IT is instructive to observe how many times "I" or "me" occurs from the fourteenth to the last verses of the seventh chapter of the epistle to the Romans. This great chapter of experience opens up to us a view of our hearts, and teaches us where we are spiritually. The experienced physician, gifted with perception, upon hearing some of our symptoms, inquires, Do you feel this? or, Are you subject to that trouble? And the patient wonders how the physician exposes the very symptoms of which he himself had omitted to speak. In spiritual matters the constant reference to self, to "I," to "me," lays bare to us our inmost selves. "Am I really a Christian? Could a Christian have such thoughts as I have? I am brighter today, but I shall be as despairing as before, tomorrow." What is the ailment here? The statements are no doubt perfectly just and true, but they are symptoms of a very feeble state of soul, and they all indicate self-occupation. If a man be in pain, the pain necessarily occupies him; but where there is pain, there is a cause producing it. The pain produced by self- occupation is evidence that Christ—occupation is wanting, and the true healthy Christian life—living Christ—"To me to live is Christ"—is not apprehended.
Let us look further into the experience before us. It is evidently that of a true Christian, for he cries, "I hate sin; I do not wish to do it." This longing after holiness and hatred of sin prove the speaker to be truly a child of God, for dead men do not feel, and when we were dead in trespasses and sin, we did not feel the sinfulness of sin.
A man swimming under water is not sensitive to the weight of the water above him; but let him when on land attempt to carry but a very small part of the water, the weight of which, when in it, he did not feel, and he will be crushed under the load. The sense of the load causes a struggle to be free from the burden, and the struggle to be free from sin is real and earnest in the true Christian, and it is a terrible and heartbreaking one.
However much the fact of the struggle may prove that the burdened soul is alive, the struggle is not Christian liberty of soul, it is not heavenly placidity of mind; but it is instead a sore and heavy experience.
The heart laid bare before us in our chapter, after a while comes to this remarkable confession: "I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not." We see here the good will, the holy desire, but a lack of power. We trace the love of holiness planted within, by the Holy Spirit of God, and we perceive no power to be holy. The experience is true and honest in the presence of God, for no false refuge is allowed, no weakness is excused—far from it. Nevertheless, the enlightened heart and conscience are at a loss. The believer is nonplussed, mastered, hopeless, and he cries: "I find not the power to live the life I long to live!" Yet this darkness is but that of the hour before the dawn; it is the prelude to the wise and true conclusion of the struggle: “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.”
The experience of I, I, I, me, me, me, is like that of passing through a long and weary tunnel; and when the point, "I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing," is reached, the bend in the tunnel is gained, and in a few moments there will be daylight.
When the believer knows that in him dwelleth no good thing, he has learned that he cannot in his own strength do one single thing, or think one single thought, acceptable to the Holy God. It is the lesson of utter weakness, of the utter worthlessness of self.
What, then, shall be done? Instead of self; it shall be Christ; it shall be "not I, but Christ who liveth in me." Christ the power—not myself. Christ, with Whom "I am crucified"; Christ, with Whom we died. In Christ risen, victory; in Him on high, power. And God has exposed us to ourselves, and has revealed Christ to us so that we might "rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh," and thus live the true Christ life.