Live According to the Spirit

We do all we can (and more) to ensure that we have a happy, comfortable life; we’re encouraged to, even expected to.  Do we want Jesus or what the world regards as a blessed, bountiful life?  It may be an unfair question, but it is a question.  Paul intends to help every believer to begin to perceive in a far more robust and beautiful way what a wonderful Savior we have.  We’ll never really fully understand if we’re more enamored of what we can have or get here than with what God offers.  Paul began by insisting that everyone is in need, real, dire need, of a Savior, because—whether they realize and accept it or not—everyone is bogged down in a world of sin, even those blessed with the saving blessing of faith.  Now the sacrifice God required for the forgiveness of sin has been made, on our behalf, if people will accept it.  That sacrifice that restores us to God can be accepted only by faith.  Faith, like the sacrifice that forgives, is given to us, not earned by us.  Our works, our efforts, do not, cannot restore us to God, no matter how hard we may try to climb our way back into His love or claw our way up.

Paul’s audience, familiar with Greek tragedies, remembered that the fault of one could, and did, have horrible consequences for many: a cascading failure.  He tells us that, in a similar way, the victorious righteousness of one—Jesus Christ—has eternal consequences for us all.  So, if Christ is the gift of forgiveness for sin, couldn’t we then just go on living the Me-first life, confident in the constant forgiveness won for us all by Christ?  If God was offended, and God cleared the offense . . . bully for Him!  Let’s get up and play.  Paul responds that the last place any freed prisoner wishes to go is back into the cell.  But the cell can become familiar, even comfortable.  A comfortable jail cell!  And we can make them that.  We can live our forgiveness, or we can live our imprisonment.  Our residual problem is the lingering desire to believe that and behave as if the prison were freedom and happiness.  The law showed us the freedom we could not win; the law made apparent to us the prison of sin around us and sought to provide us with safekeeping, there.  Safety required looking at the law and seeing and understanding our situation.  If we looked, we did so by the Spirit.  If, looking, we saw the truth, saw reality, this also was by the Spirit.  We live, now, we move and breathe, now, by the Spirit, who is the strength, glory, and wisdom of God.

“Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God” (8:8)  Who could possibly be in this “realm of the flesh.”  What is this “realm of the flesh”?  It’s not just that they are unable to please God.  They don’t want to; pleasing God is not high on their list of actual interests.  We know such people.  But who is in the realm of the flesh?  And who are we to say—judge not, right?  Is it judgment to exercise discernment?  Better not make any choices or decisions, then—judging.  Is it judgment, to speak the truth in love?  Apparently it is in Canada!  Who is best served and most pleased with the silence of Christians clinging to the truth of God’s Word?  No Christian is in the business of condemnation; we are in the blessed way of salvation, calling everyone to join us on the journey in the clear light of the truth.  The Spirit is with us for discernment; let us not grieve the Spirit by ignoring His counsel.  We must exercise discernment, to save from eternal judgment as many as God will allow us.

But we don’t see things that way, because we listen to the world, and the world tells us not to judge, that love and judgment have nothing to do with each other.  Even for God?  And as we pride ourselves on our not judging—so pleasing to God, not to!—the culture around us, and weak brothers and sisters in Christ swept under by the riptides of this culture, get drawn further into the realm of the flesh.  They perish, not even knowing to cry out for help, no longer seeing any need or reason to.  And who is pleased, then?

But who is in the realm of the flesh?  What a strange phrase!  Those whose thinking is not governed by God’s Word are in the realm of the flesh.  They don’t listen, won’t listen; they no longer can; sin stops their ears.  They are governed by another set of values.  The Modern and Postmodern Eras that have so greatly shaped current ways of thinking, praising and condemning, presented us with a parade of people who came to prominence through not permitting their thinking to be governed by God’s Word, or at least not by what any church taught as the interpretation of God’s Word.  There is much that can make us less than enthusiastic about life together.  We often hear of the importance of community, connection, friendship—people do not feel connected to others as they have in generations past!  It also seems as if the last place people want to go to find community, connection, and friendship is church.  We’re all familiar with those who prefer to steer clear of “organized religion,” though what that term entails is not always clear . . . mainly rejecting any sense of obligation to be part of any congregation, rejecting the idea of the privilege of being a committed participant in a congregation.  No one ever sees these critics of “organized religion” in the congregation—do they pray? do they give? do they ever open a Bible?—but don’t dare call them a nonbeliever.  We all have our excuses.  Which will God accept?

