Romans 7:20

Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

7:18-22 The more pure and holy the heart is, it will have the more quick feeling as to the sin that remains in it. The believer sees more of the beauty of holiness and the excellence of the law. His earnest desires to obey, increase as he grows in grace. But the whole good on which his will is fully bent, he does not do; sin ever springing up in him, through remaining corruption, he often does evil, though against the fixed determination of his will. The motions of sin within grieved the apostle. If by the striving of the flesh against the Spirit, was meant that he could not do or perform as the Spirit suggested, so also, by the effectual opposition of the Spirit, he could not do what the flesh prompted him to do. How different this case from that of those who make themselves easy with regard to the inward motions of the flesh prompting them to evil; who, against the light and warning of conscience, go on, even in outward practice, to do evil, and thus, with forethought, go on in the road to perdition! For as the believer is under grace, and his will is for the way of holiness, he sincerely delights in the law of God, and in the holiness which it demands, according to his inward man; that new man in him, which after God is created in true holiness.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Now if I do ... - This verse is also a repetition of what was said in Romans 7:16-17.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

19, 21. For, &c.—The conflict here graphically described between a self that "desires" to do good and a self that in spite of this does evil, cannot be the struggles between conscience and passion in the unregenerate, because the description given of this "desire to do good" in Ro 7:22 is such as cannot be ascribed, with the least show of truth, to any but the renewed.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

See Poole on "Romans 7:19"

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

Now if I do that I would not,.... The same conclusion is formed here, as in Romans 7:17, not with any view to excuse himself from blame in sinning, but to trace the lusts of his heart, and the sins of his life, to the source and fountain of them, the corruption of his nature; and to ascribe them to the proper cause of them, which was not the law of God, nor the new man, but sin that dwelt in him.

Geneva Study Bible

Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Meyer's NT Commentary

Romans 7:20. From this follows, however, the very proposition to be proved, Romans 7:17, that it is not the moral self, but the sin-principle in man, that performs the evil.

οὐ θέλω] as in Romans 7:16.

Expositor's Greek Testament

Romans 7:20. The same conclusion as in Romans 7:17. If the first ἐγὼ is right, it must go with οὐ θέλω: Paul distinguishes himself sharply, as a person whose inclination is violated by his actions, from the indwelling sin which is really responsible for them.

Bengel's Gnomen

Romans 7:20. Οὐκ ἔτι) no longer,[76] namely, as I formerly used to perpetrate it [taken from κατεργάζομαι]. Some degree of serenity and deliverance gradually arises. I is emphatic, in antithesis to sin. He who says with emphasis, it is not I that will it [non volo ego], instead of the former, I would not [non volo (without ego) I do not will] (Romans 7:15) is already farther removed from sin.

[76] Not now, as in former times, when I was wholly dead in sin.—ED.

Romans 7:20