May 7, 2017 A New Dimension by Pastor Josh Sheldon

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May 7, 2017 A New Dimension Romans 8:5-8 Pastor Josh Sheldon

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Let's keep our attention focused on the scripture. If you would turn, please, to Romans chapter 8.
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This morning's message will be based upon verses 5 through 8 in this chapter, but I'm going to read to you starting at verse 1 of chapter 8, and I will read down through verse 13 of this chapter.
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But again, 5 through 8 will be the message, but I want us to get the whole context here as best we can without reading the entire book to you.
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So Romans 8, beginning at verse 1. Romans 8, beginning at verse 1.
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You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if, in fact, the
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Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him.
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But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
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If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised
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Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
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So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.
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For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
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Again, our text this morning, verses 5 through 8. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the
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Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the
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Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law.
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Indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. May God bless us as the
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Word is preached and heard this morning. The work of the
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Holy Spirit in bringing sinners from what they are, which is sinners, to what they must be to come to God, usually called saints in the
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Scripture, is a work that is the exclusive work of the Spirit of God, and it is a work,
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I would propose to you this morning, a work of total transformation. A total transformation.
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Those who have been given faith to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ have been remade.
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Titus 3 .5 says that God, according to His mercy, has saved us, and how is this accomplished?
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By the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ, our
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Lord Jesus said in the chapter just before what Jesus read to you, you must be born again.
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Other verses could be cited, but there's a point that is made. God does not work in half measures.
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The Baptist said God gives His Spirit without measure. Paul, in this same book of Romans that we're going through so slowly, back in chapter 5, verse 5 of this book, he said
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God's love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. This work of the
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Spirit, this transformative work of the Spirit, is a work that is a good and total, and I would say a complete work.
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Now lest you concern yourself that I'm preaching or I'm even implying that we could come to anything close to complete holiness, total sanctification, perfection in this life,
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I am not. I am not, and I will not defend it any further than that. But understand this, you don't need to be repaired.
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If you were an automobile engine, you don't need to be tuned up and given a couple of new spark plugs and you're going to be okay.
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Not just a tweak, not just an adjustment. I mean, if you've been with us since chapter 1, verse 1 of this book of Romans, which many of you
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I see here haven't, but for those of you who have had, if you think that for even a moment you think I just need to make a little bit of a change here and I'll be okay before God, I would scream out at you, are you out of your mind?
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Have you even been listening? Have you read this book? No. You don't need to make just a few changes.
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You don't need to just stop being so bad. You don't need to be a little bit more disciplined. You don't need new habits.
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You need a complete remake. And this is the work of the Holy Spirit. This is the transformative work that the apostle
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Paul is speaking of here in this section of Romans. And so thorough is this transformation that Paul here in Romans 8, 5 through 8 is speaking of.
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So thorough is it that he can say that Christians, those who have been remade by the
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Holy Spirit of God, transformed, reborn, rebirthed, so complete that here in these verses before us this morning, he can say you're actually on a new plane of existence.
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You're not what you were. We aren't perfect. We won't be until Christ calls us to himself.
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For now we struggle as we live in the tension of these twin realities. On the one hand, the
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Christian has a new heart and has been brought from the realm of flesh to that of the Spirit, a different plane of existence.
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On the other hand, here we are in these bodies which are growing corrupt, this physical covering that remains vulnerable and attracted to the vagaries of sin.
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Last week we covered verses 1 through 4 of this chapter. The last verse there, verse 4 there, says that God's purpose in condemning our sin in Jesus' flesh, and of course it's speaking of the cross, the cross of Jesus Christ where he suffered the just penalty that you deserved for your sins.
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And yet God poured his fury at you upon him. That's what he's speaking of here, condemning sin in Jesus' flesh, that suffering, which if you and I had brought upon us, the suffering would begin now.
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And do you know when it would end? Never. Eternal dying is what
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Jesus actually, literally, took upon himself. This is what Paul's speaking of in the passage from last week.
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Sin, your sin, condemned in his flesh. And then he gives the purpose of this, and just as a matter of review, why did
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God do that? Why did God send his son? Why did God condemn your sin in his flesh? In order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the
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Spirit. And the verses this morning that we have, chapter 8, verses 5 through 8, expound on this truth.
