December 9, 2022 - Romans 7:10

“The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me” (Romans 7:10). What a strange statement! What does Shedd have to say about it? He provides an interesting observation: “No creature can be happy, so long as he feels himself under limitations. To be checked, reined in, and thwarted in any way, renders a man uneasy and discontented.” I put on a shirt, the other day, that had become taut, especially around my middle (Surely, it was that the shirt had shrunk, not that my girth had expanded.). How uncomfortable that was! And how quickly I slipped out of it!

The law of God binds us up. It creates tension within us when we break it. Under even the slightest conviction, we are so uncomfortable, and we wish to escape that feeling. But we cannot! Shedd makes another observation, though: “[Jesus] frees the sinful soul from all this. He delivers it from the penalty by assuming it all upon Himself and making complete satisfaction to the broken law. He delivers it from the perpetual restraint and the irksome effort by so renewing and changing the heart that it becomes a delight to keep the law.”

These quotes are becoming quite long but I must add Shedd’s final plea: “The instant you plead the merit of Christ’s oblation, in simple confidence in its atoning efficacy, that instant the heavy burden is lifted off by an Almighty hand, and your curved, stooping, trembling, aching form once more stands erect, and you walk abroad in the liberty wherewith Christ makes the human creature free.”

By God’s Word at last my sin I learned–

Then I trembled at the Law I’d spurned,

Till my guilty soul imploring turned to Calvary.

Mercy there was great and grace was free,

Pardon there was multiplied to me,

There my burdened soul found liberty–

At Calvary. -- William R. Newell (1895)