TUESDAY March 12th
Romans 8:11
‘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.’
As Paul continues to talk about the activity and the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer in this verse, which is one of my favourite verses in this chapter, he reminds us of both the present activity and the future activity of the Holy Spirit in us.
Firstly, we are presently living in this flesh, our human bodies, which are decaying and will one day die because of sin, yet at the very same time, by the Spirit we have been made alive! This echoes what Paul had to say in Ephesians 2 where he talks about us as being dead in the trespasses and sins but now have been made alive with Christ. And as a result, the Spirit lives in us. This is good news, but the good news gets even better!
For if (and he does) the Spirit of him (that is the Spirit of God) who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then we have not only been made spiritually alive in the present, but the day is coming when the same Spirit will give life to our mortal bodies which will have died, this to me speaks of the future, the wonderful resurrection day when as we saw as we were going through 1 Corinthians 15 that all those who have died in Christ will one day be raised to life everlasting. The Spirit will give life to our mortal bodies, and instantaneously the mortal will be miraculously changed to become immortal. Just as Christ was raised, so too shall all who have come to put our faith and trust in him, all who have the Spirit of God dwelling within them.
I am not going to enlarge more on this subject as I have already done this in looking at the great resurrection chapter, but here let us just stop and consider the words in this verse, ‘If the Spirit of him . . . dwells in you’. When we fully grasp hold of what this means, to quote Paul again, we are the temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16), it should cause us to seek with all our hearts to be temples that are worthy and fit for the presence of the Spirit of God.
‘Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body’, 1 Corinthians 6:19–20.