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The new man in your heart has this desire now to please God. But there still lives in your members the vestigial remnants of the old man of the flesh who has declared war on the leanings of the Spirit. And there are many times that when the conflict comes, you'd rather follow the old man than the new man.
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That's true, isn't it? And not doing the good that you know you ought to do and instead doing the evil that you know you ought not to do is an affliction shared by all Christians this side of glory, including the Apostle Paul. Welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing youg Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. So how does our will work, and is it free as we continue our time with RC Sproul in Romans 7, that'll be our topic today. Before we get to this sermon, remember that you can study all of Romans with Dr. Sproul. When you request the Hardcover edition of his Commentary on Romans, simply make a donation@renewingyourmind.org and we'll get a copy to you. Well, if you have your Bible, turn to Romans chapter seven, because here's Dr. Sproul.
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I'll ask you to turn to chapter seven of Romans, beginning at verse 14. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal souled under sin. For what I am doing I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice, but what I hate that I do. If then I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me that is in my flesh nothing good dwells. For to will is present with me. But how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do. But the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now, if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh, the law of sin. We are always susceptible as Christians to having ideas creep into our thinking that are quite contrary to the truth of God, but they kind of slip in unnoticed. We don't plan to embrace pagan notions that are incompatible with the truth of God. But it's been said, if a lie is repeated often enough, people begin to believe it. I would say that overwhelmingly the most widespread pagan idea that penetrates our thinking and that many times we never give it a second thought, is the humanistic, secular and pagan view of the human will. Which view of the human will is about as far removed from the biblical view as it can be. And so deeply entrenched is this pagan notion of, of the will that when we preach of the sovereignty of God in His ministry of redemption, in his work of sovereign election, and the disposition of his saving grace through the good pleasure of his will, people immediately protest, often vociferously, sometimes with great anger and passion, that this violates the free will of man. And when we begin to probe what is meant by the free will of man, what is usually expounded is this widespread and pagan understanding of the will. Now, one thing we agree with, with the pagan here, with the humanist, with the secularists, is that we as human beings are volitional creatures. And a volitional creature is a creature that has the capacity of making choices, of exercising their will. We are voluntary creatures, and we distinguish between voluntary actions and involuntary actions. Maybe certain Hindu mystics or people like Mahatma Gandhi could stop his heart from beating at will, but the vast majority of human beings have their hearts beating involuntarily. I don't have to make a decision every morning when I get up and say to my heart, please start beating. It goes in an involuntary manner. But if I decide to shave when I get out of bed in the morning, or not shave, that's not something that happens in an involuntary manner. To shave, I must make the decision. I must make the choice to exercise my will, to. To pick up the razor and trim my beard, as it were. We understand the difference between voluntary actions and involuntary actions. So then, what is the difference between the pagan view of the will and the biblical view of the will? Briefly, the pagan, human, humanistic, secular view of the will is that the will is so free that every choice that it has before can respond to out of what is called philosophically indifference. That is, to be truly free in the making of decisions and the making of choices, that freedom must be absolute. Insofar that there is nothing that influences or compels you to choose to the left or to the right. The will to be free must have no preconceived bias, no previous inclination, no prior disposition in one direction or the other. And that's what is meant by a will of indifference, that the will approaches every life situation, every option, with the true freedom to go this way or that way. Am I going too fast? You understand what I'm saying here? By the will of indifference. When John Calvin was engaged in a dispute over free will with his opponent, whose name was pegius, in the 16th century, part of the debate focused on this question of the nature of the human will. And Calvin made this observation. If you mean by free will that all of us, even in our sinful condition, have the power and the ability to choose what we want to choose by decision to do what we desire to do, then Calvin said, I completely agree with, with the idea of free will. If, however, you mean by