The Life-Long Struggle

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Happy Friday and welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian J.D. Greer.

As always, I'm your host Molly Vidovitch. Do you ever feel like you're living a double life? We've all seen the cartoons with the little angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other one. One side wants to do the right thing and the other side wants to do the complete opposite.

Well, believe it or not that may not be too far off for most of us today. Pastor J.D. Greer looks at the battle raging within every Christian and he teaches us that knowing you have the ultimate victory should completely change your outlook while you're still in the fight.

So grab your Bible and let's join Pastor J.D. in Romans chapter 7 as he encourages us in this lifelong struggle. In Romans 6, which we concluded last weekend, Paul began the discussion of why Christians still seem to struggle so much with sin. Do you ever wonder, I asked you, do you ever wonder if Jesus and his resurrection power actually came into me, why is it that I still struggle so much with those same old temptations? Why don't I love God more naturally? Why do I often struggle to pray?

Why is it that sometimes I just don't feel like worshiping? Paul talks about his own struggle with these things in Romans 7 and it is, I told you, one of the most encouraging chapters in the Bible. Paul's self-account here in Romans 7 reminds me of a classic book that I read many, many years ago by Robert Louis Stevenson called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a believer and he was certainly inspired by the struggle that Paul is describing here in Romans 7. In the story, this Dr. Jekyll, who is a fine, upstanding citizen, is frustrated because it seems to him like inside of him there's a bad part and a good part and the bad part is always getting in the way of the good part and holding the good part back from being all the good part can be. He calls himself in the book an incongruous compound of good and bad mixed together. So Dr. Jekyll is a chemist and so he develops a potion that separates the two parts of him so that only the good part comes out by day, that's Dr. Jekyll, and then only the bad part comes out by night. He sequesters it into the nighttime region. That's Mr. Hyde, whose name, Mr. Hyde, comes from the word for hidden or hideous.

The two of them exist alone without one restraining the other. The problem, as Robert Louis Stevenson tells the story, was that the evil part of Dr. Jekyll was far more evil than he had imagined. Mr. Hyde's every thought was centered on himself. He was spiteful. He was angry. He was vengeful. He even murders people. Dr. Jekyll said, I was tenfold more wicked than I ever thought. Robert Louis Stevenson, speaking through Dr. Jekyll, explains, I discovered through this process that man is not truly one, he is two. If it wasn't that I was a hypocrite, he said, both sides of me were completely sincere. Does that resonate with you at all?

I certainly feel like it does for me. I feel like an incongruous compound of completely opposite people. Two different JDs that are in there. There's a JD that wants to do the right thing.

And then there's another one that doesn't want to do it at all. And both of them are totally sincere. That's what Paul is talking about here in Romans 7. He's going to describe his experience both pre-Christ and even after becoming a Christian how he feels this way. Tim Keller outlines this passage. He said this passage basically divides you into three sections. He said verses 7 through 13 are going to describe a battle that you can't win. Verses 14 through 25 describe the battle that you can't lose. And then verses 1 through 6 is going to give you an analogy that shows you how to make the transition between the two, between the battle that you can't win and the battle that you can't lose. I'm going to kind of follow that general breakdown of the passage. I'm going to read verses 1 through 6 first, but I'm not really going to comment on them until the very end because they're really just Paul's answer to the dilemma that he sets up. So he gives you the answer first and then the dilemma second. So we're going to start with the dilemma and then loop back around to the answer. Now let me go ahead and warn you upfront. These first few verses are going to sound weird and random.

The analogy in them though is quite brilliant and I'll try to show you why it is so brilliant at the end. Here we go. Verse 1.

You ready? Since I'm speaking to those who know the law, brothers and sisters, don't you know that the law rules over somebody as long as he lives? For example, a married woman is legally bound to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies, well then she's released from the law regarding the husband. So then if she's married to another man while her husband is living, she'll be called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law.

Then if she is married to another man, she is not an adulteress. All right, everybody look at your neighbor and say, I have no idea what point Paul is trying to make with all this. Okay, right. Okay. We're all kind of confused. That's fine.

