Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States – Lutheran Seminary God Pause “Moved by the Promise” for Wednesday, 9 July 2014 – Read Romans 8:1-11

Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States – Lutheran Seminary God Pause “Moved by the Promise” for Wednesday, 9 July 2014 – Read Romans 8: The Solution Is Life on God’s Terms
1-2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
5-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
9-11 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!(The Message)
More than anything in this text, notice the statements that are in the 2nd person: 
But you are not in the flesh; 
you are in the Spirit, 
since the Spirit of God dwells in you. 
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 
These declarations provide the lens for understanding the characteristics of those who are in the flesh and those who are in the spirit. Remember as you read—for example, "for those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh"—that you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. Remember that the Spirit of God dwells in you as you read, "The mind that is set on flesh is hostile to God."
Hear this good news anew: "But if Christ is in you [and he is], though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you [and he does], he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you."
Thank you, O God, for these promises. Help us acknowledge the gift of your indwelling in our lives. Teach us to live according to the Spirit, to set our minds on the things of the Spirit that we might have life and peace. Amen.
Shauna Hannan
Associate Professor of Preaching, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, S.C. 
Master of Divinity , 1998
Romans 8: 1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.
3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,
4 so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
5 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.
6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law--indeed it cannot,
8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
10 But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.(New Revised Standard Version)
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