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Walking, what does it mean to walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit? How can this be? How can we do something like this?
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If the righteous requirement of the law is the sum and total of all that God demands of us, that's the righteous requirement.
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Last week we talked a little bit about how there's 613 individual laws. That's not what Paul means. Paul means take all of that and put it in one vessel.
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And that is what he's talking about here, the righteous requirement of the law fulfilled in us who believe in him,
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Jesus Christ. How can this be? That I, a lawbreaker from start to finish, that I should be able to live as one who has fulfilled all that God requires.
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How can this be? Well the first answer to that question is that it is for those who've been justified by faith.
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Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Justified by faith.
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That's a declaration of the sovereign God which he makes of his own authority for his own good pleasure because it pleases him and it increases his glory to do so.
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He has therefore declared that those who are transformed by his
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Spirit, justified by the faith that the Spirit himself gives. And this because it pleases
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God to do so. That the finished work of his Son on the cross, that all the benefits that Jesus Christ won there as he suffered in our place, everything that he accomplished on the cross, all of that wonderful benefit, ours, by faith.
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And this is what it means to have been justified. This one time determination by God that we've been justified before the bar of his law because Jesus Christ represented us at the cross.
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How is this tied to Romans 8, 5 through 8? Because we're really just reviewing last week's message, 8, 1 through 4.
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I ask you, do you believe this? Do you believe this truth? That God Almighty sent his
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Son, the eternal second person of the Trinity, that in Jesus Christ God became flesh, walked among us, dwelt here on this earth, and went to the cross, and there took upon himself all the punishment that God has justly determined for all our sins.
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Do you believe this truth? If so, if so, let me tell you something.
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Well, let the scripture tell you something is a better way to put that. You didn't figure this out for yourself.
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I tell you, I didn't make up this message and start a society that would come and listen to this new paradigm that we came up with.
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No, this is the old, old gospel message, and we didn't figure it out. We didn't put it together.
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Because to even believe such a thing requires this complete remake. You can't believe this gospel if you're living in the flesh, if you are not converted, if you have not been born again.
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It can't happen. There's nothing in you, there's nothing in me that could have made this up.
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There's nothing in you or me that could even believe such a thing. It is only by God's grace and the transforming power of His Holy Spirit that this kind of thing can be apprehended, believed, and then trusted with all our hope thrown at the cross by faith in the
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God who declares what He has done in His Son. Now we don't need a revamping.
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We need to be remade. Otherwise this truth is just going to fall to the floor and be left there.
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And this is what Romans 8, 5 through 8 is about. How am I able to walk by the
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Spirit and not by the flesh? And here's the answer. Because God, by His Spirit, has transferred you to a different plane of existence.
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And with that new paradigm comes a whole new way of thinking, which this gospel absolutely is.
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The message this morning concerns that. It concerns your state of existence. And there's only two.
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There's only two. There is the flesh or there is the Spirit. That's it.
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There's no in between. Each is characterized by the thought processes inherent to them.
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And so the settled disposition of mind they lead to is as distinct as the two realms from which those thoughts emanate.
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Now I want to say right up front that these verses in Romans 8, 5 through 8 are not what we call hortatory, hortatory, excuse me, hortatory.
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They're not hortatory in nature. What I mean by that is in these verses there's no imperative command that says something like therefore you must do this or therefore you have to stop doing that.
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There's plenty of that in Romans, but it's not here in Romans 8, 5 through 8. The Apostle Paul is stating in the plainest language possible that those who live by and according to the impulses of the natural man, that's what he calls the flesh, those who are governed by the flesh and the desires that the flesh incites in him, that they are thinking and living in a very dangerous way, in hostility, in open hostility to God.
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And this will ultimately lead to, that's what he says.
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And of course the opposite, as the flesh is opposite of the spirit, the opposite then is true for those whose lives are ordered according to the movements and the passions aroused by the spirit of God.
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What does he say in verse 7? They will know life and peace. Paul told the
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Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 13, 5, examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith.
