Living by the Spirit: Embracing God's Transformative Power

"For what God has done with the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do by sending, could not do by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. What's Paul saying there? We say God, through Christ, does something pretty dramatic and totally unexpected in a human form, comes in to deal with sin." [00:04:25] (26 seconds)



"Jesus, it is through Jesus that we, his followers, have the responsibility to live by the law. What does that mean? What it means is, oh, wait a second, stop, you're now telling me I've got this addition, this higher responsibility to, to really think about the behavior in my life, the decisions I'm making. Who I am hurting? Who I am affecting by my actions." [00:05:54] (35 seconds)



"And it's easy to kind of read through this with this, and come away with a conclusion that, well, what Paul's really saying is everything that came before Jesus, everything that, and basically what he's talking about is the sort of, the notion of legalism within Judaism, that is the sort of following of Torah law, has somehow now been replaced by Jesus' and the Spirit." [00:02:55] (31 seconds)



"us as to to just what is it that that that humans in community need to do to thrive like what is it that we have to keep working on together and then we continually do a lousy job with what do we have to do and it's laid out for us there but jesus represents that fulfillment and it is up to us to kind of try as best we can knowing that we will fail but just to keep trying to sit to reach that same kind of fulfillment and why that's important is you got to read the whole letter this is one of those one of those instances where you just if you pull out a few verses you can really come away with the rest of the letter of paul's epistle the romans really does bring this theme out and really starts to see how there is a fundamental unity in his in both where he comes from as a as a pharisee where he was trained and instructed in in legalism in the law and his his personal transformation in in his experience with with jesus the christ you and it's from that we get our kind of main message that if you live your life according to the flesh you cannot fully understand the spirit of god so i'm going to repeat that if you live your life according to the flesh you cannot fully understand the spirit of god so if you live your life constantly thinking about what's in it for me what's my immediate gain from all of this you will never know christ in your heart you will never you could pretend you could come to church and you can do all this but if you really live your life according to what what am i going to get out of it then it's it's just it's absolute hypocrisy at its highest level but so many of us and we all myself included we we move through this dynamic and some days we are very much rooted in a a broader sense but other days we're just thinking about ourselves we're just you just folk and i i'm just like all the rest of you okay there's no we all struggle with this one so that's the first thing to just stop being beating yourselves up about this one right like that's so important that there's too much of that I see too much of this you know this sense well I'm not doing all the things I'm supposed to be doing as a disciple of relax right that was never the expectation it's what we strive for knowing that we're going to fault it but we keep it we keep at it we keep trying we keep pushing we keep but see the thing is that this notion of living according to the flesh is is better understood it's not just a sexual connotation or a physical gratification connotation it's everything that takes us away from that understanding of the spirit why and this is where it really because the spirit is in you you that's what Paul says whether you whether you can understand that or not it's there you just gotta bring it out you just have to bring it out and it takes so much because in verse 9 what does he say 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 the fact that you you know you make that decision in your life to turn yourself over into being to becoming a follower of Christ that spirit is in you it dwells within you now how do you bring that to life in a way that is in fulfillment of what Paul is saying because you know when you stop and think about it that's a really powerful idea like would you just really it's it's and I don't think we do this enough it's an intense powerful spiritual message that your life is so much more important there's so much more to your life than what your immediate gratification might be about there's so much more that Christ offers you and if you could just hold on to that you can just hold on to that and live that through your life then God's going to truly bless you I believe that fundamentally let us pray" [00:06:30] (0 seconds)



"Well, Paul doesn't leave us hanging on that question, he kind of takes it now to a point where he gives us a bit of an answer, and it's his usual rhetorical style, which is sort of hard to get your arms around, but where he's at with this chapter is he's talking a lot, he's going into more detail about this notion of the sort of body -spirit dualism." [00:01:56] (28 seconds)



"How we're so often, and we talked a little bit about the flesh as, in a more broader sense than just about sexual propriety, we talked about just how we kind of often make really dumb decisions." [00:01:36] (21 seconds)



"And it's from that we get our kind of main message that if you live your life according to the flesh you cannot fully understand the spirit of god so i'm going to repeat that if you live your life according to the flesh you cannot fully understand the spirit of god so if you live your life constantly thinking about what's in it for me what's my immediate gain from all of this you will never know christ in your heart you will never you could pretend you could come to church and you can do all this but if you really live your life according to what what am i going to get out of it then it's it's just it's absolute hypocrisy at its highest level but so many of us and we all myself included we we move through this dynamic and some days we are very much rooted in a a broader sense but other days we're just thinking about ourselves we're just you just folk and i i'm just like all the rest of you okay there's no we all struggle with this one so that's the first thing to just stop being beating yourselves up about this one right like that's so important that there's too much of that I see too much of this you know this sense well I'm not doing all the things I'm supposed to be doing as a disciple of relax right that was never the expectation it's what we strive for knowing that we're going to fault it but we keep it we keep at it we keep trying we keep pushing we keep but see the thing is that this notion of living according to the flesh is is better understood it's not just a sexual connotation or a physical gratification connotation it's everything that takes us away from that understanding of the spirit why and this is where it really because the spirit is in you you that's what Paul says whether you whether you can understand that or not it's there you just gotta bring it out you just have to bring it out and it takes so much because in verse 9 what does he say 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 the fact that you you know you make that decision in your life to turn yourself over into being to becoming a follower of Christ that spirit is in you it dwells within you now how do you bring that to life in a way that is in fulfillment of what Paul is saying because you know when you stop and think about it that's a really powerful idea like would you just really it's it's and I don't think we do this enough it's an intense powerful spiritual message that your life is so much more important there's so much more to your life than what your immediate gratification might be about there's so much more that Christ offers you and if you could just hold on to that you can just hold on to that and live that through your life then God's going to truly bless you I believe that fundamentally let us pray" [00:06:30] (0 seconds)



"holy and gracious God wow what you have done for us in the name of Christ it's just breathtaking all our pretensions and our hershey's in the Holy Spirit our glory to our Lord Jesus Christ the Father and the Holy Spirit trickle down from heaven to the earth thank you for your ability to give us afol" [00:12:01] (27 seconds)



"praise to God. and that's good for us all. place that dwells within us. It's already there. You put it there. How amazing is that?" [00:12:41] (16 seconds)



"Thank you for such a profound blessing. Amen." [00:12:57] (5 seconds)