“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” - Romans 7:15
“I’m going to eat fewer calories”, I say to myself. Then my left hand reaches out for a chocolate chip cookie. “I’m going to build a better relationship with George”, I say to myself as my colleague calls with yet another complaint. Then I say exactly the wrong thing to him one more time.
If you have never done that, don’t bother reading any further. If you recognize yourself in Paul’s confession, maybe you would like to know more about overcoming it.
It is one thing to say to ourselves, “Do the right thing!” It is another to actually do it. When Paul says in Romans 7 that he sees two laws working at cross-purposes in him, he is not saying that he literally hears voices telling him to do things he knows are wrong. He is not suffering from mental illness. He is talking about a problem that puzzles and frustrates the best of us at times.
Paul sees it as part of the human condition, but he does not see it as a necessary part of the human condition. That’s important, because it is easy for people like me to read this passage from Romans 7 and say, “well, I guess that’s the way I am. There is nothing I can do about my impulses, so I may as well give in to them. God will forgive me, after all.”
That’s not what Paul is saying. He is like a doctor who looks at an X-ray and knows your leg is broken. He also knows how it can be healed. Paul is describing the brokenness of the human spirit when he talks about this inner conflict between what we want to do and we actually do. Sometimes we call it "addiction". Sometimes we experience it as rage or depression or obsession. Always we wonder, like Paul does, why we think and do stuff we know we shouldn't think and do.
Paul says that, if anything, our attempts to “fix” ourselves only seems to make things worse. That may be even more true when the “fix” is religious. The rules and regulations we make to control the “bad” parts of ourselves become even more oppressive if they have the force of the divine behind them. That turns the dysfunctional into "evil" and the inappropriate into "sin".
“I’m going to eat fewer calories”, I say to myself. Then my left hand reaches out for a chocolate chip cookie. “I’m going to build a better relationship with George”, I say to myself as my colleague calls with yet another complaint. Then I say exactly the wrong thing to him one more time.
If you have never done that, don’t bother reading any further. If you recognize yourself in Paul’s confession, maybe you would like to know more about overcoming it.
It is one thing to say to ourselves, “Do the right thing!” It is another to actually do it. When Paul says in Romans 7 that he sees two laws working at cross-purposes in him, he is not saying that he literally hears voices telling him to do things he knows are wrong. He is not suffering from mental illness. He is talking about a problem that puzzles and frustrates the best of us at times.
Paul sees it as part of the human condition, but he does not see it as a necessary part of the human condition. That’s important, because it is easy for people like me to read this passage from Romans 7 and say, “well, I guess that’s the way I am. There is nothing I can do about my impulses, so I may as well give in to them. God will forgive me, after all.”
That’s not what Paul is saying. He is like a doctor who looks at an X-ray and knows your leg is broken. He also knows how it can be healed. Paul is describing the brokenness of the human spirit when he talks about this inner conflict between what we want to do and we actually do. Sometimes we call it "addiction". Sometimes we experience it as rage or depression or obsession. Always we wonder, like Paul does, why we think and do stuff we know we shouldn't think and do.
Paul says that, if anything, our attempts to “fix” ourselves only seems to make things worse. That may be even more true when the “fix” is religious. The rules and regulations we make to control the “bad” parts of ourselves become even more oppressive if they have the force of the divine behind them. That turns the dysfunctional into "evil" and the inappropriate into "sin".
Paul claims that no one tried harder to follow those rules than he did and he found himself failing continually. So, at the end of his apparent cry of despair at his own actions he says, “Wretched man that I am! who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” (Romans 7:24 NRSV)
OK, great, the answer is Jesus. End of conversation. Roger, go and knock on someone else’s door. The Jesus of piety is way too small to explain what Paul is getting at in his letter to the Romans. The answer to this split and broken personality that many of us experience is not “come down to the front and give your life to Jesus” (although it sometimes IS the answer; I may get to that someday).
