Daily Lesson for June 29, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Romans chapter 7 verses 13 through 24:

13 Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. 14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. 15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. 17 So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 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. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Now here's a man willing to come clean!  Paul is what they call in AA a person of "rigorous honesty".  In other words, he has done the hard work of telling the truth about himself, and the truth is he is a lot less good than he and others once thought he was.

It cannot be overestimated how difficult this sobering truth must have been for a Pharisee like Paul to swallow. For a person habitually conditioned to think of himself and his people as agents of God's righteousness to then behold the truth in the prophet Isaiah's words that even their "righteous deeds are like filthy rags" is to look into a moral mirror and suddenly see it shattered. The whole concept of self and race and nation is fractured.

Reinhold Niebuhr called this realization the "final enigma of history".  In this enigma unraveled, humanity discovers "not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is to be overcome."

Such an enigma is hard, impossible even, to solve. Righteous indignation fights against it. This is the reason it took 150 years for the Southern Baptist Convention to apologize for slavery and (just two weeks ago) call for furling up the Confederate Battle Flag. It took that long to see. I hope it's not another 150 years for my own Cooperative Baptist Fellowship to see its own injustice towards the LGBTQ community. But the unrighteous of the righteous is the hardest thing in the world to see. It's the log in our own eye.

Paul says, "What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."  What we want to do is be good people. I want to be a good man. But the irony is that in becoming good we discover the truth of Jesus' words, that in fact, "No one is good but God alone."

That's a sobering look in the mirror. And it's also a necessary one, if we wish to be saved.