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Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent

March 20, 2023

The Invitatory

The Lord is full of compassion and mercy: Come let us adore him.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading: Romans 7:1-12

Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only during that person’s lifetime? Thus a married woman is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives; but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning the husband. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress.

In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.

What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.

Meditation: Jo Ann B. Jones

Interpreters have long debated what Paul is trying to communicate in this segment of his letter, with its use of the first person singular. Is Paul writing of his personal experiences as a follower of Jesus Christ? Or, is he describing the dilemma he experienced before his call/conversion? Or is Paul assuming the posture of the “universal human” and writing of the difficulties and the situation in life that all human beings face prior to entering into a saving relationship to God? It may be that Paul speaks here more in the voice of “Adam” than in his own personal voice. If so, it is clearly best not to hear Paul as delivering biographical information at this point in the letter.

Paul writes of sin. But in our culture, the concept of sin has all but disappeared. As one observer put it, sin, on the one hand, has been reduced to something like bad taste or a mistake–serving the wrong wine at a dinner or saying something embarrassing to oneself or to another. On the other hand, sin has been abstracted–so that pornography is a sin, but adultery is a bad choice.

Paul’s understanding of sin is far greater than any of these. For Paul, sin is more than the sum of human misdeeds. It is through the understanding of the law, that we can recognize our violations of it and, therefore, what sin is. Sin is a force to be reckoned with, a force set against humanity and God alike. Every person is susceptible to sin constantly and sin compels one to act contrary to one’s best understanding and intentions. Sin opposes God, drives humanity to destruction. Only God can deal with this evil power in such a way as to liberate humanity from its force. How do we recognize sin’s effect in our lives? We must wrestle with the frustration of sin’s incalculable sway over ourselves, despite our best intentions to do what is right before God. How have we experienced the frustration of knowing the right thing to do and, then, doing something else? Moreover, how do we understand such actions and failures?

And, yet ironically sin opens all of us to recognize and contemplate how we have experienced God’s grace. Have we known the freedom that comes from God’s defeating the power of sin? How do we understand such experiences? It is given to us to know life as the experience of God’s grace, rendering life as a far greater gift that we have apprehended it to be. It fills one with an appreciation and gratitude that knows no bounds. In these next weeks of this season of Lent we have time to wrestle with hopelessness, frustration, as we await delivery, grace, and great gratitude in Eastertide.

The Lord's Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy Name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory,

for ever and ever. Amen.