“I Do Not Do What I Want”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, May 10, 2026
Reading: Romans 7:15-25a
Good morning, everyone, happy mother’s day. This is often the third most attended church day of the year after Christmas and Easter. Mother’s Day was invented by a Methodist in West Virginia in the early 20th century. She wanted to emphasize the sacrifices in being a mother. But she watched her invention become just another commercialized holiday—the floral industry had way more carnations than buyers this time of year. So, she tried to take it back. Wrote to Congress and the president to get it revoked. Didn’t get answers. People like Mother’s Day, take the win ma’am.
I’m struck by the Bible’s maternal language. Jesus Christ compares himself to a mother hen, protecting her chicks. St. Paul tells the church: “We might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” (1 Thess 2:7). The most interesting thing we Christians say about God is not that God is great. That’s true, but lots of faiths think that. We also think that God has a Jewish mom. And if you can get your head around that, you’re doing better than anyone ever has.
I’m especially grateful to the church for being a mother to all of us in faith. Any one of us who follows Jesus has God for a Father like he does and the church for a mother. She births us in baptism, nurses us with communion, raises us to maturity but even after that still cares for us. So happy mother’s day. Not just to you who are mothers, but to you who have mothers, that is, to all of us.
Our current series is on the book of Romans, Paul’s most consequential book. I encouraged you last week to read the entire book when you can. It’ll take an hour or so. Or read a bit at a time. You can read scripture like a baby suckles: in no hurry, enjoying being with mom even more than the life-giving sustenance. Last week we spoke of the way Christ’s salvation changes reality. Engulfs all of humanity in an embrace before we know to ask for it. The moms I admire most are the ones who mother not just the kids with their same last name, but whoever is at their table, whoever falls and hurts themselves, whoever needs a ride to practice, and a word of encouragement. I heard a comedian once talk about being pregnant. She said ‘people congratulate us as a couple for having a baby. But let’s be clear about who is doing the work here. As “we have a baby,” I am a god. My husband is an ingredient.’ Next week we’ll be back on Christ’s embrace of all creation. But this week we have a strange interlude.
“I do not do what I want,” Paul says here about seven different ways. “I do the very thing I hate.” If you’ve ever been in the position of knowing the good thing to do, and yet warring against that and deciding not to, well, Paul’s words will be familiar. Who am I kidding, you’re human, you know that full well. You know you need to get to the gym, but man, the bed is comfortable. We know we shouldn’t eat that, but mercy, it’s calling our name. Have you ever eaten something you shouldn’t in the house and justified it by saying, well if I eat it, I won’t be tempted to eat it anymore. If you haven’t, I invite you to forthwith.
More seriously now, Paul describes well the experience of addiction. However badly they might want to, addicts can’t just rescue themselves. There is a “law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive.” Our bodies actually become dependent on substances that do harm and even kill. The church has spoken of Paul’s anguish here as “the bondage of the will.” As much as we might wish to do a thing, we’re in a kind of invisible prison, and can’t do that good thing any more than a prisoner can just will to walk out. Some historians of ideas even think the church invented the notion of the will. That is, ancient philosophy thought you reason with someone, they see what they need to do, and so do it. If they don’t, they just need more reason. Convince them, and they’ll do good. People still act this way—if someone does what they think is wrong they just lecture them more. But Paul noticed we human beings don’t actually work that way. We might 100 percent wish to do x and yet 100 percent be unable to do x. That’s a bit of an innovation in the history of ideas. Interesting the people who invented the notion of the will thought it was powerless, bound, unable to produce the result it wanted. In other words, moral freedom is an illusion. We feel free. I can do this or that. Sure, but that’s just the freedom to choose where to sit in the jail cell. Until Christ breaks you out.
Scholars of Romans are a bit puzzled by this passage, as powerful as it is as a descriptor of human behaviour. Not long before, Paul had been triumphant: “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Christ saves from death, so we’re swept up in our heavenly mother’s embrace. Just after this passage comes one we read at every funeral in here: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Whatever it is in us that fears death should not: Christ has conquered the grave. I’m reading a splendid biography of Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest thinkers of the last half millennium. He wrote this as he faced his own death before age 40.
Without Jesus Christ, death is horrible, detestable, and the horror of nature. But with the resurrection, death is entirely different. It is the gateway into eternal life and the presence of God, and so it is worthy of love, it is holy and the joy of the faithful.
