Living the Faith: The War Within Me
Pastor Tan Thai · Nov 6, 2022
This sermon explores the inner spiritual battle between the old self and the new self in the life of a believer, based on Romans 7:14-25. Paul confesses that although he desires to do good, evil clings to him, and no one can win this battle through their own strength. The only solution lies not in personal effort or law-keeping, but in Jesus Christ.
This sermon, preached on Sunday, November 6, 2021, focuses on one of the most important realities of the Christian life: the inner battle that occurs in the spirit of every believer. Based on Romans 7:14-25, the pastor points out that the greatest obstacle to living out one's faith is not circumstances or the people around us, but oneself. The entire Christian life can be understood as a war between the old self before coming to faith and the new self after, even though both share the same body and name.
To illustrate, the sermon draws on Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novella 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886), in which an upright doctor is transformed into a ruthless murderer. The pastor argues that Stevenson, a believer raised in a God-fearing family, may have drawn his central idea from Paul's teaching in Romans 7. Three parallels are identified: first, hidden within every person is a sinful self that the Confucian saying 'human nature is originally good' cannot explain; second, this sinful nature is often carefully concealed even in those who appear outwardly moral; and third, human beings can never deal with sin through personal willpower and determination alone.
The sermon presents four consequences that follow when believers try to overcome sin in their own strength: mental confusion and an inescapable cycle of despair, guilt and shame, discouragement and disappointment, and ultimately hopeless surrender. The pastor uses the vivid image of a corpse bound to a murderer as an ancient punishment to illustrate the oppressive burden of sin that people carry daily. He also demonstrates that the law cannot resolve sin but in fact provokes it further, citing the historical example of Prohibition-era America and the teaching of Romans 7:7-8.
The conclusion opens with hope as the pastor quotes Paul's desperate cry, 'Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?' followed immediately by the answer: 'Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!' The solution is not more knowledge or greater effort, but Jesus Christ himself. The sermon closes by introducing two passages from Ephesians 4:22-24 and Colossians 3:9-10 about putting off the old self and putting on the new self, promising to develop this theme the following week.