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Test yourselves or do you not realize this about yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you unless indeed you fail to meet the test.
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These verses in Romans 8 I think can help us here. The first thing
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I want to cover with you, and I want to cover it rather quickly because I don't want this to turn into a lecture. This is a sermon.
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We're preaching the gospel. But there's a reason that I chose verses 5 through 8 as a single distinct message.
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And what preachers are taught to look for is a unit of thought in the Scripture. Sometimes it's a larger number of verses, sometimes smaller.
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Here it's fairly small. A unit of thought. One thing we look for is the inherent structure in the
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Scripture. You have clues from the author that tell us that here is a unit.
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Here's a single thing that you can pull out, find the meaning, and it's a meaningful message because it's a single thought by the
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Holy Spirit to this author. So verses 5 and 8 are structured in a way that's very similar to each other.
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They form what we call an inclusio, a beginning and ending. What they bracketed between them, 6 and 7, verses 6 and 7 combined to make their own particular point.
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Now why did I do this? How did I find this? It's not that I'm extremely clever or anything.
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I think it was pretty easy picking fruit, as they might say.
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The key word in verses 5 and 8 is the same in both. In verse 5 it's translated as live, in verse 8 it's translated as are.
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For those who live according to the flesh, and in verse 8, those who are in the flesh.
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And these two words, live and are, they come from the same Greek word.
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And they're used in both verses in exactly the same form, and with the same basic grammatical construction.
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And I want to take a moment on this because I think it's important to the point that Paul's making. The Greek word
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I'm talking about here, verse 5, live, verse 8, are, is the
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Greek word antis. You don't have to remember that. It was the Greek word antis. And I want to read to you in the original language the first few words of these verses.
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So I want you to hear this. Verse 5 starts out, gar oi sarca antis.
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And then verse 8, de oi sarci antis. See that?
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Leaving out the gar and the de, it's oi sarca antis, oi sarci antis.
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All that's just to point out that verses 5 through 8 are a discrete section, a unit of thought within the larger argument that Paul's making.
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Now I don't want to try your patience with all this review, because we're taking a pretty small portion of scripture here, but it's important that we keep
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Paul's overall flow of thought and view. And verses 5 and 8, by this similar construction, and because they have the same key word, live and are, this forms one unit of thought for us this morning.
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And so we need to look at some key words within that. Antis, I've already spoken a little bit about.
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That's one of the signals that we have, that we have this one unit of thought in the scripture.
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Antis is from the Greek word for I am. It describes a continual state of being.
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It describes a state of existence. It's where we get our English word ontology, the study of being, the study of existence.
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We use it when we study the nature of God. We speak of God ontologically this or ontologically that.
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The earliest lesson we have in that is actually back in Exodus chapter 3 and verse 14, where God reveals himself as Yahweh, as I am.
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And there's much ontological truth in that, because it speaks of his existence. What does
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Yahweh tell us about God? It tells us that he's eternal, that he's independent, that he depends on no thing or no person for anything.
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He's unchanging. This is all ontological truth about God. It's speaking of his nature, speaking of his being.
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Now we're not eternal. We're certainly not unchanging. But we do have a state of existence that is continual, which is what this verb ontos in chapter 8 verses 5 and verse 8 means, a continual state of existence.
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Not eternal, but continual. And this is what Paul's driving at.
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This state, this mode of existence is the paradigm that sets the way we think and set their minds.
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Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of flesh. Those who live according to the spirit set their minds on the things of the spirit.
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That comes from a single Greek word that means a settled disposition, a certain way of thinking.
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Now it's not mental acuity. It's not your skills intellectually, not your
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IQ or anything like that. It's a worldview. It's a way of seeing things.
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It's a word that speaks of the direction of the will. You know,
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I want to think of this as a sieve, as a filter. When things come at you, when decisions need to be made, when a response to somebody has to be given, what's the first thought that comes to your mind?
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Is it from the flesh or from the spirit? If from the flesh, perhaps, you're making a decision, you're going to say, well, how far do
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I have to go? How much is this going to cost? What's it mean to me? What's going to be more convenient?
