Romans 7:7-25; The War Within

Jason Sterling April 19, 2026 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL

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Transcript

The Law Exposes Sin Within

Rehab Grace And Two Mistakes

Seeing Yourself Clearly Through Coveting

SPEAKER_00 0:23

If you have a copy of God's Word, turn with me this morning. Romans chapter 7. If you have uh in front of you, you'll see a Black Pew Bible. Again, I encourage you to open up the scriptures. The context is important. We'll look at some context this morning that will help us understand this passage better. And so if you need a Bible, you'll see one there in front of you. Last week, if you remember, we looked at the end of Romans 6, the beginning of Romans 7, and we answered the question: who do you belong to? And why does that matter? And if you remember, Paul ended with this image of marriage. We are married to Christ. And in a good marriage, you want to please the one that you love. And so we're motivated to love and serve Christ out of love, not out of obligation. That's where Paul left us last week. But here's the question that every honest believer is already asking. And Paul knows it. If that is true, then why do I keep doing the things that I hate doing? If I belong to Jesus, if I love him, if I want to please him, then why, let me say it this way, why is that new marriage often so difficult and hard? That's exactly where Paul goes next. Romans chapter 7, verse 7 through 25. It's not a detour, it's the answer. And so let's read this passage together and then we'll pray. This is the word of God. What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means. Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, You shall not covet. But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good. Did that which is good then bring death to me? By no means. It was sin producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin, for I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Now if I do what now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good. And so now it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh, for I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, is it not is it no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I do that I when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. Let's pray and let's ask the Holy Spirit to be with us this morning. Father, come. This is a difficult passage in many ways because I see so much of myself here. And so fill me with grace. Fill me with clarity as I teach it. Thank you for the work that you've done in my heart through it this week. Some here this morning are exhausted and discouraged. Would you show them this morning that you have not given up on them? Others are self-righteous. They think they've got it figured out. And I pray that the Tenth Commandment would do a work on them. Just like it did on the Apostle Paul. For those this morning that don't know you, I pray that you would show them their need for a rescue. And more than anything, point us to Jesus so that we leave here saying one thing. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. May that be the cry of our heart. In Jesus' name. Amen. Anyone who's been through serious surgery knows that the hardest part is not in the operating room. The hardest part is after. It's the rehabilitation. You leave a surgery and you expect to be feeling better, but instead, what happens is you often feel worse before you feel better. Rehabilitation in physical therapy is brutal. Ask anyone, maybe it's you this morning, who's had a knee rebuilt or a shoulder rebuilt or hip replacement. The exercise is hurt. And the progress is often very slow. And at every point, every patient at some point hits a wall and says, This can't be right. Something is wrong. Maybe I should stop. Every good physical therapist will tell you you're exactly where you need to be. Because the pain is not a sign that something went wrong, it is a sign that something is working. The soreness is the tissue rebuilding itself. The difficulty means the joint is being restored. The fight is the healing. And the patients who quit because it hurts, they never fully recover. Those who stay in the game, who work the process and keep fighting through what feels wrong, well, they get their life back. Most of us expect grace to work like surgery. You go under the knife, God fixes it, you wake up, I'm good. What we don't often expect is the rehabilitation. We don't expect the ongoing ache, uh, the sense that something is still unresolved inside of our hearts. And so we often start drawing the wrong conclusions. We either one decide that the surgery didn't work and that if we're still struggling like this, we must not really be a Christian at all. Or we go just numb and we stop feeling the war, we stop choosing to fight, we stop acknowledging the gap, and we say, Well, I'm not struggling anymore, so I must be good, I've arrived, I must be maturing. In Romans chapter seven, Paul refuses to let us make either mistake. Romans 7, Paul's describing the normal Christian