No matter what you make Romans 7 out to be, Romans 8:13 stands unequivocally. True regeneration produces people who fear God, love God, become obedient to God, and who triumph over their flesh. Too often Romans 7 is interpreted by our feelings and experiences rather than by its context.
Romans 7:19 is a very convenient excuse for those who want to live in sin.
CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT.
Romans 7 is sandwiched between Romans 6 and 8, so the 2 Timothy 2:15 student of God's Word has some heavy duty context to deal with. The first problem we have begins in Romans 6:1—"What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" If Paul, in Romans 7:14-25, is speaking as a true Christian, we could justify this way: "Well, I'm saved by grace anyway, so so what if I can't kick evil. I'm saved by grace, right? There's no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, so what's the big deal? I can sin. Grace is greater than my sin." Paul answers this in verse 2: "By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?"
"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11). What does it mean "dead to sin"? Remember the question from verse 1. The context of Romans 6 is in regard to the power of sin. "For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace" (Romans 6:14). What is he talking about? Is he talking about whether I sin as much as I did before? He surely is. "But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed" (Romans 6:17). He's talking about me having stopped sinning the way I used to sin when I was lost. "You were once slaves to sin, but have become obedient from the heart." To what? To the standard, to the Word of God. Romans 6:7 says, "For one who has died has been set free from sin." I was set free so that I become obedient from the heart. Sin shall no longer have dominion. "If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live" (Romans 8:13b).
"But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life" (Romans 6:22). There is a certain life lived that leads to eternal life. Don't believe that? Look at Titus 1:16: "They profess to know God, but they deny Him by their works." James 2:18 says, "Show me your faith without your works and I will show you my faith by my works." Ephesians 2:10 says we were "created ... for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." Christians live a particular way that demonstrates they have received newness of life. Paul is asking the question from Romans 6:1 all the way through. Shall we continue to sin? He says, "Look! You can't! You're dead to sin—you've died to sin being in Christ, united in Him; just as He rose, you've risen in newness of life." That is regeneration. You cannot continue in it; God made you obedient.
"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin" (Romans 6:11). He's hitting upon the way you think. Consider yourselves dead to sin. The word used here is the Greek logizomai (λογιζομαι), which is the same word used 11 times in Romans 4. It is the same word used to say, "Abraham believed God, and it was counted (reckoned, imputed) to him as righteousness" (Romans 4:3). We are to count, reckon, consider ourselves to be so. If I consider myself to be no better than Romans 7:14-25, am I considering myself dead to sin? If I consider myself a wretched man, if I consider myself that all I can ever do is the evil that I don't want to do, am I being consistent with Romans 6:11?
Is it possible to reckon myself dead to sin while in the same thought think of myself as the man in Romans 7:19? "I do not do the good I want." He doesn't say, "Sometimes I don't do it." He says, "I don't do it." "The evil I do not want to do, that I practice." The NASB and the NKJV have correctly and rightly used the term "practice." It has that emphasis in the original Greek as well. According to 1 John 3:4-10, a person who practices evil is not a Christian. Who is your father if you practice sin? The devil. This man is practicing sin.
Paul makes a risky statement in Romans 6:14 that he knows is going to rile the Jew, and he knows that he must fully explain that statement. He realizes that he needs to explain about not being under law, so as you break into Romans 7, he picks up his discourse again about law. He uses an illustration about marriage. Death releases us from relationships. The first husband was the law, and we are now married to Christ.
"Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God" (Romans 7:4). What has happened to our relationship to the law? We have died to it. We have been freed from the law in order that we may bear fruit for God. The Galatians had gone back to the law and instead of becoming more righteous, they were becoming more fleshly. You cannot be justified or sanctified by the law. Does that mean we abandon law? Not at all. The path to righteousness is degree by degree being made into the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Romans 7:4-6 are the keys to interpreting the rest of Romans 7 and on into Romans 8. Verse 4 comes off of 6:22 and is being enlarged upon. Verse 5 is a picture of a lost person because there is death. The first half of Romans 8 is about the lost man in the flesh and the saved man in the Spirit. Verse 6 is a picture of a saved man. The man in Romans 7:14-25 is of the flesh. He is not bringing forth fruits of righteousness. He is faced with the law and only seeing sinful passions spring forth. Romans 8:4 gives us a beautiful picture of the Christian life. We're talking sanctification here, not justification.
The law is good, just, holy, spiritual, but it can't sanctify us. In Romans 7, the law could never change him. It's the perfect standard, but when someone of the flesh is sold under sin, confronted by the law, all he does is evil. The law that said "Do not covet" only stirred up all sorts of covetousness (Romans 7:7-8).
