Romans 7:23 contains a curious phrase. It goes like this: “… bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members” (NKJV throughout). There is a “law of sin” that operates in every part of our body, saturating all of its faculties, and making us its slave.
Your Bible might call it the “sin nature,” but the Greek says otherwise. Since it’s a law, it contains principles, or corollaries, accompanying it that are always true when the law of sin is operating.
What are these principles? This is an important question, because when we recognize them in us, then we know the law of sin is at work. And that is never a good thing. It spells disaster to our Christian walk with God and endangers our heavenly rewards. It means we are overriding the Spirit’s work in us.
What does it look like? What are evidences that the law is at work? Paul found it in himself and spent time examining this cancer in his own body. Here are the law’s principles he discovered.
“What I will to do, that I do not practice” (Rom. 7:15). This principle of the law of sin is that it acts contrary to your best intentions. The good you want to do, you don’t do. You have an idea that would honor the Lord, but you could not follow through with it.
“But what I hate, that I do” (7:15). You know it’s wrong, but you do it again anyway. Then your prayer that night is, “Sorry Lord, I did it again.” It’s not just a bad habit. It’s immoral and against God’s goodness. That’s how scary the law of sin is. We are slaves to a creepy master.
“To will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find” (7:18). The law of sin is stronger than your will. You know the life you want to live for God, but it keeps turning into a mess. You don’t have the will power to beat this.
“For I know that in me (in my flesh) nothing good dwells” (7:18). Most church-goers will never come to this conclusion. We will never find reasons to hate this law of sin in us. We will read books to educate ourselves, reform ourselves, and discipline our minds and bodies in a thousand self-help ways.
We feel there must be something we can do to fix this. Education, medicine, psychology, self-flagellation, and more are tried and discarded. We can’t seem to touch the law of sin in any way. As long as there is something good in here, we’ll keep on searching for a fix.
“I do not understand” (7:15). The realization of this force in us makes us scratch our heads. What do we do about this? Most of us will never ask this question. We will accept it as our lot in life. “I confessed it, so I’m good.” We pretend it’s not there and hope nobody finds out.
These are all corollaries to the law of sin. They are symptoms that the Spirit is not operating but sin is.
What was Paul’s response? “O wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (7:24). Paul did not accept this way of living. He called it death. He could not imagine that this was the best salvation that God Almighty could come up with. This struggle is exactly the same as the adherents in other religions groan over, those religions with false gods. This can’t be all there is to it. Surely there is a fuller salvation in Christ somewhere.
Yet I’ve heard Christians shrug, saying, “Paul struggled with this, so I’m in good company.” Paul struggled, but did not shrug in resignation. He agonized over the issue. He found a law in him that was “warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members” (7:23). He was thinking something good, then an immoral thought would intrude that was hard to stop. Is this something we should let slide by? We should roll over and play dead? Should we not ask with Paul, “Who will deliver me?” (7:24).
Because Paul suffered and refused to accept that this body of death was God’s plan for him, God graciously answered him, giving him understanding. And Paul responded, “I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (7:25).
Well, that’s quite underwhelming a response. Don’t we already believe in Jesus? Aren’t we already saved? Then what is going on here? What happened is that Paul got an answer from outside of himself. The Lord pulled it out of Paul’s vast storehouse of Old Testament memory verses: “The just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17, quoting Habakkuk 2:4).
It ties in with the opening of the theological portion of his Romans epistle: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation, for the Jew first and also for the Greek” (1:16). The rest of the epistle addresses this profound truth.
In this verse, Paul is not only talking about the initial salvation moment when we first trusted Christ, but the salvation gained over sin and temptation we enjoy every day we walk by faith. “The just shall live by faith.” Every day. Every hour. When we walk by faith in Jesus, God supplies power to save and protect us.
Paul continues his explanation in chapter 8. Something happens when we “do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (8:1, 4). There is a connection being made between the just that lives by faith, and the just that lives according to the Spirit.
There is a difference between walking (living) according to the flesh and according to the Spirit. Jesus already tried to tell us: “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matt. 16:25). Paul takes that thought and expounds on it here.
You’ve seen the rocket take off from Ft. Lauderdale. Normally, the law of gravity means that when you jump up, you always come down. But the rockets that escape the pull of gravity prove that a stronger law of propulsion and aerodynamics can overcome the law of gravity. There also exists a stronger law than the law of sin: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death” (8:2). Wouldn’t you want to know about this law?
Paul was right. A greater victory had been available all along. There is power to help us stand against sin.
What is the connection between faith and the Spirit? One thing the law of sin can’t do is trust in God. It can only trust itself. So when you choose to trust God, the “power of God to salvation for everyone who believes” goes to work. The Spirit empowers the faith, grace is released, the weak is made strong, and temptation is refused. All of this is the power of God, and it works to deliver you from the temptation to sin.
Every day we have a choice to live by the Spirit or the flesh. When we “live according to the flesh” (8:5) to pamper it, we strengthen the law of sin in us (6:16), making deliverance seem further away and hopeless. When we live by biblical faith, we turn from the flesh (we put it to death) and live to God by His resources of grace. In faith, we ignore the nudges of the flesh to pursue what we know is God’s will, and are empowered by the Spirit to follow through.