life and what it looks like. And it looks like three things seeing yourself honestly, number one. Secondly, fighting without shame, lastly, resting in Jesus. Seeing, fighting, resting. That's the map. Let's look at our first heading: seeing yourself clearly. Paul has just told us, remember, end of Romans 6, beginning of Romans 7, you died to the law. And so you've been released from the law as a means of salvation. And again, Paul is brilliant. He anticipates the questions, and he knows exactly what we will be thinking. And so he anticipates it, and he says, Well, if we needed to escape the law, and sin arouses, sin, if sin is aroused by the law and leads to death, then the law that's the problem. It's basically sinful. And he immediately says, again, we've heard this over and over if you've tuned into the series, by no means. Because you see, the law didn't create the problem, the law exposes the problem. Two ways. Look at verse seven. It defines sin. The law names what sin actually is, including things that you would never identify as sin. We'll see that in a moment. Verse eight. The law defines and reveals sin. Look, verse eight. Sin seizing the opportunity through the commandments produced in me all kinds of coveting. It exposes how sin lives inside of us very specifically. And think about it. Paul, the apostle Paul was a Pharisee. He knew these commandments. He had worked through these commandments his entire life. And here's the thing: nine out of the ten, you can reduce them to externals. I haven't committed adultery. I've not murdered anybody. I've not bowed down to an idol. And when you do that, the law becomes a checklist, and a checklist, as you know, is manageable. And then he gets to the tenth. You shall not covet. And when he gets to the tenth, something in the apostle Paul breaks open. And the reason why is because coveting lives entirely on the inside. Envy, self-pity, and bitterness, longing for more beauty and more wealth and more approval than you currently have in an unhealthy way. And the tenth commandment comes and shatters that right in the heart of the Apostle Paul. Look at verses 9 through 13. Paul says he once was alive apart from the law. What does that mean? Well, he doesn't mean that he didn't know the commandments. What he's getting at is he's never felt the full weight of the law. He felt fine, he felt spiritually confident. And then the commandment came home to him. Sin came to life in a way and killed him. So what's Paul's conclusion? Verse 12, and this is important. The law's holy. The law's good. The law is righteous. Translation: the law is not the problem. The problem's us. The problem is inside of us with our hearts. That's what Paul sees. Externally, he was good. Internally, he was a complete mess. And the law shows him that. And did you notice he saturates this passage with all sorts of death language? And he means it. Sin doesn't just trip you up, it executes you. The law didn't just kill Paul. The sin is what killed Paul, using what was good, the law, as a weapon. You see it? In other words, the law cannot save you. It's meant to show you that you need to be saved. Say it another way: the law is a mirror that you are to hold up, to show you who you really are, and to show you just how deep your sin goes that you cannot fix yourself. So that you will throw your hands up like Paul does, and we'll get there. A wretched man that I am, who can rescue me? Show you your need for a rescuer. And at first that might sound like bad news to you, but that is great news because it is the beginning of rescue. It's the beginning of life. That's the mechanism at work. Let me give you a picture. We've all experienced this at some time in our life. You see a sign, think about the last time you saw a sign that says, wet paint. Do not touch the paint. Or do not walk across the grass. And what do you do? Well, if you're anything like me, you're like, surely not. And you what? You touch it. I just want to see. Nobody touches wet paint because they need to. You don't benefit from it. You're not thinking about the wall at all until the sign goes up. And then suddenly it's all you think about. The desire, the rebellion in you that didn't exist five minutes ago suddenly becomes irresistible. And we know this. We stiffen up, don't we? In commands. There's something inside of us that pushes back against any command. And the more clearly the law speaks, the harder sin fights. The wet paint did not put anything in you that wasn't already there. And neither did the law. It's not a flaw in the law, it is a flaw in you. And it's a flaw in me. It tells us something about ourselves. Nobody fails the tenth commandment occasionally. It's constantly. The quiet rage when someone gets the recognition that you think you deserve. Comparing yourself and parenting. Pride when your kids perform, shame when they don't. The single person watching another wedding invitation arrive. Happy for the couple, no doubt, but also feeling that familiar ache of why not me. And if you're still not convinced, just get on Instagram for about five minutes. And you will