You Are in the Holy Spirit
Romans 8:5-11 · Roger Henderson · Feb 25, 2024
Romans (2022-25), No. 063
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261934201318

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

So we're gonna continue on here in Romans 8. Okay, so I titled this lesson, You Are in the Holy Spirit. But if you're a good Bible student, you'll realize that there's a complimentary statement. You're in the Spirit, and the Spirit is in you. You are in Christ, and Christ is in you. You are in God, and God is in you. It's just amazing, that statement about where we live, where we are as a believer, is a two-way situation, which is wonderful. Okay, so, I decided to go kind of backtrack just a little bit and look at the verses that Mike covered in the last couple weeks.

And I wanted to kind of start off with kind of defining the word flesh. And, you know, I looked in vines And I like Vine's complete Bible dictionary, New Testament, Old Testament. And he had like 12 categories of how the flesh is used. And so I said, do I want to present 12 categories of how the flesh is used?

Because I want to get to just the one I want to get to is the one you know about, the flesh is where our sin nature abides. I want to talk about that guy. So I found actually, Chafer did a much better job. He had three categories. I said, three? Three is something I can handle. Three we can get our hands on.

So here are the three categories of the flesh used in the New Testament. I also found, if you do a little search on your computer, of course, not by hand, 140 plus times the word flesh occurs in the New Testament, quite a few times. pretty important word. So sarx is a Greek word. So the first one is, the term flesh refers only to the material body of man. And you could use the word body in place of flesh.

And the verse, one of the many verses is and we just covered this first actually but if I live on in the flesh or my body it will mean fruit for labor for me I do not know which which to choose so that's the flesh used in terms of the body man's body the second category may a little more expansive is the idea of humanity's relationships, classifications, and this is one from 1 Peter, for all flesh, or all humanity is like grass, and all its glory is like the flower of the grass, and so on, the grass withers and so on, the rest of the verse goes. So that's the second category. The first category, the material part of man, the body. Second is human relationships, mankind, humanity.

And the third is the one that is the key, I think, that we see a lot in Paul's epistles, the word flesh, which is restricted to the spiritual part of man and not the most attractive spiritual part of man. It's the element in man which is spoken of both unregenerate and regenerate man. And basically it's opposed to God and godliness and it defines our fallen nature, our fallen nature in Adam, our disposition to sin. And the reason I'm doing this is because we're going to see in the verses that Jim read in 5 through, what Mike covered in 5 through 8, he talks about the flesh, this this fallen nature of Adam as opposing the Spirit of God. And those are the two players involved. So I want to go back and kind of review that. Okay, so here's the verses again, the first four verses, 5 through 8.

For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mindset of the Spirit is life and peace. Because the mindset on the flesh is hostile toward God, for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

So I have kind of a couple highlights. I have all the flesh and spirit highlighted in blue. But what I want to kind of point out here today is, and Mike kind of touched on it, but I want to kind of take a little bit deeper dive. This idea about, it has the word in English, set their minds on. That's a verb, which you're going to see.

So that's one term that Paul uses. And then he has just the term mind. which is a noun form of the verb. So these two parts of speech, set on the mind, is the idea is phroneo in the Greek. It's a verb which describes the action of the mind, how we, to be minded in a certain way. So verbs are action things, so that's what our mind's thinking on, if you will. And then the word mind itself is a noun, and it has to do with what's in your mind.

Literally, the thought. They're very close. So it's got a noun and a verb, but they're used slightly differently. And I think it will help us in going through these verses. Okay, so with that in mind, pun intended, let's proceed. Okay, so what I did here, I like block diagrams, I like diagramming, so I kind of combine them together, so here's a block diagram diagram.

So the subject of the first part here is for, the subject of this part is, the complete subject is those who continually exist according to the flesh. And the reason I put the brackets in there, that's the verb amy, It talks about this idea of continual existence. So the subject here is those who continually exist according to the flesh. And the verb here is our word I mentioned, phreneo, is they think about or set their minds on, and what they set their minds on are the things of the flesh.

So this isn't rocket science, this is if those who are continually according to the flesh, what do they do? They think about the flesh. Okay? And then we're going to have the corollary to that. But those who continuously exist according to the Spirit, they think about or set their minds on the things of the Spirit.

