“Who Am I?” (Romans 7:14-25) - Romans for Everyone X -

Who Am I?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian. He was also well known for his resistance to Nazi dictatorship. He was arrested in April 1943, imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp, and executed by hanging just before the Nazi regime collapsed. While he was in prison, he wrote a poem with the title, “Who Am I?”[1]

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a Squire from his country house.

Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectations of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all.

Who am I? This or the Other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

A Christian’s Own Experience

So, who am I? Who are you? In today’s scripture, Romans 7:14-25, Paul is telling his own story, his own struggle as a Christian. And at the same time, he is universalizing it to every true Christian’s experience. As a Christian, on the one hand, we easily fall into moral pride. There are times when we feel like we are above sin. On the other hand, we also fall into hopeless despair. We struggle with the huge gap between how we live today and how we are to live as Christians. And we feel like we would never live up to the demand of God’s word in this life. In this respect, Romans 7 provides us with healthy, balanced biblical realism. Romans 7 is a great help in balancing between pride and despair. It pushes us away from pride toward humility, and away from despair toward hope. Then, how should we live as Christians in view of this biblical realism of Romans 7?

Thanks Be to God!

First of all, we are to live as new creation in Christ. When we believe in Christ, we are united to him and saved from the power of sin. We have been free from sin and enslaved to God. What a wonderful change of our status! (justification) Along with this new status, now we have new heart, new self, new nature, new identity in Christ (regeneration or conversion). We know this does not come from us; it is the gift of God (Eph 2:8). It is the work of God. So we cry out with thanksgiving and with confidence, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25a)

The best way to live as new creation in Christ is to give thanks to God and praise him in every moment. Jonathan Edwards said that pride is God’s most stubborn, secretive, worst enemy. But thanksgiving and praising God is the best medicine to cure our spiritual pride. When we give thanks to God, we acknowledge who God is and also reflect on who we are before him. By doing this, we have healthy, balanced self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-assessment. Pride comes from ignorance and insufficient reflections. But, humility comes when we acknowledge the truth of what we are. Michael Ramsey, an earlier Archbishop of Canterbury, gave some wise advice about humility at the ordination service. And I also grave those words in my heart:

1. Thank God, often and always… Thank God, carefully and wonderingly, for your continuing privileges… Thankfulness is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.
2. Take care about confession of your sins… Be sure to criticize yourself in God’s presence: that is your self-examination. And put yourself under the divine criticism: that is your confession…
3. Do not worry about status… There is only one status that our Lord bids us be concerned with, and that is the status of proximity to himself…[2]

Once Paul was a self-confident Pharisee. He thought that he was blameless before God’s law (Phil 3:6). But when he was born again, something like scales fell from his eyes, and then he was able to see himself clearly. In verse 18 he cries out, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh!” Here Paul is saying, “Apart from Christ, apart from my new nature in Christ, I am not good.” So then, he cries out with thanksgiving, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” And we join him in this cry of confidence and thanksgiving.

What a Wretched Man I Am!

Secondly, we are to remember that even though we have been saved through Christ from the guilt of our sins and from the judgment of God, we have not yet been delivered from indwelling sin. That is, indwelling sin is still living in us. In verse 17 Paul says, “So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.” Indwelling sin, or sinful nature, or flesh is still a powerful enemy of every Christian. In his Confessions Augustine gives us a good example of indwelling sin. When he was 16 years old, one night he and his friends shook a pear tree and stole its fruit. He confesses that his motive was not that he was hungry, because they threw the pears to the pigs. He says, “I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing, but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong.”[3] We have a deep desire to do something for no other reason than because it is forbidden. We want to cross the boundary. We want to be in charge. We want to be God. This is the essence of indwelling sin. And Paul, a true, mature Christian, was no exception. So Paul cries out, “What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And we join him in this cry of deep longing.

Ongoing Warfare with Sin

Paul concludes today’s passage with a sober, realistic summary statement: “So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin” (v. 25b, NIV). In other words, Paul, and we Christians, have both our new self and our sinful nature, indwelling sin. We are both indwelt by the Spirit and harassed by the flesh. We are freed from the guilt of our sins and indwelt by remaining corruption. The battle between our new self and our sinful nature is ongoing and fierce. This battle will continue until we die or until Christ comes. That is the biblical realism of Romans 7. Then, how are we to live? The answer is to embrace our new identity in Christ by faith and to become what we are by his Spirit.

Now I want to close todays’ message with the powerful story of Rachel Gilson, introduced in the October 2017 edition of Christianity Today magazine. She begins her story with the following statement: “This is not a story of being gay and becoming straight.” At the age of 15, Rachel felt an attraction to other girls. After she went to Yale, for some reason she began wondering whether God could exist. She started gooling religious search terms. In that wave of webpages, she started to encounter Jesus for the first time. And she wanted to know how she could reconcile her life with Jesus and his teachings. With the help of her two friends she studied revisionist interpretations about sexuality, but she grew frustrated, because they didn’t line up with the plain meaning of the Bible’s words. One day she saw her Catholic friend read an orange book, titled Mere Christianity. She stole the book and read it. She reached the conclusion that there was a God. The following Saturday, she went to Yale Students for Christ. She also went to the Bible study. And she fell in love with Jesus. But still, she had many questions. Her particular question was, “How would I deal with my natural, unshakable attraction to women?” But she didn’t get the answer. Her first lesson of the Christian life was how to obey before she understands. She knew Jesus is always on her side, profoundly. So she did trust him. But in the meantime, she went back to old patterns several times. In the midst of despair she cried out, “Why wouldn’t God just fix me?” Slowly, she came to understand that “making her straight” wasn’t the answer. Later, by God’s grace, she got married to a godly man and experienced joy and healing. Many Christians tried to use her as a mascot and proudly declare that God healed her homosexuality. But the truth is, even 10 years of her marriage, she still experiences attraction to women. Rachel concludes her story in this way: “That’s why this is not the story of my becoming straight, which has never truly happened and is beside the point. It is the story of my becoming whole, which is happening every day.”[4]

If our besetting sin is heterosexual or homosexual lust, let us affirm that in Christ we have died to this fallen, distorted identity and in Christ we are new. Let us not say, “I am a homosexual,” but say rather, “I struggle with homosexual desires.” In Christ homosexual, adulterer, alcoholic, are not who we truly are. Let us trust him and look to him for the help to become who we truly are in Christ. If our besetting sin is anger, let us affirm that in Christ we have died to that identity and in Christ we have his patience and gentleness. Let us fight against anger as one who has the victory in him. Paul said, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7). Let us join him. Let us be honest and examine our indwelling sin in us and say “What a wretched person I am!” And let us always remember and declare that we are new in Christ and we are becoming whole and say, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Let us fight on. Amen.

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[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Who Am I?” http://www.dbonhoeffer.org/who-was-db2.htm

[2] John Stott, The Living Church (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 173-74.

[3] John Stott, The Message of Romans: God's Good News for the World (InterVarsity Press: 1994), 203.

[4] Rachel Gilson, “I Never Became Straight,” Christianity Today (October 2017), 50-54.