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What's going to be better for my retirement? Not anything of those are bad. But if of the spirit, and your mind's set on the things of the spirit, then that filter is a little bit different.
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And it says, what saith the Lord? What brings glory to Christ's name?
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That's what he's talking about. Calvin rightly said here that this setting of the mind, this word here that we have in there, encompasses all the faculties of the soul, reason, understanding, and affections.
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Again, not the quality of our thought processes, not that you have to be smarter or more intelligent than anyone else,
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IQ or any other measure or capacity isn't what's in view here. It's about the dominating influence that comes to you by means of your continual state of being.
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It's about whether you are ontologically flesh or spirit.
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You see, because your ontology, your state of being, this plane upon which you exist, it leads to your settled mind, your worldview, your whole way of analyzing things.
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You see, the way we think comes from the realm in which we exist. Spirit or flesh, and that's it.
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The mind of flesh is classically described in 1 John 2, verse 16.
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He says, for all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride and possessions is not from the
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Father, but it's from the world. Well, if it's from the Father, it would be spirit.
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It's from the world, it's of the flesh. It's that simple. How do we discern here?
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Can we discern here? Paul tells us in many places to test yourselves, examine yourselves, and here's some ways to do that.
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The danger of being in the flesh and standing before God on that great day is beyond extreme, so let's test ourselves.
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How can we know? I just have some questions. I put these questions to myself. When your mind wanders, where does it go?
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When your mind wanders, where does it go? When you don't have anything pressing in upon you, you just got some time, you don't need a nap, you don't have a book to read, there's nothing on TV to watch, there's no sports, the family's okay, and you're just sitting and, as we say, musing, where does your mind go?
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Ask yourself this, what are my most important goals and ambitions? What really gets me going?
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What keeps me up at night? Get a good education, a good job, a career, take care of my family, have a house, a reliable car, these things, nothing wrong with those things.
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What about my most important goal, becoming like Jesus, growing in holiness and sanctification, putting off the deeds of the body more and more, and becoming more and more like Christ, this continual lifetime process?
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Something related to that, what accomplishments excite me the most? What accomplishments excite me the most?
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Getting that degree, that promotion, that raise, finding that house and fixing it up and making some money as prices continue to rise, that's a great accomplishment.
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How about putting off some of the old man and more of Christ?
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How exciting is that to me, really? What failures are most disappointing?
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What sin keeps coming back against you and it begins to crush your spirit more and more because you can't get away from this, doesn't have to be the same one over and over, or is it not getting that raise at work, or not getting that degree in five years as you had planned or something like that?
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What failures most disappoint you? These are just ways that a person can examine themselves and see, okay, am
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I thinking in terms of flesh or am I thinking in terms of spirit? And then a more important question, a more ultimate question, based upon those answers which only you can answer in the quietness of your own self, your own spirit, what does this say about whether I am in the flesh or in the spirit?
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What does this say about this transformative work that the scripture speaks of and whether that work has really been done in me?
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We're not saying that if you think rightly, God will be pleased with you. It's really the other way around. God, by his spirit, if his spirit has come upon you, he's changed your existential reality and your thinking must necessarily follow suit.
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First Corinthians 2, 13 and 14, Paul writes this, he says, I wonder, do you ever feel like you just don't fit in?
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I mean, the common way we have of putting this becomes almost a platitude, but if you're in the office and you're standing around the office cooler or the coffee machine and you're hearing the jokes or you're hearing people's priorities, just what they're talking about, and you come in with your
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Christian viewpoint or just standing as a Christian and not laughing at the same jocularity as everybody else, you just don't quite fit.
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I mean, it's an uncomfortable feeling, and it really should be because God makes us as social creatures.
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He made us to be in community, first with him and then because of him, in community with others.
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In fact, you know, the whole definition of the church is community. Do you know that? You hear people sometimes speak of, well,
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I have church. I have church at home. I'm watching a good sermon that I like on DVD or picked it up on YouTube. Folks, that's not church.
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Church is community. God made us to be in community, and that's one reason if we are really in the spirit and we really have this need to be in community, which is the way
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God made us in community with him through faith in his son, Jesus Christ, that first and foremost, but because of that in community with others of that same faith.
