I am so happy to serve a sovereign God. There is so much comfort to be found in the fact that He is all-powerful, all-good, and all-perfect; He makes no mistakes and He never fails.

I have been selfish and I have been afraid.

The past two months have been unspeakably difficult. Not because of anything external, but because of me. I have learned better what it means to contend with the flesh; I have known the right thing to do and longed to do it, and yet I have continually fallen short.

Paul says in Romans 7 , “I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” And oh how the meaning of that has been etched into my mind and conscience these past weeks! Every word of that passage has been infused with new depth of meaning for me. I have always known what it is to sin willfully, but lately I find myself waging war with tiredness and sickness and uncertainty and (most of all) a tremendous mental “backlash” after these past few stressful months. It has been stressful, no matter how much I would like to ignore or deny the fact, and I think that even if I had reacted flawlessly to the situation, it still would have been stressful. Even just the physical aspects of things — surgeries and recoveries, weeks of radiation and tiredness/sickness, and not inconsiderable pain even still. All these things have taken their toll. Add to that the stresses that are a result of my own failure to trust God — the worry, anxiousness, nervousness, and everything else that goes along with them — and I am emotionally and mentally exhausted. Even if my life in this very instant is going perfectly as I had intended, there’s still this enormous backlog of tension that runs as an inescapable undercurrent in the midst of every happy moment.

So here I am, in the middle of much present discouragement, trying to stop drowning in this sinful ocean of not-quite-despair. I am clinging to every little bit of hope that I come across as surely as if it were food and I were dying of starvation. But to be honest, I am still failing.

And yet. What does Paul say in the midst of his exposition about warring within himself? “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” He doesn’t say that his mind took over his flesh and won the battle forever. The battle continued to rage. “I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin,” he concludes. That’s not an answer in the conventional sense! It doesn’t tie up everything neatly and announce that the work is complete and perfect. On the contrary; can a Christian come any nearer to despair than to admit with resignation that their flesh remains sinful? That regardless of how much they know the right thing to do, they find themselves unable to do it? Is there anything worse in our lives? Sin is the very opposite of our joy. But even as Paul writes these ostensibly depressing truths, what else does he find to say? Thanks be to God.

Could a phrase seem more out of place? “I’m rotten through and through, and all this perfection that I’m striving for is absolutely unreachable. Praise God!” What on earth is Paul going on about here? Contextually, he’s talking about the law which shows us our sin but fails (in salvation) because of our flesh. If the law was all we had to go by, we’d all be lost causes: we’re “wretched.” Even when we want to do the right things, we fail. But the praise is that we are not saved by the law — we’re saved by grace through Christ. I praise God for showing me that I’m still depraved even when I’m not meaning to be. When my sin is in one sense out of my control (being, as Paul says, what my flesh chooses to do but not what my mind wills), it is so clear that even if I trained my mind to perfection and dedicated myself from birth to a sinless life with the best of intentions, I would still fall short. I don’t need God’s grace merely because I’ve made bad decisions; I need God’s grace because every atom of me is tainted with sin. The most perfect person I could conceive to be would still fail. It’s a small distinction, but important. It’s very easy for me to fall into the fallacy of thinking that these little sins I choose to commit are the ones that would send me to hell, which is really a sort of works salvation in reverse: if my sins of choice are my death sentence, then perhaps if I didn’t commit them, I could live? But my current situation is teaching me that not all sins are “of choice.” I’m fallen no matter how hard I try not to be, and still completely responsible for that fallenness.

Secondly, and oh so encouragingly, Paul rejoices because Jesus Christ is the answer to “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” To be helpless in the grip of a sinful nature is a horrible thing. Paul goes on to explain that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness… we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” And it is in this context that that marvelous and famous promise is given: “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” This is grace for today, I think — the Spirit is surely helping me in my weakness now, and it is so unspeakably amazing to think that He’s interceding for me with the words I don’t even know how to speak. And it only gets better: “…those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.” This “body of death” will soon be cast away completely, and our souls will be glorified! We will be perfectly sanctified, restored, and freed forever from the grip of sin. The depth of my struggles today should be matched by an ever-deepening thirst for that future fulfilling of utter grace! And the deeper the struggle, the deeper the thirst!

While I praise God for being perfect and also for proving my own imperfection, I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t think I’m responsible for my current state of difficulty. I am having a dreadful time keeping a positive attitude and I’m entirely too enveloped with fear. These things are sin. I am responsible for my flesh, even when it’s fighting with my mind. It’s even more horrible to me that I am proving unable to rein it in. I am not rejoicing in sin; I’m rejoicing that I need God! I’m rejoicing in the awesomeness that He is not only sufficient, but that He is gracious, and that He is showing me these things anew and violently to my mind.