“If the Spirit dwells in you” (Rom. 8:9-11)

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Why is the apostle writing this eighth chapter of his epistle to the Romans?  He is writing it because the Christian lives in a fallen world, a fallen world that is not only a place of sickness and disappointment, but which is also a place in which the devil lives and works and prowls in order to do maximum mischief among the saints and to overthrow their faith if he can.  In this chapter, Paul talks about “the sufferings of this present time” (18), the vanity of the creation (20), the bondage of corruption (21), groaning and travailing in pain (22-23), infirmities on top of uncertainty (26-27).  These in fact are among the “all things” that God is working for the good of those who love him (28).

And yet, as we wait in hope for God to work them for our good, these sufferings, tribulations, distresses, persecutions, famine, nakedness, dangers, and sword (35), can make it seem at times as if God has abandoned us.  After all, if God really is for us, as Paul triumphantly declares in verse 31, how is it that these sorts of things happen to the elect?  Where is the good in all these things?  Or, to put it in terms of Thanksgiving week, what is there to thank God for?

Well, this chapter is meant to help the discouraged saint to have courage and hope in the face of uncertainty and suffering.  And the main thing is to help us to see and believe and know that God is truly for us, that he has not abandoned us, and that these trials, far from being evidence of his turning against us, are tools in his hand to bring glory to his name and ultimate good to our souls in the purpose of God.  This is a chapter not just about hope but a chapter that is meant to bring hope.  This is a chapter that is meant to shore up wavering hearts and hands that hang down.  This is a chapter not only on assurance but one that is meant to create assurance in the hearts of believers.  It is a chapter to be applied personally; note the second person in verse 9: “But ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.”  Paul expects his readers to apply these realities to themselves.  If you are a Christian, you should do the same.

That’s what the apostle Paul is up to in these verses (9-11).  They are meant to tell us something about the glory of the Christian life that makes our final salvation certain and our falling away unthinkable.  If what the apostle says here is true, then the people of God will be finally saved.  In this week of Thanksgiving, this of all things ought to stir our hearts up to thank God for this gift of salvation in Christ, a gift which cannot be taken away, which neither moth nor rust will corrupt and which thieves – including the devil – cannot break through nor steal.

For you see, Paul’s argument is not just that the elect will go to heaven when they die, and that we should believe that.  Though that is of course perfectly true, that’s not his argument.  His argument is that because something is true of you now, you can know that this other thing will be true of you in the future.  And the present reality that points to future glory is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the heart of every believer.  

In establishing this point, Paul give us a number of if-then statements.  Paul is saying, if this is true of you, then this other thing will be true of you.  What are these conditionals statements?  Well, in verse 9, the apostle says that if the Spirit of God dwells in you, then you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit.  Then he says, if you don’t have the Spirit, then you don’t belong to God – or, to put it in a logically equivalent form: if you belong to God, then you have the Spirit.  Going on in verse 10, Paul says that if Christ is in you then the body is dead because of sin but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.  In verse 11, that if the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells in you, then he will also raise our mortal bodies from the dead.

So what we have here are four conditional statements, four if-then clauses.  But there is something else that ties these verses together, and that is the interesting way in which they describe the Spriit of God.  In verse 9, he is first just the “Spirit,” and then “the Spirit of God,” and then “the Spirit of Christ.”  Then in verse 10, though Paul is still talking about the indwelling of the Spirit, he says, “and if Christ be in you.”  

What do we make of this? Well, the best way to interpret this is in light of our Lord’s own words to his disciples which are recorded for us in John 14 and 16.  He says, in light of his impending death and resurrection and ascension: “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (14:16-18).  The Spirit is sent by the Father as the Comforter or Helper of the believer, and he is sent to dwell with us.  Hence he is the Spirit of God, or the Spirit of the Father, because he is sent by the Father.  But he is also the Spirit of Christ because it is by the Holy Spirit that Christ dwells in us and comes to us.  “I will not leave you comfortless,” or “I will not leave you orphans” – Jesus will not abandon his people.  He goes on to say, “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (26-27). This is the meaning of “and if Christ be in you.”  Christ dwells in us through the mediation of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit mediates the presence of the risen Christ.  As our Lord puts it in the 16th chapter of John, “if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you (7).

