Rom 7

Body of Death

Romans 7.1-25

Joseph Tandy

How have you been since last Sunday?

How has the week gone?

I imagine that, as for me, since last Sunday's sermon everything has gone smoothly!

You have managed to have no impure thoughts, no angry words, no selfish desires.

At no time have you struggled to love others.

You managed to always forgive, always question yourself when necessary, always put the interests of others before your own.

Let's try something, if you had to rate your performance this week, what would you give yourself?

19? 19 and a half? 20?!?

For several Sundays now we have been learning that the Christian is no longer a slave to sin, he has been freed from it and thanks to Jesus he has become a slave to righteousness!

Hence our perfect week, during which we had no difficulty in obeying God!

Keep it up! See you next Sunday ...

If ever the second degree tends to go over your head, this was it.

Our question this morning: why is it still difficult to obey God?

Or to put it another way, if I have been freed from sin, why do I still feel trapped by it at times?

Why is it so hard to obey?

If you're like me, avoiding impure thoughts, selfishness, or anger is something you'd like to do in theory, but the practice is something else.

I don't want to lose patience with my children ... but I do.

I don't want to talk badly to my wife ... but I do.

I don't want to be jealous of others' success ... but I am.

Holding our tongues, keeping our thoughts pure or fleeing sexual temptation may be things we would like to do; sometimes it feels like sin is stronger than us.

But if I am free from sin, why is it still difficult to obey God?

What is your strategy when you get tired of falling back into the same old ways?

Maybe you started the year full of motivation. "I'm done, I'm done with this sin, here's everything I'm doing to make it happen. I'm redoubling my efforts, I'll make sure I always do this, I'll forbid myself that.

I find it difficult to speak well to my parents? Every morning I will repeat ten times in front of the mirror: "You will honour your father and your mother, you will honour your father and your mother, you will honour your father and your mother...".

Discipline, rules, effort. Maybe that's your strategy.

Is it working? Or are the results mixed?

Why is it still so hard to obey God?

When the apostle Paul wrote Romans, the same question was being asked.

If you have been following this series from the beginning, you know that Paul wrote Romans with the aim that the Christians in Rome would become his partners in the mission to lead the whole world to ... obedience of faith.

Paul wanted to show that the good news of Jesus would result in people all over the world bending the knee before the throne of God to obey him.

But the question is: does it work? Does faith in Jesus really lead to obedience to God? Or should we try another approach?

Just as we can ask ourselves: if the good news of Jesus works, why is it still so difficult to obey God?

According to Romans chapter 7, the answer is this.

Our body.

Why, if Jesus has set me free from sin, as we heard last Sunday, do I still struggle to obey?

Because of my corrupted, fallen body, still sold to sin, which the Bible calls a "body of death".

The goal this morning is realism.

Realism about the Christian life; we will struggle with sin all our lives. As long as we are in this body.

Realism also about the fact that if we want to move forward, the help is not in us or in a list of rules to do better, but in God and the change that only he can produce.

Two points:

• I am dead to the law…

• For the problem is my body

To the law I am dead (1-12)

What if another approach than faith in Jesus would allow us to do good and obey God?

Perhaps we have already asked ourselves this question. The good news of Jesus - is that enough to help us obey or do we need something more powerful? A bit of spiritual Red Bull. What if there was a magic bullet somewhere else?

The first thing Paul does is to point to the only approach that looked like it might work in his day, to show that it doesn't work.

He talks about the law of God, the commandments given by God to Moses for the people of Israel.

Paul says that this law, far from helping, was only making our situation worse and therefore we needed to be free from it.

Verse 1 - follow with me

"Do you not know, brothers and sisters - I am speaking here to people who know the law - that the law has power over a man only as long as he lives? 2 So a married woman is bound by the law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that bound her to him. 3 If, therefore, she becomes another man's wife while her husband is alive, she will be considered an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law, so that she is not an adulteress by becoming another man's wife."

Paul explains what happened when we believed in Jesus. He says that it is like with a marriage. 

A married woman who gets together with another man, while her husband is still alive, commits adultery. She is still bound to her husband.

But if her husband dies, she is free to remarry. She is no longer bound by the previous commitment. Death puts an end to it.

The same applies to us in relation to the law of God.

