Dan was a single guy living at home with his father and working in the family business. When he found out he was going to inherit a fortune after his sickly father died, he decided to get married so he could share his fortune. One evening, at an investment meeting, he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She took his breath away. "I may look like just an ordinary guy," he said to her, "but in just a few years my father will die and I will inherit $200 million." Impressed, the woman asked for his business card, and three days later she became his stepmother.
Things don’t always turn out the way we imagined. Take our Christianity, for example. After we confessed our sin and allowed Jesus to come into our heart, we started doing the things that Christians do. We started attending church. We started reading our Bible. We stopped doing things that are shameful and worldly. At last, we thought, life will be different. We could finally become a new person. And for a while this seemed to work. For a while it seems we mastered our old sins. But then reality set in. We found that the very sins which we attempted to overcome still lurked deep within us – tempting and luring us back to those old shameful behaviors. And we discovered sins we didn’t even know we had. This isn’t what we imagined Christianity to be like. Indeed, it is not just the sinner of the world who needs grace, but the Christian needs it as well, perhaps even a little more.
Consider the words of Paul the Apostle – the man who traveled preaching and teaching and planting churches all for the glory of Jesus Christ. You wouldn’t expect him to struggle with sin, yet listen to his words in Romans 7.
“Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” groans Paul. Why would he feel trapped by sin even though in chapter 6 he had spoken about being set free? It’s because Paul not only needed to teach his readers about grace, but he needed to remind himself as well.
When a person learns of God's holy standard of living, they begin to realize just how far short they fall. Once they learn that certain behaviors are considered to be sinful, they are aghast to find those very behaviors within them. And they are shocked at how easily and frequently they sin. What a horrible revelation this must be - to realize on the one hand that you have been set free from sin, yet to still see the same old sin within yourself. This is what Paul is speaking about in this section. Knowledge of the Law did not make him sin, it illuminated his sin. And he was shocked just how often he caught himself living outside of God's parameters.
We have come to Christ and confessed our sin. We have admitted freely that we need Him to be our Savior. In His grace, God accepts our confession of faith and grants us eternal life. Yet sin still remains. We are not cleansed of sin. Sin has not been removed from us. We find its ugly stench still lingering, still poisoning the very depth of our soul. But we had hoped for something else. We had hoped that sin would be cast aside and we would become new creatures. Yet at the end of the day we realize that nothing has changed. We still struggle with the same old sins that plagued us before Christ came into our lives. We look at our lives and are ashamed at the kind of person we are. Oh what a wretched person we still are!
Does this mean we are not set free? Does this mean we are still held captive by sin? Because sin still remains, does this mean we are not truly saved? Absolutely not, says Paul. What it means is that we have now become a person with two natures - a sin nature and a spiritual nature. Prior to our relationship with Jesus we had only one nature - a nature governed by sin. But now we have the ability to see our sin and confront our sin. The day our sin nature is removed awaits us in the future. However, in the meantime our sin nature is covered by the sinlessness of Christ. He wraps us in His robe, covering our sin. We are loved by the Father and declared righteous by the Father not because we've become religious and straightened up our lives, but because of Jesus Christ our Lord. Sadly I have come across very few Christians who truly understand this.
As a Christian matures they should be allowing the Spirit to guide them instead of the flesh. But truthfully a battle is being waged within you each and every day. The old sin nature is luring us back into sin while the Spirit nature is calling us to holiness. And every moment of every day this war takes place within each believer, which is why we should respect the older saints among us. For 60 or 70 years they have been living out their Christian life. They have been at war for a long, long time, yet have not been overcome by the adversary. There is much we could learn from an older believer.
Being Christian does not mean we have done something to remove our sin, but that we have allowed Jesus to cover our sin. Beneath the festival robe He has placed upon me I am still the same wretched man I used to be. The only difference is that I know today what I did not know yesterday. Yesterday I was not aware of my sin. Today I am. And yet even though I have confessed my sinfulness and God has granted me eternal life, I will still sometimes sin. I will still struggle to allow the Spirit to overrule the flesh. Sometimes the flesh overrules the Spirit. However, because I am dressed in the righteousness of Christ, God chooses grace. Even though I have offended Him, God grants grace – not because I have earned it, but because I have placed my faith in Christ; my Advocate who pleads on my behalf (see 1 John 2:1). Actually, we don’t fall from grace when we sin, but rather grace, like rain, falls down on us.
Grace is the other boundary, the other guard rail, which God has established in His world; the other being Truth. It is between Truth and Grace that a Christian lives. Truth says that we must stop living as if we were still bound by sin. Truth is the standard by which God calls us to live. Grace is what He grants us as we strive to reach that goal. Grace is what we are granted when we sometimes live as a person still held captive by sin.
Becoming a Christian is becoming a person with two natures, one born of the Spirit and one born of the flesh. And the two wage war within each believer. The mind is set on God, but the flesh is set on sin. The mind desires to serve the Law of God, but the body desires to serve the law of sin. Paul’s point is that our only hope can be found in Jesus - not because He eliminates the desires of the body, but because He grants us grace when the flesh overcomes the Spirit within us. To truly understand God’s grace is to truly understand that when God looks at a believer He sees not their righteousness but instead the righteousness of the Son (compare Isaiah 61:10). Because of their faith, God credits the righteousness of Christ to their account. And when you begin to realize this you will begin to finally understand grace.
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