“You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. If in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”
How amazing is this! This scripture is totally different than what we might think we would read in God’s Word! And it does mean exactly what it says!
The fact is, we are not in the flesh! A believer has the literal Spirit of Jesus living within his own person and is no longer ruled by a fallen human nature! We have been made alive by the living presence of our resurrected Jesus and released from the power of flesh. We are no longer in the flesh, but rather, we are in Christ Jesus. Paul continues to repeat this message because it is so crucial to our Spiritual understanding and because our human experience contradicts God’s declared truth. We are redeemed; we are God’s purchased possession!
This is a sensitive issue; scripture’s contradiction to worldly wisdom is certainly understandable! Throughout scripture, from Genesis through Revelation, a contrast is made between darkness and light. In the original creation we read on the first day God introduced light to separate the darkness. This theme is constant through the whole of scripture be it in Old Testament Israel through the prophet Isaiah or Jesus Himself on earth or the end times of Revelation.
We, born-again believers, are ourselves the Light of Jesus living in this world of darkness. Since Jesus made us righteously alive in Him, His Spirit bears witness with our spirit because He is in us! We are the bride of Christ Jesus.
Man’s truth is not God’s truth! The born-again believer needs Spiritual discernment because we have an enemy walking about as a roaring lion seeking to devour his prey. Born-again believers are Satan’s targets of attack.
It is very tempting for young believers to draw upon personal discernment to apply within their new spiritual circumstances. However, doing so quite likely will distort our understanding of God’s absolute truth. We need constantly to consult God’s own holy word while growing in God’s culture of grace through faith. This is totally a different life-style than natural man is accustomed.
Probing God’s salvation is an amazing journey into His fellowship and love. We are used to dealing with frail exploitable mankind but God’s culture of grace comes out from God’s own immutable omniscience and agape love.
We don’t want to use scripture to say something that appeals to our comfort zone while avoiding to know what God Himself is actually intending us to Spiritually understand. Romans 8 is God’s inspired word written with purpose and intent! It is accessible through His Spirit joined to our spirit, our fellowship, and our devotion! Be intentional by reading and meditation before Him in prayer!
The spiritual meaning of the “flesh” refers to the forces and enticements in the world contrary to the holiness of absolute truth in agape love. It is one thing to experience earth’s worldly influence, it is another to be controlled by a sin nature. But, on the other hand, we have been “salted with fire.” We have both the righteousness of God and the power of fire to overcome since we are in Christ Jesus.
We introduced this in an earlier GraceNotes, the “Pathway” into God’s agape love; our eternal realm is Spiritual, even while we flourish in this temporal domain of darkness; our physical energy needs spiritual power within our temporal bodies. This challenge is also our calling! We are called to produce Spiritual fruit while living temporally in non-spiritual jars of clay.
We are created new to be overcomers with Jesus’ own resurrection power; we are no longer controlled by the flesh even though we live fleshly by habit; we continually become more flesh conscious as we grow in God’s grace! God uses flesh to teach Spiritual lessons to our heart! Take poor Job for example! Our flesh is God’s Spiritual workshop teaching us about grace with knowledge about God since we are “salted” with righteousness in Jesus!
The first two verses of Romans 8: 9-11 is declaring an undisputable spiritual veracity we will discern with our personal spiritual eyes; we grow spiritually in Christ Jesus as we consume His grace!
Our existing physical body belongs to the realm of death but you and I are already born alive into the spiritual kingdom of our resurrected Jesus. Yes, it is a dichotomy, but we already have entered into our eternal kingdom since we now live spiritually within the resurrected life of Jesus Christ Himself. We no longer need to pander to things that are fleshly; our flesh is only temporary and is spiritually dead.
You might say these three verses are Paul’s bull’s eye for our spiritual target. In verses 9-10 he tells it, as it is, and then in verse 11, he sums up what it will be!
You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit! (verse 9)
If you have the Spirit of God, you have the righteousness of Jesus! (verse 10)
If you have Jesus’ righteousness, your body will be glorified! (verse 11)
Once created new in Jesus, we are set free from the law of sin and death; “the old is past and the new has come.” Any person who is in Christ Jesus has an eternal-view, not a “Christian Worldview;” one is of the Spirit and the other is of the flesh. Paul tells the Galatians, “If we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit,” Galatians 5:25.
When we enter this world as babies, we are self-centered. We grow in a natural culture where we are number one. We learn to take care of ourselves, protect ourselves and manage our circumstances so that our future is secure; we take care of ourselves first. This basic human survival culture focuses on family or our individual self, first, others come second.
When we become a born-again believer, we enter into a totally different culture. It is not a “sin” culture at all, it is God’s grace culture. Our redeemed life is set free from the sin culture of self-orientation and places us into God’s agape love culture of grace instructing total reliance upon our holy God!
This is what grace is all about; it is where we find forgiveness and mercy leading into God’s amazing agape love! This is made possible through the gospel provisions of Jesus’ holy payment for sin, enabling us to enter into the purity of God’s own righteousness thru Jesus. We become righteous (justified) in and thru Jesus’ redemption, replacing our own selfness with sanctification.