Verse 4

In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you too have been put to death in relation to the law through the body of Christ in order to belong to another, to the risen one, so that we may bear fruit for God. 

Last Sunday, we learned that by believing in Jesus we have been freed from the bondage of sin. We may find it hard to believe at times, but we can see why this would be a good thing.

In this passage, we learn that by believing in Jesus we have not only been freed from sin, but also from the law, which is counterintuitive.

Imagine two countries. One country where laws exist and are enforced, and another country with no law. This is the wild west.

Which of these two countries will have the lower crime rate?

That's obvious! The one with laws.

But here we discover that it is by extracting ourselves from the law that God enables us to bear the fruits of obedience!

The law is not the solution, it is part of the problem!

How does this happen?

Verse 5

"For when we were given over to our own nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law worked in our members, so that we bore fruit for death." 

Towards the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was said that the anti-inflammatory drug ibuprofen was dangerous for people with the virus. (Apparently this has since been discovered to be false. For the sake of this illustration, let's assume it's true.)

It was not said that ibuprofen was bad in itself, but that for a person with covid, it made things worse.

This is a bit like what Paul says about the law. It is good! It reflects the character of God. But given to people who are already sick - not of covid-19 but of sin - it makes them worse.

He says it awakens the sinful passions in their members. What does that mean? He explains in verse 7:

"What then shall we say? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! But I have only known sin through the law. For I would not have known what covetousness is if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet. Taking the opportunity offered by this commandment, sin produced in me all kinds of desires. For without the law sin is dead.

When the law comes into contact with a child of Adam, the result is not more obedience. It is more rebellion.

It is like with children. If I say: I forbid you to climb on a chair to get sweets, what will they say?

"We didn't think of that!"

Through the Ten Commandments, Paul learned that he should not covet. To covet something that was not his.

But understanding this, instead of making him a better person, it instead produced in him, covetousness!

It made him want to sin! We know how it goes. We are told: you have no right to do that. What happens? All of a sudden you feel like doing it.

It is not that the law itself is evil. It is holy and the commandment is holy, just and good.

But imposed on people like us, it's like ibuprofen for someone with covid-19. It only makes things worse. We'll talk in a moment about why the law has this effect.

But already it's showing us that any strategy for fighting sin and obeying God that relies simply on rules, our efforts to follow them and a resolve to be disciplined is doomed to failure.

It will not work.

It can look very pious. I can barricade myself behind lists of dos and don'ts. I can be very demanding of myself. I'll never do this again, I'll get up at 5am every day to do that.

But in the end all it will feed is either our pride, because we think we're doing well, or hypocrisy, because we manage to project an image and hide the reality, or despair, when we discover we're not up to it.

It doesn't work. We don't need more legislation. We need liberation.

The great German theologian, Martin Luther, experienced this for himself.

At the age of 21 he became a monk and not just any monk; an extremely zealous monk.

He imposed all sorts of ultra-demanding rules on himself. Getting up to pray at 2am and again at 4am every day.

Denying himself food. Sleeping without a blanket on a stone bed. Flogging himself with whips in the belief that it would help him stop sinning. 

But the further he went into this extremely demanding lifestyle, the more troubled his conscience became. 

All his self-imposed obligations only showed him how far he was from what God required and how deep the sin was in him, despite his best efforts to get rid of it.

The further he went, the more he realised that he was not up to scratch.

And the justice of God that he wanted to respect, he later admitted, he hated. It frightened him.

All his religiosity produced the opposite of what he was looking for: hatred against God, not love.

Maybe we experienced it too.

I absolutely have to read my Bible every day at 7am for half an hour. What does that produce? Not always joy in listening to God. It becomes a burden.

I absolutely must pray such and such a number of hours a week. What does this produce? Not always joy in prayer. It becomes a quota to fill, not a conversation with our father.

I absolutely have to find the right system of safeguards to avoid giving in to sexual temptation. It can be helpful to have safeguards in place.

But if I stop there and don't attack the root of the problem, which we're going to talk about, it will either produce pride when the safeguards work, or despair when I inevitably discover how to get around them.

Multiplying the rules is like what ibuprofen would have done to a covid-19 patient. It is a superficial and counterproductive solution.

Perhaps you are not a Christian today.

