How's Your Aim

Part 1

Although I have not shot a gun in many years now, and do not consider myself a sportsman, I made at least three discoveries that day, while using for my target a tin can I placed on a farmer’s fence post. First, I discovered that I could not expect to hit the designated target unless I aimed at it. Secondly, I discovered the more I practiced the more likely I was to hit the target. Thirdly, I discovered that no matter how intent I was on hitting the target, there were times when I completely missed it.

Those very same discoveries I made that fall afternoon while standing between rows of corn stubble, have followed me in my walk with God as well. I have come to realize that I cannot expect to please God unless I aim to; I have learned the longer I walk in fellowship with God the better my aim in pleasing God has become. But I also have learned that no matter how much I want to please God, there have been times when my performance was wide of the mark.

How’s your aim? One’s aim in the Christian life may be too high or too low. In this article we will consider the latter.

Is Your Aim too Low?

While practicing with my gun that first day, and many times later, not once did I try to hit the tin can on top of the fence post by aiming at the dirt located at the base of the post. I did not try to aim too low.

Yet, there are many preachers and Bible teachers who repeatedly tell their parishioners and sincere students in so many words: “Aim too low; expect to miss the target! Expect to sin! The fact is, I miss the target more often than any one of you; I am the biggest sinner here!” And all the listeners nod in agreement as they are provided by their spiritual leader with a convenient salve to sooth their many willful disobediences and guilty consciences.

This widespread, but erroneous teaching, is founded upon a false premise which states in effect: a Christian is still so depraved in his regenerate state that he cannot consistently please God. Such a teaching says that even though—to use the language of Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:11—the Christian has been washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, he cannot expect to hit the target God has placed before him, even though he has aimed with all good intentions at the target.

What is the Target?

The target God has called all of the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ to always aim at is the target of divine love, as defined and revealed in His holy Word.

The Lord informs us in Romans 13:10 that “love is the fulfillment of the law.” When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he said, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”(1)

I said that the target the Christian is to always aim at is the target of divine love, as defined and revealed in God’s holy Word. Divine love—agape love—is more than a feeling. It is Christlike conduct, Christlike attitudes, Christlike reactions, Christlike thinking, Christlike decision-making, Christlike pursuits. Jesus was divine love manifested in human flesh. Whatever Jesus did was always consistent with divine love.

Now this divine love is to be the target the follower of Christ is to always have in his aim. Not in his own strength, mind you. But indwelt as he is by the Holy Spirit, the Christian is equipped with a power that is greater than the Tempter’s power. He has God-power. He can, by the power of God within him, resist the devil; he can, by the power of God within him, overcome evil. To tell believers anything else makes a mockery of God’s Word and says that God is a liar.

The pastor that tells his people that even though God has forgiven them for the things they did while living in the “pig pen,” yet they can’t expect to live other than like pigs, may be offering his people no more than what he himself is experiencing. The proverb certainly applies in this case: If the blind leads the blind, will they not both land in a ditch?

For those whose aim is too low, they believe and teach that no matter how the Christian aims as he walks in fellowship with God, he cannot expect anything more than a missed target. Such faulty reasoning flies in the face of God’s revealed Word. Based on this erroneous teaching, the adulterous woman Jesus forgave and told to “sin no more,” should not have had any reason to expect that she could actually leave a life of immorality. Aim as she might, the best she could do was to continue to live an immoral life.(2)

The same logic and analogy can be made for every other sin: Even though God tells the Christian to “put on” or “put off” specific kinds of unacceptable conduct, no one should expect to live up to such a high standard.(3) After all, we’re sinners! And what do sinners do? They sin!

What about Romans 7?

For those whose aim is too low, one of their favorite texts of Scripture is Romans 7. For example: “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (v. 15). “For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want” (v. 19).

They take great comfort in these verses and in this passage which they have incorrectly interpreted. They reason: If the apostle Paul did the best that he could and still could not overcome sin in his life, who am I to think that I can? So their woeful and defeated reasoning goes: How can God expect me to overcome lust? How can God expect me to overcome sinful anger? How can God expect me to live a Christlike life? After all, so they reason, Paul tried and he couldn’t!

Is Romans 7 God’s description of God’s best experience for the Christian? Is this the apostle of Christ’s personal testimony of his own Christian life? Absolutely not—on both counts!

If Paul is describing his own present, personal experience in these verses, how is it that he can on the other hand report in Romans 8:37, “But in all these things [those things mentioned in verse 33-36] we overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us”? If this is Paul’s account of his own defeated experience, how could he in good conscience exhort Christians, as he did in Galatians 5:16, to “walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh”?

The truth of the matter is, Paul is not confessing to a defeated Christian life. What Paul is describing in Romans 7, is his own personal struggle in trying to please God and keep a good conscience, while he was yet living under the law—serving God in the flesh—before he met Jesus on the Damascus road and three days later was filled with the Holy Spirit. Romans 7 is the personal testimony of a devout Jewish Pharisee doing his best to live a righteous life without God’s regenerating power. Romans 7 is a description of a person who tries to keep the law of God, without walking in the Spirit; it is depicting a person who is depending on his own efforts (the flesh) to achieve spiritual victory, instead of humbly yielding to God, thereby triumphing in the power of His Spirit.

How do we know this is so? Let’s take a look.

Paul introduces this passage by informing us who he is addressing: “I am speaking to those who know the law” (v. 1). Then he proceeds to tells us that the Old Testament law had jurisdiction over an individual for his entire life. He illustrates this with a marriage/divorce analogy. He says that an adulterous woman is only “free from the law” whenever her first husband dies [note: this is not, by any means, a comprehensive biblical explanation of the marriage/divorce issue].

