Opening Illustration: A radical change is expected and required when a person comes to faith in Jesus Christ. When no change becomes apparent, we begin to wonder if there has been a genuine conversion or if the one who was truly saved understands God’s Word concerning sanctification and discipleship. Charles Colson, in his excellent book, “Loving God,” entitles one of his chapters, “A Christian Gangster?” Gangster Mickey Cohen had made a profession of faith, and it was hoped that he had sincerely come to faith in Jesus Christ. Time evidenced that Mr. Cohen wanted to continue to live as a gangster with the assurance that he would go to heaven when he died. For a man like Cohen, genuine conversion to Christianity would require some radical changes in his mindset, motivation, and methods.
That change is both necessary and radical for anyone who comes to faith in Jesus Christ. The libertine extreme seeks to minimize the change which is required, wanting to avoid any rules or commands. They want to speak only of grace and not of righteousness or God’s Law. They want to continue to live in sin just as they did as unbelievers.
Introduction: In our passage for study, Paul first reminds us that we are free from the condemnation of sin and the oppression of the law. He then goes on to explain that we may now choose to live either a natural, or spiritual life. We may strive to live the Christian life by obedience to the law and end up controlled by sin and at enmity with God, or by faith in Christ, be led by the Spirit and find ourselves at peace with God.
Paul gives his readers no specific commands. He lays down no rules. After all, the Law has set the standard. Those things which Paul will lay down as specific applications find their biblical basis in the Law (see Romans 13:8-10). Instead, he speaks of the Christian’s obligations. Paul’s words in verse 12 inform us that we have no obligation to serve the flesh and strongly imply that we do have an obligation to serve God in the Spirit. This reiterates what he has already taught in verse 4 and explained in verses 5-11: We shall fulfill the requirement of the Law when we walk according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh.
How can we (continue to) Walk in the Spirit?
1. ABIDE in Christ (Who fulfills the righteous requirement of the law) vs. 1-4
“Not guilty; let him go free” – what would these words mean to you if you were on death row? The fact is that the whole human race is on death row, justly condemned for repeatedly breaking God’s holy law. Without Jesus we would have no hope at all. But thank God! He has declared us not guilty and has offered us freedom from sin and power to do His will.
Paul is getting to the point that if we are not in Christ, we are against Him and hostile to God. If our life revolves around agreeing and pleasing our flesh, we just cannot please God. Christ life is subject to walking in the Spirit so that the fruit and the gifts of the Holy Spirit are manifested. Paul doesn’t use the word flesh (sarx) in the context of flesh and blood but literally. The Spirit prevails over our fleshly desires when we abide in Christ. The earthly nature is subdued by the intervention of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
To abide in Christ is to live a life dominated by the dictates and the love of God. Here Paul thinks of life that a man dominated by the flesh, the sarx, lives he is not by any means thinking exclusively of sexual and bodily sins. He is not thinking altogether of what we call fleshly sins. The flesh to Paul was human nature in all its sin and weakness, and impotence and frustration; the flesh is all that man is without God and without Christ.
So Paul says here that there was a time when the Christian, before he was a Christian, was at the mercy of his own sinful nature. In that state the law simply became something that moved him to sin, and in that state he went from bad to worse, defeated and frustrated man. But, when became a Christian, into his life there came the surging power of the Spirit of God, and, because in his life there was now a power that was not his power, he entered into victorious living instead if defeated existence.
In Romans 6, Paul tells us that righteousness is required of those who have been justified by faith. Those who have died to sin must no longer continue to live in sin. They must no longer present their bodies to sin, but must present their bodies to God as instruments of righteousness. Paul shares in Romans 7 from his own experience as he shows that living a righteous life is humanly impossible. The Law is not the problem, for the “Law is holy, righteous, and good.” The problem is the weakness of our flesh. Unaided by God, the best a Christian can do is to serve God with his mind but to serve sin with his flesh. Great agony over this condition causes the Christian to cry out to God who alone can deliver him from the body which is dead with respect to achieving righteousness. There the role of Christ is so important that we have to abide with Him to be able to walk in the Spirit.
2. REJECT the carnal desires of the flesh (vs. 5-8)
First and foremost those who are “according to the flesh” have their minds set on the flesh. They have a one-track mind. They are like an AM radio which can receive only signals on this band. FM signals are not received and cannot be. The spiritual dimension of life—that unseen realm which is only grasped by the enablement of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:6-16) and which can only be believed by faith (Hebrews 11:1)—is only perceived by those who are in the realm of the Spirit, by faith in Jesus Christ. Those who are “according to the Spirit” have their minds tuned to the things of God and to His Spirit.
The second reason why those who are in the flesh cannot please God. “For the mind set on the flesh is death, while the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace.” It took me a long time to take the verb is seriously. Elsewhere Paul tells us that sin leads to death, and righteousness leads to life. Here Paul says that the mind set on the flesh is death. There is a significant difference between that which leads to death and that which is, in and of itself, death. God’s wrath is both present (Romans 1:18) and future (Romans 2:5). God’s salvation likewise has a past, present and a future dimension (Romans 5:1-11). So too death is both present and future. Death is much more than physical death. Death is separation from God. The fleshly mind is so alienated from God that those whose minds are set on the flesh are dead, alienated from God, limited only to the physical world and their distorted perception of it.
Thirdly, those who are in the flesh are not merely ignorant of God and unaware of His existence; they are actively hostile toward God and toward His Law (verse 7). Fallen men hate God, they reject His authority, and they resist His Word.
