A Sermon Inspired by Romans 7:15-25a
Sermon 1 in “Nothing Shall Separate Us” Sermon Series
Is it just me, or does this portion of Paul’s letter to the
church of Rome sound more like a tongue twister than a Scripture lesson?
“I don’t do what I want to do and
I do do
what I don’t want to do,
so
if I don’t do what I want to do,
is
it me who does it
or is it sin that does it,
and
who is gonna help me not do what I don’t want to do
and do do what I
want to do?”
If it’s this hard to wrap our tongues around what Paul has
written, then what hope do we have to wrap our minds around what he’s actually
trying to say?
Maybe it would have been easier if Paul had just cut to the
chase like they do in the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, “Hi, my
name is Paul, and I’m a sinner.”
It doesn’t help our confusion that we started reading Romans in
the middle of a chapter, in the middle of the letter. Romans is 16 chapters
long, and there are 25 verses in the 7th chapter, and we started
reading at verse 15 where the first words we hear are “I don’t know what I’m
doing.” It’s kind of like we only started listening halfway through a movie or
a news story or a sermon so that we are paying attention at the end and we see
the happy ending or hear the reporter’s sign off catch phrase or listen to the
preacher say “Amen,” but we aren’t so sure how we got there or what’s really important
anyway.
So fully relying on God’s grace and your patience, I think
it’s important we learn a little bit more about Paul’s letter to the Romans so
we can understand all this business about the do do’s and don’t do’s of grace.
What is helpful to understand about Paul’s letters in the New
Testament is that Paul is most often writing to specific communities of faith.
He is writing letters to churches that he, Paul, helped to start as a
missionary and evangelist. After his conversion to Christianity, Paul spent his
life sharing the good news of Jesus all over the Roman empire. Wherever Paul
spent time preaching the gospel, he helped to start a church. So, that’s why
when you read most of Paul’s letters, they begin with a greeting like, “Grace
and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ!” And they end
with promises to visit again soon or with instructions to say hello to certain
people. Reading a letter in the New Testament is really like opening someone’s
mail from two centuries ago.
But Romans is different because Paul didn’t help start the
church at Rome. Most scholars believe that Paul wrote this letter to the Christian
church as an introduction of who he is and how he understands the Gospel,
writing to maybe ask for their financial support for his mission work or for
their help and prayers while he was in prison (which he was many, many times).
So, in Romans, Paul explains thoroughly how God has offered
salvation to the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. He starts all the way back at the beginning with Adam in the garden of
Eden and the first act of sin and disobedience against God and then he painstakingly
sweeps through the history of time, recounting how even when humans disobeyed
and sinned and turned away from God, God was faithful over and over again to
the covenant. In other words, God is righteous—God does what God said God will
do. We humans – not so much.
And so we need help! Our whole life is distorted, is bent out
of shape, is out of whack because of sin. Paul writes in Romans 3:23, “All have
sinned and fall short of God’s glory.” If you were raised in the church (or if
you were raised in the South), you have heard that Bible verse before, and you
may even know it by heart.
But that’s only half of the sentence. The very next verse
says, “But all are treated as righteous freely by God’s grace because of a
ransom that was paid by Christ Jesus.” And that’s the gospel in a nutshell for
Paul.
All of us are sinners.
Every single one.
None of us can be righteous on our own. We just can’t. Sin
has messed up our lives, our hearts, our souls, our world.
So we need help!
God is righteous, so God sent his son Jesus to pay the price
for our sin, because we couldn’t. And God offers this gift, our sin being
cancelled, to us freely! It costs too much. We could never afford it. So, God
just gives it to us because that’s who God is—righteous and loving and full of
grace. THANKS BE TO GOD!
Paul continues, then, to teach that since we are sinners saved
by grace, we have been given a new life in Jesus Christ. And a new life
requires a new lifestyle. Once we were a people under the oppression of sin,
but now we live under a new system—the system of God’s love, forgiveness, and grace.
We have a new identity in Christ, and it’s time for us to give up our old sinful
ways that lead to death and begin the life journey of following God’s way that
leads to life, to transformation, to discipleship as a follower of Jesus.
