I am not a professional psychologist, but I am an amateur, in that I love the souls, the psyche, of people. As a pastor/shepherd, discipler, and as a practicing disciple of Christ myself who walks the road of sanctification every day, I can also say that identity of soul is vital and internal conflict about identity is destructive and paralyzing.

For example, the misery of young men and women being catechized and cajoled by worldly counsel into gender denial and attempted transition is a hellish reality. The confusion of and combat against embodied fact ruins lives. Some of the physical damage is irreversible, and as great as grace is to deliver from guilt, we can expect severe struggles on the road to restoring the image of God for those who convert to Christ.

As another example, I’ve been a part of a couple conversations about PTSD recently, and if I had known I forgot, that the stress of trauma after the fact is regularly not about what a soldier saw but what a solder himself did. The worst conflict isn’t over atrocities witnessed but atrocities committed by oneself. Who we thought we were doesn’t hold up to the evidence of our behavior, and that leaves a lot of unwanted, uncomfortable memories. Soldiers without a Savior, without gospel, may have a lifetime conflict in their minds that threatens their survival long after they’ve left the field of military conflict.

These identity conflicts provide at least a partial analogy to the Christian’s experience with the passions of the flesh that wage war against the soul (1 Peter 2:11). It is war, and Romans equips us.

A reporter once asked Mike Tyson about his plan for an upcoming fight with Evander Holyfield: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Romans chapter 6 equips us to throw punches in the fight, and chapter 7 equips us so that we’ll be ready when we get punched in the mouth.

In chapter 7 Paul refers to it in terms of law, and all faith and hope and mind-renewal must be brought to bear. This is no playground. The saints will persevere by God’s grace, and they need to know the right path lest they be surprised when harassed. Christian, your saved soul needs to know this.

We considered last time that the frustration is so intense in verses 13-25 and the expressions so explicit that a surface reading may make one think Paul represents an unbeliever. But then we put the passage in context and demonstrated that only a believer actually has the sort of care and want for good. He sees an internal division, a spiritual conflict, but the conflict is a sign of life.

Paul is clarifying how the law of God, primarily the Mosaic Law, and even the 10th Commandment against coveting, is holy and good. Yet the law also aggravates and awakens sinful desires and even is found “producing death in me” (verse 13). Paul does not back off the goodness of the law, nor back off wanting the law’s standards, nor back off how the law itself runs roughshod over the souls of believers who, though well-motivated, get their relationship with the law out of order. That’s because their is another controlling principle in yet-to-be-glorified believers, namely, the law of sin, that resists. Sin is the enemy, and we need to hold on to our identify as those united to Christ and not as declared by the law.

The Law Exposes Sin (verse 13)

Paul rejects any idea that the good law has fault in bad death. Did that which is good , that is the law, bring death to me? By no means! We may ask, why go about using the law at all, Lord? Because it trains us to see sin for what it is. The Lord wants us to grow wiser by learning our own depravity.

Here’s the purpose: in order that sin might be show to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure . The law is a 5 million lumens make-up lamp to show and magnify every defect. Whether it shows more clearly a pre-existing rebellion or proves that sin is so ruthless in its demands that it will pervert the good for its own benefit, those who are Christians are trained to see more of why Christ’s crucifixion was so crucial.

The Law Provokes Conflict (verses 14-20)

The next two sections come at the same problem from two angles, both portray a conflict between intention and outcome, wants and actions. The first shows him doing what he doesn’t want, the second not doing what he does want.

The law is spiritual but he is of flesh , and that can’t be a simplistic dualism between material and immaterial. Spiritual refers to a purity and integrity. Jesus was spiritual in flesh, but not “of the flesh.” For believers, even though we have died to sin and are no longer slaves to it, we are being trained to see its deceiving and destructive work while still connected to it. We are saved, but we are not done being saved. More than just a man’s body, there is a problem in fallen human nature.

Verse 15 explains the sold under sin in context. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Paul has been given a taste of true freedom but finds himself back at the table of fake freedom. When he looks at the law this is what he sees. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good. The intention has some benefit: to show that what he did was wrong and that sin is a masterful manipulator.