So we have these two opposing situations. those that continually exist according to the flesh, or you could say they hang out with the flesh, or Brother Hal, you like to use that term, they hang out with one or the other, I'm hanging out in the flesh, or I'm hanging out in the spirit, well they produce exactly what you think they would do, they produce the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit. I like what Mike asked a couple of weeks ago, what are these things? Well, fortunately, Scripture helps us out a lot here. If you go to Galatians 5, right? It talks about the deeds of the flesh. Those are all the things that you shouldn't be doing, right? And the fruits of the Spirit are all the wonderful things you do as you abide in Christ.

So we have those two paths. Those who continuously exist according to the flesh and those who continuously exist according to the Spirit. And then verse 6 actually tells us, it tells us the result. What's the result? What's the result of hanging out with the flesh, so to speak, and hanging out with the spirit?

And they're two diametrically opposed situations. 4, so here we change to the noun form for the mind, for Nehemiah, I think it is, belonging to the flesh. is supplied here is death or separation. So that's where you don't want to be separated from God. You don't want to be in that situation. And then the converse of that, the opposite of that is the mindset or belonging to the Spirit is the life and peace. So we have this contrast between these two situations.

I'm going to kind of carry that along. Now I want to see, I want to show what happens in verse 9, how Paul says, wow, you have all this conflict going on in your mind, in your head, but God has a plan for that. He has a purpose for that and he wants you to see a certain thing. Okay, so now let's just kind of make some observations. So we see these verses talk about five and six, talk about those are the ones who continuously exist. So what we see is it's not necessarily a temporary thing. It's a pretty focused situation.

They continuously exist through two different sources. One is the flesh, and then one is the spirit. And then as just kind of reviewing, the ones according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh. The ones according to the spirit set their minds on the things of the spirit. And then I like what Macaulay did. When he got to the noun form of this, he kind of made a couple of statements which I liked and I'll just quote them here for you.

There's a mind that derives its nature from the flesh and pursues the things of the flesh. There's also a mind that derives its nature from the Spirit and pursues the things of the Spirit. So as we know, and let me keep going here. I have to get ahead of myself here.

So, people have looked at these verses five and six and they said, wow, I see, we have kind of different groups of folks. And Mike mentioned it a couple weeks ago. So we see some folks say, well, I think this is the unbeliever, So this is describing the unbeliever before salvation versus the believer after salvation. Well, certainly that description of the sin nature is true, whether you're a believer or unbeliever. But I think a better one is that it describes the struggle the believer has between the flesh and the spirit.

And we see that described pretty graphically in Galatians 5.17. A little bit different words, different expressions, but very much the same struggle here. For the flesh sets its desires against the spirit, and the spirit its desires against the flesh. For these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please."

And listening to Merriman on this topic, he talked about, well, where is the sin nature? And you know, and I had not thought of this before, and actually I should have thought before because I'm going to show you a diagram that our brother Hal had an opinion about that too. Merriman says, well, I think the sin nature is really part of our mind. I said, hmm, that's interesting. I agree with you. So the battleground we're going to see is in the believer's mind.

And our brother Hal, back about the mid-90s, 1995 or so, he loved pictures. He loved to take scripture and draw pictures from scripture. That was one of the wonderful things about our brother Hal. And you know, you can't do it perfectly. No picture can replace God's word, but it can give you some good information about God's word. So I want to show you Hal's picture here. So the picture is labeled. He has several, many versions of this picture. But this version, I actually tweaked this a little bit to make it for this presentation.

So I labeled this version of this picture, the flesh versus the spirit from Galatians 5.17. So what we're going to see, our brother Hal, he wants to show this, the first part, the A part of 5.17. It says, for the flesh sets its desires against the spirit. and the spirit against the flesh.

So how would I show that? How would I show that in a picture form? You think, well, I don't have a clue. Do I show two guys boxing each other? Two stick figures boxing each other? Is that how I show it? I don't know. But then the other part, which Merriman kind of brought across really good, the battlegrounds in your mind. This battleground between the flesh and the spirit is in your head, in your mind, in your heart. Scripture describes the human as you believe with your heart, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. So it shows us that the mind and the heart is where it's at for a person. So our brother Hal developed this picture. It looks pretty, maybe overwhelming at first. My wife says, Roger, don't draw me pictures. Just tell me. Just tell me what you're thinking. Don't draw me a picture.