All right. Verse 4. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in relation to the law through the body of Christ so that you may belong to another.

Okay, here's his point. Pre-Christ, we were married to the law. The law, remember he explained in the book of Romans, is whatever standard you think proves your worth and gains you acceptance. It says you were married to that standard. It was the center of your life. That standard, that keeping of the law was how you established your identity. It's what told you things were going to be okay in the future for you.

It's how you established your worth. Now, that might have been a religious law. In Paul's case, it was. Paul thought if he was a good enough Jew, you might think if you're a good enough Christian, a good enough religious person that then God will take care of you and he will accept you.

But it might be a non-religious version of the law. If you thought, you know, if you're a good enough student, if you work hard enough, if you're talented enough, if you're a good mother, if you're a successful businessman or a good father or whatever, then that's your identity. That's your worth. That's your acceptance.

That's what tells you things are going to be okay for you, makes you feel good about yourself and tells you that the future is going to be okay. He says, when you accepted Christ, you died to the law. You weren't married to the law anymore. You were married now to Christ, which meant that you, watch this, died to your keeping of the law as the basis of your acceptance. And now you're married to Christ. So you belong to him now in marriage who was raised, the one who was raised from the dead in order that you may bear fruit for God. For when we were in the flesh, the simple passions aroused through the law were actually working in you to bear fruit for death. But now we've been released from the law. We've divorced the law since we have died to what held us so that we may serve in the newness of the spirit and not in the old letter of the law.

That's the end of that first little section, the analogy. Again, we'll come back to it at the end, but let's just keep on moving to verse seven. This is where Paul is going to start discussing the battle that we can't win.

Verse seven, what should we say then? Is the law sin? Now, at this point, Paul is picking up again on an objection that he knows his religious Jewish leaders are going to be raising. Paul, he hears them saying, man, you are hard on that law. You're saying things like the law aroused the sinful passions and the law multiplies sin and we got to die to the law. We got to divorce that law and we got to walk away from it. I mean, Paul, you really feel like the law is bad, don't you? Paul's response?

Absolutely not. On the contrary, I would not even have known sin if it were not for the law. The law's first purpose, he says, the good purpose of the law was to reveal how sinful we are. It was a standard that showed us what our heart should look like and then showed us what our heart actually looked like. Throughout this series, we've compared it to like a mirror, a mirror that shows you how far short of God's standard of goodness you fall. Imagine you had a full length mirror in your house that not only revealed to you what you actually look like, but it also had an outline on the mirror of you, it's your ideal build and weight so that every time you look in the mirror, it not just shows you what you actually are, but it's kind of got an outline of like, man, if you were really in shape, this is what you'd look like. And you start looking like, well, which a little bit of this would here, we kind of move on to the bicep here and it would reveal to you what you are and how you fall short. That's what the law does, Paul says.

It shows you what your heart should look like and then it shows you what your heart actually looks like. For example, Paul says, I would not have known what it is to covet. I would have known that I was coveting or the coveting was a problem if the law had not said in commandment 10, thou shalt not covet.

Now coveting of course is wanting what somebody else has and then feeling like you just can't be satisfied until you have it. The law says, hey, the righteous heart, the righteous heart, the healthy heart is a heart that doesn't covet, a heart that doesn't look around and get dissatisfied and say, I need to have what that person has to be happy. Paul says, sin, seizing an opportunity through that commandment produced in me coveting of every kind. For apart from the law, sin would be dead. Once I was alive, apart from the law, but then the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. Thus the commandment, thus the commandment that was meant for life actually resulted in death for me. So sin produced death in me through what is good, the law, so that through the commandment, sin might become sinful beyond measure. Now you're like, all right, what does he mean by all that?

All right, glad you asked. Well, Paul says in verse nine, once I was alive, apart from the law, he doesn't mean that he was actually not a sinner. He just means, watch this, before he had really considered the 10th commandments, he felt alive. He felt like he was a pretty good person.

I mean, he knew some of the other commandments and he was like, you know what? I don't steal. I've never committed adultery.

