Romans 7:12—8:2
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
July 5, 2026
I chose to follow Jesus at the age of 17. I remember looking back, as a 17-year-old, at the 14-year-old me and being horrified at who I’d become: someone who was smoking weed every day, struggling not to flunk out of school, selling drugs to gangs and nearly giving my mother a nervous breakdown. That 17-year-old thanked God for greatly improving on his 14-year-old self!
Later, as a 20-year-old, I looked back at that 17-year-old self, and was deeply embarrassed by him. For my 17-year-old me had been seeing myself as a very loving person when in fact I didn’t know the first thing of what it meant to love; had been thinking I’d mastered the art of prayer, when in fact I’d only mastered the art of telling God how to do His job; had felt at peace with God, when in fact I was riddled with anxiety and could hardly sleep from worrying about my academic, athletic and student leader performance.
It’s common for our present self to view our past self as, well, a mess. While that may be a true view, we should realize that, if we’re following Jesus and growing into His likeness, there is, ten years from now, a future self who’ll think this, our present self, is quite a mess, albeit less of a mess than the self that existed ten years before. In other words, in pursuing Christ-likeness, we remain a mess, and celebrate progress by becoming less of a mess, one time after another.
And how do we continue to progress? We might think it’s by getting clearer about our duty and getting stronger in our desire to fulfill it. But the truth is we only progress by getting in on God’s deliverance of all who depend on Him to set them free from their enslavement to sin. Our hope hangs, not on our achieving anything, but on our availing of help coming from outside of ourselves.
The letter to the Romans contains Paul’s greatest theological explication of the Christian faith. In its seventh chapter, however, Paul gets personal and autobiographical. He shares how he values “the law of God” as something “holy and just and good”, but he also shares, with anguish, how for all his devotion to the law and zeal to comply with it, the law has not yet made him fully holy and just and good. He admits how often he can “will what is right but…cannot do it”.
I believe Paul would have identified with the poet Carl Sandburg when he lamented, “There is an eagle in me that wants to soar; and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.” Paul also feels pulled in two directions at once and thus is “at war” within himself. Paul sees the challenge in doing what he urged the Colossians to do when he told them to “strip” off “the old self” with its practices, and to “clothe” themselves with “the new self” which is being radically changed into “the image of its creator”. Yes, Paul knows, as he’s just said in the previous chapter of Romans, that all who’ve been born a second time and been given a new heart on which God has written His law, have been made, in their “inmost self”, in their essential core, “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus”; but he also knows that the less central members of himself still await the purifying transformation that his heart has undergone. There is a delay as it takes a while for that new heart to pump its new blood to every part of the body and thereby change each one over time.
Paul employs a special vocabulary to explain his and every believer’s condition. For example, when Paul speaks of the “flesh”, he’s not referring to the physical body, but to the life lived apart from God and in reliance on human determination and exertion. Thus, Paul sees himself as simultaneously “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” and “of the flesh” and “enslaved” to sin, as he here describes himself. All that is to say, Paul is in one respect at peace with God and belongs to God, and, in another respect, battles God and belongs to sin – in fact, to such an extent that he twice says here that, when he fails to do the good he wants and does the evil he doesn’t want, “it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” Paul is a conflicted person in a long, slow process of progress.
His own experience regularly reminds him that the strength of his “flesh” is no match for the overwhelming, dominating might of what he calls “the law of sin” – “law” meaning here, not a code of precepts, but the operating principle and governing force in a way of life – in this case, one which prioritizes the human contribution over the divine one.
The might of the law of sin is in fact so great that it interjects its evil influence into the holy law of God and turns the law into an unwitting servant of its malevolent agenda. That it can accomplish such suggests no deficiency in the law. The law of God is like a perfect glove whose beneficence depends on what hand is slipped into it to use it. Filled with the good hand of the Spirit, the glove that is the law makes for justice, compassion and righteousness. Filled with the bad hand of sin, it makes for ungodliness, selfishness and all kinds of evil. For example, though in keeping the law Paul claimed to be “blameless” (as he puts it in Philippians), his living by the law ended up making him (as he puts it in 1 Timothy) “the foremost” or “the worst” of all sinners, “a blasphemer, a persecutor and a man of violence”, the enemy hater of Christ and of His people. The fault there lay not in the law; for, as Paul puts it here, “it was sin, working death in me through what is good” – that is, through the law.
Now, if the law, as good as it is, cannot save itself from sin’s dominance, why would we think it could save us from it? Where then can we find hope for our pursuit of Christ-likeness? If we’re not equal to the task by our keen sense of duty and our passionate desire to fulfill it, who then will rescue us from our spiritual impotency?
“Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”, Paul at last exclaims in exultation. Jesus puts into play “the law of the Spirit of life” and sets us free from “the law of sin and death”. If we believe we’ll be delivered from our old sin-bound self by some other Self, an infinitely greater Self, who’ll intervene on our behalf and enable us to triumph over evil, we allow the breath of God to fill us, like helium in a balloon, and lift us higher than we could ever take ourselves. Thanks be to God indeed!
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