By the way, the Eastern and Western Churches split in AD 1054 in the Great Schism at least partly over the question of, in theological terms, the procession of the Holy Spirit.  The Eastern Church said that only the Father sends the Spirit, but the Western insisted that the Spirit is sent, proceeds from, the Father and the Son.  The Protestants, including Baptists, follow the Western Church on this, and in the West the Nicene Creed is recited as saying, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.”  Of course, we can see from our Lord’s words in John that the West is unquestionably right here in the inclusion of the filioque, which is Latin for “and the Son.”  The Spirit is the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ because he proceeds from, and is sent by, both.

Now this is more than just an obscure theological point.  It means that every Christian at every moment is indwelt by the third Person in the Holy Trinity, who comes to dwell in us so that by his indwelling Christ dwells in us so that we have access to and fellowship with God the Father.  This is truly amazing.  It is amazing in part because this dwelling is not an occasional dwelling.  In the OT, you read of the Spirit coming upon people and then going away.  That is not what Paul is describing here.  The word used here is the Greek word oikeo, which means to live in a house.  This in turn invokes the ideas of nearness, familiarity, and influence.  

Nearness.  The fact that the Holy Spirit dwells in us not only means that he is near us, but as we’ve pointed out, that Christ himself is near, that the Holy Spirit mediates Christ’s presence (Jn. 14:17-18).  We’ve noted the name changes: Spirit – Spirit of God – Spirit of Christ – Christ (Rom. 8:9, 10), but we shouldn’t interpret that in a Sabellian or modalistic fashion, which thinks of God as revealing himself not as three different persons but as three different modes.  The Holy Spirit is indeed distinct from Christ.  He is the one who raised Christ from the dead (11).  And he is distinct from the Father for he is the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead (11).  However, the point is that the Spirit mediates the power of the risen Christ in all who belong to him.  Note how Paul prays for the Ephesians: “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph. 3:16-17).  He is indeed near to us through the Spirit.

Familiarity.  Not the kind of familiarity that leads to indifference, but the kind of familiarity that leads to communion and fellowship.  Christianity is not just a philosophy, it is not just a religion; more fundamentally, it is a relationship.  Through the Holy Spirit, Christ comes to indwell us, so that we can have fellowship with him.  He communicates to us the love of the Father and we tell him of our love for him.  He does not hold us at arm’s length, but rather he embraces us with love and affection.

Influence.  This influence can go both ways: we can grieve the Spirit through sin (Eph. 4:29), and the Spirit can change and empower and fill us as we yield in obedience to God’s will for us.  But even though it goes both ways, we must never make the mistake of thinking that the Holy Spirit’s work in us is ultimately dependent upon the fragility of our own weak wills.  No, he who began a good work in us will complete it at the day of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:6).  He is working in us to bring us into conformity to Christ.  He is molding us into Christ-likeness.  Are we weak?  Yes, but “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Rom. 8:26).

Now this is true of every Christian.  Paul is not describing super-saints.  He is not only talking about mature believers, but every believer, even if they have been such only for a few seconds or whether they have been so for many decades.  And of course the question is, if this is true of the believer, how can we doubt that his or her salvation is secure?  How can we miss heaven when God dwells in us by the Holy Spirit?  To ask the question is to answer it!

Let’s try to work out the implications of this magnificent reality in terms of the if-then statements in these verses.  I will put it like this.  If the Spirit of God and Christ dwells in you, then four things are going to be true of you.  First, you will have a new nature.  Second, you will have a new identity or a new name.  Third, you will have a new life.  And fourth, you will have a new hope.  Let’s look at these one by one.