That gives me courage. Pascal got it from Paul who got it from God.
Yet tucked between these comforting notes of peace with God in Romans 5 and no more condemnation in Romans 8, we get this passage on the bondage of the will. “Wretched person that I am,” Paul laments. Weird to go from peace to wretched and back. Some think we have a description here of humanity without Christ. On our own we can’t even do the good we want or avoid the evil we don’t want. Others have thought it’s a description of God’s people who have the law but no power from the Holy Spirit to abide by it. “For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (7:23). For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 4 mentions of the word law in just one verse. I don’t think it would work in one of his majesty’s courts here in the dominion of Canada to say we couldn’t follow the law because there was another law at work in our members, the law of sin and death. Paul sounds here a little like the cliched, “the devil made me do it”: “Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me” (7:20).
So, what is God saying to us today, through this passage?
My pastoral colleague Joanne led bible study last week. I told her I was stuck on this passage, not sure what to say, so if one of our saints said something wise or juicy to get me unstuck, could she pass it along? She smiled. So, you’re stuck on the passage about stuck-ness? Yeah, I am. Maybe I’m not alone? Most people I know feel stuck in some part of their lives or other, or in the whole thing. How do we get free?
Here’s a story of getting free. Two friends of mine are colleagues to one another and world renowned in their field, excellent at what they do. And one had been avoiding the other for 20 years. Why? She’d given a paper at a conference with the other present. She was sure the paper was a disaster. Imposter syndrome is not uncommon among the accomplished. So, she avoided her friend for two decades out of shame and embarrassment. They were finally together recently, and she confessed her anxiety and avoidance to her former friend. Wait, what? You gave a paper there? I have no memory of this. Can we just like be friends again? Sometimes getting unstuck just requires the bravery to confess. And then to ask a 6-year old’s question on the playground: can we be friends? Yeah, I’d like that.
Getting unstuck spiritually can feel like a shift in tectonic plates: nothing for years, then sudden movement that changes the landscape. CS Lewis noted this once:
Do you know, only a few weeks ago I realised suddenly that I at last had forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I’d been trying to do it for years: and like you, each time I thought I’d done it, I found, after a week or so it all had to be attempted over again. But this time I feel sure it is the real thing. And (like learning to swim or to ride a bicycle) the moment it does happen it seems so easy and you wonder why on earth you didn’t do it years ago.
Bitterness, someone wise said, is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. You forgive not for them, but for you.
But it can’t be that easy, can it?
Christian tradition is unanimous on something: we can’t just make ourselves right with God by our own willpower. And this runs counter to every myth in our culture. We’re all told we can be whatever we want if we just put our mind to it. Our schools unanimously teach that. Every Disney film preaches it. Push the other way, tell someone they can’t be something they want, and you’re a villain. We don’t pay enough attention to the damage this credo does. If someone’s life doesn’t turn out the way they want, with a Disney ending, then it’s their own fault. Didn’t work hard enough, I guess. Ever notice the harshest thing you can call someone in our culture is a loser? Ouch.
Christian tradition teaches this: we’re all losers. And we can’t help it. It’s an inherited condition. Comes with being human. We’re all as stuck as Paul describes in Romans 7: the good we want, we don’t do. The ill we don’t want, that’s what we do. It’s a law. And there is no way out. No one wants to go see that movie, do they?
But where there is no way, God has made a way in Jesus Christ.
Let’s try a situation that everyone would agree is unfree: actual chattel slavery, as practiced in North America from 1619 to 1865, from before the Mayflower for a quarter millennium. During that time Christianity was used to enforce the system: the bit of Paul most quoted says “slaves, obey your masters.” So why wasn’t Christianity roundly rejected by enslaved people? Because they saw something in this bible, in this Jesus, that appealed to them. God liberates slaves from Egypt. That’s the heart of the bible. Jesus is abused, beaten, lynched. Hey, that’s . . . us. Christianity has this near infinite malleability. But its center of gravity is freedom and grace. Sure, it can be used to support slavery and degradation, anything can. But when this story gets in the hands of oppressed people, it’s dynamite, subversion. Just listen to the songs they sing. There’s a reason state legislature forbade slaves to read. But they couldn’t keep out the Holy Spirit who makes people free.