The faithful gather, beloved; we rejoice to do so.  “I was so glad when they said unto me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord’” (Ps 122:1).  “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another” (Heb 10:24-25).  Habits—good or not exactly—are hard to break.  Let us be mindful—prayerful!—about the formation of habits.  As by grace we exercise vigilance—and God-given wisdom—we become better able to keep ourselves disentangled from the flesh.  We will no longer live for the sake of the sinful nature remaining in us, howling for a hit.

We have been rescued, pulled out, lifted.  God sent a savior for us; we are saved, safe; yes, we’re banged up, tattered, and we are being sanctified—life in Christ grows in us.  Long ago, in the days of Noah, God looked over the earth and was saddened to tears by what He saw; He was sorry that He had made people—just see what they do, and don’t do.  So, he decided to wash the earth, wash away the pollution.  And He was pleased, so greatly pleased, to spare one man: Noah, and his family, because Noah walked in righteousness (Gen 6:8-9).  Noah had accepted the gift rejected by the rest: knowledge of God, love for God, faith in God.  Noah lived by grace, and, in Christ Jesus, so do we.  God gave Noah an ark; we have been given the cross.  “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1).

When God called more loudly to me, a quarter century ago, He particularly, powerfully opened my ears to words John vividly remembered Jesus saying: “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life” (Jn 5:24).  No condemnation for those in Christ.  You and I are no longer under condemnation: our condemnation was condemned with the body of Christ on the cross.  With the body of Christ, we died to sin and were released from the penalty of the law.  The law is for those not yet alive to God in Christ, those living without Christ.  The law will not save.  It is not the purpose of the law to save but to make sin apparent, and the horror.  Ever wonder why it’s basically impossible to kill the killer in any horror movie?  Why the killed off killer comes back in the next five films, ever more desperate, demonic, and deadly as ever?

Those who have not died with Christ, who have not had the baptism of fire, are not released from the penalty of the law.  Those who think to live by keeping the law—whether God’s law or whatever law seems best to them—remain in the death grip of sin.  Not that they would ever say so.  How could they?  Life is only from the Lord, our Savior, by grace, through faith.  Faith is life for us, life for whoever will receive it.  And we wonder, and pray, even agonize, because we know those who do not receive, who ever seem to keep salvation at arms’ length.  The slow, formal dance of indifference and rejection

Now, the former law is set aside.  The original law remains: the law of love.  Paul speaks of Christ as the means, the doorway, for “the law of the Spirit who gives life” (8:2).  Love is lifegiving.  We might regard what Paul has been doing over this large section of Romans as an extended reflection on the first psalm, which sings of two ways in life: the way of the wicked and the way of the righteous; the law of sin and death, and the law of the Spirit who gives life.  The Spirit who gives faith gives life also—faith is life, for us, and apart from faith, there is no life, just a life sentence.

Paul speaks of “the law of sin and death” (8:2).  I can’t take him, there, as meaning God’s law.  Paul has spoken, clearly, of the law being good.  It’s that other law at work in every person, shaping, demanding, numbing, blinding: the law of sin (and the wages of sin, remember, is death).  Sin takes what is good—God’s law, God’s Word, even God’s love—and uses it to kill us.  But how can God’s Word, or His love, be used to kill us?  God’s Word kills us when we do not see sin in the light of God’s Word, because sin has used God’s Word so as to teach us not to see.  Sin uses an idea about love to teach us not to see.  Love is blind, right?  No, love, God’s love, sees, clearly.  Sin deceives and uses desire to deceive us.  We want many things to be true.

The law was rendered unable to accomplish that for which God gave it: the law “was powerless [. . .] because it was weakened by the flesh” (8:3).  That doesn’t mean our bodies as bodies made keeping the law impossible for us.  The flesh, for Paul, is the sum of the constant presence of sin, urging us further, deeper, strengthening its stranglehold on us.  The law is life God’s way.  If we will not receive that way, God states the way more urgently: God calls, beloved; He calls for us.  The law calls people to righteousness and holiness.  People continue, ingeniously, to evade, avoid, and overturn the law, to refashion God’s way into our way, once more.  This is idolatry—a god who reflects the best and brightest of us—as understood in a given time and place, a given cultural moment, along with its unacknowledged biases.  But God is beyond us, beyond culture, and beyond our ability to fashion after our own image.

