why do I keep doing this?
Tuesday 6.30.26 | Romans 7:15-25a | Proper 9A
Paul wrote Romans 7 from inside the loop
everyone recognizes and nobody wants to talk about.
TL;DR: Paul describes a split that everyone in recovery, therapy, or honest self-reflection recognizes: wanting to do good and watching yourself do the opposite. Willpower won't fix it because the problem is an occupying force, and the rescue is someone pulling you out of the current.
the loop
I know this feeling.
You decide, clearly and calmly, that you’re going to respond differently this time. You’re not going to snap this time. You’re not going to reach for the old coping mechanism or let the anxiety run the conversation. You’ve thought about it. You’ve prayed about it. You know exactly what the loving response looks like.
And then you do the other thing.
The ugly word comes out before the kind word, and it hurts upon impact. The phone is in your hand before you realize you picked it up. You hit send before you realize that your emotions typed that text. The old defensiveness fires and the conversation goes exactly where you swore it wouldn’t go.
And afterward you sit there wondering: why do I keep doing this? I know better. I want better. What is wrong with me?
Paul wrote Romans 7 from inside that exact loop.
“I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing.”
That's not a theological statement. That's the thing you say to your spouse at 10pm, or to your therapist on Tuesday, or to God in the dark when you can't sleep. I was going to do better today. I didn't.
this is not a failure report
The church has often read Romans 7 as a confession of moral failure, a description of what life looks like when you aren’t trying hard enough. But Paul isn’t describing someone who doesn’t care. He’s describing someone who cares deeply and still can’t close the gap.
That distinction changes this passage.
Paul is writing from the middle of healing. The part after you know something is wrong but before anything has resolved. The part where you can see clearly what love looks like and your body keeps defaulting to the old script anyway.
Anyone who has been through recovery knows this place. So does anyone who has done trauma work, or tried to change a family pattern that runs back three generations. You are not failing. You are in the part of the process that feels the most like failure, and it’s the part most people don’t talk about because it doesn’t make for a good story.
Paul talks about it. He puts it in the letter. And Paul doesn’t clean it up first.
the intruder
Here’s the part I need people to hear.
Paul makes a distinction in this passage that the Western church has mostly ignored.
He says: “it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.”
Paul is separating the person from the pattern.
The Greek word he uses for what Sin does is aichmalōtizonta. It means to take someone prisoner of war. To capture them at spearpoint. Paul chose a word for someone who has been occupied, not someone who made a bad choice.
Sin is not your identity.
Sin is an intruder that moved into your body and started running the place without your consent.
Your nervous system stores the old patterns. Your body remembers what it learned in unsafe places. The survival mechanisms that got you through childhood, or a bad marriage, or a toxic church, are still firing even though you’re not in that situation anymore.
Paul calls that Sin dwelling in your body. A therapist might call it a trauma response. Both are describing the same thing:
Sin is something in your body that acts before your brain catches up.
That is not who you are. That is what happened to you. And willpower alone cannot evict it, because it lives deeper than your willpower can reach.
the cry
This is where Paul stops teaching and starts screaming.
“Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
The word for rescue is rhusetai. It means to snatch someone out of danger. To pull a child out of a rushing current.
It is not a calm, scheduled meeting.
It is an emergency extraction.
Paul has stopped asking for better strategies or a new set of rules. He is asking for someone to come get him, because he cannot get himself out.
And the answer comes:
“Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The Eastern Christian tradition reads this as the Great Physician walking into your hospital room. Christ doesn't send instructions via email from his office. Jesus comes in, pulls up a chair, and sits down next to the person who is stuck in the loop.
I imagine Jesus saying: “I know. I see your wound. I'm here. We're going to work on this together, and it's going to take longer than you want, and you're going to repeat the old pattern more times than you think you should, and none of that changes the fact that I'm not leaving. I’m never leaving you.”
That’s theosis: participation in God’s life. The slow, patient presence of a healer who is in no hurry because he knows the wound goes deep.
what this means on a hard day
If you’re stuck in this loop today, here’s what I want you to hear.
The pattern is real. You're not making it up. But the pattern is not your identity. You are the person who noticed the reflex and hated it. That noticing is your true self. Paul calls it the inner person who delights in God's law. The Eastern tradition calls it the nous, the spiritual center that Sin cannot fully overwrite.
Abba John Colobos, one of the desert fathers, said something that has stayed with me:
“We have left aside the light burden, to blame ourselves, and borne the heavy one, to justify ourselves.”
— Abba John Colobos
We spend so much energy defending the false self, explaining the pattern, managing how people see us. The lighter challenge is just telling the truth: “I’m stuck. I need help. This thing is bigger than my willpower.”
That’s not weakness. That’s the beginning of rescue.
The cry “who will deliver me” is not a sign that your faith has failed. It is the sound of a person who has finally stopped pretending they can fix this alone.
And according to Paul, that’s exactly where Christ shows up.
reflect
Where are you stuck in the loop?
What pattern keeps running even though you know better?
What would it change to hear that the thing hijacking you is not who you actually are?
Today this immediately made me think of the fine friend and incredibly gifted human I lost to addiction at the tender age of 43. How he must have suffered in silence and lies, trying to fix things himself.
Paul, this touched something I know from recovery. There are patterns that begin in wound, become practiced in secrecy, and eventually seem to take on a force far larger than our best intentions.
I am grateful for the reminder that the pattern is not our identity. At the same time, recovery has taught me that grace holds two truths together: I am more than the thing that has mastered me, and I cannot make peace with it as though it has nothing to do with my choices.
The cry for rescue became real for me when I stopped defending the pattern and stopped making shame my name. Christ did not merely excuse the captive. He met me in the truth, called me into the light, and gave me people with whom to practice a different life.
That is slower than willpower wants. But it is real freedom.