I Do Not Do What I Want
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want,
but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)
An Emerson College poll last year revealed a surprising paradox about news consumption in America: social media is the least-widely-trusted and most-widely-used source for information about the news.[1] More than half of Americans reported that they put “not much trust” or “no trust at all” in the information they received from social media sites; even so, nearly 40% said that social media or YouTube were their main sources of news.
Some would say that this is an example of what economists call “revealed preferences”; the idea there’s a difference between what consumers say they prefer and the preferences that are revealed by their actual purchases. Or you might think that there are two kinds of people: the ones who distrust social media, and the ones who get news from it. But I don’t think either of these is right. Like many people, I’m in both categories. I really would prefer to do what my wife Alice does, and get all my news from long-form journalism and 19th-century novels. And yet “I find it to be a law that when I want to [read The Atlantic online], [Facebook] lies close at hand.” (cf. Romans 7:21) Again and again, fifteen minutes into scrolling through posts that alternately baffle and enrage me, I realize I’m that I’m just like Paul: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)
This is a trivial example, of course. But it’s a bigger pattern. If you’ve ever found yourself in a heated conversation, and thought, “I’m going to be the bigger person here” and then immediately lost your temper instead, then you’ve experienced what Paul means. This happens to me sometimes. When I lose my temper, it’s not a “revealed preference” for retaliation over forgiveness; it’s simply that “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7:19) If you’ve ever tried to break a bad habit, or if you’ve struggled with an addiction, then you know what this is like over an even longer term; it can sometimes feel as though there is “another law at war with the law of [your] mind.” (7:23)
This is the insight at the heart of Paul’s psychology: that the human will is imperfect. We don’t always choose what’s right, but even when we do, we don’t always manage to do it. There are big moral questions and ethical disputes. There are times we really do disagree about right and wrong. But this isn’t actually the main ethical struggle of everyday life. The problem we face—at least according to Paul—is not so much that we disagree about whether 20% of things are good or bad, and need to work that out. It’s that we all agree about 80% of what it means to do the right thing, and we set out bright and early Monday morning to do it, and by Sunday, here we are again, needing to confess “our sins, known and unknown, things done and left undone,” because, like Paul, we “have found it to be a law that when [we] want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”
Every one of us is imperfect. We try our best to do the right thing, and we often do, but not always. We continually bump up against our own limitations, and our own weaknesses, and we wish it weren’t so. “Wretched man that I am,” Paul says. “Who will rescue me from this body of death!?” (Romans 7:24) I love Paul’s emotional range. “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death!? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
It seems like a non sequitur, but it’s the whole point. Who will rescue us? Jesus came to rescue us. Jesus came—not to make us perfect, which very clearly hasn’t happened yet—but to set us free from the burden of our imperfection. God sees our failings and comes to us with mercy, rather than with judgment. Jesus comes to lift a load off our shoulders; he sees us struggling, and says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you 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.” (Matt. 11:28)
We can choose to follow that model of grace. Think about the tone of Paul’s words here. There are a lot of “I” statements: “I do not understand my own actions… I do not do what I want.” And they’re really we statements: not only “I (Paul) do not do what I want,” but “we (human beings) do not do what we want.” But they’re certainly not “you” statements, which are inevitably asymmetric. Paul isn’t saying “you do not do what I want.” He doesn’t point a finger of blame. He recognizes that we are all in this together, that I, Paul, am no better than you.
And we can respond to one another’s failings with curiosity and grace, if we begin from that sense of sameness. If I know that I do not do what I want, then I can admit that the same thing might be true for you. If I know that sometimes I say or do something that I don’t mean, then I can recognize that when someone is unkind to me, they may not have been trying to hurt me, and I can offer them the same grace I sometimes need. If I can accept that I’m imperfect, then I can let go of the need to prove I’m better than anyone else—and all of the anxiety and resentment that comes with it.
What Paul says is true. The recognition of our own limitations is the beginning of the path to growth. The road to spiritual maturity begins with humility. And I think that this is as true for groups of people—for families, for churches, for nations—as it is for individuals.
250 years ago, fifty-six men from Thirteen Colonies gathered to declare, among other things, that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Their words and their ideals have inspired generations of Americans to dedicate their lives to the cause of freedom; many have given their lives to defend it. And of those 56 men, nearly 3 in 4 owned other human beings, whom they kept enslaved. Both these things are true, and I can’t help but feel that they represent what Paul said, on a national scale: they did not fully live out their ideals; they “delight[ed] in the law of God in [their] inmost [selves], but [they saw] in [their] members another law at war with the law of [their] mind.” And it would take another war for the sin of slavery to be overthrown, and generations more for that “self-evident truth” of equality to extend fully to all men and women.
This wouldn’t come as a surprise to Paul. He knew that people are not “good” or “evil,” one or the other. He believe that even when we are actively engaged in the struggle for good, evil lies close at hand. To say that there was a great evil in our nation at its founding is not to say that our nation is only evil. To say that these Founders fought for ideals that were good is not to excuse them for the ways in which they failed to live them out.
We can look at our nation’s history in the same way Paul invites us to look at ourselves: to see and name the struggle contained within our history and our lives. We can acknowledge and admit the ways in which our Founders were flawed, imperfect men, and be inspired nevertheless by their vision of liberty and justice for all. We can celebrate our own goodness and admit our imperfections at the very same time. In fact, we might even say that that’s the greatest thing a person or a nation can do; to acknowledge our own failures, and to continue struggling to grow beyond them, knowing that even in the midst of imperfection, we are the beloved children of a God who sees us and says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
[1] “2025 National Media Poll.” Emerson Polling. May 2, 2025. https://emersoncollegepolling.com/2025-national-media-poll/.