I mentioned evangelicalism last week. Before it was a political football like today, it’s this simple belief. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Ro. 3:23). All. “But God proves his love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Us. Slaveowners may have thought they were free. They weren’t. They were as stuck in a system of bondage as anyone. But listen to what Paul says. We’re all sinners. Our only hope is that Christ died for us. That’s the gospel, the evangel, the good news. Enslaved people could hear that and say hmm, that sounds like good news to me, and bad news to anyone who claims to be better than me. You’ve noticed that black people tend to be a little more free with their movement in worship than most white churches. The black church has always been a place, a people, who say in here, in this time, my body is free of your expectations. I move with God’s Spirit, not your laws. That’s because the God of Exodus liberates slaves, the God of Jesus is a loser, whose loss grants salvation equally to all.
Christian tradition might be at its most counter-cultural when we say we are all bound. We are sinners who can do nothing to redeem ourselves. Try harder and it’s like struggling against a straitjacket, you just make things worse. Karl Barth said trying to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps is like trying to pull ourselves out of a quicksand by our hair. But God does grant grace, and so some of us get freed. The difference between those freed and not is nothing in the freed ones. It is the God who has mercy. One of the articles of faith in the Anglican communion, part of church law, says this:
Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby before the foundations of the world were laid he hath constantly decreed . . . to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ . . . and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation. . . the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort.
When she first heard that, my mentor in preaching Fleming Rutledge heard good news. Before God created the world, God chose me in Christ to be saved. That’s sweet, pleasant, and comforting. But there’s a dark side though isn’t there? What about those not-elect, not-chosen, and so without sweetness, pleasantness, or comfort? Well, the church has said, nobody knows who’s elect and who’s not. Don’t presume. It’s up to God’s mercy. The church in some instances has said, that the elect show God’s mercy. The condemned show God’s justice. God is indeed both things: altogether mercy and altogether righteous. Bummer to be on team justice though, eh?
The Methodist Church that Timothy Eaton began life as thought that Christ extends grace to all. No one is condemned before the foundation of the world to show God’s justice. And all of us receive grace sufficient to respond with faith and so to be saved. Let me illustrate with a quote on grace from Frederick Buechner:
Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do.
There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it.
Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.
Now that’s some hot gospel. We do have to reach out and accept grace when offered. And the ability to reach out and accept it is also grace. Nothing we do adds anything to God’s grace. It’s altogether gift. That’s a wild and strange teaching.
Now, in the history of ideas, our inability to know whether we are elect to grace or not is what helped birth capitalism. Calvinists specifically insisted we couldn’t know if we were saved. All we could do was to be as industrious as possible. The not-knowing was crucial for the busyness that produced business: in Switzerland, Scotland, the Netherlands, and eventually the world. There is probably no more unquestioned creed in human history than market capitalism right now. What rival does it have? Soviet communism has been gone for a generation. Nothing has ever created wealth like the market. We wouldn’t have this church without it. Like it or not, it’s a staggering and awe-inspiring achievement over the last half millennium of human life.
And it comes, sort of as a by-product, from this odd bit of teaching on grace invading our stuck-ness in Paul. On our own we are imprisoned. But Jesus Christ is the prison breaker. With him risen not a chain is safe. They’ll all be broken one day.
We started with mothers’ day. I’ve lingered in being stuck and how Christ gets us unstuck. I think these two hold together. Here’s how. Think of a mother and her child. They are never done with one another, are they? For all the drama and pain that comes from wanting to be a mother, from mothering gone wrong, from alienation, giving birth to another human means something. That umbilical cord never really gets cut, does it? None of us can birth ourselves. We come from another.
The great Henri Nouwen, longtime resident of this city, used to tell this parable, I’ll close with it. Two twins are chatting in the womb. It’s dark in here. Yeah, and it’s getting more cramped. I’m bored. Me too. So, let’s talk. What if there’s a world outside of this womb? What do you mean? What if we’re about to get born into some other world? You don’t really believe that do you? Ok you’re right I don’t. . . What if there’s a mother? What’s a mother? Well, some One about to give birth to us? Come on you don’t believe that do you? You ever seen her? What evidence do we have? None. I admit. I just think there is. You go on thinking that then.
This is a story about God. And mothers. And all the rest of us. Amen.