ROMANS 7: 21-25

21So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, 23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

 So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin. †

Double-Minded  

Why is it we can want what is good but fail to do it? Why is it that stuff we don’t want to do, we do? What is wrong with humanity that makes us so double-minded? 

We have salvation in Christ and our sins have been forgiven, so therefore we are no longer slaves to sin. . . but we continue to sin! No matter how pure we feel inside, we can’t get our act perfectly together on the outside—not even close to perfect. 

The human predicament affects all of humanity—that includes born again, saved and sanctified in the blood Christians as well as everyone else. Paul speaks for us all when he says: 

 So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.

Paul clearly acknowledges that to be a human being is to have two minds about everything. Mind 1 loves The Lord and wants above all to please Him and serve Him with all we have. Mind 1 knows good from evil, right from wrong, and regularly, willfully commits itself to the good up and against the bad. Mind 2 is dedicated to ignoring Mind 1. Mind 2 says Mind 1 is too bossy and should lighten up.  Mind 1 he calls the mind and Mind 2 he calls the flesh. And they each seem to have a will of their own. 

It’s possible to talk of our moral life—our perpetual quandary over ethics—as this battle between the mind and the flesh, Mind 1 and Mind 2.

“Brother Donkey”

So in our very nature we live with a divided will. Though in our right minds we seek virtue, beauty, truth, and obedience to God; our flesh has drives and appetites of its own that up end, end run, and otherwise surprise our righteous minds. 

St. Francis referred to his body as “Brother Donkey” (actually, it’s ‘Brother Ass,’ but I don’t want to make the junior highers giggle). As if his spirit were his true self riding on a donkey which is his body. The body has needs: must be fed, cleaned, taken care of, and otherwise disciplined. 

C.S. Lewis comments: 

Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now a stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body.

The season of Lent has been the time for Christians to take pains to subdue the flesh and keep it in its proper place, because if allowed, that donkey will take over.

We seem to be helplessly double-minded. How did we get this way? We’ve been this way since the fall of Adam. With original sin came a brokenness that affects not only our relationship with God, with the world, and with one another, but also with ourselves. That brokenness goes right to the heart of how we see ourselves and what we can know about ourselves. 

In writing to the Corinthians, Paul  says we see things wrongly—only in part and not the whole. He speaks of seeing in a mirror “dimly,” but “dimly” is a poor translation. The word for “dimly” is literally “enigma,” so we see in a mirror enigmatically, only to remain puzzled, mystified, or amazed at what we behold. 

It might be better to think of that mirror as one of those distorted, fun house mirrors you see at the fair. The image—not only of ourselves, but of our Maker—we perceive only through the distortions of our fallenness. The image is tainted out of recognition by the reality of sin. 

The good news is that the day is coming when we shall see face-to-face and know ourselves even as God knows us. Until then, we remain a mystery—an enigma—even to ourselves. 

Road to Hell pavers

One result of the Fall is that we do not perceive ourselves perfectly. We are a mystery to ourselves. Our motives and intentions are all mixed and largely indecipherable to us. 

You might think you know what your motives are, but there is no real certainty because of that distorted mirror. It is that brokenness that gives us all world literature. The novel itself seems to be humankind’s attempt to answer one or two simple questions: 

What is a human being? 

Why do people do what they do? 

Every system of explanations is useful, but all are incomplete. With a little attention, we can shoot holes through most of them, but they’ve given us Freudian psychoanalysis, educational theory, and every book or movie you’ve ever enjoyed. We have art and literature because we don’t really know what makes people do what they do. We cannot know what motivates someone 100%. Our good intentions are always mixed with self-serving ones. We sort them out only by oversimplifying them. 

Human beings remain a mystery. We do see in a distorted mirror, despite what many in the world would try to tell us. 

Do you really know your own intentions? Do you really know what motivates you right down in the core? Not really. The Bible upholds this mystery and Paul is explicit about it. We can illustrate the problem with a simple question: 

What is more important: right action or good intentions?

Let’s start by saying intentions are more important. The problem is immediate: people of good intentions are guilty of all kinds of high crimes. Samuel Johnson told us:“Hell is paved with good intentions.” How much of the world’s evils have been done by people who truly believed they were doing the right thing? Too many to count. Hear T.S. Eliot: 

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”

Okay, so let’s back off the intentions side of the balance; it must be our actions that count. Forget all the good intention jazz; it’s what we do that matters. Actions are all that really count, so we ought to put our focus and emphasis there. Good actions don’t depend on good intentions—to do what is right is all that matters. Have we decided it, then? Actions are more important than intentions? No. 

Let’s go back to 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul says: 

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

All the good, proper, and righteous action—even self-sacrificial dedication(!)—that is not grounded in the good intention of agapé love is vain, empty, pointless, and gainless. So here, Paul seems to say that good intentions mean everything!

We don’t—and won’t—get to the bottom of this. 

Who Will Save Me?

Paul states our human dilemma quite clearly in verse 24: 

Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

We are lost to ourselves, knowing neither motives nor intentions with any depth or certainty; nor can we trust in our actions themselves to deliver us from evil. 

Brothers and sisters, there is no easy out to this situation. We are in the flesh, which means we suffer the pangs of the flesh. Don’t imagine that there is an easy out—a simple resolution or easy dismissal—there is not. We live in the already and the not yet. Christ has won the war, but we are marching on toward its final conclusion. We—the member of the Church and the Body of Christ—walk this life across a bridge from promise toward fulfillment. 

We are not dedicated to all fulfillment here and now—that is the offer of the flesh—but we live for the promises of Christ. We live toward their fulfillment and in service to those promises’ implications. 

We, like Moses, may not see ourselves arrive there in this lifetime. Or like the earliest—perhaps best—saints, who, knowing less about Jesus than you or I, willingly went to the crosses and wild beasts of the Roman coliseum rather than serve the flesh. Hebrews 11 references them:

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.  —Hebrews 11: 13

We, too, are strangers on this Earth, but Christ gives us the Holy Spirit as our guide for the journey. We live, move, and serve with a partial awareness at best, but we do so—like a man walking a balance beam between twin towers—trusting in Christ for the final fulfillment of all things.  That trust  is enough. That trust is the Christian faith.  †