I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.–Rom. 7:9
Would you read the best experience of a true believer in Christ ever written? I believe it is here in this chapter. Try your own: judge of others by this. If we are taught by the same Spirit, our experience will answer to that of Paul in the following particulars:
A sense of sin will be revived in the conscience, which no human palliatives or lulling opiates can any longer hush to silence. You will so see, and be sensible of its dread and terror, that you will confess yourself to be totally destroyed by it, and that your case is desperate.
This is effected by the law, "for by the law is the knowledge of sin." Rom. 3:20. "When the commandment came "–that is, when the purity and spirituality of the holy and perfect law of God comes into your heart and conscience, then you see that it requires truth and perfection of obedience in the inward parts as well as in the outward life. You see you have it not: you find it is impossible for you, a sinner, to fulfil God's holy law.
Then you die: you become as a dead man. Seeing the exceeding sinfulness of sin in you, and the dreadful curse of the law hanging over you, all hope of life forsakes you. Sin and the law live within you; they pierce your soul to the quick. The law adds strength to sin. You can no longer flatter yourself that your state is good, that you can do any thing to bring yourself upon good terms with God; you have now done with all works of righteousness to that end; you can have no more hope from your obedience to the law, than from your transgressions against it: you see sin in all that you are, and in all that you do.
But the hand of the Comforter is in all this. His loving design is to bring you to live by the faith of the Son of God. Instead of looking to your own righteousness, and living by it, you are to live wholly and solely upon his life and by his righteousness. But while "alive without the law," and striving to fulfil the law, you overlook Christ, slight his righteousness, and think it better to trust your own than his. Now the Spirit keeps alive sin and the law in you for this very purpose, to make you wretched in self and happy in Christ. All experiences that do not effect this are vain. Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. Rom. 10:4.