God truly wants to deliver us from sin, but He will often patiently use our struggles and weakness to bring us to the end of ourselves, where we finally say from the heart, “Lord, I can't do this! Please save me!”

Host: Kathy, it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming in to talk with us.

Kathy: Thanks. It's wonderful to be here.

Host: Kathy, we're going to continue our discussions in Andrew Murray's wonderful book Absolute Surrender, and in today's chapter he starts out with this title, “O Wretched Man that I Am!” He takes that from Romans 7:24-25, and I'll just read that real quick. “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 7:24-25a, KJV)
       He talks about the reality in this chapter of what it means to come to the place where God can have true freedom to work in us, to move through us and for us to have freedom from our own wretchedness. And using Paul’s writing here, he divides the process of coming to that freedom into four stages for the man who comes to that place. A regenerate man, a weak man, a wretched man and a man on the border of complete liberty. Let's go through those one at a time. Let's look first at the regenerate man. I will just say I thought this was one of the most balanced and well written perspectives of what it means to be a regenerate man and why the regenerate man still struggles with being a wretched man.

Kathy: I want to read Romans 7:17. “Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.” (KJV) Andrew Murray says here, “That is the language of a regenerate man, a man who knows that his heart and nature have been renewed, and that sin is now a power in him that is not himself.”

Host: Yeah, he talks about the regenerate man being one who has a desire to do the will of God. And I love the way he brought this out that if you have a sincere desire to do the will of God, then that is evidence that God has put something in you. I just find too many people stuck in that thing of, “Oh I've got sin in my life. I don't belong to God.” And I think the enemy uses that to keep us from moving and growing in our relationship with the Lord.

Kathy: Absolutely. He definitely capitalizes on it. That was my story for many, many years, that I was seeing what was wrong with me and thinking that because I wasn't doing better that there was something wrong with my relationship in Christ. And I learned—and we'll read through this—that I don't have the power to live the Christian life, I can't do this. That’s all part of God’s process that he takes us through. He doesn't rescue us from that. I know many Christians are in this phase of, “Why am I still struggling with this sin and why isn't there any deliverance?” Well, there is deliverance, but it's not going to come with the snap of a finger. The problem is so many of us want to get free so we'll feel better about ourselves spiritually. But that is not God’s end goal for us.

Host: Yeah, God's got something much more wonderful that He's bringing us to. Well, really, he begins to answer that very question when he talks about the weak man. He says, “Here is the great mistake made by many Christian people: they think that when there is a renewed will, it is enough; but that is not the case.” Talk a little bit about what he's saying there.

Kathy: Paul said, “I will to do what is good, but the power to perform, I don't find it.” This whole process of overcoming, of being delivered, of trusting in Christ is a lifelong process of finding out that we don't have what it takes to live the Christian life. We feel like we're insane half the time because we have the desire to do His will and love Him and serve Him and yet we've got this other thing going on that's constantly opposing that. That is difficult to work out in the brain, but it's a reality in the Christian life that I have been born again, I belong to God, but I cannot obey Him without coming to this place where I know I am a wretched, wretched man.

Host: And that really is his third point. Talk about what that means.

Kathy: The whole idea of, “I am a wretched man,” is coming to an end of self and it's a process again of realizing I have nothing good in myself. There is nothing to commend me to God. Nothing. And I'm not saved, cleaned up and born again because I did anything. It was total mercy that came to me and met me. And I think I learned this maybe ten years ago, I threw up my arms in the air in frustration and some amount of anger, just feeling the futility of trying to work out my salvation. But in the end, I believe I came to the point of saying I am a wretched woman. My heart is black. I can't do this. Lord, I cannot serve you. In my flesh, it's impossible for me to do this. And it was at that point things started to change for me.

Host: You know, we talk about the wretched man, and I know when I first saw this verse, I'll just be honest, my reaction was, “Oh, great, I'm a wretch. I don't have to worry about changing.” That's a dangerous place to go.

Kathy: Yeah. That's very dangerous and I think a lot of people are in that. You can get to a point in your Christian journey where you get tired of fighting and what we've said up to this point isn't that you quit fighting against sin. The point is that you're not going to overcome in your flesh, but you have to keep doing battle. And this is the battle. You get tired of it. You want to say, “Okay well, Paul said it. I'm wretched. This is all you can expect from me, so plop down in my mire of self-pity and just give over to it.”

Host: Yeah. And they never move into Chapter 8 of Romans, which is the great hope. They've missed the great hope that's being offered to them by the revealing of their wretchedness.

Kathy: Right. And that is where you just keep plowing, you just keep going and you don't settle down into the wretched man place. That’s not where God's taking you to, He’s taking you past that.

Host: Yea. Andrew Murray refers to this man that has chosen not to make that mistake but has seen his wretchedness as the “almost delivered man.” Bring us the good news, because this is the glorious news of it all.

Kathy: I'm going to just read what he said. “The man has tried to obey the beautiful law of God. He has loved it. He has wept over his sin. He has tried to conquer. He has tried to overcome fault after fault, but every time he has ended in failure.” And another quote, “It is the man who is conscious of his own weakness as a believer who will learn that by the Holy Spirit he can live a holy life. This man is on the brink of that great deliverance.”
       It's the power of the Holy Spirit living in us. When you finally throw up your arms and say, “Lord, I am a wretched man. I'm weak. I can't do this. Please, help me!” In that cry, I don't know what the time frame is—for me it was a long time—but that cry invites the Holy Spirit and so the Holy Spirit starts to come. And that is when you are receiving the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t come by having somebody lay their hands on you every three months. It's not like that.

Host: It's walking in the Spirit.

Kathy: It is a constant cry inside and if you don't have that cry, ask for God to give that cry to you. Ask God to make it real to you that you have to have the Holy Spirit living in you. The more that you are walking in His Spirit, the less conscious you are of yourself altogether. You're not measuring yourself anymore by doing good or doing bad, you’re just flowing with the Lord and you’re in love with God. I think the main characteristic of walking in the Spirit is just loving the Lord. The Holy Spirit brings such a freedom inside.

Host: Yeah, Paul says in Romans 8:13 that what the Holy Spirit does is give the victory. “If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” (Romans 8:13b, KJV) And it's the Holy Spirit who does it. He is helping me every day and that's the great victory.

Kathy: One other thing that Paul said in Romans 14:17 is that the Kingdom of God is joy in the Holy Spirit. That is true and until you've come into that fullness, you won't know what that joy really is. There are other maybe minor tones of joy, little joys, but that joy carries you through life. Through all the suffering, through all the ups and downs.

Host: Yeah. I know people will hear us talk about this and they'll say, “Man, I don't have that.” Well, neither do we. But God knows you don't have it. Cry out to God for it. He wants to do this in us. If you have a desire to do God's will and you find yourself continually failing, God is allowing that to bring you to the end of yourself so that you can be opened to the filling of His Holy Spirit. Don't fall into despair over your failure any more than the sense that God is using it to bring you to the end of yourself as you said.