Who Will Deliver Me out of the Body of This Death?
11for sin, finding occasion through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me. 12Therefore the law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy, and righteous, and good. 13Did then that which is good become death to me? May it never be! But sin, that it might be shown to be sin, was producing death in me through that which is good; that through the commandment sin might become exceedingly sinful. 14For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am fleshly, sold under sin. 15For I don’t know what I am doing. For I don’t practice what I desire to do; but what I hate, that I do. 16But if what I don’t desire, that I do, I consent to the law that it is good. 17So now it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwells in me. 18For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing. For desire is present with me, but I don’t find it doing that which is good. 19For the good which I desire, I don’t do; but the evil which I don’t desire, that I practice. 20But if what I don’t desire, that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwells in me. 21I find then the law, that, to me, while I desire to do good, evil is present. 22For I delight in God’s law after the inward man, 23but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. 24What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me out of the body of this death? 25I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! So then with the mind, I myself serve God’s law, but with the flesh, the sin’s law.
The law helps people tell right from wrong as they go through life. Only through the law do we realize how small and unworthy we are, and only through it do we come to know that we are children of God who have received Christ. Yet even with the law giving such guidance, even with its teaching to help us discern sin, it is hard to grasp the will of God unless we see how much sin is still alive within us. The apostle Paul had been a legalist, and when he met Jesus Christ and understood what the law was for, he became a true Christian. He did not stop at knowing that Christ had atoned for the sin the law brought to life. He went a step further, laid bare before the church in Rome the sin within himself, and showed them how self-centered human beings are.
Romans 7:13
13Did then that which is good become death to me? May it never be! But sin, that it might be shown to be sin, was producing death in me through that which is good; that through the commandment sin might become exceedingly sinful.
Because outward faults are easy to spot, they can be put right at once. The sin that lurks within is another matter. Only its owner knows it, it can be hidden for as long as one likes, and all the while it can feed one’s desires; and because of that, no one thinks of giving it up. Some people assume that no one else will ever find out the sin inside them, and others think that if things turn out well, they can be forgiven. But is that really so? To know one’s own sin is a sign that a person knows God or has a good conscience, so such a person is bound to feel the struggle.
Paul was overwhelmed to know that Christ had borne the cross for his sins and that he had been saved by that grace. Yet even in his joy he saw good and evil locked in ceaseless conflict within him, and he was bitterly disappointed with himself for being unable to shake off his sin. Once he could judge rightly in spiritual things, he watched the commandment make his sin stand out ever more sharply, and he came to understand far more deeply how frail human beings are.
Romans 7:15
15For I don’t know what I am doing. For I don’t practice what I desire to do; but what I hate, that I do.
God gave Adam and Eve the freedom to enjoy everything in the garden of Eden. But the serpent, wanting to rob them of that freedom, tempted them to set their hearts on the one thing forbidden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Satan still tempts God’s people the same way today. God gave up his only Son to death and forgave our sins, but Satan struck at the weakness of our members so that people would not look to that grace. Sadly, because we ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil through Adam, we have no choice but to judge everything in terms of good and evil. We strive to walk in the way of good, but with an evil nature we keep giving in to the temptation of sin. We wage a desperate war against the sin entrenched within us, yet our members cannot resist its sweet allure and in the end they always yield. Christians do good at times, but because they cannot let go of a self-centered life, they also make their compromises with the world. Even Paul, born again through the word, groaned that he was a weak man. If that was true of him, our spiritual warfare will go on until the day we meet God.
You, too, will know how weak you are, for every day you watch the law of your mind and the law of sin fight within you. This is because even as you resolve to live by faith, before you know it you are judging and condemning by the world’s measure. Are you truly a good person? Or are you an evil one? Being asked whether you are evil may sound as if you had committed some great sin. Yet to judge every moment by your own interests rather than by the will of God is what we call evil.
I would like us to think for a moment about Pastor David Wilkerson, who went home to the Lord in 2011. He pastored a small country church in western Pennsylvania. One day he happened to read a magazine article about a gang of drug-addicted teenagers in New York who had brutally murdered a fifteen-year-old boy with polio, Michael Farmer, in Highbridge Park. As time went by, Wilkerson could not stop thinking about those boys. A message kept rising in his heart, telling him to go to New York and help them, but he was sure it was beyond him. Then one day, as he sat watching TV, a thought came to him: what would happen if he spent as much time in prayer as he did in front of the television? He sold the set at once and began to pray two hours a day.
As he prayed, Wilkerson experienced the mighty work of the Holy Spirit, and through prayer he saw his own life miraculously changed. All he had done was trade his television hours for hours of prayer, yet God gave him, as a gift, a wonderful future beyond anything he could have imagined. He made his decision in prayer, and with the help of his congregation he was able to go to New York. What he suffered there is beyond words, but God used him according to his plan and worked many miracles through him. He sought out teenagers in alleys and playgrounds, taught the word to young people who were drunk and high, and showed them real love by feeding them and giving them a place to sleep. Those same young people mocked him and beat him, and he faced countless hardships, yet in the end he succeeded in bringing the gospel to New York’s gangs. As he witnessed the miracles God worked, he founded Times Square Church in New York and led a great many lost and wandering young people to the Lord. Some of those who received the Lord went on to study theology, and others went out to reach young people who were wandering in drugs as they once had. The people Wilkerson brought to God are beyond counting.