I've never killed anybody. I take care of my parents. I don't worship idols. I go to synagogue every Sabbath and so I'm faithful in that.

I tithe every dollar. He says, but then there was something in that 10th commandment, that 10th commandment, thou shalt not covet. It just really gripped me. When he says the commandment came, it doesn't mean that he didn't know it before, but he just fell under conviction. He started to think about what it meant and he realized that that command had nothing to do with external obedience. That command had everything to do with the attitude of the heart and Paul started to realize that even with all of his external obedience to the other commandments, his heart still longed for what other people had.

His heart chafed against it. He was envious of others and he wanted what they had. He was jealous of people who were better at doing the law than he was and jealous of what they had and the blessing they walked in and the favor that God seemed to give them. Then to make matters worse, it's like Martin Luther pointed out, he realized that this was the commandment behind all the other commandments, which is why Moses puts it last.

This is the commandment that when you break this one, will actually make you break the other ones, right? I mean, Martin Luther, he asked, why do we steal? Why do you steal from somebody? Well, it's because they have something that you want and you want it, so you go and take it.

It's coveting that produces the desire to steal. Why do you lie? Well, quite often, the reason you or I lie is because there's something we want, but we can't get with the truth. So we got to bend the truth in order to get what it is we want. So for example, you exaggerate your accomplishments or you minimize your faults so that you can gain approval.

Can't get approval with the truth, so you got to kind of hide some of your flaws and exaggerate what you're doing so that you can win approval or you lie to obtain a position or an advantage that you couldn't get with the truth. But why do you commit adultery? Well, the reason you commit adultery ultimately is you covet sex with somebody that God hasn't given to you in marriage. So Paul saw that his heart was guilty, not just of a sin.

His heart was guilty of the root of sin, the heart of sin, the main commandment, if you will. Thank you for listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. To learn more about this ministry, head over to J.D. Greer dot com. Do you have a question or even a prayer request? Send it to us anytime by emailing requests at J.D.

Greer dot com. Now we'll get back to our teaching in just a moment, but I wanted to make sure that you heard about our brand new featured resource. It's a Bible study by Pastor Tim Keller called The Gift of God. It'll take you through the first half of the Book of Romans, and each of the seven studies includes about 12 key verses to study, as well as application questions and prayer prompts. This is a great way to dive deeper into the deep, rich teaching of the Book of Romans, either for your own understanding or to facilitate discipleship conversations with someone else. To get your copy, give us a call now at 866-335-5220 or give online at J.D.

Greer dot com. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor J.D.

And then here was the real twist. Paul started to see that even his zeal in religion had been fueled by covetousness. What made Paul zealous in religion was that he wanted respect. He wanted status. He wanted distinction above others.

So when other people looked like they were doing well, he despised them and he was jealous of them because he wanted to be the one that was known as the best at keeping the law. So what do you do when you realize that one of your primary motivators in religion is itself sinful? Well, then you feel like you've died.

That's what Paul says. I feel like I've gotten slain in the heart. And that's when the wheels really started to come off because that just made me more insecure with God, which made me even more zealous to show that I was better than others. And that made me even more of a tenth commandment breaker because I started to get really envious to everybody else. And it's like the more the commandment came, the more that I died. My attempts to keep the commandment just made me worse. That's what he means by sin through the commandment produced in me, coveting of every kind. Verse nine is what he means when he says, when the commandment came, sin sprang to life again. It aggravated sin in me and I died. Verse 13, sin was producing death in me through what is good, the law, so that sin in me might become, might be revealed as sinful beyond measure.

Now let me go back to an analogy I used a few weeks ago if it helps you get your mind around this. I told you, imagine you were sick in bed with the flu and all of a sudden I showed up there in your room or whatever and I had a list of commandments and the commandments were, thou shalt not have a fever and thou shalt not cough and thou shalt not feel weak and thou shalt not have a headache and thou shalt not have the chills. By the way, all things that a normal person would do without a law, right?

