(3.) But all this while he was painfully conscious that he was infinitely below its standard. The very fact of hungering and thirsting after righteousness implies in itself that your hunger is not yet supplied: so in this passage St. Paul teaches us that he was still very far from what he most earnestly desired to be. He felt what I may term the bitter provocation of shortcoming: ‘The good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not that I do.’ There was the unceasing consciousness of falling utterly short of the high standard set before him in the law. He does not say this to justify sin, for he tells us how he hated it; but he teaches us, as plainly as words can teach anything, that at the very time when God had by His great grace so changed his heart that he had discovered the law and was delighting in it, there was still in him what the ninth Article describes, when it says, ‘The infection of nature doth remain yet in them that are regenerate.’ The old, fallen, sinful human nature was not extinct in him, and this ruin of his fallen nature was acting as a clog and drawback on his holy longings after the perfect holiness of God. Thus in his one self there was a contest between grace and nature, between the new man and the old. Of the one he says, ‘I delight in the law of God after the inward man;’ and of the other, ‘I know that in me (_i.e._, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.’ By the power of the Holy Ghost he could say, ‘To will is present with me;’ but through the power of the old nature he was obliged to add, ‘How to perform that which is good I find not.’ It was this bitter pain of thus failing to reach the standard of his heart’s desire, that drew from him the cry, ‘Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ Some people think that such language could not have come from an enlightened believer, led by the Spirit, and walking in the sunlight of the eighth chapter. They seem to forget the twenty-third verse of that very chapter, in which he says, ‘Ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.’ (viii. 23.) For my own part, I believe it was the leading of the Spirit that called it forth, inasmuch as that leading led him to aim at the true standard of the holiness of God. I agree with the wise commentary of old Scott:— ‘This energetic language, which many imagine to describe an unestablished believer’s experience, or even that of an unconverted person, seems to have resulted from the extraordinary degree of St. Paul’s sanctification, and the depth of his self-abasement, and hatred of sin; and the reason of our not readily understanding him seems to be that we are so far beneath him in holiness, humility, acquaintance with the spirituality of God’s law, and the evil of our own hearts, and in our degree of abhorrence of moral evil.’