and Richard Schademann
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me. So again "the law's" dilemma is, How to destroy the cancer without destroying the patient, when the latter is really the cancer's inseparable host? The answer is -- and here the medical analogy limps -- that the law cannot separate the one from the other.
THE Answer is: The Radical Surgeon, "by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, condemned sin right in the flesh," cauterizing both together. But how is that any better than the law? Doesn't that still merely "fulfill the just requirement of the law?" For if in Christ the old fleshly patients have simply died, what is there of them which survives? Aren't they somehow replaced? Enter Pentecost -- and the old selves made new in a whole new alliance with the Holying Spirit, as "con-SPIRITors." Read on. rwb |
hearts, establishing a local operations center inside the very bodies of Christ's believers. This is where we trust that "there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus." This is where, quite bodily, we experience the holying, hallowing, healing work of the Holying Spirit. Dare I say, therefore, that we -- who are not at all "spiritual" if by that you mean ghostly, we who are downright temporal and bodily -- are the Holy Spirit's essential con-Spirit-ors? How can that be?
Through and with us time-space believers the Spirit gives encouragement to our whole human one-another-hood, Christ's body the church, as together it grows toward wholeness in Jesus Christ. And as it grows it shows. How does it look? How do we bodily Christians, embodied in the church whose life is the very indwelling of God, "look" to others? How is our Spirited life visible, readable, audible, palpable to those around us? |
| Romans 8: 1-8 (NRSV) There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 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, 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. 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 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, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. |
and Richard Schademann |
What distinguishes the Holy Spirit from other spirits is that this Spirit always points us to Jesus Christ. And that is how we, in turn, help to "holy" others, by pointing them not to ourselves but to Christ. We begin to look like the One we look to. And the others, if they at all see us for who we are, see him. They are touched not only by Christians' words and deeds but by the faith behind those words and deeds and, behind the faith, the Jesus Christ onto whom faith "gloms." You might say the Church is the holy "conGLOMerate," the communion of those who with and through one another glom onto the same Christ, thanks to his Holying Spirit. Like I said, "con-SPIRITors."
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"Walking according to the Spirit," "living according to the Spirit," "setting our minds on the things of the Spirit:" a pretty tall order by anyone's standards. Yet without this we "cannot please God." Normal Christian life, being a justified sinner, is an ongoing struggle between minding the Spirit and minding the flesh. Yet for all this struggle, our reprieve from sin and death is already a thing done. "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." Trusting this is "setting our minds on the things of the Spirit," already now. And doing that now "pleases God."
Now already, yes, and also here. Here and now. Christ's Spirit has taken up residence right in our |
R is for.... Well, a whole Lot of Big Pauline R's, all of them "things of the Spirit" to "set our minds on." Vv. 9-11 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. But if Christ is in you, 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, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. |