Possessing the Treasure shares a teaching by John A. Broadus:
O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 7:24—25
The language is intensely passionate, — “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Then with the sudden transition of passion, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“How shall I be good?” is a question that used sometimes to rise in your mind when you were a child, sometimes when nobody would imagine you were thinking of such things as that. “How shall I get,to be good.” And it is a question which, amid all the commotion of this runaway life of ours, comes back to us very often, comes back even to people whom you would not suppose to be thinking of such things at all. The grossly wicked men, the men who are the slaves of vice, many of them, perhaps all of them, have their moments when there is a sort of longing that rises in their souls to be good, and when the hope returns, indestructible, that somehow or other they will get to be good after all. It became a sort of jest a few years ago, I know, to speak of “the wickedest man in New York,” but I wonder sometimes if the wickedest man — whoever he might happen to be, considered as God considers — does not sometimes want to be good.