We are physically born as created human beings weaned upon worldly realities of self-survival. When we enter into God’s grace thru Jesus, we tend to bring our natural human baggage, our human identity while growing-up. Now, in Christ Jesus, we are introduced into a “spiritual” kingdom and we have no clue! We now are a Spiritual identity being guided us to walk in the “light” of Jesus.
We bring into our “born-again” spiritual life the human baggage of worldly culture which we must put to death. We must learn to live by faith and in so doing, we find Jesus is also providing us with His resurrection power to be conquerors, overcomers within God’s own grace culture of agape love. We are more than conquerors through him who loved us, Romans 8:37. But our discernment of this reality, within our new created life in Jesus, takes time to mature during our spiritual growth. Solid food (Spiritual) is for the mature, for those who have powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil, Hebrews 5:14.
Our contemporary Christian community has adopted an idea of a “Christian worldview.” This is a contradiction in terms; in scripture there is no “Christian worldview!” Paul addressed this very issue point blank via his letter to the churches in Galatia. People were turning to a different gospel because people were discovering their “Christian worldview” through a teaching subsequent to Paul’s teaching, Paul having left and returned to Jerusalem.
Man has the tendency to change the gospel message so that it is easier to accept and more comfortable for existing humanity. Man thinks It is OK to improve himself rather than acknowledge we are all sinners requiring salvation in God’s grace. God’s eternal-view which is, in fact, total and complete will prevail for all of man’s eternality. There is only one God and He has been alive before there was a heaven and earth! He has come down into created earth, so that, we, created beings, can be taken bodily into His eternal righteous reality.
Our task is to understand God’s eternal-view which is revealed within Himself. Our participation is as children in God’s family; Jesus taught the disciples to pray: “our Father (abba, Father ), in heaven;” we are in Him and He is in us! We have received the “Spirit of adoption,” His Spirit bearing witness that we are children of God. This redemption process is “rooted and grounded” in agape love through His grace; the righteousness of God Himself is rooted in us!
Redemption, as used in scripture, means God’s buying us back to Himself. Our created humanity is bought back with the purchase price of Jesus’ death for our sin; it also means being set free from our slavery to sin. In the words of a chorus:
“We are his, because He made us.”
“We are his, because we gave our heart and life to Him.”
Our Lord Jesus’ resurrection over death, provisions His agape love and grace into our salvation, so that, we may receive into our own fleshly body the glory of His Person. Our body has become the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. We no longer belong to ourselves, we have been bought with a price so that we can now glorify God within our very bodies of clay, 1Corinthians 6:19b-17.
Redemption, by definition, includes the freeing us from our slavery to sin and becoming Jesus’ own purchased possession. This means we are not only dead to fleshy dominance, but alive in Jesus! Our existing selfish desires are no longer our master; it is simply a matter of getting our “want to” fixed!
Through our new creation in Christ Jesus, which includes our human spirit being joined with God’s own Holy Spirit, we now rule over our flesh and are equipped to glorify God in our flesh! We read in verse 11 that the resurrected Jesus will also bring life into our mortal bodies of flesh; this is part of our sanctification process; it is what Paul describes as putting on the new man but in addition, it means also acquiring new resurrected bodies like Jesus Himself.
Verses 8 and 9 gives us a statement of fact, i.e., we are not in the flesh! Verse 11 provides a follow-up application of our new reality in Christ Jesus, both the glory of God revealed in our existing bodies and the future promises of new bodies liken to our resurrected Jesus.
Now let’s take a look at the first verse of our passage. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. If in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
We are in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you; anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him.
Here, in plain sight, is the fullness of God’s trinity person seen through the Holy Spirit of God. This is a statement of the three-in-one persons of God. These interchangeable descriptions reveal to us something about the nature of agape love and our redemption. The dynamic of our identity within Jesus shows our participation of who we are in our inner being; we are not only Spiritual, we are not only in Christ Jesus, but thru the Spirit, Holiness is in us!
There is now a dynamic in play between our new creation in Christ Jesus and God Himself. He has seated us with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. We have been created in Christ Jesus with the Spiritual senses to participate with God personally, on His level, in His agape love, Righteously!
We are “rooted and grounded” in Jesus’ agape love; we are intimate participates of God’s Spiritual Family. We may not be sensitivity to our vibrant intimacy of God’s agape love; it is operational on our behalf but we are spiritual babies, still sucking on the bottle of our Spiritual milk! We need to grow in grace and knowledge of Jesus in us! We need to realize the full impact of this dynamic existence while still in our “dead” flesh. We need to consume the Spirit of grace who is imparting life while we are living in these earthly jars of clay!
We were struck how Lloyd-Jones paraphrased Paul in this section:
“I have just been telling you that this problem of sin in your life is now only a residual problem.”