A New Nature

Verse 9 opens by Paul saying, “But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.”  In some sense Paul is just summarizing what he has already been saying, and which we have been looking at in the past several verses (2-8).  But it’s a good opportunity to do just that: summarize where we have been before turning the corner.

Paul has been talking about walking in the Spirit because we have the mindset of the Spirit because we are in the Spirit (4-8).  What the apostle says now is that this most fundamental reality (being in the Spirit) is rooted in the fact of the indwelling of the Spirit.  In other words, we are in the Spirit because the Spirit is in us.  This points us to the fact that what changes us is not fundamentally us, but God through the Holy Spirit.  He is the one who gives us a new nature by giving us new birth.  

What is it that makes a person turn from their sins to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ?  Is it the preacher’s eloquence?  The hearer’s intelligence?  Is it because the person who converts to Christ is smarter, wiser, or better than those who don’t?  What is to explain the difference?

Some people will say that “free will” explains it, but what does that even mean?  Doesn’t everyone have free will?  Why then doesn’t everyone turn and convert?  If free will can’t explain it, what does?

Paul tells us the answer in his epistle to the Ephesians.  Here is what we are by nature: “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others” (Eph. 2:1-3).  Now this is what we were: dead in sins, and enslaved to the world, to the flesh, and to the devil.  This is essentially the state that Paul is referring to when he says that the unbeliever is “in the flesh.”  What then can deliver us from this death in sin?

Paul’s answer comes in two words: “But God” (4).  In other words, if you are in the Spirit, then there is one and only one ultimate explanation for that fact: it is because God put you there.  God did it.  How?  Paul goes on to explain: “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: that in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” (4-7).  In other words, God saves people from a death in sins by giving them new life.  He raises them from a spiritual death by uniting them to Christ in his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension.  And that is what Paul is getting at in Romans 8 when he describes the believer as being in the Spirit.  We are in the Spirit; we have a new nature in the Spirit because the Spirit is in us.

Why is this important?  It is important to know this because if God is the ultimate explanation of our salvation, if he is at the bottom of it all, then we can trust that he get us through to the end.  What God began, he will finish.  You can’t undo the work of God.

A New Name

Paul goes on to write, “Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his” (9).  If you don’t have the Spirit of God indwelling you, then you do not belong to God.  Or, to put it in a logically equivalent way, if you belong to God, then you have the Spirit of Christ.  Those who belong to God have the Spirit of God, and, having the Spirit of God, they set their minds and affections on the things of the Spirit and walk in the Spirit.

One way to put this is that those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit have a new identity, a new name: they belong to God, they are God’s people.  Paul goes on to tell the Ephesians that “through him [Christ] we both [Jew and Gentile] have access by one Spirit unto the Father. Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God” (Eph. 2:18-19).  Because you have the Spirit, you are no longer strangers to the covenants of promise, but you are in fact members of the covenant community of God.  You belong to him.  Or, as the apostle Peter puts it, “in time past [you] were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy” (1 Pet. 2:10).

In some sense, it seems as if the apostle is ascending in order of magnitude in terms of the blessings that we have due our having the Spirit in us.  He gives us a new nature, yes, but that is not all.  His puts his name upon us.  He calls us his own, he adopts us into his family.  I like the way J. I. Packer put it in his book Knowing God.  He said that in regeneration, God puts in us the family likeness, and in adoption, he gives us the family name.  God embraces us as his own.

Now think about that: will God forsake those who belong to him?  Never!  In fact, he says the opposite, doesn’t he?  As the author of Hebrews reminds us, “he [God] hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me” (Heb. 13:5-6).

