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What did I
do that for?!
Passages: Romans 7:15-8:8 / John 14: 15-27
This
morning is confession time. For the last month or so I have been on that thing
we all hate: a diet! That however is not my confession. Salads and red-top milk
now lace my fridge and meat has become an absent friend for the most part.
Treats are supposed to be low-fat which often seems to be a synonym for
tasteless or salty. It means trips to the gym although on the plus side that
also means trips to the sauna. Believe it or not I do want to do this: to
improve my health, improve my stamina, sleep better and so on. Here is my
confession: I am an awful cheat. 
Despite wanting to loose
weight it seems that I want crisps, cream cakes and fast food too. I am my own
worst enemy. I have a constant internal battle between what I want to do and
what I seem to do. I nearly always immediately regret when I cheat and yet I
keep doing it. It’s a self-destructive cycle that I don’t seem to be able to
escape from.
Life can
be like this, can’t it. We set ourselves goals, we set ourselves morals to live
by: to do good and avoid evil. We set out with genuine intentions to do these
things and often start out well. To be more patient with our families, to smile
more at work, to be more generous with our money or to look after our money
better, to stop smoking, to put others first, to look after our health, the
list goes on and on. Sometimes we manage this yet after a while we fall back
into those old patterns to self and want, then the whole process starts over
again and again. All too often it seems impossible to escape and if we do then
we are one of the few that manage.
In our
reading today Paul was thinking some very similar thoughts. He was in despair.
All those good things God said to do like loving God first, putting other
before himself, loving everyone, working on his temper, not worrying so much,
he constantly kept failing at. And all those things God said not to do like
breaking promises, hurting others in words and actions, being selfish and
loosing our temper, these he just kept on doing. Its not like he wanted to be
selfish, yet if he looked at his actions that’s what he kept doing. Why was it
that even though he always wanted to be good that he kept failing. It didn’t
make any sense. He wanted to obey God and follow his ways and yet too often he
simply followed his selfish nature. It is the human condition and has plagued
us, and every other person in history, for our whole lives. We seem like a
people torn in two directions and that is exactly how Paul sees it. On the one
hand he desires to do good and to follow God, yet on the other hand he keeps
doing evil, the thing we call sin; those things that ignore God and neighbour
and focus only on ourselves. 
God calls
us to be perfect just as he too is perfect. A holy God that calls us to be
holy. He wants us to come to him, to love him and follow him, to enjoy being
known as his. He desires for us to be whole, to be the people he made us to be
and to know the immense love that he has for us and yet he cannot have a hint
of sin in his presence, not even an inkling. It’s like having a knife you’ve
used to spread marmite then wanting to use it to spread butter. Not matter how
much you scrape it on the toast there is still some marmite the gets into the
butter and corrupts it. It seems hopeless, even impossible, especially if we
look to our past. None of us can honestly say that we have lived a perfect life
so far, nor can we envisage it in the future no matter how hard we try. It can
often feel like locking the gates after the horse has bolted. Perhaps we find
ourselves echoing the language that Paul uses, “What
a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to
death?” The system we are trapped in, this system of sin that leads to
death, needs to be broken and yet our attempts to break it simply drive us
deeper into that very system. 
It is like
an old clay-bottomed well. Over the years the well has all but dried up. The
only remains of water is the wet clay at the bottom. One day a boy walks past
this well with his father and the father warns the boy sternly, ‘you must never
go near that well. It is very dangerous’. The next day, enticed by the well,
the boy returns on his own and leans over to look how far the well goes down
and why his dad thinks it’s so dangerous. At that moment he slips and falls to
the bottom. As he sits the bottom his feet get stuck in the clay and not
wanting to get in more trouble he tries to get out himself. The problem is that
the more he struggles the deeper into the wet clay he sinks. Every wiggle and
jump he uses to get out simply drives him deeper and deeper into the clay. It
seems like there is no hope.
