I guess sometimes you can’t really appreciate how good it is until you remember how bad it was. Funny how the desperation of going through what once was can be forgotten while enjoying the blessing of what now is. As I’m reading the latter part of Romans 7 this morning . . . and once again identifying with the conflict portrayed by Paul . . . I realize that the “Thanks be to God” takes on a revitalized meaning when I recall the “Wretched man that I am!”

Romans 7:13-25 portrays the classic battle between the things of the flesh and the things of God. Paul recalls a time when “the things of God” were bound up in the law. Being the law of God, it was spiritual in nature (7:14) . . . and Paul desiring to be a godly man, and a spiritual man, delighted in the law in his inner being (7:22). But while he could “serve the law of God with my mind” (7:25b), he found another reality playing out in his body, in his flesh.

Paul couldn’t understand his own actions, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate . . . 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” (7:15, 18b-19). His mind said, “I know I should go right “. . . but somehow, he again and again ended up going left. His inner man sought to faithfully live according to the law and tried to program his internal GPS with the right destination, but way too often he found himself going around in circles and ending up in a place so far from his desire. And the reason? “For we know the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin” (7:14). The sin that dwelt within him became the sin that controlled him . . . “so now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (7:17, 20).

Ok, so how frustrating is that? To want to do the right thing, but again and again find yourself crashing and burning as you do the wrong thing. To want, in the inner man, to be godly, but to keep failing in the flesh. Oh, the wear and tear on the conscience . . . oh, the burden of guilt borne on the shoulders . . . oh, the hopelessness of ever getting on top of things . . . oh, the constant failure . . . oh, the repeated shame before a holy God . . . “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (7:24 NKJV)

I can relate . . . been there . . .

But it’s in the recollection of the “wretched man” that the “thanks be to God” (7:25) becomes so much sweeter . . . and so, I “read ahead” of my reading plan a few verses . . .

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:1-4 ESV)

There it is! Deliverance! No longer walking according to the flesh in it’s continual frustrating failure . . . instead walking in and according to the Spirit of the living God who now resides within me. Rejoicing in the sin-freeing work of the Son of God . . . “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Not that it’s a perfect walk . . . slips and trips along the way . . . but I have been freed from the captivity of the “sin that dwells in my members” (7:23b). I’m now “under new management” . . . able to do all things through Christ . . . my spiritual DNA re-wired to realize in my flesh the desire I have in my heart to be more like God’s blessed Son through the renewing and transforming work of God’s Holy Spirit.

O’, thanks be to God . . . O’, praise be to God . . . under new management . . . for His glory . . . amen?