Daily Devotional • March 31
A Reading from Romans 7:1-12
1 Or 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? 2 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. 3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she belongs to another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she belongs to another man, she is not an adulteress.
4 In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5 For 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. 6 But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are enslaved in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the written code.
7 What then are we to 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.” 8 But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law sin lies dead. 9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived 10 and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. 11 For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. 12 So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.
Meditation
How often does our own scrupulosity obfuscate our true religion? The fault of the law lies not in the Lawgiver, but rather in those whose hearts misunderstand the law. The law given by the Lord to Moses was good and altogether perfect, just as the one who mandated it was perfect. Yet the whole of the Old Testament testifies to our corporate failure to live into the law, and the Gospels testify to the distortions that came from that failure. St. Paul himself was blameless under the law, yet still needed conversion to Christ. He was struck blind outwardly, just as he was inwardly blinded by the law. St. Paul’s following of the law highlighted sin for him, for it was by the contrast of the law that he was able to understand what sin was. In the rigor of the law, and in St. Paul’s scrupulous following of the same, he was held back from the fullness of life.
Children see the world literally, and at the same time, imaginatively—a dangerous combination. This is why when you tell a child not to take a cookie from the cookie jar, they will instead take one from the cabinet. The child is fulfilling the “law” given by her parent, yet is still in disobedience to it. The “law” has served to highlight to the child exactly how not to follow the law. The hope is that, as the child develops and matures, she will understand the point of the law and no longer need such immediate direction. Yet we, who have been baptized into the new covenant and are freed from the law, are allowed to develop beyond the schoolmaster into the maturity of life in the Spirit. The law is holy, yet we are called into something holier still, deeper into the person of Jesus Christ. As we fall deeper into his person, his precious death and burial, and his mighty resurrection, we find we no longer need a taskmaster or a schoolmaster, for the king is ever with us. Our scrupulosity is seen as it truly is: a hindrance and a lie. Our joy lies in perfect obedience, not to Sinai, but towards Nazareth.
The Rev. Samuel Cripps is the rector of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist in Wausau, Wisconsin.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Episcopal Diocese of West Texas
The Diocese of Maryland – The Episcopal Church
The Rev. Samuel Cripps is the rector of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist in Wausau, Wisconsin.