Those who are unsaved are “in the flesh,” and as those in the flesh they serve Satan, in mind and body. They may not consciously serve Satan, but they do consciously seek to indulge their flesh, fulfilling its lusts. And in so doing, they reject God and rebel against Him. No wonder it is impossible for anyone to please God by walking according to the flesh. The flesh cannot and will not comprehend the things of the Spirit. The mind set on the flesh is death. The flesh hates God and rebels against His authority and His Law. And even if unsaved men wished to do right, they could not do so.
Consider these illustrations. Serving God in the flesh is like trying to manufacture sophisticated silicon computer chips in a garbage dump, rather than in a “clean room.” Pleasing God in the flesh is as impossible as trying to train a wolf to be a sheep dog. Being righteous in the power of the flesh is like trying to teach a corpse to dance. It simply cannot be done. Now we know why Paul was not able, in the flesh, to keep God’s Law, even though in his mind he agreed with it and desired to obey it. Now we know why those who would fulfill the requirement of the Law cannot do so by walking “according to the flesh.”
Again it doesn't matter how we may feel about the quality of our service to Christ. There may be little noticeable change in our life-style since we first believed. Yet, the truth is, if Christ is in us, then he is giving life to this mortal frame of ours. As we open ourselves to him, he takes control. If we trust him, he will enliven us. If we set our minds on the "Spirit's desires", we will find ourselves beginning to "live in accordance with the Spirit".
3. CHRIST-CENTERED (Christo-centric) Lifestyle (vs. 9-11)
Paul, and every Christian, faces two problems as dealt with in our text: first, the problem of sin; second, the problem of righteousness. Our problem with sin is that we do it. Our problem with righteousness is that we do not, and cannot, do it. God solved the first problem by condemning sin in the flesh through the death of our Lord at Calvary. Now, in verses 9-11, Paul tells us how God has provided the solution for the second problem.
God’s Law reveals the standard of righteousness. The Law tells us what righteousness is like. The Christian agrees with the Law of God, that it is “holy, righteous, and good.” The problem is the strength of sin and the weakness of our flesh. As Paul has shown in verses 5-8, the flesh cannot please God. God has provided the means for Christians to live in a way that enables them to fulfill the requirement of the Law and to please God. God’s provision—for Christians only—is the power of His Holy Spirit, who indwells every Christian.
The flesh is dead, because of sin. But the Spirit is alive, living within us, so that righteousness will result. The Spirit, who indwells every true believer, is the same Spirit who raised the dead body of our Lord from the dead (v. 11). Our problem, as Paul says in Romans 7:24, is “the body of this death.” Our bodies, which are dead due to sin, so far as doing that which is righteous, the Spirit will raise to life, as He raised the body of our Lord to life. And so the problem of righteousness has been solved. We cannot, by the flesh, please God and do that which is righteous. We can, by means of the Spirit, fulfill the requirement of the Law and please God.
There is the life which is dominated by sinful human nature; the life whose focus and center is self; the life that is absorbed in the things that fascinate sinful human nature; the life whose only law is its own desires; the life which takes what it likes where it likes. In different people that life will be differently described. It may be passion-controlled, or lust-controlled, or pride-controlled, or ambition-controlled. Its characteristic is its absorption in the things that human nature without Christ sets its heart upon.
There is the life that is dominated by the Spirit of God (Christo-centric). In the man’s heart is the Spirit. He has no mind of his own. Christ is his mind. He has no desires of his own; the will of God is his only law. He is Spirit-controlled, Christ controlled and God-focused.
These two lives are going in diametrically different directions. The life that is dominated by the desires and activities of sinful human nature is on the way to death. In the most literal sense, there is no future in it. That is because it is getting further and further away from God. To allow the things of the world completely to dominate life is self-extinction; it is spiritual suicide; it is again in the most literal sense, soul destroying. By living it, a man is making himself totally unfit ever to stand in the presence of God. He is hostile to God; he is resentful of God’s law and God’s control. God is not his friend but his enemy, and man ever won the last battle against God.
The Spirit controlled life, the Christ centered life, the God-focused life is on the way to life. Daily it is coming nearer heaven even when it is still on earth. Daily it is becoming more Christ-like, more one with Christ. It is a life which is a steady progress to God that the final transition of death is only a natural and inevitable stage on the way. It is like Enoch who walked with God and took him. As the child said, “Enoch was a man who went walks with God – and one day he didn’t come back.” I hope and pray for all of us to be like that …
Illustration: There's a story about a girl who was the daughter of one of the royal families of Europe. She had a big, round nose that destroyed her beauty in the eyes of others--and especially in her own eyes. She grew up with this terrible image of herself as an ugly person. So her family hired a plastic surgeon to change the contour of her nose. He did his work, and there came the moment when they took the bandages off and the girl could see what happened.
When the doctor removed the bandages, he saw that the operation had been a total success. All the ugly contours were gone. Her nose was different. When the incisions healed and the redness disappeared, she would be a beautiful girl. He held a mirror up for the girl to see. But, so deeply embedded was this girl's ugly image of herself that when she saw herself in the mirror, she couldn't see any change. She broke into tears and cried out, "Oh, I knew it wouldn't work!" The doctor labored with that girl for six months before she would finally accept the fact that she was indeed different. But the moment she accepted the fact that she really was different, her whole behavior began to change.
People tend to act according to what they believe about themselves. If we are deceived into thinking that we are not what God says we are, then we are going to keep on acting that way. That is why the way to break the power of the most vicious and evil habit is to see yourself as God sees you.
Application: So finally we allude to the question we had put forth in the beginning –
How can we (continue to) Walk in the Spirit? We being in Christ and He in us is where we start. The decision ultimately is in our hands. Living by the dictates of the flesh are only going to get us to death row. If and when our lives are dictated by Christ, it becomes evident to all that we are walking in the Spirit. Are you?