free will the ability of a human being to choose from indifference, from a will that is not tainted, influenced, or held captive by its propensity for sin, then free will is far too grandiose a term to be applied to human beings. What Calvin was saying is, yes, we have free will in the sense that we have the ability to choose what we want. But that ability to choose what we want is not only mildly influenced, but is radically conditioned by the human corruption of our hearts, out of which flow the choices that we make. That is to say, we make evil choices not from indifference, but from a prior disposition and inclination to wickedness. As the Bible said, the desires of our hearts, this is prior to regeneration, are only wicked continuously. Now, how does this work out with what Paul is saying here in terms of Christian experience? The good that I would, that I do not, and that which I would not, the very thing I do. He's describing here this conflict sometimes between rival goods, that can be the very most difficult decision of all. Not just between good and evil, but between two different goods that can really paralyze us. But Paul is thinking in terms of all things being equal. See, the new man in your heart has this desire now to please God, but there still lives in your members the vestigial remnants of the old man of the flesh who has declared war on the leanings of the spirit. And there are many times that when the conflict comes, you'd rather follow the old man than the new man. There's no other explanation for sin. Part of me wants to obey Christ, but not all of me. There are still these inclinations, still these desires that have not been totally put to death, that they come and they bump up against my good intentions. Get in a class where the discipline of the group, the commitment that you make in advance, strengthens your resolve to grow in your understanding of the things of God. Make a family resolution, that unless you're running a fever, you're in indigestion, in the hospital, you're going to be in church on Sunday morning. You're not going to make the decision every Sunday morning. Well, should I go to church today or should I not go to church today? Let me see, what am I inclined to do this day? No, you establish a principle in your family. And you say, in our family, one of the things we do, we don't have to make decisions, we don't have to sweat over it, is that we are in the Lord's house every Sabbath day. This is exactly what the apostle Paul is talking to us about in terms of our spiritual pilgrimage, in terms of our spiritual growth. What he's saying is we have to put to death the old man, we have to feed the new man. And we know that so that when you're inclined, when you're on a high spiritual high, say, okay, I'm gonna change my diet, I'm gonna change my routine, and I'm going to get into a pattern into a group where there is discipline that will help me put the death of the old man and feed the new man. You know, that was the genius of Weight Watchers. It's still the genius of Weight watchers. I wish they never would have changed their system because I knew the old system. I don't understand the new system. So I tried everything else. But, you know, I used to hate to drive every Tuesday to those meetings where there'd be 50 women and two men. And I would have to step on that scale every week. And the scale wouldn't lie. And then they would ask us in front of everybody, well, how did you do this week? I put on upon, well, that's okay, but next week we want to see less of you. So you had the group dynamic. I mean, it's a beautiful idea, really. That's why so many people have been helped by that. Because if left to yourself, the self discipline tends to lose its passion and its zeal. Now, if we understand how the will functions and how we're involved in this kind of. Of conflict that the apostle sets forth here in his letter to the church and wrote, there's a way out. You know, when we join the church, we say, I'm going to make diligent use of the means of grace. The means of grace are the instruments that God gives us to help us overcome the weaknesses of the flesh. But understand, you will always choose what you are most inclined to choose at the moment of decision. To make diligent use of the means of grace is really to program yourself with worship, with prayer, with Scripture, so that your desires are actually sanctified. Dear ones, if you knew how much God hated your sin and you had any affection for him at all, you would never want to displease him to that degree. But again, we get our information from different sources. We read the Scriptures, and the Scriptures set before us what God delights in. And we read it and we say, I want my life to be like that. And the rest of the week we hear voices from every side telling us it's no big deal. God doesn't really care. And so we lose sight of what is pleasing to God, and we hear what is pleasing to our friends. We hear what is pleasing to the culture, and you see what happens. Our delight in God begins to lose its passion. That's one reason why we have to have the doctrine of justification by faith in our bloodstream. Because there's enough continuing sin in my life to remind me that without the righteousness of Christ, I have no hope whatsoever. All right. There's more to be said on this business of the will. I've written a whole