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Sometimes things come up that highlight this difference in us. There's a man I know, a brother in the
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Lord. He's been invited to have an interview for a good job at a good company.
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He found out that the president of that company, a man who's quite wealthy, influential, he has a homosexual activist agenda, and he uses his wealth and he uses his influence to press his agenda down as far as possible in the elementary grades.
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What does it mean in a situation like this to think in terms of the flesh or in terms of the spirit?
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Well, this man, who I will not name, he's a good dear brother of mine. His first thought is, okay, given that this guy is on high in this company and that me down here, there's kind of a trickle -up effect, if you will, where I'm supporting him because my work is going to have some benefit to him, his security, his salary, this sort of thing.
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The first question that he has wrestled with, what does this say about my relationship to God and my faith in Jesus Christ?
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Now, I'm not saying here we're going to find the will of God in this matter. Believe there's liberty.
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And all I brought this up for because this is a real rubber -meets -the -road situation that has actually come up.
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I only commend it to you because this gentleman's first thought was, and still is, what does it say about God?
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Does the scripture give me any indication here? Can I find here a clear direction?
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I believe that's as if not more important than where you actually end up.
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That's all I'm talking about here. I think that's what Paul is speaking of here when he says, setting your mind on the things of the spirit or setting your mind on the things of the flesh is, what's your first thought?
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Now we don't get it perfectly every time. I have to keep saying that. We're not talking about complete sanctification.
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We're not talking about perfection in this life. We're talking about the dominating way that we view things, this worldview we have, this sieve through which we pass everything.
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And sometimes we take that filter and we've let it down for a moment. We think the old way. These things happen. We're talking about the general course of our life, the way we think, the way we view things.
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You see, if you're in the spirit, not in the flesh, in the spirit meaning having been redeemed out of this world and brought to faith by God's regenerating power through his spirit, the whole way of thinking is different from all the rest.
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The power of God unto salvation is our glorious truth, something that is spiritually discerned.
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Now to the world, to the fleshly, it's just the opposite. It's foolishness.
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I mean, Peter writes in 1 Peter about how our old friends, they're surprised, they're amazed.
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They're going, what's this person doing? They no longer join in the old debauchery, the old sinful ways, the old partying attitude.
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And we say, how so? How do we stop living that way? And the answer is because God has by his spirit brought us into a different mode of existence, a different ontology.
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No longer are we that. No longer are we flesh. But spirit. Now just to be clear, we're still physical beings.
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We're still prone to the law of sin and death insofar as we are going to die, as Alistair Begg says, one out of one.
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We didn't suddenly become like angelic beings with halos and wings on us. We're here, now, living on this earth.
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What do we mean when we say we're spirit? So Paul's been speaking of throughout this book of Romans about conversion, about the work of the
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Holy Spirit in converting our souls and bringing us to faith so we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And with that, again, our whole worldview, our whole outlook changes to that of the spiritual.
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The old ways have lost their appeal. Not perfectly, not 100 % consistently.
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They still kind of bite and grab and pull at us. There's reasons for that, and they will come up as we go through Romans.
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But what we're talking about here, being in the spirit versus the flesh, is something different than just don't do that, though the scripture often says just don't do that.
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It's a different outlook. It's a way of seeing things. It's a mindset that is set on the spirit. It's the spirit of life molding into you the image of Christ, which is this lifetime process of sanctification.
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The spiritual mind has a worldview that says to all issues at hand, job, marriage, home, children, whatever it may be, it says, what says the
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Lord? And what does the Lord say? But the living God has given us his living word, so it's what says the word of God.
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Psalm 1 would explain it this way, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the
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Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. It's like Psalm 119, verse 11, your word,
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O Lord, I've hid in my heart that I might not sin against you. It's just a spiritual way of thinking, that I want to be so infused with God's word, the living word from the living
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God, that anything that comes at me, every situation, when I'm driving, when
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I'm walking away, when I'm going to bed at night, when I'm looking at jobs, when I'm looking at school, when I'm talking to my wife, when
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I'm responding to my husband, they all go through this filter. What sayeth the
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Lord? The more of this word in which the Lord sayeth, that we've hidden in our hearts, memorized if you will, memorized with proper application, understanding context, and how it applies to this daily life, the more of it becomes a part of us, the more we think spiritually, and the more we think spiritually, the more these decisions will be made in a way that is pleasing to God and good for our souls, and bring us into the image of Christ more and more and more.
