Lent 5 midweek sermon: Romans 7.1–8.1
This sermon concludes our Lenten midweek services, wherein we read and meditated upon Romans 4:1–8:1.
When President Bush landed on USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 to announce the end of major combat operations in Iraq, there was a banner displaying the words “Mission Accomplished.” That phrase would later come to haunt Bush’s presidency, as the insurgency in Iraq grew more and more deadly.
The complicated military situation in Iraq – a swift conventional victory, followed by years of guerilla warfare against hidden enemies – is a pretty good analogy to the situation we as Christians find ourselves in. On the one hand, victory has been accomplished, as we heard two weeks ago in Rom. 6: “We were therefore buried with [Christ] through baptism in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” Christ’s victory in His cross and resurrection is ours in Holy Baptism. Mission Accomplished.
And yet, there is an insurgency within us that is not happy, not happy at all about the regime change. Our flesh was and remains quite enamored with the former tyrant. The things the commandments forbid, the flesh loves. What the Spirit leads us toward, the flesh resists, and what the Spirit urges us to reject, the flesh lures us toward.
It is a warfare going on inside each of us, a battle of wills, a struggle to the death between the new man, led by the Spirit, and the old Adam, who delights in sin and seeks only what pleases the self. Your will wants to love God, wants to hear the Word, wants to pray, wants to honor authorities; you want to help your neighbor, live a life of chastity and fidelity, be free of the desire for money and possessions, and speak what is kind and helpful. But we find in ourselves another will – a will that only does those things out of compulsion, and in truth hates it all. That fleshly will spins cunning tales of deception, is ready to bite and devour others, is filled with a lust for money, power, sex, all kind of physical gratification, and dishonors parents, pastors, presidents, hates to pray, hates to listen, especially to God’s Word, and ultimately has no respect for God whatsoever.
That was St. Paul’s experience. That’s my own experience. And if you dare to truly examine yourself, you’ll find it’s your own experience as well. Dr. Luther said, “There is no one among us who does not possess a big, fat share of the flesh; a whole kneeding trough full.” Those two wills, forces, desires, are battling it out within you every day. You have been baptized, your sins are forgiven, the Holy Spirit bestowed, heaven promised, and yet that natural man, like an army of insurgents, stubbornly remains and seeks to thwart the new will, resisting every impulse of the Holy Spirit.
All that is what St. Paul describes when he says, “What I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” What is the origin of these things that we hate yet nevertheless find ourselves doing? “I know,” he says, “that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells.” We all have a big fat share of that flesh, and the longer we are Christians, the more we see how deep, insidious, wicked and depraved we really are. Our capacity for evil is horrifying in its enormity.
Well, if this is part of who we are, and we are stuck with the flesh in this life, does this mean that we just should stop worrying about it, learn to forgive ourselves, and accept the reality of sin in our lives? God forbid! Shall we keep on sinning, since we are forgiven? Certainly not! Shall we sin boldly, assuming that out salvation cannot be lost? May it never be!
The great Lutheran theologian Adolph Koeberle said that the Christian, “through the power of the Holy Ghost can and should cooperate, even though it be still in great weakness.” We are terribly weak, but the new will, the new man, the regenerate person who has been baptized fights, struggles, and cries out every day with Paul, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Our flesh is never getting better. We seek to subdue it, control it, suppress it, lock it like a raging animal into a cage, but we will never reform it, never perfect it. The flesh is never getting better until it is destroyed. The Lord kills and makes alive; the Lord kills for the purpose of making alive, remaking us. We long and sigh for the day when we are rid of the sinful nature, and God raises us up in new bodies of flesh that are nevertheless free of our present impulse to sin.
For now, we live in a perpetual state of warfare, a new man who lives in joyful liberty, gladly doing the will of God, and the Old Adam who must be driven through bitter compulsion to obey the Commandments. Because of this war, because of this conflict, we always have to live in expectation of the judgment. For us, it must always be the eleventh hour, always anticipating for the coming of Christ, always cognizant of the danger of falling away. Those things you have done in secret, thinking that if no one knows, then you are safe – stop them. What you know is wrong, resist, and if you fall, confess it immediately.
And most importantly in all of this is renewing our life of prayer. None of us prays as we ought. Dr. Luther said that “A true faith will turn into a simulated faith if we do not live in the fear of God, watch and pray.” The end of our reading tonight, where Romans 7 turns into Romans 8, shows us the pattern of our prayers: “O God, you see what a wretched man that I am; I am not even fit to pray to You or cry out to You; who will deliver me from this body of death, this flesh that is intoxicated with sin? I thank You, dear God, that Jesus Christ my Lord has won the victory over sin and death. You baptized me, You have declared that I am in Christ Jesus, and that there is therefore now no condemnation for me. Help me day by day to stop walking according to the flesh, but to live according to the Spirit. Grant this for the sake of my Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”
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Brother, great into and with it, you preached Romans 7 rightly.