Romans 8:1-30. This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on May 19, 2024, Pentecost Sunday.
Our passage today does not focus on the gifts of the Spirit, but on the leading and help of the Holy Spirit.
As we were walking through the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 to 7, we recognized that it begs certain questions. How can a person do these things? How can I love my enemies? How can I be perfect even as my Father in heaven is perfect?
The short answer to these questions is that it will take a miracle of God. Similar to Abram and Sarah wondering how they were going to have a child, we wonder how God will do the impossible things that He says He will do in us. Like Abram and Sarah did, we can try to accomplish it in our flesh, but this is not God’s way. In the end, it would be Isaac who would receive the promises of God to Abraham and carry them into the next generation. Thus, we must not look at ourselves, our abilities, and our strength to find hope. Rather, we look to Jesus, the one who is doing this powerful work within us.
We are told that God gives His Holy Spirit to those who put their faith in Jesus so that we can then do the impossible. I do not mean things like jumping over a tall building in a single bound. These are the kinds of things our flesh dreams up when it thinks of doing the impossible. No, I mean those impossible things that God has promised to do in us and through us.
So, let’s look at our passage today and see the hope that we have in the help of the Holy Spirit for us.
This first point is one of the main points that Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount. Those who follow him will be enabled to fulfill the righteousness of the Law. Paul sees this as the result of walking with the Holy Spirit.
The preposition that is translated as “with” has an added sense of something else that is in opposition. We walk with the Holy Spirit as opposed to what we were walking with before. In this case, Paul sees our flesh as the problem. This shows the choice that is before everyone who hears the Gospel of Jesus and then responds in faith. It is a choice between continuing to follow our flesh, or turning away from it in order to walk with the Holy Spirit.
This was always the weak point in the Law of Moses. When verse three talks about the weakness of the Law, it is not pointing to a problem in the words themselves. It is our tendency to follow our flesh. The Law was perfect, but we are not. Thus, we end up only condemned by those words.
Jesus boiled the whole purpose of the Law down to loving God with our whole being and loving our neighbor as ourself (even when that neighbor is our enemy). When our flesh leads, we fail this all the time, but when the Spirit leads us, then we are enabled to accomplish what God was wanting. Now remember, we wouldn’t have the Holy Spirit if Jesus hadn’t gone to the cross for us and won the authority and right to pour out this Holy Spirit upon his followers.
So, let’s delve a little deeper into walking with the Holy Spirit. Walking has to do with how we live our life, the directions we go in, and the purpose behind what we do. We are not intended to do this alone, but instead, to do it with the Spirit of Christ in us. It is not up to my wisdom and my strength. Like Adam and Eve talking with God in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden, so too, we can pray and receive the wisdom, the leading, of the Holy Spirit for what we face.
It is the Holy Spirit that teaches us to fulfill the purpose of God. It is the Holy Spirit that teaches us how to love God and other humans in the way that Christ has loved us. These things are not in contention. To love God is to be helped by Him to know how to love others. The world may try to put them in contention. However, you do not help (love) people by bending God’s word or twisting it.
When we follow the flesh, we are generally doing stupid things that we will need to repent over later. Just like parents teach their kids to focus on a task, or teachers help students to focus while in class, we too are enabled to focus on the right things by the Spirit of God.
The power of technology is not helping us in this area of focus. People may focus on a screen for long periods of time, but we are almost completely disabled in our ability to get our heads out of it and into what God is trying to accomplish. Of course, focus has always been a problem, even before such technology. It has been a problem because the flesh in in competition with the Spirit of God. When a person is saved, they are given the Spirit of God; He dwells within them. Yet, they still have a mind of the flesh that is hostile to the things of God. If left to our own devices, each of us would become focused on the things of the flesh, not the things of God.
In this area of God’s things, i.e., things of the Spirit, versus things of my flesh, there are things that I need to get rid of, and there are things that I need to start doing. Maybe, I didn’t read the Bible before, or I didn’t pray and gather together with Christians, but now I start doing those things. Maybe, I used to be involved in sexual immorality in certain ways, but now I stop doing those things that are contrary to God’s design in my life.
