Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1062
“I delight in the Law of God after the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” Romans 7:22,23.
LAST Thursday evening, as many of you will remember, I addressed you upon the final perseverance of the saints. I have been greatly surprised and gratified during the week to learn how many persons found comfort and cheer from the simple explanation of that doctrine which I gave you. In fact, on the past two Thursday evenings [PERSEVERANCE without presumption, #1056, and A persuasive TO steadfastness, #1042] we have been handling a precept and a promise both relating to the same matter, though each putting it in a different light. The one admonished us to perseverance by holding fast—the other assured us of preservation because we are fast held.
The welcome you gave to these familiar expositions has led me to think it would be acceptable, especially to such of you as have been lately brought into the sacred household and may not even know the rudiments of religious experience, were I tonight to follow up those two elementary discourses with some little account of the great inward conflict to which the Believer’s life is exposed.
The passage before us tells a portion of the experience of the Apostle Paul. We all of us concede that he was a most eminent saint. Indeed, we place him in the front rank. For this reason his experience is the more valuable to us. If your greatest saints have their inward struggles, how much more should we expect to have them who have not attained the same degree of Divine Grace the Apostle did? If he who was not a whit behind the very chief of the Apostles yet had to say, “When I would do good, evil is present with me,” then you and I, who can only take the position of babes in Grace, or of ordinary disciples of Jesus Christ, must not be surprised if we have to bear assaults that surprise us and enter into struggles that distress us. We must not be surprised if we are often, by emotional stress, forced to cry out, “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”
I shall ask you, therefore, for your personal consolation to notice, first of all, that the ruling power in the Christian’s mind is a strong affection and, therefore, an intense pleasure in that which is pure and holy—“I delight in the Law of God after the inward man.” Secondly, there are passions and propensities within the breast of a man which come into direct conflict with this holy principle—“I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind.” And, thirdly, that the discipline involved in this constant hostility, despite all the fretfulness and irritation it causes, is not without true and satisfactory evidence of our spiritual welfare. “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
I. It may be said of every true Christian that the ruling power in him delights in the Law of God. The new nature which God has created in every Believer cannot sin because it is born of God. This is the work of the Holy Spirit and as such without guile, unblemished, incorruptible. We are made partakers of the Divine Nature. The Divine Nature, so far as it is communicable, is given to us when we are begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
We are born not of the flesh, not of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God. We receive from God a new nature at the time of our regeneration. This new nature, though it is the younger, compels the older nature within us to submit to it. It has a struggle, but it gets the victory—that significant word, “The elder shall serve the younger,” is abundantly fulfilled in the little kingdom within our souls! It has a long struggling trial before the full subjugation and there are many harassing rebellions to encounter, but at length, that which is born of the Spirit shall overcome that which is born of the flesh and the Divine Nature within us shall vanquish the sensual nature. The Christian man, because of this new nature implanted in him, delights in the Law of God. He has no desire to change that Law in any way whatever.
When we read the Ten Commandments, our conscience approves the ordinances of God while it reproves our own culpable shortcomings. Yes, we feel that only God could have drawn up so complete, so perfect a code. We would not wish to have one single iota, word, or syllable of that Law altered, though it condemns us! Though we know, apart from the precious blood of Christ, it would have cast us into Hell and most justly so, yet with holy instinct, pure taste and righteous judgment we consent unto the Law that is good. It expresses God’s mind on the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, truth and falsehood, harmony and discord—and our mind agrees with God’s mind.