You have always believed that being a Christian is ... trying to be a good person by following rules.

But Jesus does not offer more legislation. He offers liberation. From sin ... and from the law, which sin uses to imprison us.

To the law, I am dead.

But why? Why is it like this?

Why does the law make us worse?

Why is it counterproductive to impose a list of rules on ourselves in order to obey?

On the contrary, it seems the logical thing to do.

What is our fundamental problem?

For my body is the problem (13-25)

Let's go back to our original question. Why is it so difficult to obey God?

Why does God's good and holy law ultimately produce disobedience?

Why do we still struggle with sin today?

Verse 14

"For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am marked by my nature, sold to sin."

It is said that a newspaper once wrote to some famous authors, asking the question, "What is wrong with the world?"

The Christian writer G. K. Chesterton replied:

Dear Sir,

I am.

Yours truly, G. K. Chesterton

That is what this verse says. What's wrong? Me.

The problem is me.

Or to be more precise, it is my body. My body, born in the image of my father Adam and therefore corrupt, dying and enslaved to sin.

Like father, like son. Just as Adam's body became rebellious and mortal because of his disobedience, so does ours.

Let's check the text together.

Look at how many times Paul talks about our 'members' - the parts of our body - in this passage.

Verse 5:

"the sinful passions awakened by the law were working in our members".

Verse 23:

"I find that there is another law in my members; it struggles against the law of my mind and makes me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members."

Our body is like a war zone where sin opposes every effort to pacify it.

In verse 17 Paul speaks of the "sin that dwells in me" and the good that "does not dwell in me." Same expression in verse 20.

He is inhabited, contaminated, infected by sin, at least his body.

And look at his cry of frustration in verse 24

"Wretched human being that I am! Who will deliver me ... from this body of death?

Have you ever been conscious of having a body of death?

We are entering the season where I am particularly aware of it. Springtime equals allergies equals reminders of my body of death.

It's pathetic compared to what some of you have to put up with in your health.

Our body is a body of death. Even if you are young and beautiful, and you are, you have a body of death! Sickness reminds us of this, aging reminds us of this, and our sin also reminds us of this.

We have a body of death. Not just a physically dying body, although it is. Sooner or later it will wear out and my heart will stop beating. But a body that is already spiritually dead and doesn't want to do what God wants it to do.

For Paul this is the source of enormous frustration.

Verse 15:

"I do not understand what I am doing: I am not doing what I want to do and I am doing what I hate." 

Verse 19:

"Indeed, I do not do the good that I want to do, but instead I do the evil that I do not want to do."

Paul sounds like he is fighting against himself!

Maybe we sympathise!

I had said that this would be the last time I would look at pornography, or get angry with my mother or talk behind my colleague's back.

But then I did it again.

Have you ever experienced this?

I didn't do the good I wanted to do, I did the bad I didn't want to do. And not for the first time.

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

Oh, say, somebody, Joe, weren't you listening last Sunday?

We've been freed from sin. We're no longer its slaves. We can obey God. It was written in black and white, and Jason showed us.

But you seem to be saying the opposite! That sin is stronger than us after all.

It is because Paul describes himself in this passage as being "sold out to sin" that some think he must be talking about his experience before he was a Christian. He didn't know Jesus yet, and that's why when he tried to obey, he couldn't

I used to teach this, before I changed my mind not long ago, because it no longer seems the natural reading of the passage.

No, Paul is talking about himself, at the time he was writing, Paul the Christian, and he is not just talking about himself but about every human being, non-Christian or Christian, considered - and this is the important point - from the point of view of his body.

Every human being, Christian or not, has a corrupted body, sold to sin, incapable by itself of doing good.

We all inherited our bodies from Adam.

In what sense then are we free from sin as we heard last Sunday?

It's a bit like an ex-convict getting out of prison. His sentence is served, he is free to go wherever he wants, but if he has spent 20 years in a cell, sitting on his bed staring into space, what is he naturally going to do after he gets out?

Sit on his bed and stare into space.

His body will be so marked by 20 years in prison that even if he is no longer a prisoner, he will often behave like a prisoner unless he is rehabilitated by a third party.

This is what Paul says about us.

He contrasts our identity on the one hand and our ability on the other.

Last Sunday - our identity: free! No more punishment to serve. God becomes our master and invites us to serve him.