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Psalm 1, this man's ontology is that of a spiritual man, meditating day and night on the word of the
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Lord, and delighting in it. He wants to know what God says about all matters of life. This is 2
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Timothy 3 .16, all scriptures inspired by God is good for rebuke, and for training a man of God in righteousness.
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Psalm 1 goes on a bit, it says, the wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away, flesh, spirit, as different as could be, and it's very consistent with verses 6 and 7 in Romans 8.
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These verses that are bracketed by this inclusio that I was talking about earlier. Think back there with me.
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Verse 6 in Romans 8, for to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace.
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For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law, but indeed it cannot.
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This one whose ontological reality is his flesh, this physical reality is all he knows, all he cares about, all he thinks about, and what's the ultimate end of that?
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Death. Death there's no other way. It's as stark as it can be.
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It's death now because this one only acknowledges the here and now. It is death later because the soul lives on and will answer to God.
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Those whose reply for their sins is their own goodness will perish forever. Their mind set on the flesh will reap that reward.
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And verse 7 gives us the reason for this. Death comes as a logical consequence of the ontological realm in which they live.
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The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law, indeed it cannot.
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Now listen, it's not too hard to understand. Why do they die? They die because their whole existence, which leads to their whole way of looking at life and the world, is in a manner hostile in enmity with God.
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It's diametrically opposed to Him. He says here that submission to God's law is impossible.
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The reason is obvious. Paul said in chapter 7 of verse 14 of Romans, for we know that the law is spiritual.
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To come at it from a human, a physical, a flesh -based perspective is a losing proposition from the start.
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God is spirit. Jesus read this to you. And those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
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We know that God is spirit and God gave us a spiritual scripture. The living
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God giving us this living word. To come at it from a physical viewpoint is completely opposite and will not bring forth any good result.
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This way of approaching God, approaching the scripture, approaching life, I need to warn you, if you are not in Jesus Christ, that you are in a way standing as it were in battle formation against the living
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God. You're at enmity against Him, hostile to Him, thinking completely opposite the way
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He would have you. He says here submission to God's law is impossible.
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And again, the reason is obvious, for we know that the law is spiritual. By the works of the law, no flesh shall be justified.
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The flesh -based person cannot understand the spiritually derived truth that only Jesus Christ could obey
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God's law because it was condemned in Him. He sent His Son because of the weakness of the flesh because we could not obey the law, cannot obey the law.
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That's a spiritually derived truth. And the flesh -based way of thinking just hates
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God anyway and so cannot even pretend to love His law. If you're outside of Christ, I tell you, your case is grave and very, very dangerous.
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Your mind is set against, violently against, the Lord of the universe. You're actively, you're determinately hostile to God.
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And this is more than just being opposed. Some people say, I'm not against God, I'm just not for Him.
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I'm neutral. So leave me alone. And Scripture says no.
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If you are not existentially, if you are not ontologically in the Spirit, then you are necessarily both those things but in the flesh.
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And if in the flesh, you are actively hostile to God and there's no neutral ground.
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Hostility denotes hatred as an inner disposition and objective opposition. So why do you die?
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I would ask another way. How can you expect to live when your inner disposition, your ontology, your whole way of thinking is objective hatred against God?
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James states the case as succinctly as Paul did. He says, for do you not know, brethren, that friendship with the world is enmity against God?
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So verse 8 closes this section. Those who are in the flesh, remember our is our word, ontos, those whose ontology, those whose plane of existence is in the flesh, cannot please
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God. It could hardly be stated more strongly. If you're in the flesh, all your effort, all your work is for nothing.
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This is what the prophet Isaiah means when he says all our works are as filthy rags. All our righteousnesses, excuse me, all our righteous efforts, all our best foot forward before God is what?
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Filthy rags. Filthy stinking rotten rags.
