“For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave under sin. For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good. So now I am no longer the one doing it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. Now if I do what I do not want, I am no longer the one that does it, but it is the sin that lives in me. So I discover this law: When I want to do what is good, evil is present with me.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Almost without fail whenever a Looney Toons character was faced with a moral quandary and was actually struggling with it, the struggle was portrayed by a tiny angel version of the character on one shoulder, and a tiny devil version on the other shoulder. The two would comically debate back and forth until a decision was reached (and the decision usually went the way the devil version was pushing). Everyone has a basic sense of right and wrong that is coded into their operating system. That programming leaves us at least aware of what’s right and even desirous of it, but we show a remarkable ability to resist that desire in favor of what we know to be the wrong thing. Why is that? In a truly classic passage here, Paul wrestled with that very question. Over the course of this post and the next, let’s explore it with him to see where he lands.

Let’s go back to that cartoon image of a little angel and a little devil on someone’s shoulders when he is facing a moral quandary of some sort. This is a situation we have all faced at one time or another. Honestly, we’ve all more likely faced it a whole bunch of times…like daily…even multiple times a day. And I’m not talking about having tiny cartoonish angelic and demonic versions of ourselves standing on our shoulders comically arguing back and forth. I’m talking about the tension of wrestling with wanting to do something while knowing deep down (and probably not very far down) that doing it would not be right.

Paul understands. He has been there too. He’s been there, and he lays out the tension of that moment here in agonizingly accurate fashion.

Now, there are a couple of different ways we could understand exactly what the situation is that Paul is describing here. The first is that Paul is talking about the moral tension unbelievers face when wrestling with the consciences (i.e., the image of God asserting itself in them). The basic argument here is that believers aren’t going to face tension like this because they have been freed from sin’s power and therefore won’t struggle with it here the way Paul describes. If someone who has professed Christ is battling sin to this degree, that’s a sign they haven’t yet fully embraced Him and His power in their lives.

The other approach is to see this as someone who is following Jesus wrestling against the sin nature that is still alive in them even if it has been put to death. In its death throes, it is still causing them (us) all manner of trouble. Because our lives have been renewed in Christ, we understand what is right. More than that, we actively desire what is right. But that old sinful nature that still clings to our flesh keeps asserting itself, leading to the struggle Paul describes.

Most commentators lean in this latter direction because it resonates so truly with their own lived experience of following Jesus while still battling against their old, sinful nature. There is no doubt in their minds – or the minds of people who know them well and can affirm this with them – that they are following Jesus. But the battle still exists. Having lived as a slave to sin for many years, that’s a hard mindset to break. “For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave to sin.” This is why Paul calls us to renew our minds. The life of Christ is not only a function of our doing, but of our thinking. If we don’t learn to think like Christians, the living will be difficult to accomplish very consistently or well.

As Paul describes this inner conflict, what he says breaks down into two parts that echo each other. Both parts end on the same haunting note. “For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate.” This is perhaps a struggle you understand. I certainly do. In Christ, we know what is good thanks to the indwelling presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit. But on our own, we keep falling short of that standard. Instead, we do the very thing we hate: sin.

“Now if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good.” This hatred of sin is the result of the righteousness of God dwelling in us. We agree with God that our sin is bad, that it is evil, that we should not be doing it. The law is right in its boundaries; just in its judgment. There’s no complaint here. We’ve lived in violation of the law and experienced the terrible consequences of that. But it’s like there’s this other thing in us that keeps pushing us away from the path of righteousness. As a matter of fact, Paul says it is exactly like that. “So now I am no longer the one doing it, but it is sin living in me.”

In the second part of Paul’s personal woe here, look at how he repeats himself with a bit more detail, and lands in the same place. “For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. Now if I do what I do not want, I am no longer the one that does it, but it is the sin that lives in me.”

It is sin living in me. It is the sin that lives in me. Our flesh is the problem. Let’s offer an important caveat here, though. We are not merely helpless victims to all of this. We still make the choices we do. We are responsible for the choices that we make. The problem is that sin has so thoroughly corrupted our processes of thinking and reasoning that even when we know what is the right thing to do, still, we pursue what’s not. Like Paul said, we don’t do the thing we know we should do, but do instead the thing we hate. We do this so consistently, in fact, that it’s almost like there’s a law governing the whole ugly process that we are bound to keep. Paul again understands: “So I discover this law: When I want to do what is good, evil is present with me.”

So then, why is all this? Why do we keep facing this struggle? Why do we keep living like this law has any power over us? Why do we do the thing we hate rather than the thing we desire and know we should be doing? Here’s one thought: It’s because we keep trying to win this battle on our own. We have committed ourselves to making ourselves good enough for God. Yes, we have accepted that Jesus is Lord, and that He is our only hope to get into a right relationship with God in the first place, but once we are there, we easily revert back to our pre-salvation thinking and take on the burden of keeping ourselves right with God on our own.

The justification is easy to buy into. Jesus has done the hard work of saving us so we don’t want to burden Him any further. He’s got other people to save. With His Spirit living in us, this should be easy for us to manage on our own. We don’t want to be totally dependent on someone else like this. Our old commitment to self-righteousness resurfaces, and we delude ourselves into thinking that this time we will be able to beat sin on our own. Yet we are indeed fooling ourselves. We are reenacting another scene from Looney Toons, but this time we are Wiley E. Coyote trying to beat the Road Runner. We get stuck on stupid and as a result keep blowing ourselves up, never making any real progress toward our goal.

So then, what do we actually do about all of this? Stay tuned. Paul lands there tomorrow. And then next week, we finally get into the main event of the Gospel. You won’t want to miss where this is all going.