This verse proves that the very best of men are sinners still. Paul, an apostle, yet a wretched man. This was not someone else saying this about him, but was what he himself acknowledged. He did not say, "O wretched man that I used to be," but "O wretched man that I am!"
    When men become partakers of grace, they are not thereby made free from the being of sin. It will still dwell in their flesh (Rom. 7:20) but it shall no longer have dominion over them (Rom. 6:14). "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" (I John 1:8).
    But though there is this sinful nature even in the child of God, and he cannot live above sin (Rom. 7:15-21), yet in regeneration he is given grace to fight against sin and to bring his body into subjection (I Cor. 9:27). He is killed to the love of sin and commanded to let not sin reign in his mortal body, nor to obey it in the lusts thereof (Rom. 6:12). If we could live above sin, then Paul would have said, "Let not sin exist in your mortal bodies."
    Paul also referred to himself as "less than the least of all saints" (Eph. 3:8), and as the chief of sinners (See I Tim. 1:15). He acknowledged that no good thing dwelt in his flesh (Rom. 7:18), and in the same context he was very candid about the warfare within himself between good and evil. See also Galatians 5:17. It is only by the grace of God that a man can see this in himself and confess it to himself and to others. It is the nature of men to deny their faults and failings and to try to justify themselves in their sins. But when Paul was brought to see himself as he was by nature and to grieve over his sins, he could freely confess that he was the least of the apostles and was not meet (or fit) to be called an apostle, because he had been a persecutor of the church of God. He also gave God all the glory for the change that had been wrought in him (I Cor. 15:9-10).