Well, our brother Hal violated that many times. But I think actually Bonnie liked this picture eventually over time. So let's dive into this picture and see if we, with those two pieces of information, he's trying to show us about Galatians 5.17 and also about this struggle in the mind.

So he shows, notice at the top, right under the hairdo there, he shows it's the mind slash heart. Okay, then so what's in that circle of that guy's head is what's going on. So he shows in the center of that the soul, the mentality, the senses, the conscience, the emotion, the will. And then kind of key here is, Back to 517A, what's going on here? The spirits, desires coming up from the right hand side, they're impacting the soul. From the left hand side, you have the flesh impacting the soul.

And now we get down to the crux of the situation. this thing he's labeled abide. I believe, in talking with our brother Hal over the years, that kind of comes from the Gospel of John. Abide in me and I in you. It's the idea of hanging out, abiding, being at home.

And how does a believer do that? He does that by faith, right? We accept Christ by faith and we walk by faith. So what's driving this whole thing is, where will we hang out? By faith, will we hang out in the Spirit, in the Holy Spirit, or will we hang out in the flesh?

So that's how I'll try to accomplish in that diagram. And let me add a couple of other things. He had several versions of this and actually what he did to infuriate you, to challenge you, he would change the labels. He would change the spirit label and the flesh label, he changed it to something else. Well how can you do that?

Well, in Scripture we find that the Lord in His grace, He'll have different terms, synonymous terms. So we'll find that sometimes, we're going to see in verse 9, He's going to call the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Christ. He's going to call the Holy Spirit the Spirit of God.

That's all the same thing. So what you could say is, you could relabel this picture, it's Christ's life, my struggle is Christ's life versus my self life. So he had versions of this picture that had that struggle. And the more you see that, well wait a minute, you're talking about the same struggle. It's the same struggle between the spirit and the flesh.

Other parts of Scripture are taught between Christ's life and my self life. And there are actually more beyond that. You can label the flesh the sin nature, Adam's nature. So as we see, Scripture is marvelous in the fact that it has many synonyms to convey the same idea. Okay, well, hopefully, you see there's a struggle, right? Well, what's neat is, what's really amazing is, Paul doesn't say, okay, brothers and sisters, you got a struggle, go for it.

I want you to paste it on your refrigerator, and okay, and today you're gonna decide, am I in the spirit or am I in the flesh? Where am I at today? I spent 85% of my time in the spirit, 15% of the time in the flesh. Was it 50-50, 20-50? Is that where he wants us to be? When he starts with verse 9, he doesn't want us to be there. Verse 9 starts off, however, you are not in the flesh but in the spirit. Wait a minute. You changed the rules here, Paul. You just talked about the struggle. So now we come into this wonderful area of position and condition.

How does God want us to see where we're at? Yes, we have that struggle between the flesh and the spirit. but He wants us to see ourselves where He sees us, in the Spirit. And that's why He goes through these 9, 10, and 11, to show us that the Holy Spirit is to where our focus is to be. And He shows us even that it's critical that you realize that if you're a believer, you have the Holy Spirit. There's no doubt about it. In fact, if you say you don't have the Holy Spirit, you're not a believer.

So I won't read those right now. But anyway, I highlighted the spirit in you several times. But that just kind of got to me. I said, wow, he spent those four verses talking about the struggle, and then he changes. However, you're not in the flesh, but you're in the spirit. That's where our focus is to be. OK. With that introduction, let's get into our verses here. OK. However, you are not in the flesh, but in the spirit.

So however is a word of contrast day. And I believe it contrasts very well, not everybody agrees with this, but to me and others, it seems to contrast very well with going back to Romans 7, where Paul says, for while we were in the flesh, in past times, that's the verb tenses, in past times. So he's comparing where he was before he was a believer. He was in the flesh. He had nothing else but the flesh. But now we're in the spirit. Now we have the spirit of God. That seems to be the contrast to me.

So it says, however, you, and it's literally you yourselves as a believer, emphatic, are not, and this is the negative of this cool word emi, the state in which something continuously exists. He says you're not. You're not in the flesh. You're not in this sin nature from Adam. but you're in the Spirit.

You're now in this wonderful living union with the Holy Spirit. And that's the wonderful news. That's what you want to have in your head, so to speak. That's what you want to walk your Christian walk with, that I'm now in the Spirit and not in the flesh.

