foods to eat or not to eat, but what was supposed to be simple soon met it’s match.
One night after one of our VBS nights, my wife made the statement that she would like to have a concrete from Bop’s frozen custard. Actually, she didn’t say it, I said it but she didn’t stop me from saying it so she might have well said it. Now the thing was, I had been on this diet for a while and I had been doing pretty good. And with that one phrase, my body had two reactions. The first was that little angle on my right shoulder saying “Don’t give in. You’ve come so far, don’t do it.” Then there was that little demon on my left shoulder that kept whispering to me, “Creamy, Cold, with Strawberries and Chocolate…” And after flicking my angel off the right shoulder, I enjoyed one of the best treats this side of the Mississippi. I licked the cup down to the last drop.
Yet afterwards, you can guess the feeling I had. Besides being full, and was thinking, “Why did I do that?” I knew better to eat that ice cream, yet what I knew in my mind, my body told me the opposite. Now after succumbing to the temptation, I felt myself feeling both discouraged and disappointed. Why bother? And of course I said to myself, I’ll never do this again! But as you can imagine, this episode has been repeated at least three times since then.
Now I wish that I could say that this has only been repeated in my effort to stay on a diet, but on more than one occasion I have found myself doing something I knew I shouldn’t be doing only to say afterwards, “Why did I do that?” It’s like a car wreck, you don’t want to look, but you end up looking and you say why did I look at that. One of my passions is Kentucky Basketball. When watching them play, its like a whole new person comes out. This past March, I was watching my beloved Wildcats play against the heathens of Michigan State, wait that came out wrong, against the Spartans of Michigan State, and as the game came down to the wire, my passion and temper collided, the result was an over turned table and a cracked knuckle, worse it was all done in full view of my mom, my wife, and my kids.
Afterwards, I had to apologize for my outburst…and again I said, “What came over me.” Most of the time I am a cool, relaxed, controlled individual, but on certain occasions, that raging monster within me rises from the depths and shows itself.
Now what makes this all so awful, is that I am a preacher. I’m a minister of God’s word and I’m paid to be good. Yet I have found that its not that easy. And I have found that I’m not the only one. That’s why I find encouragement in what was read to you this morning. The Apostle Paul, the man who worked miracles, the man who had amazing faith, the man who wrote 1/3 of the New Testament struggled with sin. Now some have tried to make this be what Paul was like before he came to know Christ, but because of the context and the present tense of the verbiage, this is was an ongoing struggle in the life of one who had seen Christ, knew Christ intimately, yet still struggled to live a holy, life.
I want us to go through this and see the struggles that Paul experienced, and no doubt you will relate to his struggles. I want us to see how he overcame his dilemma, the dilemma of being saved yet still struggling with sin. There are many valuable lessons in this passage, so let’s learn them together this morning.
Now the first lesson I want us to learn here is that our hearts may be in the right place, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of our body is there with the heart. You see, when one becomes a Christian, there is a change that takes place. When a person comes to Christ they are not only transformed by Christ, but they have made a decision to repent of their sins. Now the word repent comes from two words meta noeo. Meta meaning to change and noeo meaning the mind. Repentance is a changing of one’s mind toward sin, it’s a changing in your attitude toward sin. You used to see no wrong in your previous sinful actions, but now your mind has been changed toward that sin. If you lied to get ahead, you saw nothing wrong with it but now you see it as wrong. If you were prideful, you now see the need to be humble. Your mind and your attitude has changed.
Yet that is where the dilemma really begins. Paul says in Romans 7:15 (NIV): “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” You see, before we repented we agreed to do what was wrong…but now we have repented, our minds have changed toward sin, but the problem is that there is still a part of us that really wants to sin. Paul refers to that part as our flesh, or our body.
And this is the struggle that is taking place, my mind is telling me what God wants me to do or not to do and how I should behave or not behave, but then there is another part of me that is at work warring against that command from God. Romans 7:22-23 (NIV) states, “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.”
And this is how it played out for Paul. I’ll use the translation that Whiney the Clown used, she paraphrased this to have Paul say “That which I want to do I don’t do, and that which I don’t want to do, I do do, and then I’m in real do-do.” That’s a problem we all have isn’t it. We know what we ought to do, but then we don’t do it. James reminds us in his letter in James 4:17 that for us “to know the good we ought to do and not to do it is a sin.” And we all know that we are to do certain things, behave a certain way.
