The problem with God’s law is not that we don’t want to keep them – we do – but we can’t. Our rebellion against God’s law is not that we do not think they are good laws and therefore, we don’t want to keep them, but we DO agree that they are good – they are good for us – but we just can’t do it.

What I mean is that on one hand, we agree that the law is good. But there is something within us that says that it’s more pleasure to do what the law prohibits. And we find ourselves breaking the law, going after what’s prohibited. And we can’t help this.

It’s no different than a person who desperately wants to lose weight, but when the hunger pang hits in the middle of the night, he finds himself opening the refrigerator door. It’s no different than an alcoholic who’s seen the devastating effect of his alcoholism, but he can’t stop drinking.

It is usually a young person who will say, “Just snap out of it. I did it! Why can’t you?” He hasn’t lived long enough to realize that there is something that he’s attached to that he can’t snap out of so easily. It could be money. It could be a relationship. It could be a social media that he finds himself falling into again and again.

What is our hope? Are we doomed forever?

1 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:21-25)

If we could just “snap” out of it, Jesus did not need to Save us. We would just save ourselves. But we can’t. That’s why Jesus came to do it for us. But that doesn’t mean that we stop trying. But this time, with Christ on our side…. 

We WILLL overcome one day. And the very fact that we are fighting our sin is evidence that we are alive in Him.

PH