I grew up in a pretty strange house. My house was originally built as kind of an apartment for sharecroppers on Mr. Taylor's plantation way, way back in the day. And the first thing, if you were to drive up to my house, the first thing you would notice is there are two front doors. Now when I say two front doors you're thinking like there's one little walkway with a portico and then maybe you come back out there's a long brick walkway and somewhere else there's kind of a hidden door. What I mean is we have one big front porch and two doors right next to each other. I didn't think this was weird because it is the house I spent my entire life in but everybody else who walks up doesn't know right offhand that the door on the left is the one that gets you into the living room. The door on the right has never, ever, ever been opened as long as I remember. But it would get you to my sister's bedroom. Nobody else knows that. I thought that was implicit knowledge. There's some other weird things about my house. The kitchen was built by my granddad. It just kind of sits on the ground so the floor rots out about every third or fourth year because you're really supposed to have crawl space. You're not supposed to put floor on dirt. Who knew? But the strangest thing about my house, to me, as a young boy who grew up with older brothers who liked to scare him, is that if you go up into the finished attic, the finished part of the attic where my brothers had a room, there's a door behind a bookcase. That alone is weird. And I was told terrifying stories about what was behind that door. And I was threatened of what would happen to me if I opened that door, which were much more believable than the stories. And even though I spent the whole four years I was in high school in that room, I believe, I cannot remember a single time I have ever opened that door. It's just too scary, I'm not going there. The Apostle Paul in this text, in Romans 7, the last text in Romans 7, he takes us to something similar, to a door that we don't like to open. But it's not, maybe not the most precise way to describe it as a door. It's more of a flaw, a gap. And it's in a deep, deep part of our character that we don't like to talk about. It's in a deep part of our character that we kind of want to pretend is not there. But that flaw comes out. I remember my first time of experiencing the flaw. It was on my fourth birthday. And it was kind of the first birthday party where I was old enough that I really have clear memories of it. People were coming in from out of town for me, right? The kitchen table had a big cake and presents on it for me. And I remember everybody getting bubbles and we're playing and everybody was singing to me. And my birthday is in May, and I had one of those little kiddie pools, you know, it was like this deep in plastic, but I thought it was the most awesome thing ever. And we were gonna, I'd been telling people for weeks, we were gonna swim on my birthday. Now, of course, you can't swim in this, but let me go, I was four. And my birthday came, and it was cold, like many Tennessee days are in May, it was cold. And of course I didn't care and my mom had told me all day we weren't gonna swim and I didn't care and I filled that pool up and I went and jumped in it. And I remember the spanking that I got and just this overwhelming feeling of, I mean, this day was for me. And the very fact that everything about this day was for me, it made me act badly. It made me act more rebelliously than I would normally act. There's something wrong with that. It's this thing that's kind of deep in our personality that we usually were able to cover up, but it surprises us. A good friend of ours is running for the student council, and she's such a close friend of ours that we don't vote for her because we honestly just can't imagine life if she were to win and I didn't. I don't like that about me, but I did that. It's a part of me that's deep, and it comes out at very weird times. It ruins wedding rehearsals. I don't know how many wedding rehearsal dinners you've been to. I've been to maybe 50, so many so that Bianca and I, we sit around and we talk about them, and we just compare toasts. Oh, this is the, you're not the best friend here. I am the best friend here toast. This is the, oh, well, it's good that you've known her since you were three, but I'm the one who really knows her toast. And it's very quick and easy to see that most wedding rehearsals aren't really about the couple. It's about me showing you that I'm the one who's actually the best friend here. It's that thing that comes out when you yell at your child on Christmas morning. Or you get so mad, maybe you don't yell, but you're so mad at him. How dare he not look happy after all I've spent? It's that little part in you that makes you turn a single disagreement, one disagreement into an issue that corrupts a friendship. This flaw takes different forms. We feel it at different times. Sometimes it just comes across as anger and we don't even know what we're mad about. Sometimes it comes out as a joy. A joy in the sorrow of another. Really being happy that Peyton Manning gets injured. Sometimes it comes out as a jealousy. Sometimes it comes out as a fear. Sometimes it comes out as a frustration or a sadness that cries out that the world should be better. Sometimes it does come out in our sin when we sin and we disappoint ourselves. But we honestly look at what we did. We honestly look at the surface sin. And we say, you know what? The reason why I did that is not because I don't believe in Jesus, because I do. I never stopped believing. I just didn't want Him right then. I wanted this sin more than I wanted Him. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about that flaw within us that is so deep that it makes the apostle Paul say, I don't even know what I'm doing. The things that I want to do, I don't do. The things that I wanna stop doing, I just keep practicing, I can't quit them. I find it to be this irresistible law, like the law of gravity that whenever I seek to do good, evil is right there beside me. and makes him cry out with the most dark, the darkest cry in all of scripture, wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of sin and death? And the fascinating thing that we're gonna see is that that cry, that barbaric cry from the very core of his being is right next to, it is one verse away from the most comforting, joyful, glorious, hopeful chapter in all the Bible. And what I want you to see, my goal for you today is not to see that those two things, that's not a contradiction, that's not a surprise. This flaw in your character, this dark place in your character that you don't want to admit exists, you have to go through that flaw. to get to the glory. It's the only place to find it. You see, we're talking about something this semester called Christian virtue, changing from the inside out. And what I want you to see, and what you really, if you're gonna get it at all, what you have to believe is this, human virtue and Christian virtue are complete and utter opposites. Human virtue is based on pride, Be this kind of man. Be a self-made man. Be a refined person. And it appeals to shame. Aren't you ashamed? You don't want to be that kind of girl, do you? But Christian virtue is based on humility. We have a God of humility. And in order to build Christian virtue, we have to dig out the foundations of our pride and go through this flaw. And it is built up with love and with grace. And you will not ever even begin to build upon it until you face that flaw. And you see that it's a doorway that leads to glory. Please read with me from Romans 7, verses 15 through 25. I do not understand what I do, but what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do. Now, if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it's no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing. Now, if I do what I do not want to do, it's no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work. Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being, I delight in God's law. But I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God who delivers me through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So then I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in my sinful nature, a slave to the law of sin. Thus far, the reading of what is at one and the same time, the most confusing and disheartening text of scripture that has to me become the most encouraging place in scripture. Because I don't know about you, I'm just glad to know that I'm not the only one who feels this way. Amen. Amen. First thing we see in this text is this, even after, even after coming to Jesus, even after confessing your sins and being received and forgiven and having His Holy Spirit indwell you, even after that, you are still not what you ought to be. You are still not what you ought to be. Paul says it like this. I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. where I delight in the law in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Now, first of all, you have to know this, theologians hate this passage because it is not clean. This doesn't fit our categories very well, and we want theology that fits. And theology that fits says that Paul here must have been talking about himself before he was a Christian, but now that he's a Christian, he's talking about himself in the past tense, even though he uses only first person and only present tense. Even though there is no grammatical way whatsoever, he could possibly be talking about himself in the past. He has to be talking about himself in the past. because this would be clumsy and dirty and not clean. And I want you to know that truth is seldom clean. The truth is usually messy. And the truth is, as Paul has described it, and as you have experienced it, the truth is after you come to Jesus, you are not simple and clean and perfect. millions of miles away from it. You're still unable to be what you want to be, right? You know that. And you find evil right there beside you, even when you're trying to do good. I mean, when you do something perfect, if there's a sin that you've You hate, and you're doing everything you can to stop doing it. Maybe there's somebody in your class that you just despise, but you know you're supposed to love her, and so you invite her to your birthday party. Maybe it's, you finally have gone six months or two years, and you haven't looked at pornography once, and you don't even want to anymore. Maybe it's something else, whatever it is, you know that even in the midst of doing that, you're so proud of yourself. And that pride in yourself is the opposite of Christianity. And you think God owes you something because you did that? A friend of mine was telling me about taking his wife on a little weekend excursion to the beach, and that whole weekend, he did everything right. He likes to walk on the beach, but she likes to walk on the boardwalk, so they stayed on the boardwalk all weekend. And