Inward Foes

I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. ROMANS 7:21

For six months after her conversion Julia Foote had, she says, uninterrupted peace and joy. Then her little brother, playing with the other children, struck her in the eye by accident. The pain was intense and the sight of that eye was lost. What frightened her most, though, was not the injury. It was what rose up in her in response to it: anger, pride, impatience, and a whole brood of feelings she had not known were there. She calls them signs of carnality, and she was honest enough to call them by that name.

Every Christian knows some version of this: the first joy is real, and then an injury or insult shows that the old self is alive and well. The question is what to do about it.

The counsel she was given

She did what a young believer should. She went to God with her trouble and felt relieved for a while, and then the trouble came back, and she went again. She knew what was right and tried to do it, but when she would do good, she says, borrowing Paul’s words, evil was present with her. And she asked the people set over her what was the matter.

Her preacher, her class-leader and her parents all gave her the same answer. All Christians, they said, had these inward troubles, and were never free of them until death. This was her work on earth. She must keep on fighting, and when she died God would give her a bright crown. She wrote down her verdict on that counsel in two words: “What delusion!” But at the time she believed them, because she thought her minister too good and too wise to be wrong. So she went on struggling, she says, “hoping all the time I should soon die and be at rest.”

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

It is a desolate picture: a girl of sixteen longing to die so that she could stop sinning. Later, when she found older Christians who testified that they had been cleansed, and asked her minister and her parents about it, they told her that sanctification was for the aged and for those about to die, and not for one like her.

Preaching without power

Her memoir is unusually sharp at this point. She had heard the doctrine of holiness preached, she says, but in a way that gave her no light and no strength to seek it. And she drew a lesson that goes well beyond her own case: “How frivolous and fruitless is that preaching which describes the mere history of the work and has not the power of the Holy Ghost.” She thought of the shepherds of Israel in Ezekiel, who fed themselves and not the flock.

Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? EZEKIEL 34:2

It is a hard word, and it is aimed at those who teach. A minister can describe the Christian life accurately and still leave his hearers exactly where they were, because he has described it as history, as something that happened to other people, rather than as a present offer from a living Christ. What she needed, she said, was a Philip.

Understandest thou what thou readest? And he said, How can I, except some man should guide me? ACTS 8:30–31

That is a lovely touch. The Ethiopian in Acts had the book of Isaiah open on his lap and could not understand it until someone sat down beside him. Julia had the verses about cleansing in her own Bible, and had read them, but, she says, she had never understood what she read. Then an old couple came to the church and told, in meeting, the plain story of how they had once struggled with temper and pride and had taken it all to Jesus. Her Philip turned out to be an elderly woman whose name she does not even give, who came to her house one May morning and marked her Bible.

What to take from this

The question underneath this chapter is one of the oldest in the Christian church. Is the Christian doomed to lifelong defeat by inward sin, or can Christ deliver? Julia Foote’s answer was that He can, and the next chapter will set out how she understood that deliverance. But it is worth separating her diagnosis from her remedy, because a reader may agree with the first while hesitating over the second.

Her diagnosis was that the church around her expected nothing, and so received nothing. It had taken the seventh chapter of Romans as the permanent Christian condition and forgotten the eighth. That diagnosis is, in the main, right, and still applies to many churches.

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. ROMANS 8:2

For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace. ROMANS 6:14

Christians have long disagreed about what the wretched man of Romans 7 represents, and many careful readers see there the honest cry of a mature believer. They are not wrong to say that the fight with sin continues in some form until glory. But even they must reckon with what the next chapter of Romans says, and with the plain promise that sin shall not have dominion. The fault Julia Foote exposed was not a mistaken exegesis so much as a mistaken mood: a church that had made peace with sin and called it realism, and that counselled despair in the language of patience.

And her own later experience keeps the question honest. She wrote, years afterward, that she had sometimes lost what she called the clear witness of perfect love through disobedience, and had to weep because the blessed experience was not always constant with her. Whatever deliverance means, it did not mean for her that the fight was over. It meant that the fight was no longer hopeless.

Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. HEBREWS 7:25

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name the inward foe that most often defeats you — anger, pride, envy, impatience, lust, fear. Write it down plainly, as she did, and call it by its right name.

2. Ask yourself honestly whether you have made peace with it. Have you begun to expect defeat and to call your expectation humility?

3. Read Romans 6, 7 and 8 in one sitting this week, and notice where the chapters go, not only where they begin.

4. If you teach or lead others, ask whether you describe the Christian life as history or offer it as a present gift. Change one thing in how you speak next time.

5. Look for your Philip: an older Christian whose life shows the power of Christ over sin. Ask to spend an hour with them and their Bible.

A PRAYER

Lord, I know the struggle she describes. When I would do good, evil is present with me, and I am tired of it.

Forgive me for making peace with what You died to destroy, and for calling my low expectations wisdom.

Send me someone who will open the Scriptures to me, and open my own understanding when I read them.

Deliver me, Lord Jesus, not only at the end, but now, by the Spirit of life who sets me free. Amen.