The Life in the Spirit

The new lifestyle Christ offers us is a lifestyle that prioritizes the eternal over the temporary. In choosing life in the Spirit, we see our physical lives set free and truly live!

We suffer from a false dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual.

What I mean is we think, wrongly, that the spiritual and the physical are not connected. This is now, more and more, seen as patently false even by scientists and secularists. There is a strong connection between our thoughts and feelings.

I was taking a walk with my daughter the other day, and we were discussing the importance of physical health. We had been planning to do our walking routine together, and I reminded her that the same principles of physical health also apply to spiritual health.

You have to eat right and exercise to be both physically and spiritually healthy.

But if you never connect this in your head and heart, you run the risk of missing out on being a healthy person!

Look at our lesson today in Romans 8:2-13:

BRETHREN, the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

But you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Any one who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.

So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh-for if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live.

St. Paul challenges us today, as well as his Roman Christian audience, by describing all of humanity as either “in the Spirit” or “in the Flesh.”

His description of both categories is clear and stark.

“In the Flesh” seems to be, to Paul, the whole of life lived by the temporary.

It is weak. It is enslaved to the illness and delusion of sin, and its end is singular – Death.

It is this shortsighted focus on our life “in the Flesh” that condemns me to slavery to the fear of death. This fear is at the heart of all my selfishness, all my untamed desires, and all my indulging those untamed desires to escape the feeling of meaninglessness and despondency. Add to this the truth that it never works for long, and I’m right back in the cycle of fear and denial that never ends!