The Indwelling Presence
THE INDWELLING PRESENCE
ROMANS 8:12-17
Paul reminds his readers of the essential role of the Holy Spirit.
The theme continually returns to the Christian’s intimations of immortality. It is because the eternal Spirit of God (the Spirit of the Son) lives in Christians that our survival is assured. It is because as Christians we are one with the risen Lord that we will share in that resurrection.
Other implications follow. If God’s Spirit lives in Christians, the mind of God should be discerned by Christians, and God’s guidance should be our common experience. This guidance does not suspend or override our judgment and reason but informs both, leading to sanctified discernment between right and wrong. Guidance, in a thousand situations, needs no more than that clear knowledge. At that point God’s way becomes obvious.
We therefore return to the thought that has been implicit in much of what Paul has already written—that life for Christians is a process of renewal, a moving towards reality. First comes by faith the knowledge that God himself has penetrated the very person, the “heart,” in biblical imagery. Then comes the realization of that continuing fact, deeper daily commitment to all that it implies of present wisdom, embracing love, and increasing power—until at last we become like him, lost in him, and yet, paradoxically, more ourselves, our true selves that God intended us to become, more alive than ever we could have been lost in death. Such is the redemption of the personality.
Inevitably the body dies, but the body is not all. It is the end, the goal, which counts in all that has to do with humanity, whom God made in his image.
We should pause here to mark the triumphant point Paul now reaches in his developing argument. By adoption the child of God is made absolutely and completely a member of God’s family: the sharer of its privileges, the partaker in its life.
To ponder choose one privilege or responsibility to meditate on in these verses.