Those addicted to drugs lost their reason and behaved like zombies. Their teeth rotted, their stomachs and intestines stopped working properly, and their immunity collapsed; a great many died of bronchitis and tuberculosis brought on by drugs. The longer someone uses drugs, the more on edge and frantic they become, until delusions, visions, and voices wear the mind down and mental illness makes an ordinary life impossible. It is not that drug users are unaware of these symptoms. They know full well what is coming, and yet they cannot stop. At times they long with all their hearts to climb out of that pit of evil and cry out for help, but in the end they give in to the fierce cravings of the flesh. We can imagine how hard Wilkerson and his church must have labored to rescue such young people.
People did not understand a pastor who worked for gang members and so did not help him, and because of that, for lack of money, he had to suffer the pain of halting the ministry; he went hungry, and he was bitterly ridiculed. Even so, because it was the work God had given him, he gave it everything he had, and his family had to live a hard life as a result. His wife, Gwen Wilkerson, was a woman full of faith who stood behind her husband’s ministry, yet she had to endure great hardship. When I looked into the sources, I found that not everyone approved of Wilkerson’s faith. Over the course of his ministry he made many prophecies and passed on the visions he had seen exactly as he saw them. Scholars judged a good many of those prophecies to be wrong, and the verdicts on him have been both favorable and unfavorable.
Reading the criticism, I felt sorry and found myself wishing he had preached the Bible alone. Perhaps it grieved me all the more because he was filled to the full and labored to preach nothing but Jesus. I tell you about him because he heard God’s voice and gave his life, without conditions, to children the world had thrown away. And there is one more thing I want to tell you about him: how he died.
On April 27, 2011, while driving with his wife beside him, Wilkerson crossed the center line and collided with an oncoming tractor-trailer. He died at the scene at the age of seventy-nine. Why he crossed the line has never been explained. Yet the last post he left on his blog that day, before he died, reads as though he had foreseen his own death.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Title: When All Our Means Fail
When all our means fail, that is the most joyful and welcome thing to God. Jesus said to Thomas, “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed.” When all our means fail, when there is no sign that our prayers have been answered, those who still believe with a hope that comes from heaven are blessed. Some people have no hope at all, and some are living at the very end of it. A loved one is waiting to die, and the doctor says there is no chance. The miracle you prayed and longed for has not come. This is exactly when Satan’s armies attack, flooding your mind with fear and anger and with huge questions like “Where is God now?”
You must have prayed over this until there were no tears left, fasted, and believed firmly that God would make it right. But at that very moment, blasphemous thoughts begin to creep into your head: “Your prayers have failed. Your faith has failed.” Hearing those whispers, you did not leave God, but you would have wondered whether God is really there. Yet this whole approach has been Satan’s chief strategy for centuries. God’s people are still under this kind of attack today. To those passing through the shadow and the valley of death, I say this: your weeping will last through many dark and painful nights. And in that darkness you will soon hear the whisper of God the Father.
“I am with you. You will see that this was all part of my plan. This is not chance. This is not an accident. This is not a failure for you. Hold fast. In your hour of pain I will hold you close.”
Beloved, God is One who never fails in anything. He is goodness and love, and nothing else. When all our means have failed, that is the moment the Lord’s love triumphs. May you hold fast until the day you die.
What went through your mind as you read this last piece of writing, left as though he knew of his coming death? Were you, perhaps, thinking something like this: How can a pastor die in a car accident? He preached that God protects our lives, and then he died like this. Could that be a sign that he had sinned? If we are not blessed in this world, why should we believe in God at all? If God is really alive, shouldn’t such things never happen? Now we must return to the text of Romans and find the answer about ourselves as we look at what happened.
Romans 7:22-24
22For I delight in God’s law after the inward man, 23but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. 24What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me out of the body of this death?
If we do not rely wholly on Christ, Satan will tempt us all the harder so that sin may overcome us, and when we see a pastor who served God all his life die in a car accident, Satan will make us doubt God. You may consider yourself good because you know God and his word and have always tried to live by faith. Still, I hope you will think carefully about whether you truly acknowledge God at every moment. You may believe you know God, yet when something like this happens, when a pastor you respected dies in a car crash, you may feel your faith slipping away and darkness closing in.
Have you thanked God when your children succeeded and resented him when they struggled? Have you felt you could stand tall before God when you thought you were living a decent life, and felt guilty when you seemed to be doing wrong? I would ask you to consider these things. To judge good and evil from our own point of view like this is the very thing that shows we are evil. Being shaken by Satan’s temptation does not mean that our faith has changed. The problem is that the good and evil lurking in our hearts size up and settle every situation before faith has its say. This is what Paul meant when he said he saw a different law in his members, warring against the law of his mind and bringing him into captivity under the law of sin in his members.
