Why God, do I still sin? | Romans 7:7-24
Have you ever asked yourself this question, “What is wrong with me?” If we are honest, every one of us have asked ourselves this question. Pop psychology tells us that the answer to that question is to look within and find out who you truly are. Freud said that the “repression of desire is the bases for all neurosis.” IOW: The reason you’re unhappy is because other people are telling you what you can’t do. So we have slogans like, “the heart wants what it wants, follow your heart, you do you, just do it, speak your truth, and be your authentic self.” Happiness becomes about feeling good, not being good. The problem is that as we try to fix ourselves by self-pursuit, we are never satisfied because fundamentally we know that we are broken. For some, we hear the gospel and become Christians. We surrender to Jesus and turn to Him alone for our salvation. We think that this will fix us and will keep us from being messed up and broken. It does fix our eternity, and it does change our identity, but we notice that it’s not long until we struggle with either old sins of the past or new sins that we discovered we were doing since we started reading the Bible and getting closer. So we start to wonder, am I really a Christian if I struggle with these sins? What is wrong with me? What do I do? What did I do?
In Chapter 6, Paul talked about how believers are set free from sin by the resurrection power of Jesus. We are alive to God and dead to sin. (Justified, Sanctified, Glorified) But after reading that, it is easy for us to ask, so if I have the resurrection power of Jesus inside of me, why do I still struggle with the same old temptations and sins? Why don’t I love God more? Why is it so hard? Paul writes chapter 7 and tells us about his own struggles. It is one of the most encouraging chapters in the Bible because if Paul struggled with sin as a believer, then I am not the exception. In Chapter 7, we see the reality of sin in the believer and the rescue of the believer from sin.