Fleshly Inability Versus the Indwelling Spirit – Romans 8:5–11

PRAY

Romans 8:1–11 ESV

¹ There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. ² For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. ³ 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 for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, ⁴ 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 Spirit.
⁵ 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. ⁶ For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. ⁷ For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. ⁸ Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. ⁹ You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. ¹⁰ But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. ¹¹ If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

Intro: As a human, you are not a robot. You are free to do whatever you are capable of doing. But what if, in your fallen humanity, you are not capable of true, God-pleasing spirituality… without God’s miraculous intervention and ongoing help? That is precisely what the Bible describes about us. God has intervened for us not only by the work of Christ, but he has also intervened by his Spirit to apply the work of Christ to our hearts, such that we are transformed by faith. So too, the same Holy Spirit remains to indwell God’s people in the new covenant, making us capable of pleasing God in a way we were unable to do in our fallen flesh.

That’s the exact scenario Paul is describing here for the assurance of believers. In contrasting life by the flesh and life by the Spirit, Paul is essentially telling believers to…

Be assured: what the flesh cannot produce the indwelling Spirit enables.

Remember that Romans 8 carries an overarching theme of ASSURANCE… assurance that, by the Spirit, God’s people are being sanctified and will be glorified. So we emphasized last time, from Rom 8:1-4, that we should be assured of God’s deliverance and provision by the Spirit.

Be assured of God’s deliverance and provision by the Spirit.

• God has delivered us from the penalty of sin. (verse 1)
• God has delivered us from the ruling authority of sin and death. (verse 2)
• God has provided for the righteousness required of us. (verses 3-4a)
• God provides his presence and power for us to live righteously. (verse 4b)

We saw that, for those who are in Christ Jesus, God has delivered us from the penalty of sin, and from the ruling authority of sin and death over our lives. So too, by Christ’s accomplishment God has made provision for the righteousness required of us, and the Holy Spirit applies that righteousness to us by faith so that we can be in right relationship to God. Now the final point from Paul in verse 4b and following is that… By the Spirit God provides his presence and power for us to live righteously.

Paul has taught us how the legal righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled by Christ: He takes our sin and gives us his righteousness, enabling our justification before God. But the question remains: How will we learn to be holy as God is holy? How will we learn to love God with all that we are and have, and to love others as Christ loves the church? This can only happen by the ongoing presence and power of God the Holy Spirit working in us, that which we cannot possibly do by our own flesh.

And that becomes Paul point as he moves forward in vv. 5-11. 

What the flesh cannot produce the Spirit enables. And that should give us great assurance and comfort. Furthermore, it should cause us to lean on the Spirit for sanctification, and to worship and revere him as he deserves in the Triune Godhead.

Here’s how Paul’s develops this thought in this section: In verses 5&6 he sets up a contrast between the flesh-centered mindset and its consequence and the Spirit-filled mindset and its results. Verses 7&8 negatively confirm the fleshly mind’s enmity with God and moral inability to submit to God’s law. Pleasing God is not possible for one who does not have faith in God in his terms. Verses 9&10 then contrast all of this with the spiritual life produced by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Finally, v. 11 concludes with assurance that present life in the Spirit will also lead to a physical resurrection to eternal life (glorification).

First let’s consider how Paul sets this up in vv. 5&6. To explain how it is that Christians walk according to the Spirit and not the flesh (from v. 4), Paul launches into a contrast between those who walk according to the flesh and those who walk according to the Spirit.

Contrasting the Flesh & the Spirit: What controls the mind controls the man… and his destiny. (5&6)

Romans 8:5–6 ESV

⁵ 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. ⁶ For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

The life of the mind leads the way. What controls the mind controls the man. The importance of the mind is front and center in verses 5-8, and its impact carries into 9&10 as well. The mind here, for Paul, is the thinking and volitional center of a man. It is more than just the intellectual, reasoning center of a man. It is also his volitional and moral center. A man’s volitional thought, his willful thinking, is quite literally what drives the bus of his moral life. As goes the mind, so goes the man.

But the disposition of man’s mind—his center of volition and reasoning—is not actually the first domino in Paul’s argument. The first issue is the man’s nature—his condition.

In this case, the best translation into English for v. 5 is one that is most literal.

“For those who are [the quality of being] according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those according to the Spirit on the things of the Spirit.”

You see, Paul’s argument is ontological. It is first about our being… which leads to a mind that spurs our behavior.

As the mind of a bird innately drives the motivation and the means to search for food and build a nest for protection, so the mind of man produces both will and reasoning according to his nature.

The fleshly mind then is the volitional and intellectual center of a man whose nature is fallen. And how do we know that Paul is emphasizing here that this person according to the flesh is fallen, and that his fleshly mind is permeated by sin? We can tell Paul is emphasizing the sinful flesh of our natural man in this context for two reasons.

