“For in my inner self I delight in God’s law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

You’ve been there before. You knew the right thing to do in a situation. You further knew what the consequences of doing the wrong thing would be. But you did the wrong thing anyway. And now you’re facing the consequences. There aren’t many feelings worse than that. The right word for that feeling is wretched. Let’s join Paul as he concludes his reflections on the nature of our struggle against sin and the sense of wretchedness that brings.

Yesterday we talked about the struggle against sin that we face as followers of Jesus. With our minds and hearts renewed in Him, our desire is for the good, the true, and the beautiful. But every time we start off in that direction, there is sin waiting to trip us up, to make us stumble, to slow or even halt any forward progress we are making. It may not own us any longer, but where it can render us miserable and ineffective, or through us keep others out of God’s kingdom, that’ll work too.

The whole thing is a war. “For in my inner self I delight in God’s law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body.”

What we face as we endeavor to follow Jesus is a battle. Yet this is not some battle against flesh and blood—at least no flesh and blood but our own. There are not enemies around us we can somehow attack to rid ourselves of the problem. The enemy is in us. The enemy is us; that is, it is our flesh. It is that part of us that isn’t yet given over fully to Jesus.

That part doesn’t want to submit. It resists all attempts to wrangle it into submission. It values a sense of total autonomy above almost all else. I say a “sense of total autonomy” because it is not actual autonomy. We will be ruled by something. More specifically we will be ruled by the thing in which we most find our identity. But we delude ourselves into believing that by choosing something other than Christ we are somehow in total control of our own lives. We aren’t of course, but the delusion is a potent one.

Because of our redeemed consciences, though, we know what’s right. We recognize the evil of our flesh, and we try to resist it. We fight, but so does it. Yet again, what is it we are fighting against? In a word: ideas. We fight against false worldview beliefs that seductively slip into our processes of thinking and reasoning and leave us blind and lost. We are fighting against ideas that warp and twist our minds, our ability to reason, such that when we are in their thrall, we can’t even see how utterly foolish we sound.

In Christ we can see what’s true. Again: “In my inner self I delight in God’s law.” Yet like a dog returning to its vomit, we keep going back to those ideas because in at least the moment they generally feel good. That’s part of the problem with sin. If we do it right, it feels good in the moment. That’s part of its incredibly seductive nature. By contrast, the path of righteousness, because it involves going against the tide, moving upstream, standing athwart the current, is hard. It can be painful. It doesn’t always feel good at all.

So then, why choose what’s hard when what is easy is right before us? Because there’s life beyond this one, and choosing the hard now is what will result in that life being good. When we let the immediate block our view of the ultimate we will make shortsighted, foolish decisions and feel totally justified in doing them. But when we open our eyes to see the ultimate, the allure of the immediate begins to weaken and lessen immediately. We can see the folly of giving preference to the now over the later and act accordingly.

But then our flesh fights back. The immediate grows ever more demanding. Giving in eventually feels like the only thing we can do without cost. And sometimes that’s the case. Rejecting the immediate in favor of the ultimate very often does come with a cost, a cost that is felt immediately. So we weaken and give in, trading the potential for short term consequences for the guarantee of long term ones.

Like Paul said: this is all a war. But here’s the thing: as long as we keep fighting like we are the ones on whom our victory or defeat hinges, we will keep losing. We don’t have the wherewithal in ourselves to win this war. If we operate with the mindset that our walking the path of righteousness all depends on us, we are lost indeed. We will fail. We will fall into total wretchedness. Thus Paul’s cry of desperation in v. 24: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

Who indeed? It won’t be us. It won’t be a person around us. It won’t be one of the ideas of this world. There is only one hope for us. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Jesus is our hope. He is our strength. He is the one who defeated sin and death, and now we can live in His victory when we are willing to put our trust in Him. When we are willing to accept Him as our Lord, to align ourselves so fully with Him and His way and His mission and His authority that it is like we are slaves to Him (which is a pretty good option considering the alternative is to remain a slave to sin which does not have our best interests at heart, but only our ruin and destruction and the ruin and destruction of those around us through us), then and then alone will we find the victory we seek.

If you feel like you are fighting in a battle for your very soul, that’s because you are. But if you fight that battle like its outcome depends on you and your efforts, you are going to keep losing, over and over and over again. As Paul notes at the end, “So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin.” You are split. You can’t do it on your own. Jesus will be your strength. He will be your victory. He will be your freedom.

When you are in Him, relying wholly on Him and not your own strength (and understand that one of the ways He extends His strength to you is through the ministry of fellowship brothers and sisters in the church…meaning you can’t experience any of this victory apart from the church) yes, there will still be some ups and downs because our flesh is weak. But the overall trajectory will be up; up and out of this world and toward His eternal kingdom. What then this all means for those who are in Christ Jesus is what we will start exploring next week. I can’t wait to get into that with you. Don’t miss tomorrow as we do some more thinking about the church together.