And then this is mounts, I think this, Constable, this is the mounts of the mount, the Greek mounts, if you're into Greek, studying Greek. I don't know, Jim is, I think this is the one he's quoting, Constable's quoting. Nowhere in scripture do we find a clear indication that the spirit enters a person, life, at the moment of conversion than this verse, basically. He's saying this verse is the verse that kind of nails it.

You have to have the Holy Spirit to be a believer. Okay, so now we go on to the middle part. If indeed, or sense, the Spirit of God dwells in you. So this is the word sense, it's assumed to be true, therefore what follows is assumed to be the case. The Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit is called, so he's called, in this case, so here we have a couple cases where we have synonyms for the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God, And we see this term used in several verses. I'm going to quote it here a couple of times and then in a chart a little bit later on. So he's called the Spirit of God in this couple of verses here.

Romans 8.14, For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. Then we see in the Gospels, in Matthew's Gospel we see, After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting upon him. So two cases where he used the Spirit of God.

And he kind of continues on. He says, the Spirit of God dwells in you. And this is just a beautiful word. Anyway, I won't try to pronounce it. It's added to inhabit one's home, present tense, continuous action, and then Wiest brings it across as, to live or dwell in a certain place, for the Holy Spirit is making His abode, making His home within us, which is just marvelous. In you, the believer, and I have a couple more verses along that line.

Galatians 4.6, because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son Spirit of Christ, you could say, which we're going to see in a second here, into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. And then in Corinthians, do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

And then lastly, in 1 John 4.13, by this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He's given us of His Spirit. Okay, so that's kind of the middle part.

Then he kind of goes into, just in case you have any doubt about that, he kind of says, kind of a negative, the reverse of that. He says, okay, but, again a contrast here, this is kind of additional information, assumed to be true, if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, And here he's called the Spirit of Christ, so in this verse we've had him called both the Spirit, we've had him called the Spirit of God, and now the Spirit of Christ.

If anyone does not have that, he does not belong to Him. So he's trying to just close the door and nail everything closed, everything's done. The Holy Spirit is absolutely required to be a believer, there's no doubt. He is not one of Him, not one of God. And this is this negative of this amy verb again. So you must have the Holy Spirit to be of Him or in Christ. That's absolutely required. Okay, so that's verse 9. Now we'll go to 10 here. Now this is interesting, I think. You would think that at this point he would say, if the Spirit is in you. But he doesn't. He says, if Christ is in you.

And this is kind of back to this whole picture of kind of who indwells the believer. And, you know, I can't come to any other conclusion but that the Godhead indwells the believer because of all the verses that kind of interchangeably use that expression, that Christ is in you, the Spirit's in you. Not so much the Father, but mostly Christ and the Spirit. That term is used over and over again about what's indwelling the believer.

So if Christ is in you, and this is assumed to be true, there's no question, first class condition, it's literally, there's actually no verb in this one, the verb is supplied, so it's literally Christ in you, it's a statement of fact, and it's again a parallel truth about the Holy Spirit being in you, that Christ is in you, And then here's several verses that speak to the fact that Christ is in you. In John 17, the first part, it says, I in them, and you in me, that they may be perfected in unity.

And then it goes on to say in Galatians 2.20, the first part, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And then in Colossians, The last part it says, which is Christ in you the hope of glory. So the remainder of this verse, so we have the first statement here it says, assumed to be true, Christ in you.

Then he's gonna go on and make a statement about the body and the spirit. And it's in this form, if you look on the original, it has these two Greek terms, man, M-E-N, and de, D-E, and it says, on the one hand, one thing is true, then on the other hand, the other thing is true. But in our translation, it doesn't bring that across exactly that way. It brings it across a little bit differently. So it says, though. So you could say, though, on the one hand, here's one truth about you.

Even though Christ is in you, the body is dead on account of sin. So you say, OK, that doesn't sound too good. But I think that's a consistent teaching in scripture. And so you say, well, why is my body dead? Why does he say that? He says it's on account of sin. That kind of gives you a clue. So Paul actually recognized this back in chapter 7, right? Because he said, wretched man that I am, who will set me free from this body of death? So he says, the body is death.