1. We first know he certainly might mean this because at verse 3b he described the condition of humanity as sinful flesh. Christ came in true humanity but was sinless, unlike the rest of sinful flesh. He died for sin to condemn sin the flesh.
2. The second set of evidences from the present paragraph should push this beyond doubt. The entire contrast between the flesh and the Spirit divides humanity into two categories. We either have minds that are biased toward sin and are pre-disposed against God, unable be truly pleasing to God; or we are remade in Christ, with a new disposition, ability, and destiny by the indwelling Spirit.

So here’s the point: What controls the mind controls the man. Our corrupted nature leads to self-centered wills and self-reliant reasoning, which is the cause of our death.

That’s the conclusion Paul draws in verse 6 as the first of two destinies. The mind controlled by the flesh leads to death. But the mind controlled by the Spirit leads to life and peace. Paul uses these contrasting terms and destinations in their fullest eschatological sense, such that it describes our eternal destiny with its present spiritual implications. As we’ve said numerous times in Romans, death is more than merely impending physical death. It is a spiritual death of separation from God that leads to an eternal death of suffering away from God. Such is the case for everyone unless they turn to God in faith for his gracious intervention, by which God grants an eternal life that begins even now in spiritual rebirth to new relationship with God that is truly at peace with him (the opposite of being at enmity with God, which Paul describes in the next verse).

So Paul has set up this contrast between the mind controlled by the flesh and mind controlled by the Spirit, and the inevitable eternal destinies of each. Now he explains why it is that the fleshly mind leads to death.

That’s vv. 7&8. Here Paul depicts…

The Innate, Godless Enmity & Inability of the Fleshly Mind (7&8)

Romans 8:7–8 ESV

⁷ For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. ⁸ Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

These two verses answer the question: why does the fleshly mind lead to death? The fleshly mind is innately self-willed and self-reliant, creating a disposition of enmity with God, rendering him unable to truly please God in sincere obedience. 

The fleshly mind leads to death because it is at enmity with God. The mind set on the flesh is in a state of hatred and hostility against God. Paul continues: this means that the sinful flesh refuses to truly submit to God. Indeed, it isn’t possible. One cannot oppose God and his authority and at the same time obey him in sincerity. You can’t fake true submission, true obedience to God.

Obeying God only outwardly is like being an actor on a stage who says the words and does the actions but doesn’t really believe in any of the stuff he is doing or saying. It’s just a paycheck; it’s just a means to an end.

Such an approach is unacceptable to a holy God who deserves right worship. Paul says, in fact, that this enmity with God means those who are controlled by the flesh cannot submit. They are incapable of pleasing God.

To think they can accomplish this is like expecting a large language model AI to produce answers on things for which there is no information provided to it. It is like asking a fish to flutter gracefully in the air, and a butterfly to swim in the depths.

Paul’s point is that the fleshly-minded man assures his own destruction by his disposition against God, rendering him incapable of true obedience that pleases God.

That sounds pretty bleak. Is all hope lost? Not at all! Paul’s broader purpose is to convince us that God has intervened by his grace with an offer to make us new. Through Jesus he grants us life and peace (v. 6b): peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom 5:1), and by the Spirit a new spiritual life leading to eternal life.

And that’s exactly how Paul reassures believers about their ability to be pleasing to God, to fulfill the spirit of the law by the Holy Spirit of God. What the flesh cannot produce the indwelling Spirit enables.

A New Godward Disposition & Destiny by the Indwelling Spirit (9-11)

The indwelling Spirit of God gives the Christian a new disposition toward God, and a new destiny.

Romans 8:9–10 ESV

⁹ You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. ¹⁰ But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

Before getting into further details, it’s important to notice this transitions from all that Paul has been saying. A fleshly focus is self-centered and self-determined, rendering us unable to please God by the true surrender of our will in submissive obedience.

But the Spirit’s God-centered disposition in us provides the ability to please God. That’s the point of Paul’s contrast. Believers are no longer “according to the flesh” (v. 5) or “in the flesh” (vv. 8&9). In other words, we are no longer under the dominating control of the flesh’s inclination toward sin. Therefore, by the Spirit we have a new spiritual capacity and controlling influence. 

And that’s how the miracles of Jesus mirror the authoritative teaching of Jesus… and about Jesus through the Apostles. What difference does Jesus make? Is he God’s Messiah? Jesus sent back this evidence to John the Baptist: Matthew 11:5 “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.”

Now listen again to what Paul says has changed for those who belong to Christ! You are “not in the flesh but in the Spirit… the Spirit of God dwells in you.” Yes, the body will still die because of sin, “but the Spirit gives life because of [Christ’s] righteousness” gifted to believers. This is the work of Christ in us. Did you notice Paul stating that Christ is in you after saying it is the Spirit of God that indwells. Paul is not conflating and interchanging the two as if these are simply modes of God. That thinking generates theological error. What he means is that Christ is present in us by the Holy Spirit, which draws our attention to the inseparable operations of these members of the Holy Trinity, while maintaining their distinct personhood and activity in the Godhead.

