Why Do I Keep Choosing To Disobey, When I Truly Want To Obey God?
Why do I keep choosing to disobey? I feel like I surrender to God’s promises, but it’s a cycle of self-sabotage. And yet I want to obey God.
Romans 7 describe your exact difficulty. In Romans 7, Paul says that something in himself wants to serve God. He delights to do the law of God, yet finds another principle inside himself. In other words, he realized that sin was not yet fully eradicated in himself, and he still had to deal with the world, the flesh, and the devil. Even though the old man is dead with Christ, he still had to deal with these things. And he cried out, “How do I deal with this?”
Look at the prominent pronouns in Romans 7. When you talk about yourself, it’s the first person. We see Paul in the first person all throughout Romans 7:7-25, the section where he’s talking about his struggle with sin. Notice how many times he refers to “I, me and my.” I think it is so exaggerated that, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Paul did this deliberately for effect. Paul decided, “I’m going to go over the top in references to myself.” Paul includes an absurd number of self-references (nearly 50) in that section of Romans 7, because he’s trying to tell us what the problem is.
The problem is self-focus. And he doesn’t find any deliverance until he gets his eyes off of himself and puts them on his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. That’s the only place where he finds victory. At the end of the chapter, he says, and I’ll paraphrase, “Thanks be to God, I’ve been delivered because of the wonderful work of Jesus Christ.”
You are not yet perfected. You are a new person in Jesus Christ, and the new part of your inner nature is patterned after Jesus Christ Himself. That’s who you are: a new creation in Christ. Yet, the “leftovers” of the old man, that old self who was crucified with Christ still does battle with the world, the flesh, and the devil. You will battle with those until you pass from this world to the next.
That’s why you sometimes feel like sinning, because you have old habits of thinking and acting. You have sinful desires that are not lording over your life as a whole but may have strength at certain moments to dominate you in a particular time and place. You want to obey God. Just keep your eyes on Jesus and don’t let the devil suck you into his trap of self-focus.
Sometimes Christians get stuck in constantly asking, “How am I doing with the Lord? I better take my pulse right now. Am I doing okay? Am I right? Am I believing? Maybe I had a bad thought.” It goes on and on, and it’s all self-focused. We’d be doing much better in such things if we put less focus on ourselves, and focused more of our attention on who Jesus is and what He did to rescue us.