feel it. And you will see it. More beauty, more money, more success, more fun, more approval than you have right there on the screen. And the problem is not technology, it's not a personality quirk. That's the Ten Commandment doing its work. And maybe you've spent time in church your entire life, and you can explain justification. You've got all the Westminster catechisms. You know, you can give me the things on sanctification, on repentance. But the tenth commandment, my question, has it stopped being personal? And if it has, then you need to sit with that. Because knowing all the right answers is not the same as the law doing its work. If you've walked with Christ for years, here's what we need to understand: the further we get, the more the tenth commandment exposes us, not less. The sin gets more subtle, the pride gets more refined. That's the law doing exactly what it was designed to do. Every time it surfaces something in you, it's not condemning you, it's sending you to Jesus, to the one who can actually help you and save you and rescue you. So here's the problem. If the law keeps exposing us, it means that the war is not over anytime soon. So what do we do with the fight that doesn't let up? Well, that's our next point. Look at number two, fighting with shame. Part of the normal Christian life is fighting and struggling against sin. And I want you to notice something. Look at, and this is again important, I think, to point out. If you look at verses 7 through 13, all were in the past tense. I was, sin came, I died. That was then. Then look at verse 14. The tense shifts and never goes back. Look at verse 15, 18, 19, present tense, all of it. Why is that important? This is the Apostle Paul as a mature, seasoned Christian describing his life right now. And what he describes is a relentless inner conflict, two forces pulling each other, flesh and spirit, in opposite directions at the exact same time. He wants to do good and can't. He does evil that he does not want to do. He fills this gap. Do you feel this gap between who you want to be and who you actually are? We all feel that. And here's what often happens we feel it, and it often leads to real shame in our lives. Shame that we still struggle with the same thing we struggled with 10 years ago. Shame that we can't tell anyone and haven't told anyone in the church. Shame that the gap between who you want to be and who you are actually feels wider possibly than it did before. Hear me. Whatever shame you are feeling and you're carrying about and carrying in the fight, Paul knows what that's like. He's been there. And he's describing it here. Look at verse 16. If I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good. What does that mean? Paul does what he hates doing. Why does he hate it? Well, because he agrees with the law, that it is wrong, and that hatred is the cry, it's not the cry of an unbelieving heart. Romans chapter 8, verse 7 tells us that an unbelieving mind is hostile to God's law and cannot submit to it. And so the person who hates their sin and longs to be free is not demonstrating in maturity, they're actually demonstrating life. Before conversion, you didn't care. There was no war. Not because you were winning, but because there was no one to fight back. Think about the surgery picture. Soreness is the tissue rebuilding. The ache you feel is not a sign that something is wrong, but that something is working. The Holy Spirit has taken up residence in you, and he is the one who is fighting back. And let's just think about the apostles Paul, the Apostle Paul's life for a second. And he will show us that this war is not winding down anytime soon. The apostle Paul writes 1 Corinthians chapter 15, 55, somewhere around 55 A.D. And he says, I am the least of the apostles. Five years later, five years more maturity, he writes Ephesians, and in Ephesians 3, he says, I'm the least among all Christians. Five years later, four years later, around 64 A.D., he writes from a prison in Rome, 1 Timothy, chapter 1. And you remember what he says there? Not I was. This is the last year of his life. I am the worst of all sinners. The most mature believer in the New Testament's view of himself as getting lower, not higher. Not because he's coming becoming more sinful, but because he's seeing himself more clearly. And the closer he gets to Jesus, the more clearly he saw what was going on inside of him. And the bigger Jesus got, and the bigger the cross got. And it's not winding down this side of glory. We are waiting on what the Bible says, our glorification. The person who is apathetic about their sin, who feels nothing, who cares less about their sin, and says, whatever is in a far more dangerous place than the person who sees it and fills the ache and the gap and keeps running to Jesus. Look at verse 24. Who will deliver me from this body of death? That's the most honest prayer a person can pray. And if you feel that now, if you are there, that's grace. And the grace that you're asking for has a name, and the name is repentance. What is repentance? It's not just feeling bad, it's not trying