Living in the do-do with the hope of Christ

¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. (Romans 7:15-19 NIV)

So, the apostle Paul can’t do what he wants to do. Yikes! I love life, it’s living that I find hard from time to time. I remember John Wimber preaching on the fruits of the Spirit. He used to say something like this: “I remember when I was a boy growing up in Orange County (California). When it was springtime and the blossoms were on the trees you could walk through the groves and hear the trees groaning and moaning, trying to produce fruit.” After making this statement, delivered with a particularly straight face, he would then lean on the pulpit and put that big smile on his face, and just look at the congregation. Then, for those of us too dense to understand, he would explain that orange trees do not have to groan to produce fruit, it comes forth naturally and with no effort.

I think his point was you can’t be good by trying, straining, or whipping yourself with a wet noodle. It is only through the grace of God that we find salvation through Jesus. And boy, do I need grace. I guess the problem is that our DNA is bad. Paul calls it our sinful nature, our flesh. Apparently we need an injection of spiritual stem cells to turn our lives around.

I guess the hard lesson for me is this: no matter how much I moan or groan, I can’t live rightly through my own power. And then here is the rest of it: I can’t influence how much of Christ lives in me. At least that is how it feels. I can only throw my entire dependence on him. I guess this is a good weekend to think about these things and to fall at the cross, one more time, repent, and “become born again, again.”