Day 2 | Living in the Spirit

Read: Romans 8:5-11

The Work of the Spirit

5 Look at it like this. People whose lives are determined by human flesh focus their minds on matters to do with the flesh, but people whose lives are determined by the spirit focus their minds on matters to do with the spirit. 6 Focus the mind on the flesh, and you’ll die; but focus it on the spirit, and you’ll have life, and peace. 7 The mind focused on the flesh, you see, is hostile to God. It doesn’t submit to God’s law; in fact, it can’t. 8 Those who are determined by the flesh can’t please God.

9 But you’re not people of flesh; you’re people of the spirit (if indeed God’s spirit lives within you; note that anyone who doesn’t have the spirit of the Messiah doesn’t belong to him). 10 But if the Messiah is in you, the body is indeed dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of covenant justice. 11 So, then, if the spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives within you, the one who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies, too, through his spirit who lives within you.

THE KINGDOM NEW TESTAMENT: A CONTEMPORARY TRANSLATION by N.T. WRIGHT. Copyright (c) 2011 by Nicholas Thomas Wright. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers. Used by permission.

Reflect:

What does it mean for “the spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead” to “live within you”? Take some time to journal about this.

Consider:

In verses 9 and 11, when Paul writes that “God’s spirit lives within you,” this can also be translated as “dwells in you.” The word used for “dwell” in the Bible is very often connected to one particular reality, that of Yahweh himself dwelling in the wilderness Tabernacle and then in the Jerusalem temple. Paul wants his readers to capture that echo because he is building a case that Jesus’s followers are the new temple, the new place where God’s spirit dwells and is active.

If God's spirit dwells in you, then your basic identity is not in the flesh but in the Spirit. There is some danger of confusion here since Paul sometimes writes, almost in the same breath, of believers being “in the Spirit” and also the Spirit being in believers. Which does he mean? The answer seems to be both! God's spirit is not confined to the interior lives of believers but is living and active all around us. The hope is that when the Spirit dwells within us, we are in tune with God's New Creational purposes, which are going ahead in a thousand ways we don't always see.

Notice how Paul refers to the work of the Spirit in many different ways here. Verse 9 refers to the spirit of God and the spirit of the Messiah. In verse 10, it simply says that the Messiah dwells in you. Paul does similar things elsewhere. He employs a telling fluidity:the presence of Jesus, the presence of God, and the work of the Spirit, all together. (Note the Trinitarian subtext.) This passage gets at the remarkable phenomenon at the heart of Christian experience. We are living a new kind of life, experiencing a new energy leading us to praise or urging us to prayer, warning us against complacency, and nudging us to acts of love. This indwelling life, this new temple existence, is what matters.

The Temple in Jerusalem was an advanced signpost to the eventual New Creation. It was a heaven-and-earth structure pointing forward to the promise of new heavens and new earth. And in the same way, we human temples, individually and together, are meant to be signposts pointing forward to the final New Creation, of which Paul will later speak. Thus, Romans 8:1-11 establishes the base of operations, the promise of bodily resurrection, so that Paul can then move on from there, and in verse 12 onwards, explains that what God promises to do in and for his people, he will do in and for the whole creation in the end.

Practice:

Pray that the Holy Spirit presents opportunities that are “life-giving” rather than “death-dealing” in your life this week. Pray, likewise, that you will be a “life-giving” presence in the lives of others rather than a “death-dealing” one. Identify one way you can mirror the life of the Spirit for others.