Paul applies this analogy to his topic at hand, which is: As Christians, we have died to the Old Testament law through the death of Christ in order to be joined to Jesus Christ. He says prior to this union with Christ, “we were in the flesh” (v. 5), but since our union with Christ, “we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we might serve in newness of Spirit and not in oldness of letter” (v.6). Notice the tenses that I highlighted are in the past tense; Paul reminds his readers of their glorious deliverance through Christ.

He then goes on to say that there was a time prior to his conversion when he was “alive,” apart from the law. That is, he had kept a good conscience and was pleasing God to the best of his ability. However, he says that when God revealed to him how he was guilty of breaking the tenth commandment—coveting—”sin became alive and I died.” He says that this is God’s method in convicting the guilty sinner, “so that through the commandment sin [in his case, coveting] would become utterly sinful” (see vv. 7-13).

Next, he enlarges for us the picture of the person who is trying to live a good life “under the law” while living “in the flesh.” And he does this by using the first person pronoun. Paul says of this person:

“I am of the flesh, sold into bondage to sin” (v. 14). “I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (v. 15). “...for the willing is present with me, but the doing good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want” (vv. 18b-19). “I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good” (v. 21). “I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members” (v. 23). “So then, on the one hand I myself am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin” (v. 25).

Now I reiterate, these are some of the favorite texts of Scripture among those who, in my opinion, aim too low in their walk with God.

If Paul is not referring to his present personal experience in the above verses, what is the logical explanation for his use of these first person pronouns? Simply this: Paul is writing in the first person in order to emphatically underscore the ongoing struggle inside the person who is trying to live a righteous life without the indwelling, energizing power of God. The person he has in mind is not even a Christian; he is not in Christ.

This is the only logical explanation considering the larger context.

Romans 8

If Romans 7 is Paul’s personal testimony of his own experience at the time of writing this epistle, he certainly contradicts himself in the next chapter. And that is the crux of the pervasive misunderstanding of Romans 7: preachers and Bible teachers have isolated it from its larger context. One cannot correctly interpret Romans 7 apart from understanding Romans 8.

Paul says in Romans 8, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son …” (vv. 2-3) He proceeds to say that the purpose of God in sending His Son was “so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (v. 4). Furthermore, he says, “those in the flesh cannot please God. However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (vv. 8-9a).

How can the person Paul describes in Romans 7 be a regenerated Christian when he says in chapter 8 that true Christians have been “set free”, are “walking according to the Spirit”, are not living “in the flesh”, experience “life and peace”, “are putting to death the deeds of the body”, “are being led by the Spirit of God”, “have not received a spirit of slavery”, and are empowered by God to “overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us” (vv. 2-13). How can Paul be speaking of the same person in these two chapters when he says in 7:1, “I am of the flesh” and he says in 8:8, “those who are in the flesh cannot please God”?

The truth of the matter is, he is not speaking of the same person or the same spiritual state. Chapter 8 speaks of those who “are in Christ Jesus” (v. 1). Chapter 7 describes the person who is trying to serve God by obeying the law of God without being “in Christ.” He is still “in the flesh.” Paul says that the answer for the Romans 7 struggle is to go on to Romans 8: Go to Christ; die to the law and sin; walk according to the Spirit; put to death the deeds of the body.

If our aim to please God is no higher than Romans 7, then we’re sure to hit our target consistently. Let those who wish to drive their stakes down in Romans 7 do so, if that’s where they feel the most at home. For myself, and a myriad of others, I would much rather press on to Romans 8 and make my lodging there, by the grace of God. Let it be said in bold print: IF THE CHRISTIAN IS LIVING IN ROMANS 8, HE IS NOT LIVING IN ROMANS 7! And God’s desire for every hungry-hearted seeker after His righteousness is, that he might enjoy Christ’s abundant life as outlined in Romans 8.

Dear friend, how’s your aim? Has Romans 7 been your target, as well as a depiction of your own experience? Have you been struggling to live a righteous life while going from defeat to defeat?

Let me suggest that you go immediately to Jesus. To all of those who are trying to be good and live a righteous life, but have not come to Him—have not fully trusted in Him—He says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, [weary and burdened by trying to live right without the power of Christ] and I will give you rest [the Romans 7 person certainly was not experiencing Christ’s rest]. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light [unlike the yoke of the law and the law of sin as described in Romans 7].”(4)

Missing the Target

Back to our target-shooting analogy in conclusion. I said earlier that no matter how intent I was on aiming at the target with my rifle, there were times when I missed the mark. That’s precisely the same meaning of one of the Greek words used for “sin” in the Scriptures: hamartia, missing the mark.

There will be times when the Christian will be wide of the mark, not because he necessarily aimed wrong, but simply because he missed the target of love. And when I miss that target, I have sinned (hamartia). I know there are those who don’t want to call it sin, but God calls it sin. It was a missing of the mark, the target of divine love.

And what is the Christian to do when he misses the target of divine love? He is to flee to Christ: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not miss the target of divine love even one time. However, if anyone misses the target of divine love—even one time—remember, as Christians, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous One; and He Himself is the atoning sacrifice for every Christian who fails to hit the target of divine love…”(5)

No matter how experienced we are in our walk with God, we can still miss the target. Thank God, when we flee to Christ, there is abundant mercy, forgiveness, and cleansing. As for me, I must confess, I always stand in need of my heavenly Advocate, who is conveniently seated at my Father’s right hand, who is even now making intercession for me.

– Soli Deo Gloria –

All Scripture references are taken from the New American Standard Bible except where noted.

1. Matthew 22:37-39
2. John 8:3-11
3. See Ephesians 4
4. Matthew 11:28-30
5. 1 John 2:1-2a (my own translation)