God did what the law could never do (Romans 8:3). Christ condemned sin in the flesh to set us free that we might, in our lives, be those who fulfill the righteous requirement of the law (v.4). Romans 8:13 proves this. "Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,' and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:8-10). What is the righteous requirement of the law? Love (v.10). Are we, as Christians, expected to keep the righteous requirements of the law? 1 John says that if you don't love the brethren, if you don't show forth love, that's the greatest evidence that you don't belong to God.
"For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot" (Romans 8:7). This is a lost person. They don't keep God's law, they cannot. A Christian is in the Spirit. They are no longer in a hostile relationship toward God and they can keep the commandments. "If you love me, obey my commandments" (John 14:15). "Whoever says 'I know him' but does not keep his commandments is a liar; and the truth is not in him" (1 John 2:4).
In Romans 7:14, sold means "sold as a slave." Thayer's Greek Lexicon says this word means "entirely under the control of the love of sinning." He is in bondage to sin. Is the true Christian sold as a slave to sin? No. They're free. "But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. When you were slaves to sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death" (Romans 6:17-22). The end of those things is death. "What's killing me?" (Romans 7:13). I'm of the flesh. I'm not free from sin, I'm not a slave of righteousness; I'm a slave of sin.
Romans 6:12 and 8:13 are words to people that are going to have to fight. Will you struggle? Yes. Will you fall? Yes. Are you going to fail? Yes. But you will conquer. In the end, the practice of your life will be one of righteousness. You may lose battles, but you will win the war. You will move, you will progress forward, you will have more victories than failures, and the overall pattern of your life, if you're a true child of God, will be one where you are at war with sin; you are doing battle with it and you will put it to death. God makes you into sin-murderers. If that is not characterized of your life, you are not a Christian. Romans 8:13 is the guarantee of that.
Before you come to Romans 6:12, you must come to terms with Romans 6:11. Before you can not let sin reign in your mortal body, you need to think right. You've got to consider yourself dead to sin. "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). If your life is characterized by these things, you can be sure that you are not a Christian and that you will spend eternity in hell. A true, biblical, born again Christian's life is characterized by waging war on, fighting against, and putting to death sin. Daily.
Romans 7:19 is a very convenient excuse for those who want to live in sin.
CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT.
Romans 7 is sandwiched between Romans 6 and 8, so the 2 Timothy 2:15 student of God's Word has some heavy duty context to deal with. The first problem we have begins in Romans 6:1—"What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" If Paul, in Romans 7:14-25, is speaking as a true Christian, we could justify this way: "Well, I'm saved by grace anyway, so so what if I can't kick evil. I'm saved by grace, right? There's no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, so what's the big deal? I can sin. Grace is greater than my sin." Paul answers this in verse 2: "By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?"
"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11). What does it mean "dead to sin"? Remember the question from verse 1. The context of Romans 6 is in regard to the power of sin. "For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace" (Romans 6:14). What is he talking about? Is he talking about whether I sin as much as I did before? He surely is. "But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed" (Romans 6:17). He's talking about me having stopped sinning the way I used to sin when I was lost. "You were once slaves to sin, but have become obedient from the heart." To what? To the standard, to the Word of God. Romans 6:7 says, "For one who has died has been set free from sin." I was set free so that I become obedient from the heart. Sin shall no longer have dominion. "If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live" (Romans 8:13b).
"But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life" (Romans 6:22). There is a certain life lived that leads to eternal life. Don't believe that? Look at Titus 1:16: "They profess to know God, but they deny Him by their works." James 2:18 says, "Show me your faith without your works and I will show you my faith by my works." Ephesians 2:10 says we were "created ... for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." Christians live a particular way that demonstrates they have received newness of life. Paul is asking the question from Romans 6:1 all the way through. Shall we continue to sin? He says, "Look! You can't! You're dead to sin—you've died to sin being in Christ, united in Him; just as He rose, you've risen in newness of life." That is regeneration. You cannot continue in it; God made you obedient.
"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin" (Romans 6:11). He's hitting upon the way you think. Consider yourselves dead to sin. The word used here is the Greek logizomai (λογιζομαι), which is the same word used 11 times in Romans 4. It is the same word used to say, "Abraham believed God, and it was counted (reckoned, imputed) to him as righteousness" (Romans 4:3). We are to count, reckon, consider ourselves to be so. If I consider myself to be no better than Romans 7:14-25, am I considering myself dead to sin? If I consider myself a wretched man, if I consider myself that all I can ever do is the evil that I don't want to do, am I being consistent with Romans 6:11?
Is it possible to reckon myself dead to sin while in the same thought think of myself as the man in Romans 7:19? "I do not do the good I want." He doesn't say, "Sometimes I don't do it." He says, "I don't do it." "The evil I do not want to do, that I practice." The NASB and the NKJV have correctly and rightly used the term "practice." It has that emphasis in the original Greek as well. According to 1 John 3:4-10, a person who practices evil is not a Christian. Who is your father if you practice sin? The devil. This man is practicing sin.
