For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Those of us of a certain age will remember Flip Wilson’s character, Geraldine. Whenever she did something wrong the response was: “The devil made me do it.” Geraldine, like St. Paul, is describing a very common human experience — that despite our good intentions we keep messing up. The apostle does not blame the devil but “sin that dwells in me.” While not directly related to sin a good analogy would be for anyone who has tried to keep a diet. You wake up in the morning with a firm resolutine to eat right but when that piece of pecan pie comes by you can’t resist. In the moral sphere, that experience of the gap between what we want to do and what we actually do is, in St. Paul’s estimation, due to the “sin that dwells in me.” Our wills are not strong enough to resist temptation. The solution as the epistle records is not to rely on our own strength but on what Christ can do with the likes of us. This reliance is not a one time thing but a practice. Like any muscle, the more we rely on Christ the more strength we will have to do what we really want to do instead of following the latest whim.