And then if you think about it, the indwelling sin nature is the reason our body is dead. If we look in Corinthians there we say, in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive. So we are dead because of our sin nature. And this is from Wiest. The believer's human body is dead in the sense that it has death in it because of sin or the sin nature you could say. Adam's sin which brought about spiritual and physical death to each member of the human race. So we're dead because we have a sin nature. Our body is dead because of that.

But here's kind of the flip side. But on the other hand, or yet, the spirit Now, here's the case where, and I haven't come to a, I talked with Mike about this a little bit, so I have next week to kind of, I speak next week, so I have a chance to think this a little bit. So my first go through is, I want to present this. I've kind of gone both ways. It has a different article.

It has the spirit. So it makes me think it's the Holy Spirit. And also the other part makes me think that is the fact that it's just literally is life. It's just one word in the Greek. It's just Zoe. So you could translate this, the spirit life. And it seemed to fit better that was the Holy Spirit But you can make a case for it, it's a human spirit inhabited by the Holy Spirit. So anyway, I'm going to present it this way.

The Spirit is taken up as abode in you, we know that from what we just covered. And on account of righteousness, the righteousness is the character or quality of being right, that's what the word righteous means. And so Constable says basically, and I agree with this, the Holy Spirit is the source of our spiritual life for the redeemed person who now possesses Christ's imputed righteousness. We have Christ's very life. So we're righteous because of that.

Okay, so the last verse. So he kind of sums it up here, and actually in this verse kind of opens the door. He's going to start talking more about the third aspect of salvation. You know, we're saved from the penalty of sin. We're being saved from the power of sin. And we will be saved from the presence of sin. So this verse kind of opens the door on the teaching about our being saved from the presence of sin. It talks about that, as we'll see. But if the Spirit of Him, so here's another slight twist on that, the Spirit of Him, assumed to be true, now the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Him or the Spirit of God. So now it's gonna talk about this aspect of God, the Spirit of Him, and it's the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead.

And this is having raised, it speaks of a completed action, the resurrection of Christ it's a factual event and here's one verse that describes that in the introductory part of Galatians 1.1 Paul an apostle not sent from men nor through the agency of man but through Jesus Christ and God the Father and it says this is describing who raised him from the dead and we know that was the plan from eternity past from the eternal covenant that the Son would lay down His life, the Father would raise Him up again. But the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the believer.

So this repeats the state we had before. But now we're going to learn a couple of other things here. God the Father raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Also, so he adds this little word also. He says, God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, so here's the wonderful hope that we have.

He's saying, God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, but he's gonna accomplish the same thing for you as a believer. gives life or to make life and here's what kind of focuses on the third aspect of salvation he doesn't say present tense and it's true he's given us life in fact we just we just talked about that in Sunday school you know to live to live as Christ we have we have his life right now this moment 24-7 but this is talking about a future aspect it seems like to give life future tense The future resurrection of the believer's body is in view here as a context.

So he's talking about the future aspect, not our present condition. Gives life to your mortal bodies. Mortal means it's subject to death. So now it's referenced to the present, energizing is not, we're not focusing on the present aspect of that, but we're rather on the, he will quicken us and we'll be raised from the dead as Christ was raised from the dead. through the spirit who dwells in you.

The presence of the indwelling spirit guarantees the endurance of the believer. Okay, just a few closing thoughts here. And the statement that the spirit's in you is dogmatic, there's no question, it's final, that's it. And he basically says, if any man does not have the spirit, he doesn't belong to him. And remember when Christ said, you know, I go away, I'll send the helper. Christ sent the spirit into the world when he left. The Christian is characterized by the fact that he has received the divine nature.

And actually the first mention of that is in Romans 5.5 about the Holy Spirit. Because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

And I like, this is Chafer. Chafer has, his language is kind of really interesting. He says, no such being could exist as a Christian who does not possess the divine life which is essential to his newly created self, the new life in Christ. And then lastly, this new life is often declared to be none other than the Holy Spirit.

All right, well hopefully that was helpful. Picture and all. Think about that. If you have questions about that picture, you know, it's been around for, It's the mid-90s, and hopefully it's helpful. But keep in mind where to focus. Where to focus that we're no longer in the flesh, but we're in the spirit. So let's pray. Dear Father, we thank you so much. Thank you for the blessings that we have in our Savior. We thank you for the life that we have in Christ. We ask it in his name, amen.