Just what it's like to be healthy. Every time I gave you a law, I would just be multiplying the ways that you couldn't keep it. Eventually you'd kind of look back at me and you'd say, I get it, I get it, I can't keep any of these laws because I'm sick. And every time you give me a new command of what a healthy person would do, you're just multiplying the ways that I can't keep the law. That's what Paul is saying happened with the law here and here was the irony.

Here is the irony if I did that with you. The harder that you try to keep those laws, the worse you'd probably get, right? If I were like, thou shalt not feel weak, so you jump up out of bed, you're like, I can't feel weak, I got to be strong. Well, the more you tried to do that, the worse you would become. Your keeping of the law would actually just make you worse. Paul is saying that's similar to what happened to me spiritually. The harder I tried to keep the law to prove I was a good and worthy person, the more my coveting and my insecurity and my jealousy flared up, my insecurity and religion turned me into a truly awful person. And that's when I started to realize I needed a different solution than just more laws.

I'd always thought the way to fix my broken heart was more and better laws and better obedience to those laws, but I started to see that it was actually this cyclical problem and I needed a different solution. By the way, if you know the story of Paul in the Bible, when Jesus appears to him on the road to Damascus in Acts chapter nine, after Jesus knocks him off the horse or whatever and appears to him, he says, Saul, it's hard for you to kick against the goads. The goads were these long, very pointy poles that a farmer would use when an oxen was plowing the ground and if the oxen started to walk too slowly, the farmer would take the stick and he'd poke it in the back of the legs to spur the ox onward. What Jesus was saying is that's what the Holy Spirit has been doing to you and you've been kicking back against those goads like you didn't want it. One of those goads was God revealing this covetousness, sickness in Paul's heart that he really just couldn't keep the law. So that's Paul verse 13 with the battle that he felt like he could not win, which makes him now shift verse 14 into the battle that he couldn't lose.

He very subtly shifts the discussion from his pre-Christ days to himself now as a mature Christian and as an apostle. Notice the present tense of these verbs he uses in here. For while I know that the law is spiritual, it's good, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave to sin. Again, notice the present tense.

He's talking about himself right now. For I do not understand what I'm doing because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate. I hate sin, but I still do it. I want to do righteousness, but I find so much in me opposing that desire to do righteousness. So now I'm no longer the one doing it that is the sin. It is sin living in me that is the one that is pursuing the sin. I'm no longer the one doing the sin. Paul's talking about a new me. There's a new I, the redeemed man, the part that Christ has taken over.

Yet even though I'm a new man and even though Christ has taken me over, there's still these simple desires in my body. You remember last weekend I used the analogy of the Allied forces when they took over Berlin at the end of World War II. At that point, the power of Nazism was broken. The German regime was crippled. The war was over. Yet still, all throughout the German countryside and even through parts of Austria and France, there were still these pockets of German soldiers that were still fighting.

So even though the power of the capital had been broken, there were still pockets of resistance. Paul said, that's me right now. Jesus has taken over in the center, but I've still got this body of sin. Now watch how Paul turns the dial up in the next verse.

This is a truly staggering verse. For I know, Paul says, that nothing good lives in me. Nothing good lives in me. That is in my flesh. How much good lives in me?

Nothing. Now, what is your flesh exactly? Well, when you see flesh, don't just think like your epidermis and your bones and your cartilage and your blood and think like that's all bad as if the body's all bad and now the soul is good. The reason I say that that's not what Paul means by flesh is think about it. A lot of your worst sinful desires have nothing to do with the impulses of your body.

Right? I mean, the worst sins would be pride and hatred, blasphemy. Those aren't like lust of the flesh.

Those are things in your spirit. So when Paul says flesh, the Greek word sarx, he means you, all of you, mind, body and spirit apart from Jesus. Flesh means the totality of your sinful nature. Apart from Jesus, how much good is in that flesh?

None, nada, zero, nil. It's like Paul said in Romans three when we studied through that chapter. That's not to say you can't ever do kind or noble things. Just that apart from Christ, your hearts are so corrupted, so curved inward on themselves away from God that you can't really call them good. And again, this is Paul talking present tense in my flesh right now, in my sin nature.