This is at the heart of the New Covenant: “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people: And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more” (Heb. 8:10-12).  That is the preeminent blessing: “I will be to them a God and they shall be to me a people.”  Though this was typified in the relationship God had with the nation of Israel, it is fulfilled through Christ in the elect.  It doesn’t mean just that God gives us earthly blessings but that he gives us eternal and spiritual blessings.  It will come to fruition in the new heavens and new earth: “And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: and they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads” (Rev. 22:3-4).

The name that God puts upon his people is all the confidence we need to know that God will not abandon his people.  He has regenerated us; he owns us and puts his name upon us.  This is the heritage of God’s elect.

A New Life

Next, the apostle writes, “And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness” (Rom. 8:10).  The next implication for those who are indwelt by the Spirit who brings the presence of Christ to us, is that though the body is dead on account of sin, the Spirit is life on account of righteousness.  

What does this mean?  God told Adam that they would die in the day that he ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (cf. Gen. 2:17).  But of course they did not cease breathing at the moment they sinned.  However, it is true that they began to die, and the world they inhabited became a world of death.  Their bodies at that moment began to break down.  Disease, pain, and suffering came into the world.  This is what I think the apostle is referring to when he says that “the body is dead because of sin.”  The body is our physical body, and this body is dead in the sense that we are mortal and will one day succumb to death.  And all this is because of sin; first of all because Adam brought sin into the world (cf. Rom. 5:12), and then because we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God (3:23; 6:23).  In fact, Paul is really repeating what he has previously said in the fifth chapter: “For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ” (17).

However, just as “dead” does not only refer to the termination of physical life, the contrast with “life” means that this does not just refer to life in the age to come.  It means that the Christian has life even now.  It means that even as our bodies decay and we don’t have the energy we used to, we can nevertheless have fellowship with God and draw close to him.  In fact, even saints who have been the most disabled physically have sometimes been the most productive spiritually: just think of Joni Erickson Tada.  

The apostle put it this way in his letter to the Corinthians: “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:16-18).  That’s it: our outward man, our bodies, are perishing, are dead, and yet the inward man, which is alive by the Holy Spirit, is renewed day by day. I think that’s the idea here in Rom. 8:10.

We need to hear this because the fact of the matter is we can sometimes think that our spiritual effectiveness is dependent upon our physical condition.  I’m not saying there’s no link.  But I have known people who are laid up and paralyzed and who end up bedridden and they wonder why they are even around and become depressed as a result.  They think that because they can’t be up and doing that they are just cumbering the ground.  In other words, they are tying their spiritual fruitfulness in the kingdom of God to their physical condition.  But Paul does not make one dependent on the other, does he?  He says the body is dead because of sin, but even though that is true, the Spirit in us – the Holy Spirit – is life because of righteousness. The quality of the life we have in Christ is not indicated by the condition of our bodies, even though that condition is the result of mankind’s fall into sin.  The life we have is a life given to us by the Holy Spirit on the basis of the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed to those who believe in him.

Brothers and sisters, even if our bodies feel like they’re done, yet we can still be spiritually effective.  One reason I know this is because one of the greatest things we can do is to pray.  It does not take a lot of physical ability to do that, does it?  And yet, according to the testimony of Scripture, prayer is one of the most powerful things we can do for the kingdom.  If you have the life of the Spirit, your prayers are not nothing.  Prayer does things.  Listen to the language of the Bible: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit” (Jam. 5:16-18).  Or when Paul was in prison, he wrote this to Philemon: “But withal prepare me also a lodging: for I trust that through your prayers I shall be given unto you” (22).  Or as Paul reminded the Corinthians: “Ye also helping together by prayer for us, that for the gift bestowed upon us by the means of many persons thanks may be given by many on our behalf” (2 Cor. 1:11).  We could go on and on.  I love the language of Joshua 10:14: “And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel.”  God is still the God who hears and answers prayer.

Such is the life that we have in Christ that even as our physical life wanes, yet even so the life we have in Christ can grow stronger and stronger.  As the psalmist put it: “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing; to shew that the LORD is upright: he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him” (Ps. 92:12-15).  