We read the Word of God and the Spirit points out a sinful issue in us. We acknowledge it and surrender it to the Lord. We choose to follow the Lord’s way in its place. Paul put it like this: “For if you live by the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (8:13). The work of the Spirit is to lead you to die to the sin and rise up with your faith rooted in Christ.
To apply this to Paul: through the Spirit, Paul was convicted by the law (7:7–8). He recognized the deeds of the body (7:20–21). The Spirit gave him illumination so he could take the way of escape (7:25, 8:2).
“There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (8:1). If we live according to the flesh, we’ll experience struggles against sin more intensely and feel guilt and self-condemnation.
But the Spirit opens our spiritual understanding of our secure position in Christ, and so we recover quickly without condemnation. “With the mind” we “serve the law of God” (7:25). The Spirit gives us spiritual comprehension, or assurance (faith is assurance), of our riches in Christ, so we are restored to a right relationship more quickly.
For instance, instead of pulling away from God, thinking He is rejecting us, we rejoice in the “spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3), such as being “accepted in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:6), “redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins” in Him (Eph. 1:7). Through His grace we appropriate these truths by faith and live them out. We own them. We do not pull away, but lean in.
Armed with these truths, we gain sensitivity to the symptoms of the law of sin and quickly surrender to the Lord. We bring “into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4–5). That is, we recognize the temptation, the thought that dishonors God, and switch to taking up the humble servant mind of Christ in its place.
Paul taught this already in Rom. 6:13. “And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.”
Let’s unpack this way of deliverance. Hour by hour we recognize the nudges of living for ourselves. We reject them and present ourselves to the Lord as His instrument to use. If we are not giving ourselves to live for the Lord’s will, we are by default in the flesh, under control of the law of sin. Sin doesn’t know how to follow Christ as Lord, it only follows self-interest. That’s why good intentions to follow the Lord are met with resistance.
We are made to be tools for His use, not for sin. It doesn’t work to merely resist sin, then only to continue living for yourself (although in a “nice” way). To live this way is to be blind to the fact that there is no good thing in you, in your body, but the cancer of sin is operating. Until you surrender to the Lord with the Spirit’s understanding.
The reason there is a way out is because of the phrase, “as being alive from the dead” in that verse. The whole first part of chapter 6 is all about that reality. In a nutshell (and you really should read the chapter yourself), when Christ died and was buried, He left the flesh behind when He rose from the dead. When we believed in Jesus, we entered into that life; that is, we died with Him and rose with Him.
The flesh is dead and buried and the risen Christ lives for God. So we also count the flesh, with the law of sin, as actually dead, and we live to God as Christ does. With the flesh dead, it no longer has any hold on us. It has no authority over us. We put the nail in the coffin by asserting this is true and living for Jesus by faith day by day. This is why Paul answered, “I thank God through Jesus Christ!”
The way of sanctification is about becoming more like Christ. But this happens the more we know the Bible, believe it is God’s will for us, and we act on it by faith. That, in a nutshell, was the life of Christ. That’s what it means to live to God. Instead of a selfish, self-directed life, we find out how the Lord wants us to live and choose that.
That takes time because we must go against our natural tendency to pamper ourselves (the flesh). We’ll suffer when we choose against self. Choosing the flesh means the flesh is in charge; flesh is Lord and not Jesus. When we declare Jesus is Lord from the heart and yield to Him, we escape from a destructive mindset, and the law of the Spirit of life in Christ takes effect.
Yeah, this is way too much to take in at once. Read this article again, then read Romans 6-8 and see if those chapters make more sense.
The Lord opened my mind to detect this law operating in me so I would be watchful against it and learn to cut it off the walk by faith in Christ. This is the was of escape from temptation, and you can know it too. But it’s a must to keep reading the Word faithfully every day, taking time to ponder its truths and see how to live them out.
If you are a person who focuses on doing rather than being, then you’ll miss the bulk of the interior life where this warfare takes place.
I know in my first year as a Christian, I would not know how to make sense of the above. But over time, I kept pressing to know the verses Jesus gives about the cross and self-denial for His disciples. It will pay big dividends to pursue this subject, for it is dear to the Savior’s heart to “save His people from their sins” Matt. (1:21).
To recap:
- The law of sin has corollaries (symptoms, principles) that help us see sin at work in us. Do you find Paul’s frustrations in yourself?
- Paul’s response of “O wretched man” means that he expected more of a deliverance than he received, and he didn’t accept it. Do you accept the frustrations of giving in to temptation as part of the normal Christian life?
- Paul discovered that the power of the Spirit helps us escape the law of sin, and it begins by living a life of faith seen in a truly yielded life to Christ. If you agree, will you ask the Lord to bring you to that place?
- The foundation of this doctrine is in the phrase, “alive from the dead.” We were buried with Christ and raised with Him. As He lives to God, we do the same from a new identity in Him, and not from our old life. This life is entered into by faith, because God says it is indeed the new life in Christ at present.