he really likes seafood, but she likes steak and American food. And so even though they were on the beach, they went to steakhouses and ate in her kinds of restaurants. And he wants to sit on the beach all day and get a tan, but she likes to shop. And so they left the beach to go to outlet malls. And on the way home from this perfect weekend, they stopped at a Burger King in pouring rain, and he went in, because he didn't want to make her get out in the rain, so he went in for her, and he got the food, and he waited in line, and because he didn't tell the waiter it was a to-go order, you know, he got just handed his food on a tray. and he didn't get a bag, and he didn't get all the napkins and stuff they put in a bag, and he was in a hurry, and there was this enormous line, and it was one of those places where he had to go to a different line, so he didn't want to wait in line again just to ask for a bag. It was awkward, and he just wanted to get on the road, and so he just grabbed the hamburgers, and he went back to the car, and in the car, the first thing she said was not thank you, or that's so sweet of you to get out in the rain, but the first thing she said was, you didn't get a bag? And then as she's eating her sandwich and she realizes that they don't have napkins, she says, you know, if you'd have gotten a bag, there'd have been napkins in it. And then when she finishes her hamburger, she wads up the paper and she doesn't have any place to put it. And she says, man, I just wish you'd have gotten a bag. And finally, he just has had enough. And he drops bad words upon her. And he says to her, enough with the stinking bag. You old bag, I mean, you can say that, but. And of course, their perfect weekend ended with a fight and a ride home in silence. And he said, during that ride home in silence, what I realized was this, I had done nothing for my wife all weekend. Everything that I had done, I had done for me. I had done it all for me, to get her to do for me what I wanted her to do, to get her to like me, to get her to think that I was awesome so that I could think I was awesome. That's what Paul means here. Whenever we seek to do good, evil is right there at hand. Evil's right there patting us on the back going, you're so good. I'm so proud of you. Evil is close at hand. And Paul says, it's always there. It's always there. No matter how good or bad we do, no matter how far along we come, no matter how much we grow, it's always there. I was once told by a student in my ministry that I was the most humble pastor that he'd ever met. How arrogant do you think that made me? It's always there. And that doesn't work with us. We can't imagine why God would leave us like that. And we wanna say, but God, why wouldn't you just take us away so that we would never sin? And we can ask him that one day. We probably won't, but we can. But we're not even gonna get into the why's he does it this way step today. We just have to start out with acknowledging the true fact that it is always there. And then secondly, you can't do anything about it. Not only is there this yawning gap between what you ought to be and what you are, you can't do anything about it. And this is the most frustrating thing. How does he describe it in here? He says, I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is in my flesh, for I have the desire to do what is right, but I do not have the ability to carry it out. That's an easy passage to memorize. If you don't have that one memorized, you don't know yourself. I have the desire to do what is right, but I lack the ability to carry it out. I know what I should do. I've got people in my life that I should forgive, and they're at an age now when they can't really hurt me anymore, and they're asking me to forgive them. And I have the desire to do what is right, but I don't have the ability to carry it out. I know what a humble person looks like. I know that the key component to humility is not that you feel badly about yourself or that you think lowly thoughts about yourself. The true nature of humility is that you don't think about yourself at all. I have the desire to do that. But every day I ask myself, was I humble today? And in asking the question, I'm thinking about myself. Can't help it. I have a desire to do what is right. I can't get myself there. Now you may think this is slightly frustrating for you. It's killing me. This is my job to tell you what you ought to be. And I know what I ought to be. And I know what I am. And I can't get there. I can't get there. And Paul tells us, shows us, that the true joy of Christianity comes when we stop turning away from that flaw, when we stop denying that that flaw is there. And instead of denying it, instead of hating it, instead of killing ourselves to cover it up, we just step into it. And he shows us this is not something we do once, but it is something we do continually. He calls us, by his example and through his teaching, he is calling us to a life of continual rejoicing and hope that comes only through humility and confession. He's calling us to a life of confession and repentance. He doesn't tell us to look for answers to our flaws. He tells us to step into them. He says, wretched man that I am. He's not denying this. He's not saying, what should I do? He says, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, my Lord. By acknowledging, by getting into it, by stepping into his weakness, he goes from crying out about his wretchedness to singing about the glory of Jesus. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, my Lord. Thanks be to God. It's a continual lifestyle. It's a continual process. It is that beauty that comes when you're truly vulnerable. When you're just honestly, deeply humiliated. And you look up into a smiling face. You remember the first time you experienced that? The first time you stayed up way too late talking? And probably because of the sleep deprivation, you started saying things that you'd never told anybody before. And some of you ladies cried all your makeup off. And you looked up into a face that was smiling. It's as if you look into the face of an enemy and you find mercy and grace. For some of us, we knew that night that this was the person we were gonna marry. The person who saw us weak and loved us in that weakness. And that's the joy that Jesus draws us to. That is a joy that He calls us to experience, this feeling of deep joy that only comes after deep moments of vulnerability. We have to walk through this door of darkness. We have to claim God's love. He loves us the way we are, jealous, angry, self-righteous, prideful, petulant. little, take joy in wrong, evil, little things. We're just bad. It's embarrassing. I mean, honestly, some of you are just so glad that Oklahoma State lost. That's embarrassing. That's embarrassing. Take joy in somebody else's anger. It's awful. Doesn't that humiliate you? I know it. I lived years of rejoicing when Ole Miss lost. It's just ugh. Why? Why would you feel that way? Why would you comb the newspapers looking for a scandal about somebody just because you hate them? It's embarrassing. It's dirty. Don't deny that. Admit it. Step into that crack. Step into that flaw. Feel the grace that comes, that Jesus loves that person. Jesus loves that person. He says to us, I have come to meet your deepest needs, but you have to let yourself feel the need before you can ever experience it. Growth as a Christian doesn't feel like you think it's going to feel. We think there's going to be this one moment of brokenness and sadness and then a lifetime of just kind of forgetting that ever happened. But it's richer than that. It is a lifetime of experiencing that love that comes to us in our brokenness. It's rich. It's fun. It becomes a process. I mean, it becomes a process. We know that it's going to happen. You know what it looks like for me? It looks like getting up on Sunday morning, an hour before my alarm clock goes off, because I'm so nervous that you're not gonna like this sermon, and worrying and fretting, and then finally praying every Sunday, Lord, I want to be a star. You know that. I want this sermon to be good, not because I want people to come closer to Jesus, but because I want to be a star in my little world. You know that. And I just kind of laugh at myself. And I realize that Jesus loves this selfish kid who does everything for himself. And I come out and do the best I can, and I'm actually trying to get y'all to find Jesus in this. That's what it looks like for me. What does it look like for you? I don't know. You're hosting a party and you realize in the middle of getting everything ready that you don't care about the guests, you care about what the guests think about you. And you confess that as a sin. I'm not doing this for anybody, I'm doing this for me. You kind of laugh at yourself. You enjoy the grace that God gives you. And you go on and throw a party. And in the middle of the party you realize you didn't get your kid's shoes out of the floor and you're okay with that. And you move on. It just doesn't feel like you think it's gonna feel, but it's much richer. It's much prettier. It enables you to enjoy and celebrate with your friends when they celebrate. It enables you to be happy with somebody who got something good that you really wanted. You can just be happy for them. Because it feels good to win, and I'm glad you got to feel that. It means realizing that when you go out on a date and you try to make everything perfect and you fail miserably, that maybe your spouse actually loves you and not the dates you provide. And that's a good feeling. That's what grace feels like for us. It feels like building personality, building a character of virtue upon a foundation of humility. It looks like finding something every day to repent of and feeling the love of Christ going to the bottom of that repentance every day. There's a passage in the Old Testament in Joshua where there's an awful sin that God judges Israel for and in order to atone for that sin, He calls for the sacrifice of the man who committed it. And they stone him and they build a heap of stones over his body. And he tells them to call that valley, the Valley of Sorrow. And then hundreds of years later, he goes back to that valley. And he says, I will put in the Valley of Sorrow, a doorway of hope. Paul here I think is showing us the depths of what that prophecy means. In the valley of our deepest sorrows, God puts a doorway of hope, an open doorway welcoming you to grace. Are you a little bit afraid to walk through it? We're gonna spread it open for you down here at the Lord's table. I pray that you'll walk through it with me. Please pray with me. Our Father in heaven, there's just things about ourselves that we don't like. You don't like them either. Nobody likes them, they're awful. I pray, Lord, that we would stop pretending they're not there and instead that we would start experiencing your grace right there at the place where we feel the most shame. I pray in Jesus name.