And why does Paul state all of this conditionally. Apparently he expresses all of this conditionally for two reasons: to warn and to assure. He warns those who are hanging around with Christians while not really being genuine. As we said earlier, there will be pretenders among us. There are those who are following Jesus selfishly for the bread they can get out of him, but they are not willing to submit to being like him in sacrificial love and suffering. Mere church attenders may want to feel like they are “good with the man upstairs,” but Paul warns that such an approach to God means they remain his enemy. If this is you, then spiritually you do not see, you do not walk, you are not cleansed, you do not hear, you remain dead… because you have refused to see yourself as spiritually poor and needy, who desperately needs Christ to be your life.

But to those who belong to Christ by faith, the presence and power of the Spirit is meant to stoke the flames of assurance. You do not have to trust in yourself because God has redeemed you from captivity, God has restored the relationship, and God continues remaking us into Christlikeness. Your great hope and assurance in your ongoing frustration against sin is that success is not dependent on your strength but on God’s preservation and sanctification of his people by the Holy Spirit.

Finally, Paul also assures us that by the Spirit we are destined for glorification. (He only touches on it here and will take the theme up again later this chapter.)

Romans 8:11 ESV

¹¹ If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

The indwelling Spirit is assurance of our destiny, that even our physically dying bodies will one day be redeemed in the final resurrection. And listen, runner, does it matter to your present endurance to have assured hope of a finish line? Weary traveler, in the midst of the struggle, does not reaching God’s perfect home give you hope in the present?

I have been in the rainforest at night, with the only flashlight ruined by the water that got into it. The wild Amazon rainforest is dense and it is dark, really dark. And the snakes, jaguars, and spiders are 50 times more frightening to your mind in the dark. Besides, jaguars hunt at night.

But here’s the good news. I knew I was on the path that led home. And I was not alone. I had my brother with me. And we knew we were not that terribly far from home. Even if we had to feel for the path on our hands and knees, we were on the path that led home. Even if we should have to wait out the night for morning light, we were on the path home. In that hope there is such great comfort and courage in the struggle and suffering.

Although it’s of no purpose to the illustration, I won’t leave you hanging with how we got out of there. Thankfully, my other brother and my best friend came out looking for us with a massive spotlight. They whistled and we whistled, and eventually we could see the light, and that light reached us, to bring us the rest of the way home.

Again, in this overall context of assurance, Paul’s message in Rom 8:5-11 seems to be this: Be assured that the indwelling Spirit, in contrast to our sinful fleshly mindset by nature, provides a new capacity and controlling influence to produce righteous living. What the flesh cannot produce the indwelling Spirit enables.

So we can…

Conclusion: Be assured, the Spirit provides the capacity for true righteousness.

Paul is comforting true believers that if they have a mind that hungers after God, that truly desires God’s will and not their own, then that is a work of the indwelling Spirit in them. That should give us assurance of saving faith in Christ Jesus. The righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in us (v. 4) by our justification in Christ, and that reality is being progressively proven by our submission to the indwelling Spirit, producing our sanctification.

However, Paul includes an implicit warning in the negative emphasis of vv. 5-8. If one has a mind set on using God instead of seeking His will and submitting to Him, such a one should know that he remains at enmity with God. The one who tries to bend God to his own will is fleshly, but the one who desires God’s will has a new spiritual mind, empowered by the Holy Spirit. 

- If you are among us but your mind is still controlled by the flesh, respond by acknowledging that your selfish ambition and self-righteousness are proof of a fleshly mind at enmity with God. But these too are sins for which Christ died and rose again, so that you might repent and believe God’s gospel that Jesus saves from your waywardness and grants a new state of being in Him. 

- Again, even if you are very religious but think that in yourself you are capable of achieving God’s will, you are ignoring the plain truth of Biblical revelation and of daily experience. Our depravity and inability is the very reason Christ came to seek and to save the lost, and to give his life as a ransom for our wayward souls.

So too, Christians, we must remember that the inability of our flesh is the reason the Father, on behalf of the Son, has sent the Spirit to indwell God’s people. God himself secures us in Christ and God himself ensures our spiritual development. And how has God done this? By God the Holy Spirit being the very presence and power of God with his people.

I would submit to you again then that our role—our effort and our striving—should be to revere the Holy Spirit and to rely on him. Our response is to be faith in God, praise of God, and reliance upon God. And the Holy Spirit is God. He deserves our utmost reverence and worship; and he demands our submission in order that he may fill us to produce his work in us.

PRAY

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