Commentary on Romans 7:15-25a

If you are following along with preaching from the previous two Sunday texts from Romans, and if you have been reading my commentaries, then you know that this is another week to talk about sin from the pulpit!

You may not be saying, “Yay!” but it may still be an important sermon to preach. 

How many of your congregants are battling addictions? How many are living with someone who is an addict? You may or may not know the answer to that. But this text can help speak to that experience.

The apostle Paul, known throughout Christian history as a pretty good example of what it means to be a Christian, is here confessing how difficult it is to live the life of faith! Already, he is helping us to know that we are not alone; that even those we have called “saints” have struggled with sin.

Another example of a historical figure we associate with Christian faith is St. Augustine, the fourth-century bishop and writer who gave us the spiritual autobiographical classic Confessions.

In this work, Augustine is confessing both his sin and his faith. Written as a prayer to God, Augustine’s Confessions tell of his wayward youth, as well as how he sees God at work in the events leading up to his conversion. 

There is a passage in the Confessions that also sounds a lot like Paul’s words in Romans 7:15-20. Augustine writes: “But I was held back, not by fetters put on me by someone else, but by the iron bondage of my own will. The enemy held my will and made a chain of it and bound me with it. From a perverse will came lust, and slavery to lust became a habit, and the habit, being constantly yielded to, became a necessity. These were the links hanging each to each … and they held me fast in a hard slavery.”

Again, as we heard from last week’s passage in Romans 6, we hear echoed in Augustine’s words a connection between sin and slavery, but Augustine makes clear that this slavery did not come from outside himself. It is a chain he began forging himself. And yet now it feels beyond his control. 

If you know anyone who has participated in a Twelve Steps group for an addiction, you may have heard that the first step is acknowledging that a person is powerless over the substance they are addicted to. For those around them, this may seem counterintuitive: How can you be powerless over something you seem to be doing to yourself?

Both Paul’s words in Romans 7 and Augustine’s discussion of his slavery to sin as a self-forged chain help us to understand this experience better.

Yes, maybe the person started to drink or do drugs or whatever it is they have become powerless over, but those initial acts became links of a chain, which eventually added up to something that took over and feels like a compulsion.

I have heard that another way of understanding addiction is as the self’s attempts at self-soothing. The addiction begins as a way to help the person feel better (in the person’s mind), but gradually, it no longer functions in this self-soothing way and instead creates more problems for the people in their home life, work life, and relationships. 

Talking about addiction in this way can help your congregation feel less judgmental about persons who truly need help. Through addictions, people are trying to address a deep pain that they feel they cannot soothe in any other way. 

Listeners who do not struggle with drug or alcohol addiction may be dealing with a more pervasive addiction these days: our phones. Listeners both young and old may be checking their phones hundreds of times a day, spending hours at a time looking at these tiny screens. Trying to break an addiction to something you have to use for communication is very challenging, and our phones and their apps are designed to keep our attention for as long as possible. 

This is again where we can look at sin as a larger phenomenon. We may have a tendency to view persons with addictions as “the” sinner, when there is a whole system working together to encourage people to enjoy themselves, to put off their workday stress, and to get numb using various products available legally and illegally. It is important that we look at the larger scope of how we are being shaped as a people by what we pay attention to in our lives.

I like returning to the idea of St. Augustine’s chain: Link by link, we develop habits that either free us or enslave us. And we rarely know when we are creating one rather than the other! 

But talking about habits and how we can be more self-aware of the kind of people we want to be can help us imagine better the world Christ is calling us to create.

We can deceive ourselves often when we are tired, when we are in pain, when nothing seems to help. We can think, “I deserve this _____,” or “I will just use ____ for a little bit.” But how we tend to our suffering influences how we live the rest of our lives as well. 

Not to say that this is easy: Paul struggled, Saint Augustine struggled, and we all struggle in our own ways. But fortunately for us, we have Christ who has set us free, who we can turn to with our burdens and sorrow, and who can free us from all that enslaves us.