When God created human beings, he gave them neither evil nor, for that matter, good. But Adam defied the word and ate the fruit that gives the knowledge of good and evil, and because of that, good and evil came to rule over us. The harder we try to live a good life, then, the more clearly we see the evil that is present with us. Every time we go through such a struggle, we discover how fierce the battle between good and evil within us really is.
What do you think it means to live a good life? Do you consider yourself good because you believe in Christ and live a moral life, or because people recognize you as a kind person? I would like you to ponder that. There are times, for example, when we think it would be nice if God called us home now, while we are living well. At other times, when we are in the middle of sin, we fear that if he called us now we might not make it into heaven. Then what is the standard? The standard is our own sense of how well we are doing. And that is the very mark of evil. If this is how you are thinking, you must change your mind. The right faith is a resolve to live with God’s word at the center until the day he calls us. To deny yourself and live with Christ at the center is what it means to live well. Having faith does not make you good; goodness is to deny yourself and to fill yourself with Christ’s word, his mercy, and his righteousness. It is to think about everything with God, not self, at the center.
Romans 7:19-20
19For the good which I desire, I don’t do; but the evil which I don’t desire, that I practice. 20But if what I don’t desire, that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwells in me.
It is hard to believe that this is the confession of a man as full of faith as Paul, so deep was his anguish over the battle between good and evil going on inside him. In Jeremiah 17:9 the prophet cries out, “The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt. Who can know it?” Jeremiah, too, watched God’s people and himself choose evil at every turn, and he grieved over how filthy and corrupt the human heart is, that people who had received so much of God’s love should still give in to sin.
Here, then, I want to put a question to you. Think of someone like Wilkerson: one who bore deep loneliness apart from his family for the sake of his calling, who lived by faith through financial hardship, who stayed faithful to the end though dealing with gangs and addicts put him in the face of death every day. As you have walked with God, you probably carry some standard of blessing in your mind, a sense that a person this faithful to God ought to be blessed in some particular way. When a good person meets hardship, you might say, “Why doesn’t God help such a good person? Why does he make them go through something so terrible?” Wilkerson lived his whole life lonely, worn out, and in desperate struggle, never once living at ease for his own sake. If such a life ended in a car accident, what would be your first thought? Would it be resentment, a cry of “How could God be so harsh?” Or would it be the thought that, because he had fulfilled his calling, God called him home at the time God had appointed and in God’s own way? I want to hear your answer.
As if he knew that people would think foolish thoughts when they saw his death, Wilkerson tells us that when Satan attacks with fear and anger and the question of where God is now, we must keep God at the center of our thinking, because God is always with you and never changes. And he left a remarkable word behind: that we must know all of this is part of God’s plan, that it is not chance and not an accident. As though he knew some would stumble at the sight of his death, he left words of comfort on his blog on the very day of the accident.
What do you make of Wilkerson’s death? I was moved by his faith, which was never tossed about by circumstances but ran steadily toward God. And as I looked at his death, I found my heart at peace instead, for now he had laid everything down and, with a hearty laugh, finished his life as a pilgrim. If we think it beautiful when Paul or the prophets die a martyr’s terrible death standing firm in the faith, but think that a life ending in a car accident like Wilkerson’s must be some kind of judgment, ours is still the faith of a child who has not yet truly met God. Just as Jesus ended his life on the cross, whenever and however the last moment comes when God calls his people home, all of it is grace. What matters is not what we think but that God gave him rest. Wilkerson went into God’s arms on his way home from the Wednesday service. Since the accident came on his way back from worship, people would have asked, “Why?” and some would have walked away, saying there is no God. There will also be those who pass judgment on God as though their own judgment were right. As if he feared that some would leave God because of his death, he urged them not to stumble, because God never fails in anything, and to cling to God alone until death. He knew well who God is. He knew that God is doing God’s own work, and that is why he told them not to yield to the law of sin in their members.
We must be careful, because in an instant we judge things as good or evil. For a wretched person like this, trapped in the body of death and passing judgment on God, the only way to live is to rely on Jesus Christ. Only by walking with Jesus through the life we have been given, living it out by faith, can we keep from being driven by good and evil and come to judge rightly.
Romans 7:25
25I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! So then with the mind, I myself serve God’s law, but with the flesh, the sin’s law.
Paul confessed that he was a wretched man, trapped in the body of death, and that he could still give thanks because of the grace Jesus Christ had given him. We love God and yet give in to sin, and for us Christ threw himself into death; he alone is Lord over all and he alone is Savior. Who but Christ could ever defeat Satan? Even the good in us is self-centered and evil, and therefore we must hold to the right faith, the faith that does God’s will. Your thanks may fall short of Paul’s, but you have now put on a new body set free from sin. Fight on, then, to the very end, and overcome. Assurance of faith is itself the work of the Holy Spirit; may you live by faith for the good pleasure of the God who is at work in us.