Paul makes a risky statement in Romans 6:14 that he knows is going to rile the Jew, and he knows that he must fully explain that statement. He realizes that he needs to explain about not being under law, so as you break into Romans 7, he picks up his discourse again about law. He uses an illustration about marriage. Death releases us from relationships. The first husband was the law, and we are now married to Christ.
"Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God" (Romans 7:4). What has happened to our relationship to the law? We have died to it. We have been freed from the law in order that we may bear fruit for God. The Galatians had gone back to the law and instead of becoming more righteous, they were becoming more fleshly. You cannot be justified or sanctified by the law. Does that mean we abandon law? Not at all. The path to righteousness is degree by degree being made into the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Romans 7:4-6 are the keys to interpreting the rest of Romans 7 and on into Romans 8. Verse 4 comes off of 6:22 and is being enlarged upon. Verse 5 is a picture of a lost person because there is death. The first half of Romans 8 is about the lost man in the flesh and the saved man in the Spirit. Verse 6 is a picture of a saved man. The man in Romans 7:14-25 is of the flesh. He is not bringing forth fruits of righteousness. He is faced with the law and only seeing sinful passions spring forth. Romans 8:4 gives us a beautiful picture of the Christian life. We're talking sanctification here, not justification.
The law is good, just, holy, spiritual, but it can't sanctify us. In Romans 7, the law could never change him. It's the perfect standard, but when someone of the flesh is sold under sin, confronted by the law, all he does is evil. The law that said "Do not covet" only stirred up all sorts of covetousness (Romans 7:7-8).
God did what the law could never do (Romans 8:3). Christ condemned sin in the flesh to set us free that we might, in our lives, be those who fulfill the righteous requirement of the law (v.4). Romans 8:13 proves this. "Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,' and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:8-10). What is the righteous requirement of the law? Love (v.10). Are we, as Christians, expected to keep the righteous requirements of the law? 1 John says that if you don't love the brethren, if you don't show forth love, that's the greatest evidence that you don't belong to God.
"For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot" (Romans 8:7). This is a lost person. They don't keep God's law, they cannot. A Christian is in the Spirit. They are no longer in a hostile relationship toward God and they can keep the commandments. "If you love me, obey my commandments" (John 14:15). "Whoever says 'I know him' but does not keep his commandments is a liar; and the truth is not in him" (1 John 2:4).
If you believe yourself to be a wretched man, to be defeated, to be the person who cannot do the good he wants to do, you've already lost the battle. Romans 6:11 says you need to consider yourselves dead to sin. If you don't start this battle by thinking right, you'll never win it. We live according to what we believe (Prov. 23:7a).If you do not believe you are more than conquerors in Christ, if you do not believe that you must by the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body in order to win, if you do not believe you are free and have been made obedient from the heart to God's Word, if you do not believe that sin will not have dominion over you, if you believe you're some wretched Romans 7 man, then you've lost the battle. Paul is using a "historical present" in Romans 7:14-25 (in fact, from verse 7 through verse 25), demonstrating what he just mentioned in verses 7-13 and what he was confronted with. He set the historical context for us. Paul delighted in the law as a Pharisee (see Romans 2 and Philippians 3).
You act the way you act because you believe the way you believe. You behave the way you behave because you think the way you think. How you believe determines what you do. Correct belief and correct thinking will result in correct action.
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In Romans 7:14, sold means "sold as a slave." Thayer's Greek Lexicon says this word means "entirely under the control of the love of sinning." He is in bondage to sin. Is the true Christian sold as a slave to sin? No. They're free. "But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. When you were slaves to sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death" (Romans 6:17-22). The end of those things is death. "What's killing me?" (Romans 7:13). I'm of the flesh. I'm not free from sin, I'm not a slave of righteousness; I'm a slave of sin.
Romans 6:12 and 8:13 are words to people that are going to have to fight. Will you struggle? Yes. Will you fall? Yes. Are you going to fail? Yes. But you will conquer. In the end, the practice of your life will be one of righteousness. You may lose battles, but you will win the war. You will move, you will progress forward, you will have more victories than failures, and the overall pattern of your life, if you're a true child of God, will be one where you are at war with sin; you are doing battle with it and you will put it to death. God makes you into sin-murderers. If that is not characterized of your life, you are not a Christian. Romans 8:13 is the guarantee of that.
Before you come to Romans 6:12, you must come to terms with Romans 6:11. Before you can not let sin reign in your mortal body, you need to think right. You've got to consider yourself dead to sin. "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). If your life is characterized by these things, you can be sure that you are not a Christian and that you will spend eternity in hell. A true, biblical, born again Christian's life is characterized by waging war on, fighting against, and putting to death sin. Daily.