book on it, if you want to read it, called Willing to Believe. Where I go back through history and look at Augustine's explanation of it. I look at the Roman Catholic Church's view of it. I look at Luther's view of it, Calvin's view of it, Edwards view of it. So on down through the ages, Edwards made another distinction that's important. And he said that fallen man has the natural ability to please God, but not the moral ability. And that distinction there is critical between natural ability, moral ability. Let me just take a minute to explain it. A natural ability is an ability with which you're endowed by nature. For example, a bird has the natural ability to fly unaided through the air because God, in creating the bird, gave the bird the natural equipment he needs to fly. Gives him wings, a very light bone structure, feathers, so that he can ride the drafts of wind in the air. All that he needs to fly, God has given to him naturally, so that the bird has the natural ability to fly. The fish has the natural ability to live underwater because God gave him gills, God gave him scales and so on. But you don't have the natural ability to fly. If you want to fly, you have to ride an airplane. Well, you can fly in one direction down. Sometimes the landings are a little tough. We don't have the natural ability to fly. We don't have the natural ability to live underwater. We do have the natural ability to obey God in this sense, that we have the equipment, the faculties that are necessary to be obedient creatures. We have a mind that God gave us and we have the will that God gave us. So he's given us the equipment that we need, naturally speaking, to be obedient to him. What we had before the Fall was the moral ability to choose him. After the fall, it's the moral ability that's lost. This is what Augustine was teaching to Pelagius, that we had a free will and we had liberty. After the Fall, we still have free will, but we've lost the liberty because we've lost the desire to please God. That's why Jesus says in the sixth chapter of John, no man can come to me unless it's given to him by the Father. This is the Great Arminian error. The Arminian thinks that fallen humanity still has the ability to incline themselves. Oh, they have an offer of grace. And if you say yes to the Gospel, you're saved. If you say no. But nobody asks the question, well, why does one person say yes and another person says no? The obvious answer is because one's inclined to say yes and the other one isn't inclined to say yes. Then you have to go deeper and say, why would you ever be inclined to say yes to Christ? It's because God the Holy Spirit changed the disposition of your soul. Because in your fallen condition you have no disposition towards Christ. That's what Jesus meant when he said, no man can come to me unless it's given to him by the Father. We're in jail without bail, bondage to sin. That's what Augustine understood, that's what Luther understood. That's what Calvin understood, that's what Edwards understood. That's what Spurgeon understood. Unless the Holy Ghost changes the disposition of our heart through regeneration, we would never be inclined to come to Jesus. If you've come to Christ, if you've exercised your will and you have, if you've embraced Christ, you made that reception of Jesus because you wanted to, because you were inclined to, because you were disposed to, but not by nature. The only way you were ever inclined to Christ, the only way you were ever disposed to come to him was because of supernature, because God reached down and with his grace changed your desire, changed your heart from a heart of stone to a heart that began to pulsate and beat with affection for him and set you free.
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And how grateful we are that he did. Any affection that you have for Christ is because God gave it to you. This is the Sunday edition of Renewing youg Mind as we spend a few weeks in Romans, chapter seven. The sermon you heard today was from R.C. sproul, the founder of Ligonier, the ministry that, thanks to your support, produces and releases renewing youg mind seven days a week, 365 days a year. And if you'd like to support this outreach and help even more people discover the trusted teaching that you enjoy every day, simply give a donation@renewingyourmind.org and we'll send you a hardcover edition of Dr. Sproul's commentary on Romans. You can find a link in the podcast Show Notes and also a link to renewingyourmind.org global, where the ebook edition is waiting for our global listening audience. So whether at renewingyourmind.org, using the links in the podcast show notes, or@renewingyourmind.org Global, thank you for your generous support that fuels all of the global outreach of Renewing youg Mind and Ligonier Ministries. Be sure to join us next time as we conclude this short series in Romans. Here's a preview.
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The problem we face in the Church today is self denial of the radical character of sin. We don't hate sin the way we should hate it. We don't abhor the disobedience that we manifest in our lives. Paul looked at himself oh what a wretch I am when I look at my sin.
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That'll be next Sunday here on Renewing your Mind.
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Sam.