However, sometimes it is not about the thing I am doing so much as it is about the reasons why I do it. Helping poor people is a good thing. However, I can do it for fleshly reasons. I can do it because it makes me feel good about myself. Perhaps, I do it because it makes me feel like I am better than others. I might do it because I want to use it as leverage for manipulating them. The Holy Spirit teaches us how to take those impure, fleshly motivations, and cleanse them from our heart. Then, we can be enabled to do a good thing for the right reasons, reasons that are made clean by the Holy Spirit. Jesus addressed this in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:1-4. Sometimes, we simply want people to think that we are better than we really are, image control, branding.
The flesh will do religious and virtuous things for fleshly reasons, but the Spirit of God is given to teach us to say no to our flesh. The Spirit is the grace of God helping us to break free from the hold that the flesh has upon our mind and life. The flesh will be hostile to losing its grip on your life. It is used to getting its way. Paul points to this hostility in verse seven. The flesh cannot be submitted to the Holy Spirit. We can only quit listening to it and start listening to the Holy Spirit.
Even now, we see this fleshly hostility surfacing within our society. People will complain about the “horrible, vengeful God of the Old Testament.” Yet, at the same time, they will complain about the evil in the world as if it is God’s fault. What they refuse to see is the tension between the love of God, that withholds judgment for a time so that we may take hold of the solution He has given us in Jesus, and the justice of God, which will (even must) judge wickedness eventually. In its hostility, the flesh makes many self-serving arguments as to why it should lead in your life. To cooperate with it is to cooperate with what is destroying your life, but to cooperate with the Spirit of God is to cooperate with that which is giving you Life.
This issue of cooperation is key to our spiritual walk. Though Paul does not emphasize the baptism of the Holy Spirit here, let me simply say this. When you believe in Jesus, the Spirit comes to live within you. He comes to help us in all the ways we need help. Yet, we are also instructed to pray and ask for the baptism, or infilling, of the Holy Spirit. These are two different pictures of the same thing.
Being baptized in the Spirit is an external picture of immersion into the Spirit. Yes, I have the Spirit, but does the Spirit have me? Being totally surrounded by the Spirit is a powerful picture of a person surrendered to His work in their life.
Being filled with the Holy Spirit uses an internal image. You are a container that has the Holy Spirit within. However, the nature of the Spirit allows Him to increase in measure to the point of filling us up and overflowing our life into the world around us. This is something that occurs as we cooperate and seek His filling of us.
When you became a Christian, a follower of Jesus, it wasn’t your flesh saying yes on that day. It was that moment at which you heard the Holy Spirit pointing you towards Jesus, and you began to cooperate with the Holy Spirit’s leading. The only question now is this. Will I continue cooperating with, walking with, the Holy Spirit? The Christian walk is one of daily walking with the Spirit, daily thanking God for His Spirit and inviting Him to fill you to overflowing for the purposes of God for that day.
This is that life which Paul is talking about. The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead is able to give life to us in these mortal bodies. Notice that he uses a different term from the word “flesh” that he has been using up to this point. The flesh refers to the more sinister aspect of our bodies. “Mortal” sees our bodies in the fact that they are dying and we will surrender them one day. These mortal, earthly bodies are impacted by sins that we have done in them and to them. We can sometimes lose hope in the life of God because of these very weaknesses in our mortal bodies. Yet, we can have life even now because of the work of the Holy Spirit within us. My flesh might be slowly wasting away and slipping ever closer to death, but my spirit is growing in relationship and closeness by the Spirit. I am no longer ruled by the flesh’s fear of death and sickness. I am more than a conqueror in Jesus Christ who leads me forth into victory, even through the valley of the shadow of death itself!
Of course, the Spirit of God will give life to our mortal bodies at the resurrection too! However, I believe Paul’s point here is about the life we can receive and live out now, even while we are in sinful flesh, and sin-impacted, mortal bodies.
The phrase “sons of God” is important. It is sometimes translated as “children of God.” The point is not that we are not, or cannot become, mature. There is a certain spiritual maturity that is possible within these mortal bodies. However, it pales in comparison to the status of the mature sons of God that we will have following the resurrection. The resurrection is an instantaneous change, but our spiritual maturity in these mortal bodies is progressive. We come to faith in Christ as spiritual babies, but we are not intended to remain babies. The Spirit works in us first to be the evidence that we are the “babies” of God, but then to also help us grow up into the adult sons of God (as far as it is attainable in this life). Spiritually mature believers have learned to fight and win the battle against their flesh in order to follow the Holy Spirit. That doesn’t mean it is no longer a battle, and they are no longer tested. However, it does mean that they have experience and spiritual skills that they didn’t have as babies.