Now one of my things is that I know that God wants me to be a good father. I have always told my self that when I had kids I would be the kind of Father that God wanted me to be. John Ortberg, in his book The Life You Always Wanted, comes very close to describing me when he writes: "I look in on my children as they sleep at night, [and] I think of the kind of father I want to be. I want to create moments of magic, I want them to remember laughing until the tears flow ... I want to have slow, sweet talks with them as they’re getting ready to close their eyes. I want to chase fireflies with them, teach them to play tennis, have food fights, and hold them and pray for them in a way that makes them feel cherished.” But then he goes on to describe just how far he actually is from that kind of Father. And I try to be a good father, but at times I fall so short.
A while back we were at Wal-Mart getting some last minute things before we had to make a trip. It was late, around 9 pm, and I was tired. I knew I had to preach the next day so I really didn’t want to be in Wal-Mart. Denise was trying on an outfit in the dressing room and I was watching all three of my girls, and Clarissa and Carrie were acting up. Now it’s not there fault. They are kids and it’s hard to get kids to stand perfectly still with hands by their side and walk through Wal-Mart for what seems like hours, and so Clarissa and Carrie start twirling around in circles with their arms stretched out and their eyes closed. Savannah was in the cart screaming her head off, and I was already in a bad mood. Then Clarissa started twirling my way unbeknownst to me. Now I am roughly about 6 ft, my girl is about yea tall. Now you may see where I am going with this. She twirled around and hit me in what would have definitely have been considered a low blow. Needless to say, my temper went off. I yelled at the girls, and as soon as Denise got out I said we are going home now. And I stormed off. I was pushing that cart and I looked like the wicked witch of the west (dah dah dah dah) Now what happened next really convicted me, not only was all three of my girls looking about as sad as you can be, but I had a scowl on my face. And a group of college kids past by us, and I heard one of them said, “Man, did you see the look on his face…I sure would hate to get on his bad side!” Now imagine me turning around trying to invite those kids to church! Yet worse, I then realized what I must have looked like to my kids.
Gene Appel is a minister at Willow Creek Community Church, and once when someone made a comment to his wife on how nice it must be to live with such a great Christian man, his wife laughed and said “Ha!” Gene said that was an improvement because she used to throw up. I wonder if that is how Denise would respond.
I tell you that because I want you to know that just as you struggle with sin, so do I. And so did the Apostle Paul. And I think you can relate to that. You know what to do, but your body wages war against that. Maybe someone has wronged you and you know that Christ says that you are to forgive that person not seven times but seven times seventy, but everything about you is saying to seek not forgiveness but revenge. Maybe you hear someone tell a dirty joke that you know is wrong and cruel, and you don’t want to laugh but you do. Perhaps a relative tells you about her success and you know you are to rejoice with her, but instead you feel a sense of jealousy. And like Paul you say, “I don’t understand why I feel this way! I’m saved, yet why am I still feeling this way? We are like the man who fainted and went into a coma, but the doctors mistakenly thought he was dead and he was placed in a coffin. Afterwards he came to in the funeral home not knowing how he got there, and he thought to himself, “If I’m not dead, then why am I in a coffin, and if I am dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?” That’s how we are. If I’m saved, then why do I still want to do this thing that I know is wrong? If I am not saved, why do I think it’s wrong in the first place.”
Paul’s answer is that sin is still a force to be reckoned with in your life, even after you have been saved. Now sin doesn’t reign in your life as a believer, but it is still there and it must be fought on a daily basis. I want to ask a question here, if you have been a Christian for over 15 years, and if you have not sinned since you first gave your heart to Christ, raise your hand. Now either that sin can be forgiven, or all these folks are going to hell. Sin is still a daily struggle in our lives, and so Paul was feeling this and he knew the law of God, much like many of you know the law, and he delighted in the law of God, which was good, but the law was only adding to his problem. Now Paul agreed that the law was good, because the law showed him what was right and what was wrong, but the problem was that it offered no solution to the problem. He needed more than just being told what is right and wrong, he needed someone to help him do the right.
