Coming Honest

[ Download PDF Version ]

Paul’s main point, then, in Romans 6 and 7 has been to expose how we were deluded by Satan into thinking that we were self-operating selves. In actuality, it was Satan expressing his self-for-self (sin) nature as us. Then Paul tells us at length how God sent the Law with its requirements to expose us when we come honest. We first had to learn that we had not kept the Law as lost sinners, and then that we never could keep it because we have never been independent, sell-relying selves. We were deceived by Satan to think we were, but actually we were only expressers of Satan’s self-for-self nature.

In unfolding the value of the Law in Romans 7, Paul makes a unique contribution to exposing and removing the main blockage to effective
Christian living. At last, in our agony and desperation at our failures, light dawns upon us. We are then capable of seeing that the evil was not in our beautiful God-created humanity, but in the lie of the independent self (sin dwelling in us). Through Calvary, we now move in by faith to see and recognize that it is He, the Spirit of Truth, expressing Himself in and by our vessels—branch containers—in place of that evil one.

So by faith in this revealed fact, we find ourselves free just to be our human selves with no fears or condemnations. Through the Spirit’s certain inner witness, we are expressers of Him: Christ in us, as us. And now, after a brief Law interlude, we go on into chapter eight of Romans, not as in our walking Satan forms, but as walking Christs—“more than conquerors.”