For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. (Romans 7:22, NIV)
Curiously enough, right in the midst of the Del Monte’s Forest’s many famed courses—Cypress Point, Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill, Monterey Peninsula CC, Spanish Bay, and Poppy Hills—you will find the Stevenson School, a top-shelf boarding school named for the famed author Robert Louis Stevenson. We have no record of Stevenson’s having played golf, but he must have understood it quite well, for he was born in Scotland, lived for a time in Monterey, and—most significantly—wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekkyl and Mr. Hyde.
Sin had no eternal hold over Paul any longer, but it drove him to do the very things he did not want to do.We can chuckle at this notion, for if any group of readers empathizes with a person’s sudden, desperate change from good to bad, it is golfers. And to add a bit of marvelous irony to the whole matter, Stevenson’s wife once told of her awakening Robert from the dream that would shape Jekkyl and Hyde; she said this upset him, as she had stirred him from, in his words, “a fine bogey tale”!
Of course, in our game, there are no fine bogeys (well, maybe a few). What we’d far rather have is perfection all the time.
The apostle Paul was this way. It disturbed him mightily, now that he was in Christ and Christ was in him, that he was still prone to sin’s fierce grip. It had no eternal hold over him any longer, but it drove him to do the very things he did not want to do, for sin is its own impetus (Romans 7:8), an evil inspiring evil.
Why would God who has saved us allow us to continue in such a state, to declare even as a redeemed believer, “What a wretched man I am!” (7:24)?
The simplest answer is dependence. Immediately after lamenting his wretchedness, Paul lifted up an exaltation: “Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Though we are to hourly strive for righteousness, the sins of our day keep us leaning into our Savior for the application of his salvation. So, too, we lean into him to sanctify us—that is, to mature us in our faith and its expression. It is a slow process, fraught with failure, but it keeps us on a heavenly trajectory. Such recognitions that God is at work in us are signs themselves that we are indeed people of a new nature. Let us pray that each day this nature increasingly overrides the old one.
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Jeff Hopper
November 3, 2017
Copyright 2017 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
OTHER DEVOTIONS IN THIS SERIES
The Or Series 1: God or No God?
The Or Series 2: Grace or Works?
The Or Series 3: Alone or Together?
The Or Series 4: This Church or That One?
The Or Series 5: Sermons or Scripture?
The Or Series 6: Steady or Spirit-infused?
The Or Series 7: One Way or More to Practice Faith?
The Or Series 9: For Seekers or Believers?
The Or Series 10: A Statement or a Conversation?