There's nothing good at all. Now that I'm a Christian, Paul says, I've got both natures existing in me. There's this new me, the real me, saved by Christ and resurrected with him. There's a guy that wants to please God and do what's right. Then there's this other nature in there, the sin nature.

I've heard it called the old man, the guy that doesn't ever want to do what's right, the guy that only wants to please himself. Paul says, I've got both these guys in me right now for the desire to do what is good is with me. I'm saved. I desire to do what is good. That's what my repentance was about, but there's just no ability to do it. I want to serve Jesus. I want to serve Jesus, he says, but my flesh is like, nope.

St. Francis of Assisi, he should have a great way of expressing this. He referred to his flesh. Now, by the way, understand in context what he means here, so don't send me an email on this. He said, he referred to his flesh as brother ass, ass like a donkey. He said, because whenever I want to do what's right, he says, my, my flesh sits there like a stubborn donkey and says, I ain't doing it. You know? So I want to get up in the morning and have my quiet time.

I ain't doing it. I think I should pray. It's like, I got this donkey just sitting there and I know what I want to do and I want to do it, but every time the donkey just sits back and it ain't moving. And he says, and so I know that the desire to do good is with me, but brother ass is still with me and it's not going anywhere for I do not do the good that I want to do, but I end up practicing the evil that I do not want to do. Now, if I do not do what I want, I'm no longer the one who does it, but it is the sin who is living in me.

So then I discovered this new law. When I want to do what is good, evil is present. It is right there with me. That's evil is right there with me. By the way, if I were honest with people, this would probably be what I wrote down as my life verse. My life verse is you could explain my entire life as man. There's been a lot of really good intentions and I've desired to do the right thing, but evil was right there with me at kind of every single point.

So many good intentions, such little progress. Paul says, for in my inner self, I delight in God's law. That's what a saved person says. No unbeliever is going to say they delight in God's law. I've repented, Paul says. I acknowledge Jesus as Lord. I want to do God's law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body waging war against the law of my mind. What I know is right in my mind what I've repented of and my faith in Christ and it's taken me prisoner to the law of sin that's in the parts of my body. What a wretched man that I am. Paul collapses in exasperation.

Who's going to rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. And just in case, just in case, by the way, you hadn't gotten the conclusion, he repeats it again. So then with my mind, I myself, I'm serving the law of God, but with my flesh, I'm serving the law of sin. We have two parts of ourselves that are working against each other. So which side will you listen to? Thanks for joining us today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. J.D., we learned in the first few chapters of Romans about the righteousness of God revealed through the gospel and then about God's saving righteousness through faith in Christ. Now in this section of Romans, we'll be shifting to how having faith in God's righteousness leads to unfailing hope. You know, when you get to Romans five through eight, you start hearing about things like perseverance and suffering and successfully battling against sin, hope that is able to overcome discouragement or even death itself. When you're studying this part of Romans, you're going to find that that is some of the most encouraging passages in scripture you'll read anywhere. And that's why we're providing you a resource to go along with these messages that you're hearing that will take you deeper into these passages.

It's the first of a two part Bible study of the book of Romans that covers up through chapter seven. They'll go right along here with what we're teaching. In addition to hearing us walk through it, you'll be able to really press in and do what Martin Luther said.

I love his image. He said, Romans is like a book I've climbed out to the edge of every branch and I've shaken it as vigorously as possible at risk of my own life to try to get every bit of fruit off of this branch. That's what we want to help you do. And that's what this, this great Bible study, this resource by Tim Keller can help you do. You can get the first volume Romans one through seven. You can get it right now at JD Greer.com. Thanks JD. We'd love to send you pastor Tim Keller study through Romans chapters one through seven as a way to say thank you for your financial gift of $35 or more to this ministry to give call us right now at 866-335-5220.

That's 866-335-5220 or give online right now at JD Greer.com. I'm Molly Vitovich. Well, it's been a strong week of life changing teaching hasn't it? And we're just getting started again in Romans. So let me invite you to join us again next time as we continue diving deeper into the gospel message here on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.