We have been adopted into the family of God, and we have become joint-heirs with Jesus in the eternal life that God is even now giving to those who put their faith in Jesus. Technically, Jesus inherits it all, but we inherit because of our close relationship with him (his bride, his disciples, his family).
Thus, our calling is not that of slaves, but that of His family. In this passage, Paul is focused upon the motivation and hop that the believer will need to fight the flesh and follow the Spirit. You are His family in Christ. He is not going to jerk the rug out from underneath of you. You were made to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, even the New Heavens and the New Earth. You will be glorified with Christ one of these days. It is the Spirit of God that witnesses with your spirit that these things are true.
Yet, in other places (Romans 1:1, Philippians 1:1), Paul calls himself a slave of Jesus Christ. He is not contradicting this point. Rather, Paul is referencing the fact that he volunteers to be a slave serving the purposes of Christ precisely because he is so convinced of the call of God for us as His children. Now is the day of battle for the souls of men trapped in darkness. Now is the time of laboring in the field of humanity in order to draw all men into faith in Christ, and therefore, adoption into the family of God. We can be sons working long hours (the hours that a slave would work) because it is the work of our Father, our Savior, our LORD! This is not a contradiction, but a powerful understanding of what it means to be adopted into the family of God and how that frees us to completely offer our mortal lives to His glorious work of redemption.
We will share in his glory. We share in the glory of his humanity right now, but after the resurrection, we will share in his glory as the Highest One, the Anointed of God, the King of Kings and the Lord of lords.
In verses 18-24, Paul talks about how the creation was subjected to the futility, the emptiness, of the curse because of the hope of its undoing in Christ. We are a part of that great restoring of all things back to a condition of being very good (Genesis 1:31). When God’s earthly imagers have been restored, then too, the curse shall be lifted off of the earth.
In our weak, mortal flesh, it may seem hard to believe that these things shall be true. To follow the Spirit is not to walk by sight (what you see), but to walk by faith. Ask yourself, when you look at the world today, are you filled with a great hope that we are on the cusp of 1,000 years of peace, and the corrupt governments of the world being removed? No. Our hope is place upon Jesus himself. The Apostle Paul even warned in 1 Thessalonians 5:3, “For when they say, ‘Peace and safety!’ then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape.” Similarly, if it one day looks like this world will create peace on earth, then don’t believe it! It will be short-lived because they mean to do it without the One-True, Anointed Son of God at its helm.
The weakness we have in these mortal frames to put faith in what we see is helped by the Holy Spirit. He helps us to keep our hope in Christ when all is failing around us, or when the wicked pretend that they have fixed all things.
We trust that God is working all things to our good (vs. 28) because we have put our faith in Jesus Christ and are being led by His Spirit. We have too many testimonies from the Bible to doubt that He is doing such.
Ultimately, Paul describes God’s will for each of us, for all of us together: predestined, called, justified and glorified (vs. 30). “Glorified” is put in the past tense, but it is a verb that technically has no tense. The emphasis is not on when these things happen, but that they are the sure purpose of God for us. He has predestined (put a destiny before us) those who follow the Spirit of God to be conformed into the image of His Son, Jesus. To do that, He is faithful to call out to those trapped in darkness. “Look upon Jesus and be healed!” “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men!” Those who answer this call by faith are justified by God (made to be right before Him). This grace is made available because of the free-will offering of Christ upon the cross. Those He has justified, He will glorify. Though there is a certain glory that we have in following Christ in his humility, this points to the resurrection and our coming with Jesus when He returns to earth in His glory! This glorification though future is yet guaranteed because of Jesus himself. God will not deny His Son. All who have put their faith in Jesus and have become his will be made to be like Him completely at the resurrection. This is God’s purpose in you, and this is why we follow the Spirit of God rather than our flesh. All who follow the flesh are destined to miss out on all of those good things that God has planned (those things we know about, and those things that we don’t know about).
You have too much to lose to give up now. Yes, the devil, the world, and even your flesh will tell you to quit believing in Jesus and start putting your faith in the ability of man to save himself. Right now we are given the choice. What will I do with Jesus? However, one day we will stand before Jesus and the choice will be his. What will he do with me? Choose Life today! (John 14:6).