In other words, the life we have in Christ is indestructible.  Even though death is in the world, it cannot touch it.  Even though sin is in the world, it cannot touch it.  The Spirit is life because of righteousness.

But this is not all, is it?

A New Hope

The final implication comes at us in verse 11: “But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.”  Not only do those in Christ have life now, but the very Spirit who gives them life is the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead and who will raise us up from the dead as well.

I want you to see the unbreakable link between the two.  If one, then the other!  You cannot have the Spirit in you and not be raised from the dead.  It’s the same thing essentially that our Lord said to his interlocutors in the sixth chapter of John. Note all the times our Lord repeats that he will raise his own up at the last day: “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day” (Jn. 6:37-40).  And then in verse 44: “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.”  Those whom the Father gives to the Son will come to him and will not be cast away and will be raised up at the last day.  Everyone!

Jesus said this to Mary, Lazarus’ sister, after Lazarus had died: “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?” (Jn. 11:25-26).  

And notice that our Lord and the apostle are talking about our physical bodies here.  Paul says that the Spirit “shall also quicken your mortal bodies.”  Our spirits are not mortal, but our physical bodies are.  He will raise these corruptible bodies into indestructible bodies in the resurrection.  By the way, when Paul says in 1 Cor. 15 that “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body” (44), he does not mean that the resurrection body is incorporeal.  You can see this by the referent to it in these verses.  What does the “it” refer to?  Back in verse 42, Paul writes, “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption.”  The it is the dead body.  It is sown in corruption, but it – the same body that died! – will be raised in incorruption.  It is indeed sown a natural body.  However, Paul does not mean by that a material body (although it is that), but a body that is natural in the sense of mortal and broken by sin, the body we inherit from Adam – but that very same body, it, is raised as a body that is empowered and energized and shaped by the Holy Spirit.  “Spiritual” doesn’t mean incorporeal, but empowered by the Holy Spirit.  This is physical resurrection that is promised to the believer.

This is the Christian hope.  When Satan deceived Adam, he brought death into the world.  Jesus is reversing that.  He is going to overcome the devil’s work, not by scrapping the physical and the material, but by redeeming it.  The very bodies that we live in and inhabit are redeemed by Christ.  As Paul put it in another place, “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's” (1 Cor. 6:19-20).

When we lose loved ones who are believers, or when we ourselves face death, do we believe this?  Do we live as if we have this hope, or do we live in such a way that unbelievers look at us and think that we are no different from them, that all our hopes get flushed down the toilet of this world.  Let us remember the words to the Thessalonians: “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him” (1 Thess. 4:13-14).  We sorrow, yes, but we should not as others which have no hope.  

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not saying that grief is sinful or contrary to faith.  Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus.  Death is an unnatural separation, it is an alien intrusion into the good world that God made, and it demands the broken heart as an appropriate response to it.  But we should not grieve in such a way as to say to the world that we can never be happy again, or that we have been robbed of our hope in Christ of everlasting life.  We can never be robbed of that, which is the apostle’s point.  We may live in a world where our bodies are dead because of sin.  But we have life in the Spirit because of righteousness, and because of that we can be sure that one day that same Spirit – the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead – will raise us up to.

I love the reference to the resurrection of Christ.  The thing about it is that it has already happened.  We may be waiting to experience the resurrection of our bodies, but the resurrection that guarantees our has in fact already taken place.  Because he lives we will live also: “And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death” (Rev. 1:17-18).

So may we as those who belong to Christ live in light of these realities.  May we grasp the fact that through the indwelling Spirit we have been given a new nature that conforms us to the image of Christ, a new name that puts us in the family of Christ, a new life that cannot be destroyed, and a new hope in the resurrection to come.  And if you are not a Christian, know that you cannot have any of these things apart from Christ but all of them through Christ.  Believe in him, for all who believe in him belong to him and will be saved.