Read: Romans 7:14-25 - STEP Bible, Bible Gateway
Sometimes being a Christian can feel like having split personality disorder. On the one hand, our motives are being purified and aligned with God’s will, and so we deeply want what it is we know God wants. But on the other hand, we are still self-centred and caught up in our own self-interest, and so we deeply want the very opposite of what we know God wants. We can end up wanting two things that are completely at odds with one another at the same time.
St Paul writes of this dual state in the most extraordinarily vivid terms. He writes of a sense of warfare between what he wants in his ‘flesh’ (by which he means his worldly self-interest) and what he wants in his ‘mind’ (by which he means what he has resolved, through love and knowledge of God, should be his pattern as a Christian). As you read this passage you get a real sense that Paul feels like he is being torn in two by that warfare that is going on within him.
What Paul is describing is, in essence, the Christian condition. It’s why being a Christian is far harder than not being a Christian. It’s far harder to live with the war going on inside you than it is simply to give up and allow the ‘flesh’ – worldly self-interest – to govern your actions. We shouldn’t be secretive about the warfare, or about wanting and desiring things we know we shouldn’t want, or about hating the fact that we want and desire things that, deep down, we know really we don’t want or desire. It is a horrible state of affairs. It does us no good not to admit that candidly.
But Paul has good news: this condition, this sense of being torn in two – it lasts only as long as this lifetime lasts. Because Christ’s death and resurrection promises us a new existence in which what we desire ‘in the flesh’ and what we desire ‘in our mind’ will be aligned. Because both will be aligned with God’s will.
May God give us strength, in this life, to endure the sense of being torn in two that Paul writes about; and may he bless us with new life in the Risen Christ in which our desires are united, and united with his, in his heavenly kingdom.
These devotions were originally written for the parish of All Saints, Ascot and we are grateful for permission to republish them on Fulcrum.
Patrick is curate of All Saints’, Ascot in Berkshire. A musicologist by training, he is married to Lydia, a university lecturer, and dad to Madeleine. He writes (sporadically) at benedixisti.wordpress.com and tweets (even more sporadically) as @patrickgilday.