New Life through the Spirit

Responses to God's Grace

Faith Leads to Holy Living

Live in the light of God (Isaiah 2:5) 

Live Holy Lives


Romans 8:1-11
 The Message

The Solution Is Life on God’s Terms

8 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!

For Reflection

So, how does one become one with God? First of all, being one with God is not something you have to perfect. God as Christ already resides in your soul -- in everyone's soul! The soul yearns for satisfaction. Many will try to satisfy the soul's desires through taking on the world and mistakenly thinking that they can achieve satisfaction on their own through perseverance and hard work.

But, the hard truth is that no one does anything on his/her own. No one is profoundly satisfied with the accumulation of worldly achievement. Most of the time, when we suffer the most, we give up and ask for God. God replies, "I got this, RELAX, TRUST ME."

When we do give up is when we finally become satisfied and become a confederate and then act as one with our creator.  "Mysticism," you say? Well yes. The ultimate paradox of living is that one finds a satisfying life only when you lose your perception of total self-reliance.

Pray

Pray quietly often. Relax and contemplate harmony of Creation. Listen silently. Wait patiently. Observe the goodness in the world around you. Act with humility. Be kind. Be helpful.