Today - our capacity: our bodies are still bodies of death sold to sin, which can only obey if a re-education comes from outside.

Let me give you a scoop that is not a scoop.

We have exactly the same body as before we became Christians.

This may be obvious, but it is worth remembering.

If there is anyone here who thinks that the day they believed in Jesus, they left their body and went into another, sorry, but you are in the middle of science fiction.

We have the same body! A body that since Adam and Eve has been programmed to do two things: sin and die.

That's why the law can't help us. Our body loves everything that is outside the law!

That's why even as a Christian, sin can seem so instinctive and obedience so painful.

The problem is my body.

Does this mean that nothing has changed because of our conversion?

No, look at the very last sentence.

End of verse 25:

"So then by my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but by my nature I am a slave to the law of sin.

Our minds have been renewed. We believe in Jesus, we understand that we are united to him, we understand that we have a new life, we want to obey God.

Our intelligence has been transported from the mortifying reign of Adam to the life-giving reign of Jesus. That is why we find it so infuriating when we sin! God has renewed our minds to want to do good.

But, to borrow an illustration from a friend, this renewing of the mind is like trying to run Linux, a very powerful operating system, on an old PC from the 1990s.

The system is good and maybe some features will be improved, but that system will have a very hard time making the machine obey it, and basically it's the hardware itself that needs to be replaced.

Why is it still so hard to obey? The problem is my body.

My dead body that I still have until Jesus comes back.

There are three reasons why it is important to understand this.

First, to have realistic expectations about the Christian life.

If we expect a carefree world, where we do good to everyone all the time without difficulty; if we expect to have one victory over sin after another without ever suffering defeat, we may have some successes ... but the failures will destabilise us.

I think of a friend who struggled like many people with sexual temptation and who at one point fell very badly with heavy consequences for him but only.

Shortly afterwards, he said that he no longer considered himself a Christian, because according to whether the Christian faith is true, he could not have done what he had done.

This is not true. This passage says so.

We have bodies of death that are still capable of the worst sins.

The reality of the Christian life is not the world of the Care Bears. It is warfare against the hostile power within us.

If you are feeling like you are in the midst of a struggle right now, I want to reassure you. You are not a failing Christian, you are not a low grade believer. On the contrary, the very fact that you are struggling, rather than following the cravings of your body, is a good sign. Because the normal Christian life is war.

A war that will last all our lives. That doesn't mean you can't win some battles, but the war will last until the end.

The second reason why it is important to understand this passage.

It protects us from liars who would sell us false miracle recipes.

Legalism, which we have talked about, is one of them.

Multiply the rules.

It's a false miracle recipe because it's like sticking plasters on a body infected with a virus. It won't do anything to treat the problem inside. On the contrary, it is likely to generate even more bitterness against God.

Legalism is a false miracle recipe but there are plenty of others. I googled "how to stop sinning" and came across several blogs that talked as if we can be delivered from war before we are delivered from our bodies of death.

But if we swallow these lies, we put ourselves in danger of very big disappointments.

Thirdly, we need to understand this passage to understand where the help we need will come from!

The purpose of this passage is not fatalism. It's not about giving up: "I have a sinful body, that's just the way it is, nothing can be done".

No, progress is possible. But it is only when we understand our own total powerlessness that we can open ourselves to the solution offered by God.

What is it? Ultimately, it is the return of Jesus to transform our bodies to be like his.

“Who will deliver me ... from this body of death?” Paul speaks of the deliverance Jesus will bring when he returns. Does your struggle with sin make you want Jesus to come back? It should!

I'm tired of struggling! Please come back Lord!

In the meantime, it is only when we grasp our helplessness that we can open ourselves up to the help and rehabilitation provided by the Holy Spirit.

We will talk more about this in the next passage.

Yes, our body is powerless, but the Spirit of God renews our mind, reminds us of who we are through faith in Jesus, and allows us to gradually drag this old corpse in the right direction.

We progress in the Christian life, not by law, but by faith. As Jason said last Sunday, by faith we remember who we were (lost sinners), we remember who we are (our identity prisoners set free), we remember what our master offers us (life), and then simply by consistency ... we obey.

It is the Spirit that allows this ... but to know more, we must return in a fortnight.