Romans 6:12

Romans 6:12

The Dual Life of Man.

I. There are in every one of us opposing elements, there live within us an Adam and a Christ; the angel has us by the hand or the serpent by the heart. Plato describes human nature as consisting of a threefold being bound into one, a many-headed monster, a lion, and a man. The monster represents all the lowest and the basest and most animal impulses of our nature; the lion represents the passionate irascible side of our nature, in itself noble, but liable to be dangerously uncontrolled; the man represents the reason and the conscience, the ruling power within us. Plato says we can never attain the true nature of our being except when the man and the lion are at one, the man having supreme power, and both together holding the monster of the baser passions under absolute control.

II. Three warnings arise out of this subject. (1) We are accountable to God for ourselves for our whole selves. We cannot disintegrate our individuality, we cannot claim to be good while yet we habitually do evil, we cannot be in a state of sin and yet claim to be in a state of grace. Yet this is the self-deception into which men constantly fall. When they go out, like Judas, to sell their Lord, it is not in the daytime; it is in the night of their own self-deception. We have all need of the daily prayer, "God harden me against myself." (2) We cannot be too careful what we make ourselves. Even the feelings which might be honourable and harmless may be betrayed by excess or by neglect. Our passions are like the waves of the sea, and without the aid of Him who made the human breast we cannot say to its tide, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." (3) As we feel our evil passions and their mastery over us, so by the grace of God can we get rid of our worse selves altogether. It is not possible by our own unaided strength, but Christ died that it might be more than possible to all that trust in Him. They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts; they are renewed in the image of God. In them the old self is conquered indeed, the body of sin is destroyed, so that they are no longer the slaves of sin; they walk in newness of life.

F. W. Farrar, Family Churchman,March 31st, 1886.

References: Romans 6:13. Good Words,vol. iii., pp. 762, 763; R. Tuck, Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 251.Romans 6:14. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xv., No. 901; vol. xxiv., No. 1410; T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. i., p. 103.Romans 6:14; Romans 6:15. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., No. 1735.