harder. Repentance begins with seeing yourself clearly, grieving honestly about your sin, and then turning towards the God who is already moving towards you in the person of Jesus Christ. Awareness, mercy, seeing the mercy of God, turning to Jesus. So don't read your struggle and discouragement this morning as disqualification. Read it as evidence that the Spirit is at work in you. Lastly, rest in Christ. Look at verses 21 through 23. Here's another thing that needs to be pointed out in these verses. He uses the law in three different ways here. And here's why that matters. Look at verse 21. A pattern. Every time he reaches for good, evil shows up. Verse 22, God's commandments is how he uses the law that he loves. Verse 23 is what I want you to see. He takes the key. This is the key. He says that sin itself is a law. In other words, it's a force waging war against his members. Paul is not being sloppy here. He is showing you the anatomy of war. Sin is not just a bad habit, it is a power at work in you, not your master. Okay, remember Romans chapter 6. That's been settled, but it is a wounded enemy fighting inside of you. And the reason that matters is because you can negotiate with a bad habit. You can outdiscipline a behavior or a pattern. But you cannot fight a force like sin with willpower alone. This is not a battle between your willpower and your bad habits. It is a battle between two rival powers inside the same person: the renewed self that loves God and the flesh that is still fighting. A defeated enemy is not a destroyed enemy. And a wounded enemy is still dangerous, which means your only hope, this is the point, is from the outside. And Paul knows that. Look at verse 24. I love it. He stops pretending. You can see him throwing his hands up. Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? This is a cry of a man who is at the end of himself, every resource exhausted. He's tried all the strategies, he's been in all the accountability groups, he's read all the books, he's tried everything. And he knows one thing that if I'm going to be rescued, it's definitely not coming from the inside. And what he needs is not a better strategy. He needs, notice it says, not how or what, who will deliver me. Not a technique. He's crying out for a person. He's crying out for a rescuer. Jim Boyce has this illustration, and it's about a young officer in the Russian army who had been embezzling funds. And he finds out that an audit is coming. And so he adds up everything that he has stolen. And it is a debt that he cannot pay. And so he writes above below the total of all that he had stolen, and he says, A great debt, who can pay? And he falls asleep at his desk with a revolver lying on the table. And the czar, Tsar Nicholas, is doing a check and an inspection, and he walks into this young man's room, and he sees the man sleeping, and he sees the gun, and he looks down at the books, and he reads the note and he signs his name beneath it. And the soldier wakes the next morning and he looks down at the question and he sees Nicholas. And he realized that the czar had been there. That the czar had seen everything and that he had signed his name to the debt. Paul has been in that room. And he knows exactly who signed his name. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. And I love what Paul does. He doesn't explain it. Paul erupts. This is a celebration, cataloging war for twenty verses, and then he throws his hands up in pure celebration. Thanks be to God. Our rescue does not come from inside the room. It comes from the outside. Your rescue and my rescue comes from someone who has seen everything. Every failure, every relapse, your worst moments, and he signs his name anyway. But unlike the czar, he doesn't send gold and silver. Jesus gives his life. Jesus takes everything we owe and he carries it to a cross and he dies under the full weight of it. And three days later, he walks out of a tomb to prove that the debt is gone forever. The books are clean. The audit is over. Romans 7 doesn't end this side of glory. The tension remains, but the rest comes from realizing that the outcome is no longer in question. You're not fighting to earn rescue. You're fighting from a rescue that has already been accomplished. That's the rest. And the one who signed his name to everything you owe, he has not finished with you yet. And Jesus will not give up on you. Rest in Jesus this morning, the one who gave his life for everything that you owe. Can we say with Paul this morning, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord? Amen. Let's pray. Father, thank you for showing us the truth about ourselves, for not leaving us there. Would you forgive us the ways, forgive us for the ways that we've carried shame about our fight instead of running to Jesus for rescue? And Holy Spirit, I pray that you would help us to see ourselves clearly. Help us to stay in the fight without shame, resting in the gospel, working from rescue, and help us to rest and live a life of gratitude, saying, Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. It's in his name we pray. Amen.