Before Paul gets to this description of human brokenness in chapter 7, he describes God's grace in chapter 6. He says grace doesn’t get hung up on judgments of “bad” and “good” because it has bigger fish to fry. It is all about healing the human personality.
Just as people with diseases of the breasts and of the genitals used to literally die of shame because they couldn’t believe that they could find a doctor who would look at those “shameful” parts of their body without prurience or disgust, so we literally die of shame spiritually because we can’t get past our own hang-ups and look at those parts of ourselves that seem to take over our best intentions at the worst possible moments, especially if we have grown up believing that only "bad" or "sinful" people have those kinds of thoughts and feelings and do those nasty things.
In Chapter 6, Paul is saying “Dr. Jesus” is more interested in healing us than judging us and we often encounter Him in the non-judgmental people who come our way. Most clergy and psychotherapists strive for it, but don’t always achieve it. When they do, however, they can have startling results if their deep acceptance of their patient and their passion for healing somehow transfers to the client. Actually this is true of non-professionals as well.
This is not to reduce the work of the Holy Spirit to psychotherapy. Actually, I’d argue that the mysterious power that works in and among and between human beings to help people pull out of addictions, depression, and self-destruction is the work of that which is expressed in the ancient word “hal” from which we derive the words “whole”, “holy”, and “health”.
When someone else accepts us just as we are, then we can begin to accept ourselves. Those who claim to have encountered Jesus as a spiritual being universally report that they feel deeply accepted just as they are. Others may feel accepted just as they are by at least one other person. Either way, people begin to experience “hal”: healing, wholeness and even holiness.
I know of no better description of this experience than this letter written by a patient to Carl Jung:
OK, great, the answer is Jesus. End of conversation. Roger, go and knock on someone else’s door. The Jesus of piety is way too small to explain what Paul is getting at in his letter to the Romans. The answer to this split and broken personality that many of us experience is not “come down to the front and give your life to Jesus” (although it sometimes IS the answer; I may get to that someday).
Before Paul gets to this description of human brokenness in chapter 7, he describes God's grace in chapter 6. He says grace doesn’t get hung up on judgments of “bad” and “good” because it has bigger fish to fry. It is all about healing the human personality.
Just as people with diseases of the breasts and of the genitals used to literally die of shame because they couldn’t believe that they could find a doctor who would look at those “shameful” parts of their body without prurience or disgust, so we literally die of shame spiritually because we can’t get past our own hang-ups and look at those parts of ourselves that seem to take over our best intentions at the worst possible moments, especially if we have grown up believing that only "bad" or "sinful" people have those kinds of thoughts and feelings and do those nasty things.
In Chapter 6, Paul is saying “Dr. Jesus” is more interested in healing us than judging us and we often encounter Him in the non-judgmental people who come our way. Most clergy and psychotherapists strive for it, but don’t always achieve it. When they do, however, they can have startling results if their deep acceptance of their patient and their passion for healing somehow transfers to the client. Actually this is true of non-professionals as well.
This is not to reduce the work of the Holy Spirit to psychotherapy. Actually, I’d argue that the mysterious power that works in and among and between human beings to help people pull out of addictions, depression, and self-destruction is the work of that which is expressed in the ancient word “hal” from which we derive the words “whole”, “holy”, and “health”.
When someone else accepts us just as we are, then we can begin to accept ourselves. Those who claim to have encountered Jesus as a spiritual being universally report that they feel deeply accepted just as they are. Others may feel accepted just as they are by at least one other person. Either way, people begin to experience “hal”: healing, wholeness and even holiness.
I know of no better description of this experience than this letter written by a patient to Carl Jung:
“Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and, hand in hand with that, by accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be – by doing all this, rare knowledge has come to me, and rare powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that, when we accept things, they overpower us in one way or another. Now that is not true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can define an attitude toward them. So now I intend playing the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow that are forever shifting, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to my idea!” Gollancz, Victor, Man and God, Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston, 1951 p. 236.
