‘For what I do I know not.'
Here begins Paul's description of the human moral struggle that is experienced by most good people, but is especially the lot of the Christian whose moral sense has been heightened. He has constantly to battle with himself. And we have, of course, to recognise that what would appear as sin to Paul would appear to many not to be sin at all. As our consciences develop and are purified through our knowledge of God, things are seen as sin which had previously been seen as acceptable.
The words in this verse could mean that the first effect of being carnal and held captive by sin is that ‘we know not what we do'. We sin unwittingly, not realising that what we are doing is sin. How many of us daily mourn over the fact that our love for God is not as total as it should be? But as we grow older in the Christian life more and more things become recognised as sin which in the beginning we did not realise were sin. We realise then that we have been sinning all the time. And this is a continuing process because we are so sinful. ‘If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves' (1 John 1:8). We have to learn more and more the depths of what is really sin. Thus ‘what we do we know not'.
But more possibly it means, ‘what I do, I do not acknowledge'. Here Paul would be saying, ‘What I do which is bad, is something that is, as a Christian, alien to me. I am, as it were, forced to do it against my will because of the fleshliness of a certain disposition within me, but I do not acknowledge it as right, nor am I proud of it.'
‘For I do not practise what I would, but what I hate, that I do.'
‘For,' he says, ‘I do not (always) practise what in my heart I want to do', (i.e. what he recognises to be right in accordance with the Law), but rather find myself doing what I hate' (what is contrary to that Law). The fleshly man described appears to be a very contrary creature. But when we recognise that that Law admonishes that we ‘love God with heart, soul, mind and strength' (Deuteronomy 6:5) and that we ‘love our neighbour as ourselves' (Leviticus 19:18) we can see why even a good man feels that he falls short of it constantly. True love is very demanding. What is described here is not, of course, to be seen as Paul's experience all the time. What he does and hates is not in accordance with his normal practise. Indeed it is not anyone's experience all the time. It is the experience which comes at times of difficulty and temptation.