God's Dynamite: The Battle Within
"It was on fire when I lay down on it." Robert Fulghum wrote about reading this statement in a small town newspaper. Smoke was billowing from a second story window. The Fire Department arrived, broke down the front door, ran up a set of stairs, and pulled a man off a burning bed. Later, when they asked him how he got in that predicament, he said, "It was on fire when I lay down on it." Why on earth did he do that? We don't know, but his story reveals a human truth. We often do self-destructive things. We testify, "People told me not to do it, but I did it anyway." "I knew it was wrong, but I did it." The apostle Paul wrote about our human propensity to sin and self-destructive behavior in Romans 7:14-25. Verse 15 sums up his point, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do and what I hate I do." He describes an intense inner battle. On one side is the "flesh," his ...