So now it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells in me. He is not claiming multiple personalities. He is not making excuses. It’s the opposite. He’s recognizing that this is worse than he thought. He’s saying that there is an enemy within. He’s saying that peace with God (per Romans 5:1) means war with sin. There is still sin to be exposed, and the law, useful to expose it, so necessary and good, must be held as a mirror. But it must not be looked to as the judge. Going to the law as judge never results in good. The law can be a means toward righteousness, but it is a brutal master.

Verse 18 gives two further pieces of explanation. Sin is connected to the flesh and so nothing good dwells there. This affects the actions. Paul has desire but not the ability to carry it out . Verses 19-20 repeat the point, but we’ve moved from inconsistence with wants to impotence of wants. He does what he didn’t want to—sinning by transgressing the standard, and he doesn’t do what he wants—falling short of the standard. The problem is sin, and sin can be singled out as an unwelcome but persistent resident.

Sin causes sin. The law does not cause sin to exist, but yet the law does not cause sin not to exist. All the frustrations Paul describes happen under the shadow of the law. He wouldn’t know what good to want without the law, whether he does it or not. In fact, the law is good for showing what is good. But we are not neutral observers. We are not a blank slate waiting to find a good template. In Adam we aren’t fixed by just knowing.

The Law (of God) Wars Against the Law (of Sin) (verses 21-23)

The conflict is so persistent that Paul calls the conflict a law. That means that in the next couple verses there are two laws. The law of sin (in members) and the law of God (in mind). Both are controlling principles, but the law of sin is known by more than words.

There is a nagging and controlling pest, a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand . In a more humorous anecdote, there is a law that when we’re told not to imagine a pink elephant, to process the prohibition in order to obey it is to fail to follow it.

If he did not have an interest in the better it would be different, not righteous, but maybe not quite as disruptive. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, 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.

Four descriptions cover two laws. God’s law is the one in his mind, the sinful use of law is the one in his members.

There are two laws but three participants: law, us, and sin. We will never know what it would have been like without sin, mostly because law is for sinners, but also because law makes sinners worse. When we are glorified, the law will be written on our hearts so perfectly that we will not need external standards and we will be delivered from the part that sin attaches to. But for now sin is the third wheel that makes our time with the law awkward.

The Law Makes Desperate for Rescue (verses 24-25)

Sin in him was not an excuse. Sin in him was worse. The more delight in God’s law the more despicable was his sight of living with it. He could see what it could be, he could see and desire the fruit of righteousness. The solution wasn’t the law.

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

He needed, we need, to go forward as disciples, and in reading the epistle. Verse 25 is good, so is chapter 8. We look to no condemnation in Christ.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

The final summary after the expression of faith leaves us, along with Paul, in a state of conflict, with sin and with identity.

Conclusion

Romans 7 is normal Christian conflict, and this chapter equips us so that we will not be surprised. It is not instructions on what we should seek as a spiritual state of authentic misery. This was Paul as maturity, but it is not what made him mature.

Should you seek to stimulate anxious groanings?

This passage is indeed remarkably fitted for the purpose of beating down all the glory of the flesh…. Paul, by his own example, stimulates them to anxious groanings, and bids them, as long as they sojourn on earth, to desire death, as the only true remedy to their evils; and this is the right object in desiring death. (John Calvin)

I think you should seek to win the fight, not seek to get hit in the face, but recognized that its your own sin punching back. It’s not a feeling to celebrate, though it is a feeling that shows we’re in the right conflict. We are not in a wretchedness competition.

Maturity is recognizing the law of sin, staring it in the face, and telling it, I am dead to you in Christ. It is looking at the law and saying, If you are here to hurt me, I am dead to you. I am with Christ now. (see Romans 7:4)

So we live from faith to faith, not under law but under grace.

---

Charge

Christian, you are a Christian. You are reconciled to God in Christ, You are, by God’s grace, being made more and more like Christ. You are grafted into Him as a vine, baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life. Christ in you is the hope of glory. Walk in Him.

Benediction:

[M]ay your hearts be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Colossians 2:2–3, 6–7, ESV)