He Means the Apology and He Does It Again on Friday

He could nearly put it on a calendar, which is the part that has started to get to him.

Not exactly. But there is a rhythm to it, and the rhythm is roughly eleven days, and by day eight or nine he can feel the pressure in it building the way you feel weather.

He does not want to do it. That is not a thing he is unclear about. In the hour before, he genuinely does not want to, and in the hour after he genuinely does not want to have done it, and both of those are completely sincere and neither of them has ever once stopped it.

He has apologized. He has meant every one. He has also now apologized enough times that the apologizing has become part of the eleven days rather than an interruption to it.

And the question underneath, which he has never asked anybody, is how many repetitions it takes before a thing stops being something he does and starts being what he is.

Paul wrote it in the present tense

There is a passage in Romans that is uncomfortable for exactly the reason it needs to be.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. (Romans 7:19, King James Version)

The good that I would I do not.

He is describing wanting one thing and doing the other. And he writes it in the present tense, about himself, in a letter that was going to be read out loud in a church he had never visited.

He does not put it in a testimony frame. He does not say I used to be like this. That option was available to him and he did not take it.

You are not further gone than the man who wrote Romans. Romans 7 puts it in the present tense and never converts it to a past one, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an apostle's own sentence take a specific fear off somebody.

And he asks the question a man in eleven days asks

Five verses later he asks it out loud, and the wording is not restrained.

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

Who shall deliver me.

Read the shape of the question. He does not ask what shall deliver me, which would be a question about a method. He asks who.

That is not a man looking for a technique. It is a man who has run out of techniques and has worked out that the answer is a person.

And the very next sentence gives it. I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

You are asking a question with a who in it rather than a what. Romans 7 puts the question in that form and answers it in the next line, and it is the Holy Spirit, who dominates the chapter immediately after it, who does the delivering.

The chapter that follows opens with a verdict

The paragraph break there is one of the most useful in the collection, because of what comes next.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1)

Now.

That sentence lands immediately after the description of losing repeatedly. Not after a chapter about how he sorted it out. Directly after.

Which means the no condemnation is not a reward for having won the fight. It is placed, deliberately, on the far side of an honest account of losing it.

You are under a verdict that was placed on the far side of the losing. Romans 8 follows Romans 7 without anything in between, and it is the Spirit, named more than fifteen times in that next chapter, who is the reason for it.

The thing Paul asked to be removed was not removed

There is a passage where he asks for something to be taken away and it is not.

For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:8-9)

Three times, and the answer is no.

That is worth knowing for a man who has been assuming that the eleven days means something has gone wrong with the arrangement.

Paul asked properly, more than once, about a real thing, and the answer he got was not removal. It was an answer about where the strength operates from.

You are not outside the arrangement because something did not get removed. 2 Corinthians 12 records the asking and the refusal, and it is His Spirit who makes an unanswered request stop reading as a verdict.

And Galatians says why it feels like a fight

There is a sentence in Galatians that explains the experience, and the explanation is not that somebody is failing.

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. (Galatians 5:17)

So that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

That is a description of the experience Paul described in Romans 7, given here as a mechanism rather than as a complaint.

Two things pulling in opposite directions. And the sentence says the reason a man cannot simply do what he intends is that there is an actual contest going on, not that his intentions are fake.

You are inside a real contest rather than a private failure of will. Galatians 5 names both parties and says what the effect is, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named as one of them.