So, after all this talk of a new life and freedom from sin in
the first six chapters, we might expect Paul to move on to talk more about
grace upon grace and the love and peace that God grants to us and then about
the possibilities of the new life in Christ...but instead Paul is still going
on about the power of sin and our inability to do the right thing even when we
know what it is, even when we want to do it.
Come on, Paul, give us a break here. Who wants to talk of sin
and failure? We don’t have to worry about that anymore because of Jesus, right?
But Paul is wrestling with a huge question. You see, Paul was
a faithful Jewish man before he became a Christian. Not only was he a devout
Jew, but he was a Pharisee. Remember Pharisees are the religious rule keepers that
Jesus is always getting into trouble with in the gospels. Pharisees were scholars
of God’s Word, the faithful people who meditated on God’s law both day and
night and delighted in it. From his experience with God’s Word, with knowing by
heart the laws God gave to God’s people to help them live a righteous life,
Paul is wrestling with this big question in his newfound freedom from sin and
death in Jesus Christ: “Why would God give us the law if trying to follow it
couldn’t save us from death? And if God’s law can’t save us, does that mean
that trying to follow it is bad or evil?”
To this second question, Paul immediately answers “No!” In
fact, it is right to embrace God’s law because God’s Word is holy and just and
good. It just turns out, that as human beings, we can’t help but be seduced by
sin, so that not even God’s law can rescue us from being trapped by it.
But we know that, don’t we? Jesus said that the greatest
command is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all
your soul, all your strength, and the second is to love your neighbor as you
love yourself. In fact, Jesus said that all of the laws God ever gave to God’s
people are summarized in those two statements:
Love God.
Love your neighbor.
So, I ask you, how many weeks have you fallen short of those commands
after you leave this space of worship? If you are like me, you haven’t always
lived up to this goal of loving God and loving neighbor perfectly throughout
the week. Let’s be honest…we don’t even make it to the parking lot after worship
sometimes without breaking one of those commands.
Are we just that bad? Are we just not trying hard enough? Is
it really just a matter of trying harder to get our actions to match our words?
This is exactly the pickle that Paul finds himself in when we read today’s
tongue-twisting passage in chapter 7.
Since God’s law is good and holy, that can’t be the problem
with human nature. But if I’m trying with all my might to follow God’s good
instructions on how to live my life, why do I keep falling short?
Paul is
describing that very human struggle in which, sometimes, we just can’t seem to
help ourselves and stop. Paul is describing the battle of our everyday lives,
of trying to live up to our good intentions but never really, never fully achieving
what we set out to do.
It’s like in elementary school, when you have made up your
mind to sit with the new kid at lunch or play with the lonely person on the
playground, but you find your body steering you away from what you want to do,
what you made your mind up to do and, instead, your feet take you toward the
lunch table filled with familiar faces or the monkey bars where the cool kids
are hanging out. You knew what was the right thing to do...and you even really
wanted to do the right thing, but at the last moment, for some reason deep down
that you don’t even really understand, you chickened out.
Or it’s like when you get in an argument with someone you
love, and just about the time you start raising your voice and saying mean things
just because you know those words will hurt the other person right here, you
think to yourself “What am I doing? This isn’t worth it. I don’t even mean what
I’m saying. I’m embarrassed of the way I’m acting. I don’t want to be this
person,” but still, even knowing all this, even silently admitting it to
yourself in the middle of the fight, you dig in deeper and you keep going, you
keep yelling, you keep saying hurtful things...you don’t stop and you don’t
know why.
Even when we know the right thing to do, the thing that God
would want us to do, we can’t seem to do it, to turn our good intentions into
justice, into loving actions. Try as
hard as we can, we can’t seem to always do the right thing even when we try really
hard. It’s like climbing a tall hill made of sand. As the sand keeps sliding
under your feet, you put in a lot of effort, but you don’t get anywhere. It’s
enough to make you pull your hair out!
WE NEED HELP!
