Stumbling into grace...

The smallest of events can teach us everything, if we learn Who is doing them with us, through us and for us. But have no doubt: That is the total goal. We want law for the sake of order, obedience and "moral purity"; God and Paul want law for the sake of channeling us toward a realization of divine union, to force the honest person to stumble (see Romans 7:7-13—that's really what it says!), and then "fall into the hands of the living God" (Hebrew 10:31). Juridically, law is an end in itself, absolutely good and necessary for social order.

Spiritually, though, law is a means, not an end at all.

Why did Paul come to this so clearly? Because Paul himself was a man of the law. As he tells us in Philippians (3:6-8), he was a perfect Pharisee. "As far as the Law can make you perfect, I was faultless," he says. Yet in the next line he admits that he was a mass-murderer. "How could such perfect religious observance still create hateful and violent men like me?" That was his transformative question, and for him it worked. This still needs to be the question for many religious groups today.

Then what is the law really for? It's not to make God love you. That issue is already solved once and forever, and you are powerless to change it one direction or the other. The purpose of spiritual law is simply to sharpen our awareness about who we are and who God is, so that we can name our own insufficiency and, in that same movement, find God’s fullness.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

I remember struggling with that passage in Romans 7 on a train from Durham to London 25 years ago - I was actually sweating as I tried to make sense of it. I wish I'd had a copy of Rohr's book to hand then!