Romans 7

So a couple of weeks ago my 12 year old son got really really frustrated with himself. He basically allows himself to get completely sucked on to certain kinds of entertainment that he completely loses any ability to make coherent decisions. On this particular occasion, he had just blown $40 at Incredible Pizza in the game room trying to win enough tickets to buy some janky toy. And then he lost his ticket receipt so he got a big pile of nothing.

After Brannon and I spent the drive home just making things worse by lecturing him, I realized that he wasn't in the right frame of mind to try to go to sleep. So I asked him to come sit in my bed and we went and read this chapter together online starting at verse 7. By the time I got to verses 14-20 he was just sobbing.

He looked up at me and asked, "That's exactly how I feel. Do you really think Paul felt like that when he wrote this?"

I told him that of course I thought so. That Paul was writing a letter to his church friends so he wouldn't just make things up. I asked if it made him feel better to know that someone else understood how he felt.

"Well of course! Paul is like the third best Christian of all time!"

"Third?" I asked. "Who's first and second then?"

He thought for a second and said, "Well, Jesus and Moses I guess."

I told him Jesus didn't count because He's who all of us Christians are trying to copy and Moses didn't count because you couldn't be a Christian before there was a Christ. So he was even more pleased then that the greatest Christian of all time had been right in his shoes. Maybe not with arcade games. But still in the same desperate, minute-by-minute struggle against sin.

I love how verse 24 reads in the KJV. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?


As humiliating, frustrating, grueling, exhausting, and consuming as it sometimes feels, I never want to stop warring against my flesh. I want to cling to the cleansing, burning, refining, purifying, and refreshing power and presence of the Holy Spirit inside me. He is the only one who can set me free from this body of death.