Romans 7: 14-17      God’s Law Reveals Our Sin    –     Struggling with Sin

¹⁴ So the trouble is not with the law, for it is spiritual and good. The trouble is with me, for I am all too human, a slave to sin. ¹⁵ I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. ¹⁶ But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷ So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it

Once we have used God’s Word as a standard to evaluate our lives looking for an area to improve our relationship with Him, it is time for us to get to work. If we root cause most of the sins in our lives we will find at its source we violate one of God’s direct standards of Law for us in the 10 commandments. The first 4 cover our relationship with God and the remaining 6 our relationship with each other. We will usually find a pretty direct path from our sin to the relationship with others ( last 6 commandments ) because that is where the symptoms normally show up. The root cause of the symptom will almost always connect to one or more of the first 4 commands and that may be harder to identify. This is one of the decisions we will make that will allow Lent to add value to our lives or miss the opportunity.

Here is a simple example with a few of the moving parts – Commandment #10  – Not to be envious of what others have.

Rather than find contentment where we are, our human response is to find a way to get what others have so we will no longer have to be envious. In our assessment of how to best do that we realize we are going to have to work overtime and that will require working on Sunday. Now have violated Commandment #4 – Keeping the Sabbath Holy but that is the easy part. Still we move forward under the misguided thought that we are taking on more work to take better care of our family. Next we begin to accumulate the money needed to support our plan but our patience is shorter than we thought and we borrow the money to go ahead and obtain the things we “have” to have now. We find then that our entire focus in life revolves around the money we now “have” to earn to pay our bills that include these new things in life. Often without even noticing it we have started bowing down to worship money as an idle because we cannot live without all of it we can make. We have crossed over Commandment #2 in worshipping something other than God whether that is money or the things money buys us. In rolling together our actions across commandments # 10,4 & 2 we have substituted all these things for our relationship with God and we have put many things before Him. We now have trespassed Commandment #1 – Only Worship God.

This is an example we may have lived or have seen lived out many times. Our opportunity during Lent is to spend time in God’s Word to move from our symptoms to our root cause sins that are moving our lives away from God. The really great thing is that if we put in the time and study to determine the right area it will payoff in many areas of our lives. It will strengthen our witness for Jesus Christ as His purpose for our lives will become a part of our character.