Community Life Update
This Week in Worship: Between Flesh and Spirit (Romans 8:1-11)
Vacation Bible School (7/21-7/25)
Kids in Community (7/28-8/1)
Pancake Breakfast (7/12, 8:30-10:30am)
Faith on Tap (7/24, 6:30-8pm)
Adult Group (Sundays, 10am)
In case you missed it, baby Kira Cothran was baptized last Sunday during worship. She will be one year old this week. Congratulations to her family!
You may have heard that our worship leader, Tyler, is going to be transitioning out of his music leadership role in mid-August. Tyler has a business called Bradley Mountain, which has really taken off in the past year, and is opening a lot of doors for him. He now feels called to work with that vocation full time. I rejoice in this creative vocation that Tyler has been given, and although we will miss him greatly, I know that God will use him in great ways! Let us all be sure to give Tyler our prayers and words of encouragement over these next 2 months.
Now as we continue to think, pray, and dream about what may be next for us, musically in worship, we would ask for your help. Please pray for us in our search and work. We are excited about what may be next for our Sacred Ordinary service!
You know, only minutes earlier everything had been fine. I had been riding my bike up and down the street in front of our house, and with every pass I had pedaled faster and faster. I don’t remember what game I was playing in my imagination, but I do remember that I felt like I had never gone faster in my life. Up and down. Back and forth. The type of afternoon that, for a child, is like every other day, but also the best day ever.
And yet, as my mom called me to come inside for dinner and I headed home, it seemed like my previously cooperative body had turned against me. As I started riding towards our driveway, I noticed my father’s classic car parked in the driveway. There was both plenty of room to go around it, and plenty of room to stop; But one thought dominated my mind “Don’t run into Dad’s car.” For some reason, the more I stared at the car trying to avoid it… the closer I got. It was if I was being drawn towards the very thing I wanted to avoid. I panicked. My mind screamed at me over and over “Don’t run into Dad’s car. Don’t run into Dad’s car. Don’t run into Dad’s car!!”
BAM! I plowed right into the side of it. Dad came running outside as I picked myself up off the ground and he asked me the logical questions: “What were you doing? Why didn’t you just turn or brake?” But I had no idea. All I knew was that the more I tried to avoid the car and the more I thought about it… the closer I got to the thing I was trying to avoid.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it really wasn’t my fault. You see, I was experiencing a natural and evolutionary phenomena known as “target fixation.” Target fixation is when you become so fixated on an object that the more you try to avoid it-the more you head towards it. It happens because we have evolved to head into the direction where we are looking. In fact it is so common, that target fixation is even a part of motorcycle training, and trainers will tell drivers “Look where you are heading, because you will head where you are looking.” Well, that advice sure could have saved me a bent bicycle tire and saved my dad a dented car door.
This week I wondered if target fixation might be a reality for our spiritual lives as well. As we continue our series called “Between Two Worlds” on the Book of Romans, this week we will talk about a passage where Paul writes of the differences between setting our minds on the flesh or setting on our minds on the Spirit. Paul, in offering to the church about how to live more fully into their faith, reminds them that they are called to set their minds on the Spirit which is to find “life and peace.” He is, in essence, saying to them “Set God’s grace for you as your target. Think on that. Focus on that. And then you will find life and peace.”
And yet, how often do we set our minds on things other than the Spirit and goodness of God’s grace? How many times have we wondered or worried “Am I living correctly? Am I falling short of what God would have me do?” But aren’t these worries just ways of setting our minds on something other than the spirit of God’s grace and love? Couldn’t it be that these worries may, in fact, not lead us to right action, but to concern about the things we should be leaving behind in a new life in Christ?
I think our Scripture this week will remind us that target fixation can be true for faith, and that if we really look and yearn for new life… Well, lets look where we are headed. Let us begin and end our time with each other with the fullness of the Gospel message that we are loved and forgiven, because that is the word that can only evoke such gratitude that life and peace surely will follow. We’ll see you in worship, and if you’d like to read the passage before Sunday you can find it here.(Pastor Brent)
Scripture Text:
Romans 8:1-11
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!
John Wesley's Notes-Commentary:
Romans 8:1-11
Verse 1
[1] There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
There is therefore now no condemnation — Either for things present or past. Now he comes to deliverance and liberty. The apostle here resumes the thread of his discourse, which was interrupted, Romans 7:7.
Verse 2
[2] For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.
The law of the Spirit — That is, the gospel.
Hath freed me from the law of sin and death — That is, the Mosaic dispensation.
Verse 3
[3] For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:
For what the law — Of Moses.
Could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh — Incapable of conquering our evil nature. If it could, God needed not to have sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh - We with our sinful flesh were devoted to death. But God sending his own Son, in the likeness of that flesh, though pure from sin, condemned that sin which was in our flesh; gave sentence, that sin should be destroyed, and the believer wholly delivered from it.
Verse 4
[4] That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
That the righteousness of the law — The holiness it required, described, Romans 8:11.
Might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit — Who are guided in all our thoughts, words, and actions, not by corrupt nature, but by the Spirit of God. From this place St. Paul describes primarily the state of believers, and that of unbelievers only to illustrate this.
Verse 5
[5] For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.
They that are after the flesh — Who remain under the guidance of corrupt nature.
Mind the things of the flesh — Have their thoughts and affections fixed on such things as gratify corrupt nature; namely, on things visible and temporal; on things of the earth, on pleasure, (of sense or imagination,) praise, or riches.
But they who are after the Spirit — Who are under his guidance.
Mind the things of the Spirit — Think of, relish, love things invisible, eternal; the things which the Spirit hath revealed, which he works in us, moves us to, and promises to give us.
Verse 6
[6] For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
For to be carnally minded — That is, to mind the things of the flesh.
Is death — The sure mark of spiritual death, and the way to death everlasting.
But to be spiritually minded — That is, to mind the things of the Spirit.
Is life — A sure mark of spiritual life, and the way to life everlasting. And attended with peace - The peace of God, which is the foretaste of life everlasting; and peace with God, opposite to the enmity mentioned in the next verse.
Verse 7
[7] Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
Enmity against God — His existence, power, and providence.
Verse 8
[8] So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
They who are in the flesh — Under the government of it.
Verse 9
[9] But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.
In the Spirit — Under his government.
If any man have not the Spirit of Christ — Dwelling and governing in him.
He is none of his — He is not a member of Christ; not a Christian; not in a state of salvation. A plain, express declaration, which admits of no exception. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!
Verse 10
[10] And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
Now if Christ be in you — Where the Spirit of Christ is, there is Christ.
The body indeed is dead — Devoted to death.
Because of sin — Heretofore committed.
But the Spirit is life — Already truly alive.
Because of righteousness — Now attained. From Romans 8:13, St. Paul, having finished what he had begun, Romans 6:1, describes purely the state of believers.
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Email Pastor BrentNHUnited.org
Our mailing address is:
Normal Heights United Methodist Church
4650 Mansfield Street
San Diego, Ca 92116 United States
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