This Verse Will Make You Cry

Thinking about Romans 7:24.

Photo by Gadiel Lazcano on Unsplash

O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:24)

Romans 7:24 reminds me of a heart-breaking conversation I had with a man once.

He was sitting outside the church building, and I went out to talk to him. He was in complete despair. His father had died of a drug overdose a few years before, he himself had struggled with drug addiction, and his wife also had a drug addiction.

He wanted to get clean and leave the drugs behind, but she didn’t want the same thing. He was brokenhearted because he didn’t want to end up like his father and didn’t want to leave his wife to her fate - although staying with her meant he was unlikely to overcome his own drug addiction.

I prayed with him about his situation, and we talked about the importance of God and turning back to Him. I gave him some information to people who could help him with his addiction. I’ve never seen him since - I don’t know what happened to him or his wife.

But what will stay with me until the day I die is how helpless he felt.

And when I read Romans 7:24, in my mind, I’m taken right back beside that man sitting outside the church building. This verse is a cry of helpless desperation from someone who desperately wants to be free but cannot lift themselves out of their situation; they cannot set themselves free from being Sin’s prisoner of war.

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God be thanked and praised that there is hope - which is where Paul is going in the last verse of Romans 7 and how Romans 8 will begin.

But realizing what sin has done to us and where it has led us is the saddest place of human existence.