And Paul gets that. Paul knows that we are way out of our
league when we try to be righteous and good on our own, because sin is so much
more than just breaking rules or doing bad things. Sin is a real and seductive
power that distorts our relationship with God and, therefore, our relationship
with everyone and everything else. Sin is a turning away from God-centeredness to
self-centeredness. Sin makes itself at home in our hearts as human beings,
living in our bodies like a parasite, destroying us from the inside out until
we can remove it and replace it with something stronger.
No wonder we keep messing
it up. When it comes to will power versus sin power, sin wins.
Sin is even so sneaky and powerful that when we are really
close to doing the right thing, just when we think we are finally following
God’s law and Jesus’ commandments, that’s the exact moment when sin sneaks in!
Sin invades and twists our good intentions into serving sin’s purpose—pain,
destruction, death. Let me tell you about my friend Faye, who was a recovering
alcoholic and an active member of the Alcoholics Anonymous community before she
passed away. When Faye first told me this story, it was so powerful to me, that
I asked her if I could have her permission to share it in my preaching and
teaching without using her name. And Faye said sure, but she insisted that I
use her real name, and so I will.
When Faye started attending AA meetings, she found out just
how someone can want to do the right thing and end up doing the opposite because
of sin. She told me this story, “When I first started working the 12 step
program, my sponsor asked me who I hated the most in the world. After I told
him, he told me to pray for that person. A few weeks later, I came back and
told my sponsor that I couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t pray for this person
I hated. I was getting too upset, too angry, too dangerously close to taking a
drink again. My sponsor asked me what I had been praying for. So, I told him. I
told him that I was praying for this person that I hated to get what was coming
to them, for God to punish them, to make sure they couldn’t hurt anyone else.
My sponsor said, ‘You’re not doing it right, Faye. That’s not praying for the
person you hate; that’s just asking for God to hate them too.” So, he told me
to start praying that my enemy would get all the good things in life, that they
would be happy and be at peace. It wasn’t until I could pray for the person I
hated most in the world to get all the things out of life that I
wanted—happiness, peace, serenity—that I could find those things for myself.’”
Even in her best intentions to pray for her enemy, sin
overpowered Faye’s will and brought her dangerously close to drinking again, to
losing her sobriety, and to losing the ability to forgive herself and
others.
But, here’s the good news…we are not in this struggle alone.
Everyone else is human just like we are. Yes, we are a complete and total mess, but
so
is
everyone
else.
But, in order to see the fullness of God’s grace, to really
understand just what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross, we have to
understand our complete and utter failing as human beings. We have to realize
that trying to do the right thing without relying on God’s grace is like fighting
a losing battle. There are forces, like sin and death, that are at work within
us, like parasites, that we just can’t win against on our own. Our will power
may be strong, but it isn’t strong enough. We need a transplant of something
stronger.
Paul diagnoses our sin-sick souls, but he also names the cure
that we desperately need. We need the spirit of Christ dwelling within us. And,
as Paul says, thanks be to God that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, can and
does do something about our helpless state.
Through the cross and resurrection, Jesus has set things
right. He’s fixed the problem.
Now, we just have to show up at the Sinners Anonymous meeting.
We don’t have to pretend to be perfect, anymore. We don’t have to act like we
can fix all our problems by ourselves. I’ll let you in on a little secret. We
weren’t fooling anyone in the first place anyway.
Because of grace, we can admit that we are powerless in the
face of sin. We are unable to overcome by sheer will power. We can admit that because
of sin our lives are unmanageable. We don’t do what we want to do to and we end
up doing the sorts of things that destroy our lives and relationships. We can
surrender ourselves to the higher power of Jesus Christ and accept God’s gift
of grace and forgiveness that enables a new future, free from the bondage of
sin. We can gather together here, among friends who experience the same
problem, and admit our mistakes and find welcome and support. We can celebrate
the small victories, the times when, by the miracle of grace, we follow God’s
guiding Spirit within us and choose life and peace and love. We can live one
day at a time and view our mistakes of yesterday like God does, from the
viewpoint of redemption. We can rest assured that even though we cannot rescue
ourselves from sin and death, God has stepped in once and for all to restore
our sanity and to transform us from the inside out.
Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord! Amen.
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