People took God’s Word and rendered it null—not that it actually was, but people acted it as if it were and lived their lives in that light.  “They say to God, ‘Depart from us!  We do not even desire the knowledge of Your ways’” (Job 21:14).  And God means to fulfill His promises, because they are promises He has made to Himself, to be rightly seen, rightly known, rightly praised, and truly glorified in His people.  Like every other human being, we each of us—I never exclude myself!—remain adept at choosing in our wisdom what we will and will not believe.  God then, in His holy foolishness, sends “his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering.  And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (8:3-4).  What is it to live according to the Spirit?  To have, and live, faith—acknowledging entire, continual reliance upon God, submitting one’s thoughts, values, desires, wishes, to God, to be reshaped, renewed, and sanctified by God.  Faith longs for God above all.

Sin is condemned.  The law—God’s way of life—requires righteousness.  As I hope I’ve made clear by now, righteousness is not first of all doing certain things or not doing certain things.  Righteousness, for us, is seeking God, desiring God, loving God, His way, on His terms.  Righteousness is to be in vital relationship with God.  We do not make ourselves righteous; we don’t kickstart that desire.  God makes us righteous for His purposes, through Jesus Christ, our perfect sin offering from God.  Jesus is our invitation into vital relationship with God.

All that the law required—life God’s way—was fulfilled in Christ.  We love the lessons Jesus teaches; we love the works he performed.  Well, we love the words we love; we love the deeds we love.  Jesus said some other things, too, did some other things, that we aren’t exactly crazy about.  We sort of pass by those in a tacitly conspiratorial silence: I won’t mention it, and don’t you, either.

Christ died for sinners—praise the Lord!  This death happened so that the righteous requirement of the law would be met, in us.  But Paul says a bit more about believers, the church: we are those who “do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (8:4).  Christ’s death does no good for those who do not live according to the Spirit but according to the flesh.  But who does that?  Who lives according to the flesh?  How do I know whether or not I do?  What I do know, beloved, is this: as Paul mapped out so devastatingly just a bit before, I am a living dying battlefield.  The outcome is already known.  The war is won; the war is over, but the enemy fights on, in me, because the enemy is stiff-necked, pig-headed, fierce, furious, and desperate.  The war is over and there are many battles still to be fought.  I will be wounded; more dreadful, I will wound, yet Christ has the victory in me.  I know this because I know God who gives me faith.  I never willed faith.  Faith happened for me, over years, decades of my life.  It’s God, the God who is love, who assures me, even as I find myself once again face down in the mud and garbage at the bottom of the ditch, God there again, compassionate, patient, assures me that He loves me and has given His life for me so that I shall live with Him forever.  And how shall I respond?

The flesh has its way with me, still.  I permit it, still.  My mind for holiness, however, is not set on what the flesh desires—although I have a long, sad acquaintance with what the flesh desires!  My mind for holiness, beloved, my mind being renewed in Christ, is now being set upon what the Spirit desires: life, God’s way.  And by this grace at work in me, yes, I see so much more clearly, painfully, the mind of flesh at work, in myself, in others, in our society and culture, this flesh-besotted culture ever being foisted on us.  New, astounding technologies to deliver the same old garbage.

And as for the Spirit: what does the Spirit desire?  Paul tells us that “the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace” (8:6).  The Spirit desires life and peace and to bestow these blessings: true life, true peace.  Who can teach us what true life really is?  As for peace, what is that, really?  Can it even be found?  These are real, aching questions for so many.  And the answer—because there is an answer, a true answer—the answer to these real questions is not nobody.

True peace does not come from confidence in the sum of one’s actions in this life.  A life of peace comes with having a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and this begins, grows, and bears fruit by the Spirit.  Because there was in us from our beginning hostility to God, this hostility remains.  There is with us, now, also, the Spirit.  This table is a reminder for us: all God gives; God’s invitation to each of us.  The bread, tasty as it may be, the juice, delectable or maybe just a bit too sweet—in themselves these give us nothing save a few calories.  It’s as we receive these from the Holy Spirit as reminders of the gifts Christ gives—his life, his righteousness, his forgiveness, his holiness, his Spirit—that we are nourished by grace, fed by faith, and we grow.  True peace is in nothing of this world; true peace is not of us: true peace, God’s shalom, is the gift of the Giver.  It’s here, now.  You can have it.  Bless His name.