Power in the Spirit: Romans 8:9-11 Introduction So far, in chapter 8, we have learned o that there is no condemnation to those who are in Jesus Christ because they walk after the spirit instead of after the flesh. Then Paul told us that the spirit brings life o while the flesh brought death. In verse 3 Paul explained that o what the law could not do because of the flesh, God did in the flesh so that the righteousness of the law o might be fulfilled in us. o In other words God did not come in the flesh to completely invalidate the righteous concepts of the law. o He came in the flesh that the righteous concepts of the law might be fulfilled in us. o In order for that to happen though, Paul said, we have to walk after the Spirit rather than after the flesh. Verses 5 & 6, o emphasized the contrast between flesh and spirit. o Those who walk after the flesh mind the things of the flesh. o Those who walk after the spirit mind the things of the spirit. o You can tell the difference between them because of their actions. o The way you live is the key evidence of the way you walk. Paul explained, at the end of that passage, o that the carnal mind is death but the spiritual mind is life and peace. Then, last week, we talked about verses 7 & 8. o These verses explain that the carnal mind is death
because the flesh is unavoidably hostile to God o and His purpose for our lives. o Our flesh refuses to exist in harmony with the plan and purpose of God for our lives. o It is impossible to entertain the things of the flesh and pursue the things of God at the same time. o That is like attempting to travel East and West at the same time. The two are in direct conflict with each other. o Those who walk after the flesh can never please God. That was the message last week. You can t please God in your flesh. However, that isn t the end of the story. o Today s passage verses 9-11 tells us that you don t have to live that way. o You can live in the spirit rather than in the flesh. Text: Romans 8:9-11 9 But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. 10 And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Exposition 9 But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. If the spirit dwells in us, o we are in the spirit and not in the flesh. That s the key to godly living.
o That s the key to living a life that is pleasing to God, to walking after the spirit, not after the flesh. The spirit must dwell in us. o What that indicates is more than just receiving the Holy Ghost at some point and time in your life. It means that the spirit actually lives in you, o its abiding presence is at home in your life. The Greek word used for dwell o implies that the Holy Ghost has taken up residence in your life. It means more than just o talking in tongues a little then going back to life like it was before. It means more than just o the demonstration of the Holy Ghost in your shout, or in your worship, or even in the exercise of the spiritual gifts. It means letting the Holy Ghost o take up residence in your life. Not just to impact you on Sunday and Wednesday o but to control everything in your life. It means that you submit to the Holy Ghost every single day. o That when you are at work on Monday the Holy Ghost is just as much in control of you then o as it was when you were worshipping God on Sunday night. That s what it means o to be in the spirit, rather than in the flesh. It means that you are influenced by, o and your life is directed by, the Holy Ghost.
Every decision you make, o every choice you consider, o every step you take, o everything in your life is done in compliance with the Holy Ghost that is within you. The Holy Ghost is more than o just a temporary visitor to your life on Sunday and Wednesday. o It actually takes up residence. The spirit of God lives within you. It dwells in your heart, o in your mind, in your very inner most being. In the secret chambers of your heart, o in the thought life, o where no one else can see, in every aspect of your being, the Holy Spirit of God has moved in o and set up house. This is how you are made Holy. o This is how you are made righteous. Not by the might of your own will, o not by the strength of your own character, but by the influence of the Holy Ghost. This is why it is so important o that you establish a daily personal time of devotion in your life. A place in the morning o where you separate yourself away with God and pray to God, Let the mind of Christ dwell in me. Let my though processes o be influenced by the spirit. Let my footsteps be guided by the spirit. Let the words that come out of my mouth today o be filtered through the spirit of God. Let everything in my life o come under submission to the Holy Ghost. o That s how you walk in the spirit.
That s how you live righteous in an unrighteous world. You can t do it by your own strength. o You can t do it on the basis of your will power. A Sunday night blessing is not enough o to carry you through the week. If the only time that you expose yourself o to the influence of the Holy Ghost is on Sunday and Wednesday o then you are not walking according to the Spirit, you are not letting the spirit o dwell in your life. When you live somewhere, o you don t just visit there a couple of times a week. You have a daily residence there. o You must daily expose yourself to the influence of the Holy Ghost. o If you don t you will constantly struggle with your flesh. o If you don t you will have a difficult time resisting temptation. o If you don t your mind will be filled with reasons why you can t do what s right, reasons why it is too difficult to make the right choice. o Your mind will rationalize you right into sin. Without the abiding influence of the Holy Ghost, o the enemy will beat you down and destroy you in your mind. But when you have the abiding, o indwelling, spirit of God living in you, you have that same mind that was in Christ Jesus working in your mortal body. o That s what you want. That s what you need. o That s what you must have in order to live a life that is pleasing to God. You are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, o if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.
