Romans 7:21-25

I find then the law, that, to me, while I desire to do good, evil is present. For I delight in God’s law after the inward man, but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! So then with the mind, I myself serve God’s law, but with the flesh, the sin’s law.

So here we see that when it is mind vs. member, member wins. No matter how “mindful” you are, you can’t rely on your good mind to overcome your body parts! God is the one who gave us our good mental state, one which He continues to renew every day, but that can’t make us good Christians.

To have this severe battle going on inside ourselves is a horrible thing. To want to do good and to continually fail is not good Christian living! To live like this is not only frustrating, it is a kind of madness. Fortunately, we have a deliverer! Jesus Christ, our Lord, delivers us from our inability to do what we want to do in our minds.

So, on our own, we have a separation between what we want to do and what we are actually able to do, but Jesus makes what we cannot do possible. Paul will now take us into a better understanding of how Jesus can work in us to produce the kind of life that we want in our minds.