Let me illustrate this. This past week the sink in our house got clogged up and I tried fixing it by sticking a coat hanger down the drain. Now I stuck it a bit to hard and instead of unclogging the pipe I put a hole in it. So I had to replace it. I went to Wal-mart and I got the kit to replace it, and I looked at the instructions and it looked so simple, it told me what to do. Yet the problem was that the pieces didn’t fit right, and the drain that was supposed to just slip out wouldn’t budge. Now I knew what I needed to do, and I knew that I wasn’t doing it, and I didn’t know how I was going to do it. You see, at that point I didn’t need another sheet telling me what to do. I didn’t need my family coming in reminding me, “the sink’s not fixed.” What I needed was George! George Verrall is a member of our church and he is a fixer-upper of all things. And George came over and together, (mainly with me watching) George did what I was unable to do myself.
When Paul looked at the law, he saw it serving its purpose of telling him what was right and was wrong, and it showed him just how wrong he was, but what it didn’t do was help him to overcome that sinfulness. So he cried out in vs. 24, “What a wretched man I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?” and then the answer came… “Thanks be to God-through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Jesus offers us the victory over that sinful nature. He offers us victory by first providing for us forgiveness for our sins. Yet also by giving us the strength to resist the temptations we face. The temptation is there, but God has promised always to provide a way out, and Christ has promised to provide that strength which is needed is to take that escape route. We need the strength to resist our sinful nature, and that strength is provided to us not by our own power but by allowing the Holy Spirit greater control of our lives. Jude 1:24 (NIV) is a little verse we don’t turn to enough, and it says, “To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy” Someone once was asked is there anything better then the prodigal son returning home, and the answer was yes, keeping him there in the first place. You see Jesus can not only forgive, but by His grace He can keep you from falling into that sin.
You have the victory in Christ, but the question becomes not can you overcome that temptation but do you really want to overcome that temptation. The flesh is strong, and there will be a battle, and you need to prepare yourself to win that victory. C.S. Lewis said that there is always a battle taking place between your mind (what you know God wants you to do) and your stomach (what your body wants you to do to make it feel good). And the stomach will always be stronger then the mind, but the stomach has to first go through the heart…and he saw that as your will, your determination, your desire to serve God, the place where Christ lives. And he said that if we train the heart by our acts of praying, of fellowship with God, and with His church, then with the help of the heart, the mind can overcome the stomach. It’s a daily constant struggle. One man described his two natures as two dogs living in him that are always in a dog fight. A good dog and a bad dog. When asked what determines which dog wins, he responded by saying, “The one I feed the most.”
Now let me say, that Jesus knows your struggles. Remember that Jesus lived in the flesh. Scripture says that, “He was tempted in every way just as we are yet was without sin.” Jesus knows your struggles, and He is not standing there waiting to condemn you for falling, in fact just the opposite, He is standing there waiting to forgive and waiting to help you. If you have received Christ into your heart, you have won already, but recognize that the struggles are not over with yet.
Johnny Cash once recorded an album called American Recordings. On the album cover is a picture of two dogs. One dog is black with a white stripe. The other dog is white with a black stripe. The two dogs are meant to say something about Johnny Cash. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Cash explains what the two dogs mean. Cash says, “Their names are Sin and Redemption. Sin is the black one with the white stripe; Redemption is the white one with the black stripe. That’s kind of the theme of that album, and for me, too. When I was really bad, I was not all bad. When I was trying to be good, I could never be all good. There would be that black streak going through.”
You see, no one is all bad. No one is all good. We are all sinners who need to be redeemed. We all need Jesus. And if you have never said, “Jesus, I want you in my life” I want to invite you to do that right now.
I want to ask if we can have every head bowed and every eye closed. If you have never received Christ prayer with me right now. You can pray out loud or you can pray to yourself. Lord, I thank you for all that you have done for me in my life. I thank you for your love and grace (now in your own words, just thank Him for what he has done in your life), and Lord I repent of my sins. I want to turn away from them. Forgive me for the things I have done wrong, And Lord I know that I need your help, I need you in my life, and I want to turn my life over to you. I give my life to you. By your Spirit living within me, help me to live my life for you. In Jesus Name I pray, Amen.