So has God
abandoned us to failure? No, and that is the good news; God has come to redeem
us. He has not left us but rather has come to rescue us and all we have to do
is accept that. Much like that boy in the well. If he decided to continue
trying to rescue himself then surely he would be trapped forever, but instead
he realised that he needed help. The clay was too much for him to deal with and
needed someone outside the well to rescue him. So he called out to his Dad “I’m
sorry, please help”. Hearing his son’s cried he ran to the well with a rope,
tied one end around a tree and threw the other end down the well. He climbed
down the rope, reached out his hand for his son to grab and pulled him out. We
too needed someone not trapped in the system of sin and death that we are
trapped in and so God came down the rope into our well, the world, to rescue us
in Jesus. That sin we commit; ignoring God, his law and our neighbours, our
selfish ambitions needed to be dealt with and so Jesus did, by dying on the
cross then rising to life again 3 days later. The penalty of death paid on our
behalf. All we have to do, like with any gift, is to accept it and say to God,
like the boy to his dad, “I’m sorry, please help”. That is why Paul, after his
declaration of despair suddenly busts out into, ‘Thanks
be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ The question
begs to be asked then. A question that we all must ask, young and old. Have we
called out to God, rejected our selfish ambitions and accepted his rescue? My
friends, don’t do what that boy did and struggle in the clay but call out to
your heavenly father to pull you out.
The wonder
is then, that if we have accepted God’s rescue then we are out of that system.
No longer are we stuck in that clay of sin binding us to death. That depressing
cycle that leads us to despair, guilt and condemnation is made powerless to us
for we are now part of a family with God as the head leading the way, the
church. That’s all well and good you may say, God has pulled us out of the clay
of sin but what keeps us from falling back into it again? Well, God doesn’t
leave us to struggle alone, nor simply pat us on the back and wish us luck. If
we were left to our own devices we’d simply fall back into that well of sin
over and over again, in fact that was the problem in the first place. Paul puts
it like this in verses 5-8, “Those who live
according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires…The mind governed by the flesh is death…The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does
not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those
who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.” Now here ‘flesh’ doesn’t mean our physical bodies as if
they were evil, far from it, as God has created us, rather it is a shorthand
term used to mean the sinful things we do and think that has permeated our very
nature, the corrupted nature that we have come to live-by. If we carry on
living as we have always done, by the ‘flesh’ then we will fall back into sin
as we have before. It’s a basic principle of life. If we do the same things
over and over again then we should expect the same outcome over and over again.
To change an outcome the process must be changed. The ‘flesh’, Paul says, is
hostile to God: by it’s very nature it seeks self, it seeks gratification, it
seeks glory. No wonder then that it is hostile to God and to his laws, his ways
because that would mean acknowledging our weakness, our need for rescue, that
God is greater then we are, that his ways are greater then our ways. Those that
live like that cannot please God then, it is the natural conclusion that we
must come to. No matter how much good we do, no matter how much we come to
church or partake in the sacraments, we still have a nature problem of ‘flesh’;
we ultimately will reject God for self and can never reach him.
There is
another way though for those that accept that rescue God offers. A complete
change of mind is offered to remove us from the perpetual cycle of sin. Later
in Romans Paul puts it like this, ‘Do not conform
to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is —his good,
pleasing and perfect will.’(Rom 12:2) So
how then do we transform our minds? It is by receiving the Holy Spirit. When
speaking of his death and ascension Jesus told the disciples not to worry
because he’s not leaving them alone, rather he is sending us the Holy Spirit
who will ‘teach [us] all things and will remind [us]
of everything [Jesus has] said to [us].’ We must allow the Holy Spirit to
change us, to transform us, to teach us of God’s ways and to strengthen us to
live that way. As Paul says in verses 6-7, ‘those
who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit
desires…the mind governed by the Spirit
is life and peace.’ It means living differently, seeking what the Holy
Spirit wants and desires, dying to our old ways of self and want and finding
life in him.
When we
seek to be physically stronger we lift weights, we train, we stretch. This
principle is true for spirituality too. We must stretch out spiritual muscles,
training ourselves in righteousness and holiness. Learning to listen as the
Holy Spirit convicts, teaches, comforts and guides. To make time each day to
pray and to read the bible, and meet regularly with other Christians to share
what God is saying by his Holy Spirit and to spur one another on in holiness.
To choose each day to reject self and follow him, and to keep the promises we
have made.Is this easy, no but it is certainly worth it. It is also
why we make promises to support one another and to meet together. God has given
us the church for a reason. So let’s listen to his voice, let’s look for his
guidance, let’s forget the flesh and set our minds on the desires of the Spirit
to find life and peace. Amen