You must daily surrender your life to the control of the Holy Ghost. That s the positive side of it. o Now for the negative: Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. If the Holy Ghost doesn t dwell in you, o then you don t belong to him at all. Giving the Spirit of God a day pass into your life o for Wednesdays and Sundays, but then living as if you ve not so much as heard o whether there be any Holy Ghost for the rest of the week does not make you a child of God. o Quite the contrary, Paul says that if the Spirit of Christ does not dwell in you, o then you are none of his. You don t belong to him at all. This statement can be read two ways. o First of all it is a strong statement of the necessity of the infilling of the Holy Ghost. o You must be filled with the Spirit of God in order to be a child of God. o You can t belong to him if you have not received his spirit into your life. This verse alone, o is all the evidence that you should need to know that you must receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost o into your life. If you don t have his spirit within you o then you are not one of his, you do not belong to him. Secondly it is a strong statement o of the necessity of continuing to allow the Holy Ghost to direct your life,
after you re the initial infilling of his spirit. The baptism of the Holy Ghost o was never meant to be a one-time event in your life. It must actively dwell in you. o The spirit of God must live in you. In order to become one of his o we must be filled with his spirit and, in order to remain one of his we must allow that spirit o to continually dwell in our lives. We must have the spirit in us o and we must be in the spirit. They are two sides of the same coin. The infilling of the Holy Ghost should lead to o the continual indwelling of the Holy Ghost. That s the goal. That s how you continue in the grace of God, o That s how you grow into what He has called you to be. That s how you keep from sliding back o to the former life and yielding control again to the old man. You must allow the Holy Ghost o to continually reign in your life. The Holy Ghost within you o is all you need to live a victorious, overcoming Christian life. o The Holy Ghost is the answer to your sin problem. o The Holy Ghost is the answer to the struggles in your mind. o The Holy Ghost is the power to live a victorious life in this present world. o You must let the Holy Ghost dwell in you! 10 And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
If there is life in the spirit, o does that mean then that I will not die? No. Even though we are in the spirit, o and the spirit dwells in us, the body is dead because of sin. Even for the born again believer o the physical body is subject to death. Even the believer will grow old and weak. Even the believer will become frail in body. This flesh, will always be flesh. o It will always be subject to the curse of sin. o It will always have within it the evidence of the decay of sin. o The older I get, the weaker it becomes. The process of dying is working within me, even as I am living. The body is dead because of sin. o This is what I inherited from Adam, a body that will eventually die. o The scripture says that it is appointed to every man once to die then to face judgment. o If the Lord tarries his coming, this body will die. But that s not the end of the story. o Our bodies may be dying but our spirit is alive through righteousness and it will live forever because of our right standing with God. In the body, the flesh, there is death. o But in the spirit there is life both now and in eternity. Our physical bodies o are still subject to the curse of sin, which is death, o but our spiritual man, which was dead because of sin, is now alive and well. We may live in this body of flesh o but we don t have to follow it to death and destruction.
Now we have been filled with spiritual life o and we can live in the spirit. We can live righteous, o in this body of death, because of the indwelling spirit of God that lives within us. The Holy Ghost is the key to godly living. o It is the power of righteousness in our lives. It is what gives us the strength to stand against the attacks of the flesh, to overcome the power of sin in our lives. We are made righteous, o not by our might, nor by our strength, but by his spirit! 11 But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Verse 10 sets up verse 11. o The body is going to die but the spirit is life. However, that s not the end of the story. o When God redeemed us he redeemed our whole man, which means that he has redeemed our body as well. o Therefore we have a promise. The spirit that dwells within us is the same spirit o that raised up Jesus from the dead. If the Lord tarries his coming, o we will surely die, but one of these days that spirit that dwells o in us will quicken our mortal bodies back to life again. Death wasn t the end of Jesus story o and death isn t going to be the end of our story. The spirit is life.
o And, if that spirit dwells within us, it will quicken this mortal body, and we will live for all of eternity o in a glorified body. The benefits of being filled with the Holy Ghost are two-fold. o First of all, we enjoy spiritual life now and forever. o Secondly, death s hold on us will not be permanent. We will be physically resurrected. We will live again and we will live forevermore. I want to conclude this morning s lesson on a theological note. o This entire passage has been about the Holy Ghost, the indwelling spirit of God. Some theological belief systems o would like to attempt to divide God into three distinct and separate persons: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Which would mean o that we would be dealing with the work of that third person in this passage. This is all about the Holy Ghost, o which would be a separate and distinct person. However, we get some great insight o into how Paul viewed the Godhead in the way he refers to the spirit throughout this passage. In the first half of verse 9 o the Spirit of God dwells in you but in the second half of verse 9 it is the spirit of Christ. Now we know from Ephesians 4:4 o that there is only one spirit, not two. Paul, in the same verse calls that one spirit o the spirit of God o and the spirit of Christ. That makes it obvious o that Paul doesn t see a distinction of persons here. They are the same. It is both the spirit of God
o and the spirit of Christ because, in Paul s mind, there is no distinguishing between them. The whole passage o is about the indwelling of the Holy Ghost but in verse 10 Paul says that it is Christ that lives in us. Once again, the same author o who saw no distinction between Christ and God also sees no distinction between Christ and the Holy Ghost. Finally in verse 11 o he refers to the spirit that dwelt in Christ as being the same spirit that dwells in us. This passage makes it abundantly clear o that Paul did not view God as three distinct and separate persons. He could not have and written this passage o the way that he did. He saw one God in operation through his spirit. It was Paul who wrote in Ephesians 4:4-6: o 4 There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; o 5 One Lord, one faith, one baptism, o 6 One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. One God. o God in us. o Christ in us. And the Holy Ghost in us. Paul saw no distinction between them. o He only saw One God. In Paul s mind the titles of Father, Christ, and Spirit o did not divide God into three separate persons, they simply referred to the different relationships, functions,
or offices of the one God (Bernard). Paul interchanges them, o fluidly moving among the different titles, all while describing the work of the Holy Ghost because, in it all, he sees o only the one God at work. CLOSE This morning s passage o made one thing abundantly clear: the contrast between being in the flesh and being in the Spirit o is a contrast between non-christian and Christian. If the spirit does not dwell in you then you are none of his. To the new believer, o that means that you need to fully surrender your life to God and let him fill you with his spirit. To those who have been filled before, o this emphasizes the incredible importance of your spiritual life. It must be renewed on a regular basis. o Just like the 10 virgins and their oil lamps. Just because you filled it once o doesn t mean its still full. You have to daily surrender to his spirit o if his spirit is going to take up residence in your life. In either case, we need to yield ourselves this morning to the Holy Ghost.