Do you have a good excuse?

Paul wrote Romans 7 as a cry of anguish but sometimes I wonder if we have turned it into a ‘permission slip’.

Somewhere between the writing and the reading, one of the most transparent, vulnerable and honest passages in Scripture became the most theologically ‘convenient’. A heart-felt confession became a comfort blanket. A lament became a lifestyle.

It’s a challenge to our thinking; when Paul writes “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” he is not offering pastoral reassurance to people who have stopped fighting and just given in to sin. He is describing the specific torment of a man who is fighting. The struggle he names is real, and there is grace in naming it, but the struggle is the sign of life, not the shape of it.

The problem with using Romans 7 as an excuse or an alibi for persistent, serious sin is that it requires you to stop reading before you get to chapter 8. We invented the chapters, so you simply cannot stay in chapter 7 – the gospel must be heard because it is good news. Very good news. So you must read on …

Paul doesn’t end at the cry. He ends at the rescue. “Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It feels uncomfortable to read the intimate moment. That’s not a man getting comfortable, excuse in hand, no need for assistance. Those are the words of a man being rescued, thrown a lifeline. And then, out of nowhere, comes the loud rumble of thunder as chapter 8 brings the declaration that there is now, ‘no condemnation’, and that the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is at work in you. Breath-taking! The whole argument moves. It doesn’t stay stuck, parked with a broken clutch in the wretchedness.

What we’ve done, in many cases, is screenshot the wretchedness and frame it on the wall. There! That’s me – can’t help it!

Let’s be honest about what the ‘alibi’ actually does. It takes the descriptive and makes it prescriptive. It takes Paul’s honesty about the tight tension of sanctification and turns it into a ceiling on expectation. If I can always say “well, Paul struggled too,” then I never have to ask the harder question: am I actually struggling, or have I made peace with something I should still be at war with? Surely grace is there to help me resist as well as know forgiveness and restoration?

There is a real and important difference between someone who sins and grieves it, who fights and sometimes falls, who returns to the cross with genuine sorrow and genuine resolve, and someone who invokes Romans 7 the morning after in order to feel theological about their failure. One is the painful reality of life in the already-and-not-yet. The other is using Scripture as anaesthetic.

The other thing worth naming is this. The passage, whatever you conclude about whether Paul is describing pre- or post-conversion experience, is not primarily about sin management. It’s about the major insufficiency of the law to produce what only grace can. The law shows you what’s wrong, but cannot fix it. That’s the point. And the answer to that insufficiency is not quiet resignation. It’s the Spirit.

We have to finish the medicine; Romans 7 without Romans 8 is just diagnosis without treatment – it leaves you helpless.

As you look deeper, Paul’s cry of wretchedness is one of the most human things in the New Testament. Lose yourself in Paul’s writing as you read through; it’s heartfelt and utterly vulnerable, if anything, it deserves to be read with empathy, but… empathy doesn’t mean we let people build a home there. No alibi. We must move on. Real pastoral care is walking people through the cry to the rescue. Not letting them settle at verse 24 and call it good theology.

The wretched man got an answer. That answer is still available. Grace upon grace upon grace.

Have a different spirit.

It’s not something I imagine you read often, but the text in Numbers 14 is worth thinking about a few times today. Turn your bible app to Numbers; Caleb and Joshua have returned from the same land as the other ten men sent to spy out the land, but what do Caleb and Joshua see as they tip toe with the others in the shadows of a foreign land? Same ‘giants’. Same walled cities. Same geography. Nothing different about the terrain, but everything different about how they saw what was before them.

And when they bring a harrowing report, God responds, that they are basically not to worry, because they are not going to enter it. With a couple of exceptions; Joshua and Caleb. God explains, “My servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit and has followed me fully, I will bring into the land.”

A different spirit. Let that stir you today.

This isn’t about personality. Caleb isn’t braver by temperament or wired differently to the other ten. The distinction God draws is spiritual. The ten operated out of fear dressed up as realism. Perhaps we can call it lethargy. Caleb operated out of something the Spirit of God had placed in him. Faith rooted in who God is, not in a calculation of odds.

And as you look at the news later, you’ll be aware you are living in a moment that calls for exactly this.

Look around. The noise is constant. Wars and rumours of wars. Nations destabilised. Institutions that held for generations beginning to creak and shift like the bows of an old wooden ship. Jesus told us to expect it, and here it is. The question isn’t whether the world is unsettled. It is. The question is what spirit you’re bringing to it. You see, you matter.

Here’s the thing. The ten spies weren’t lying. The giants were real. The walls were high. Fear that calls itself wisdom is the most convincing kind, because it sounds so reasonable. “We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers,” they said. That’s the tell. The problem was never the size of the enemy. It was the size of God, as they were actually living it. They were looking at things, real things, real obstacles and threats in the wrong way. One day Joshua would be marching around a city for seven days… but our focus is on Caleb right now so that perhaps teh Holy Spirit will allow something to drop for you.

A different spirit changes what you see. Not literally. The giants don’t disappear. The uncertainty doesn’t lift, but when the Spirit of God is genuinely at work in you, the question shifts. It stops being “can we handle this?” and becomes “is God leading us through this?” Those are not quite the same question, and one of them has a very different answer.

Caleb followed God fully. Wholehearted. All the way in, regardless of the alarming consensus in the room.

That’s what you’re being called to right now.

Not heroics. Not having all the answers about what’s coming next. Just this: staying close enough to God that when the room gets loud and the report gets frightening, you still know what you heard, what you know and whose you are.

For Caleb (and Joshua) the land still needed taking, but the promise was still real. Forty long years on, Caleb walked in. At eighty-five years old, he stood at the edge of his inheritance and said, “give me this mountain.” The people who said it couldn’t be done were long gone.

You are not reading the Matthew 24 signs of the times so that you can panic with more to alarm you! You’re reading those signs because God wants you awake, grounded, and ready.

A different spirit. That’s the invitation in front of you right now. Be convinced with what you know from Scripture and the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Like Caleb, have a different spirit. One that says, “I believe God…”