Hello, dear reader. Thank you for being here. You lift my spirits! As a friend just wrote me, “thanks for being part of this crazy world!” Yes! We are all still part of things, and each of us has a role to play. As many of us are self-isolating, I’m reminded that Paul wrote some of his most powerful letters while he was under house arrest in Rome. He didn’t give up hope, but held even tighter to God’s promises. And many of us are out on the front lines, serving each other boldly and courageously. Thank you, thank you. No matter where we are, what can we do in the midst of our own particular circumstance to continue loving God, loving our neighbor, and to produce good fruit?

It’s never a bad idea to read some Scripture, so today we’re continuing in Romans, Chapter 7 (NRSV):

7 Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only during that person’s lifetime? 2 Thus a married woman is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives; but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning the husband. 3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress. 4 In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5 While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6 But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit. 7 What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” 8 But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. 9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived 10 and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. 11 For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment deceived me and through it killed me. 12 So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. 13 Did what is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. 14 For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. 15 I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. 17 But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. 21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, 23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.

Here’s the Life Application Bible’s note to 7:4: “…An unbeliever’s mindset is centered on his or her own personal gratifications. Those who don’t follow Christ have only their own self-determination as their source of power… by contrast, God supplies the power for the Christian’s daily living. Believers find that their whole way of looking at the world changes when they come to Christ.” 

What we think is fruitful when we’re following the devices and desires of our own hearts turns out to be a deathly, even hideous, food. It’s a pretty chilling vision, this idea that what we do separate from God is actually “bearing fruit for death.” No thank you! 

And yet Paul acknowledges it’s impossible to live rightly under our own power, in his famous pronouncement beginning at verse 15. It makes him so lovingly human for me: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” How many times today already has this been the case for me? It’s even harder to listen for and obey God when we’re dealing with turmoil at a global level, and in the disordering of every detail of our daily lives. 

But the takeaway is always the same: we can’t be counted on for good behavior by ourselves, and we can’t resist evil on our own. We must have the Spirit’s help. The Life Application Bible’s note again: “Instead of trying to overcome sin with human willpower, we must take hold of the tremendous power of Christ that is available to us. This is God’s provision for victory over sin—he sends the Holy Spirit to live in us and give us power. And when we fall, he lovingly reaches out to help us up.”

Paul demonstrates the Christian life as a daily, even constant struggle. This is the truth of it, during periods of both isolation and expansiveness, that it’s always a fight to choose the narrow gate against our own natures, again and again. 

But we can help ourselves, by making sure that what we behold is holy. And the more we’re shaped by that the more we’re able to choose godliness. We can start to be less and less aware of the sinful temptations that are definitely out there, one of which is despair. As Nelson Mandela said: “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” Amen.