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Why is that? Because no matter how good of its own merits that work is, no matter what a wonderful orphanage you started, no matter how many soup kitchens you fund or bowls you fill with good food or contributions you make to wonderful charities, if it's done from the flesh, from the physical, for your own credit, in order simply to accomplish something here in this world with no thought to God, no thought to the fact that he is spirit, no regard for Jesus Christ and the cross he bore, it's from the flesh and no matter what you may think of it, it's hostility to God.
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Do the most wonderful work that any human's ever thought of, the most beneficial thing, and do it as altruistically as anybody ever could have, and if it's not for God's glory coming from the spirit, a spirit, small s in us, remade by the spirit of God, capital
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S, it's filth, it's hatred, it's enmity, and this is how stark these differences are, so if you're not in Christ, I beg you to look to your own spirit, to look to yourself now and ask yourself, where do
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I stand? To recognize yourself a sinner, to go to the cross of Christ and there plead with him for faith to repent.
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Just as a quick aside, just so we understand what we call the order of salvation, you cannot repent, you cannot have faith unless the
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Holy Spirit comes upon you, because you don't have faith and then God says, I see that faith and I'm really happy with that, so then he sends a spirit to remake you, no, he remakes you, and then you're able to repent, the remaking is what brings faith, it's what it says in Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 8, by grace you've been saved through faith, not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not the grace is the gift, the faith is the gift,
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God transforms and gives you faith to repent and believe.
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Where was I when I started that excursus, I think I was saying that the best work you do, the most wonderful thing you do if it emanates from the flesh, if the world view that got it going is world based, is physically based, is flesh based, it's hostility to God, and the scripture makes it so wonderfully clear for us, and so you don't have a lot of parsing out to do,
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I tell you this to your benefit, if you don't know the Lord Jesus Christ, there's not a lot of gradations you have to look at, it's one or it's the other, those who are in the flesh cannot please
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God, simple statement of fact, it's plain, it's without horns, those whose existence and way of thinking is fleshly are in open warfare against God, and I don't care how good your work is, do the most wonderful thing you can think of,
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I don't care, it's against God, you're at warfare against Him, you will lose the fight, the way you're heading is ultimately death.
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Peter writes about this distinction between the old and the new in 1st Peter chapter 1, I think it's about seven verses, but I want to read them to you, so we start coming to a close, he says,
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Do you notice Peter, much like Paul, he doesn't just tell you, do better, because you can't, he doesn't just tell you, don't be bad anymore, because you can't, he bases it on the precious blood of Jesus Christ, faith in Him, that you are ransomed from your ways here, and now to go to Romans 5, transferred from this existence, this ontology, this reality of flesh to the reality of the
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Spirit, that's the basis, not our own efforts, by the deeds of the law, no flesh shall be justified.
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God's regeneration of sinners is a definitive act.
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Much like justification, therefore having been justified, this one time declaration of God that you're justified before His law, generations like that, growing into the image of Christ is a lifetime process, never complete, but the fact of it, is this one time, we don't have to repeat it.
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Colossians 1 .13 says He, meaning Jesus, He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved
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Son. Ephesians 5, 8, and 9, for one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the
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Lord. Walk as children of the light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true.
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This is the answer to verse 4, how is the righteous requirement of the law fulfilled in us by the faith we are given by and through the transforming work of the
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Holy Spirit, the very person of God who gives us that faith, the Christian is transferred into an entirely new realm of existence, and with that new realm comes this new way of viewing things and thinking, a new world view, which we call the mind of Christ.
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And as the flesh is opposite to the Spirit, and as the train of thought found in either of the two is different, so is the final result.
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Because those who think according to the flesh are thinking according to death. And those who are according to the
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Spirit will know from God life and peace. Amen? Heavenly Father, again we thank
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You for bringing us together, for giving us Your Word, and for giving us the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank
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You Father for Your Spirit and for the transforming work that He has done. I pray Father that we would ever more, more and more think in terms of the
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Spirit and follow His ways and His truth. We pray Father You continue to mold us into the image of Your Son Jesus Christ, that You show
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Him to us constantly, show us Lord where we have fallen short, and bring us