Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
It’s the universal problem: how do we TRANSMIT good desires into righteous character? The alcoholic hates himself because he got drunk again; the addict wishes he could be free again; the pornographer despises himself after he has indulged again; the glutton likewise. And the gossiper feels polluted after doing it again. “To will is present with me,” says Paul, echoing our universal cry of despair, “but how to perform that which is good I find not. ... The evil which I would not, that I do. ... When I would do good, evil is present with me” (Rom. 7:18, 19, 21). Peterson renders the same passage, “The power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, ... I don’t have what it takes. I can will it but I can’t do it. ... I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. ... Something has gone wrong deep within me. ... I’m at the end of my rope.” Transmission ended.
That’s Romans 7. Now we go on to Romans 8, which says that Christ is the answer. Of course, we’ve heard that for centuries! But look again—Paul presents Him in a different light than Christians have seen Him for centuries: Christ is not simply a clever lawyer who gets you out of scrape after scrape, paying your fines for you, substituting His righteousness to “cover” your on-going sins time after time. Verses 1-4 draw back the curtain that has hid the true Christ from view and show Him as the Son of God who became the Son of man in the truest sense. He took upon Himself the same sinful nature that we all inherited from Adam, wrestling with our same problem but conquering it in our own sinful nature. God sent “His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”
The point? He took upon Himself a SELF as we each have a self, and He denied that “self.” In other words, He took upon Himself a will of His own that was in conflict with His Father’s will, but He totally denied His own will—all the way to the cross whereon He was crucified (John 5:30; 6:38; Matt. 26:39).
Believe the truth about Christ, and then you share with Paul, “I am crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20). Victory!
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: October 26, 1998.
Copyright © 2013 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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