He goes on to say: “There was a time when you were completely ‘under sin’ in body, mind and spirit. That is no longer true, for if Christ be in you, ‘because the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is Life because of righteousness.’ Realize, then, that this is your position. You have been set free; you are as free now as you will ever be; you are ‘in Christ.’ You died with Christ, you have risen with Christ, you are seated in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus. (This) is your position now; sin is left only in your body, your ‘mortal body.’ Do not live for the relic, for the remnant; do not live for the body, for the flesh; live to ‘the Spirit’ which is ‘life’ and freedom. Do not be inconsistent with yourselves. Realize that the fight that remains against sin is only temporary and a passing one while you are still in this world; therefore do not live for ‘the flesh;’ live rather as the man your are ‘in Christ Jesus,’ the man who is in the realm of the Spirit.”
As we move on to verse 10 we see again the prominent display of the Spirit as Life. “But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.”
Paul once again is sharing with us that the righteousness of God is ministering and penetrating into us through His Spirit. We experience God and know Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit attending to our spirit. Even in our weakness we find the Spirit of Life is interceding on our behalf because we do not even know how to pray (verse 27) according to our own need!
We mere mortals must cultivate desire to seek both Jesus and God from within our own hearts. Too often we operate with mind only and thereby serve self rather than consuming the glorious agape love from God from within our heart. Only when both our heart and mind are in spiritual synch can we share God’s glory into our own spirit shinning outwardly into darkness and pride.
We are both “rooted” (organic Spirit of Life) and “grounded” (structured by the law of the spirit in Christ Jesus) in agape love. We are organically rooted in Jesus Christ; he is our life source but we are also mentally equipped (grounded) to build a life structure around us. Our structure in life supports the yield of fruit on our living branch. Or, to put it in one scriptural term, faith!
The law of the spirit of Life in Christ Jesus is our living structure; it is how we are “grounded” in Christ Jesus. The deeper the structure of our foundation, the higher we can lift His light of Life; we are intended to be an embodiment of who God is and are called to be His light in this current worldly darkness! It is Jesus who now sits at the right hand of the Father while it is the Holy Spirit of God who prepares the Bride for Jesus to shine within our worldliness.
It is the Holy Spirit who teaches our hearts and minds Spiritual things.
“What no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,
What God has prepared for those who love Him”
“… these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this by words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.”
God is this very same Spirit of Life who gives us “the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” (Romans 8:2) who faithfully administers God’s grace, probes our finite being so that we become likened unto Jesus. We are “rooted and grounded” in Jesus’ own agape love.
Jesus told His own disciples that when they would no longer be with them, He would send the “comforter” who would teach them all things bringing to memory the things Jesus had taught. So, we see here that the “Spirit of truth,” the “Spirit of the living God,” the “Spirit of glory and of God,” is the same person sealing us upon our regeneration as the promised Holy Spirit.
Verses nine and ten force our attention on the death of the flesh once we are redeemed and living in the glory of Jesus’ righteousness while occupying our fleshly vessel of clay. Verse eleven shifts our focus to the completion of our redemption; the redemption of our mortal body and the completion of our sanctification; the glorification of our salvation.
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
Our focus in verse 11 is on the work of the Holy Spirit “giving Life to our mortal bodies.” We read in verse 10: “The Spirit is Life because of righteousness.” Our righteous Life, created thru redemption, is taught by our indwelling Spirit of promise, so that, we not only grow in grace and knowledge but we put on a new man while living in tangible clay bodies. While experiencing growth in love and grace, we also know that new resurrection bodies are on God’s replacement schedule, eternal bodies for God’s eternal overcomers, to wear in His presence!
This scripture offers two aspects concerning our mortal bodies. One is our growth process of putting to death the “residual” sin residing within our fleshly container of clay. It is not that the flesh takes on life, rather, death of the flesh reveals Jesus’ life in and thru our born-again person; righteousness becomes visible through the death of our flesh! This aspect speaks to sanctification.
The other aspect of our mortal bodies is actually replacing our clay container-body with the resurrection body of Jesus Himself. Many commentaries, including both Lloyd-Jones and Theilman, interpret this verse exclusively as referring to our resurrection bodies provided subsequent to our rapture. The context and the Greek grammar certainly puts this into view. But, put in the larger context of Romans 3 through 8, we also see the message of Jesus’ Life on display in or thru our mortal flesh and being glorified through the presence of the Holy Spirit dwelling in our mortality. This process of living in God’s workshop of carnality produces our Spiritual maturity!
Paul, writing to the born-again sinners in Corinth, puts it this way: “For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” It’s not that the flesh is revived, but rather, is put to death, so that, the Life of Jesus living thru our mortal flesh becomes visible since we are “overcomers’ and our flesh is dead, giving “life to our mortal body” thru Jesus in us. While this point may be trite to some, to others it removes a major self-barrier!
The believers in Rome were wearing mortal bodies subject to death, but just as Jesus’ earthly body died, it was resurrected with immortal life. In the same way our mortal bodies will put on immortality because Jesus has already given us His eternal life. “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
“We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you must also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus,” Romans 6:9-11.
“For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” -Romans 3:23-25.
“For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.” -Romans 5:17.
“Therefore, there is no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus.” -Romans 8:1.