“For those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit have their minds set on the things of the Spirit. Now the mindset of the flesh is death, but the mindset of the Spirit is life and peace. The mindset of the flesh is hostile to God because it does not submit to God’s law. Indeed, it is unable to do so. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things I desired when I created this blog was to have a space where people interacted with the ideas I was putting forth. More specifically, I hoped to see it become a forum to foster interactions with people who don’t necessarily agree with the ideas in order to have convicted and civil dialogues about them together. Over the last year and a half that’s begun to happen…sort of. If you are someone who bothers reading the comments, one thing that has become clear over the last couple of years is just how profoundly folks committed to other worldview positions don’t understand the Christian worldview. Paul here explains why. Let’s take a look at this with him.

Growing up, I hated the University of Missouri. This was as it should have been, though, as I was raised to be a fan of the University of Kansas. Those two schools had one of the most bitter rivalries in all of college sports. I know folks around my current neck of the woods like to talk about how old the UNC-Duke rivalry is, but theirs doesn’t predate the Civil War. No, the interscholastic sports rivalry of those two schools doesn’t predate the civil war, but the rivalry between the two states does. And as soon as folks who lived near the border had something to compete on that didn’t involve killing one another, they latched onto it with a vengeance.

My formative years happened to coincide with the era when the rivalry between the two schools – especially on the basketball court – was at its apex. Those were the years when Larry Brown and then Roy Williams coached KU basketball, and Norm Stewart was cementing his hallowed legacy as MU’s basketball coach. Stewart famously hated KU so much he would not spend a dime in the state of Kansas. When the team had to play on the road in Lawrence (the town where KU is located), he would tell the bus driver to fill up in Kansas City before they crossed the state line and wouldn’t stop again until they arrived in town, wouldn’t let his players go anywhere but the fieldhouse, and made a beeline for the bus and the state line after the game was over.

Baking in that kind of an environment, I couldn’t even imagine how someone could be a fan of such an awful school. It didn’t make sense to me. And then Missouri bailed on the Big 12 Conference, along with all its storied rivalries, and jumped to the SEC in hopes of making more money in 2012. They’ve spent the last thirteen years as the mostly ignored runt of the conference without any meaningful antagonist. They also confirmed themselves to be the spineless cowards we KU fans always knew they were. We finally started playing one another again a few years ago, but the rivalry just isn’t the same anymore.

Who someone cheers for when it comes to college basketball (or any other sport) is ultimately trivial. I mean, it doesn’t feel like it when you’re a fan, and I can’t even fathom being an MU fan, but it’s still trivial. Whether or not someone worships God, however, is not. But, distinguishing what matters from what doesn’t, the utter cluelessness about the Christian worldview on the part of the secularist (and, to be fair, the reverse cluelessness often exists, but not quite so commonly as it does going the other way) isn’t too terribly different from my bafflement over how someone could be an MU fan.

This is some of what Paul is getting at here as we move forward in Romans 8. The believer and the non-believer, the Christian and the atheist, the follower of Jesus and the secularist, or however else you want to identify the opposing sides here, don’t think the same. Their minds don’t work the same way. The focus of their thinking is different. Their starting places for making sense of the world are sharply divergent. “For those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit have their minds set on the things of the Spirit.” This is why Paul will later (chapter 12) call believers to live with renewed minds.

Unlike sports rivalries, though, the difference here actually does matter. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether someone cheers for Kansas or Missouri, Duke or UNC (or State). I mean, MU isn’t nearly as good as KU in every respect…but I digress. Whether or not someone accepts the overwhelming case for the reality of the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, on the other hand, is enormously significant. It is eternally significant. One path leads to life and the other doesn’t.

“Now the mindset of the flesh is death.” This doesn’t mean that people who don’t follow Jesus only think about death or somehow walk around with murderous intent. How utterly ridiculous. What Paul means is that the mindset that is focused only on this world ultimately leads to death. We’ve talked before about why. This world doesn’t produce any life on its own. It can’t. Life comes from God. Period. If your focus is entirely on the world and the things of the world, then life won’t be the direction your thoughts take you no matter how good and noble they may seem to you or the people around you. If you are primarily motivated by something – or even someone – in and of this world, life won’t be the final result of the direction you are heading. You are living at odds with the source of life and the Creator of all you see and don’t. Your lot will ultimately be conflict and…well…not life.

“But the mindset of the Spirit is life and peace.” When your focus is on the God who created the world, who gave it life, and who sustains all the life in it each and every day by a conscious decision of His will, life and peace will be the ultimate result. That doesn’t mean that every second’s worth of your existence in this world that is broken by sin at every point is going to feel like life and peace. Jesus Himself said that “in this world you will have trouble.” Pursuing a path of life when everyone around you is pursuing a path of death necessarily means that you will be going against the flow. Swimming upstream is no easy task. Salmon do it and die at the end of their journey. And yet life is the ultimate result. Following the God of life in a world characterized by death will sometimes bring hardship and even physical death. But life will nonetheless be the ultimate result.

Now, you would think that something like a path that leads unavoidably to life would be naturally attractive to anyone with a functioning mind. And yet when all you have known your whole life is one thing, being told that it is wrong and that there is another, better way, isn’t exactly a welcome turn of events. When we are living according to the things of this world – the way of the flesh, to use Paul’s language – the ways of the Spirit won’t make any sense to us. Not only that, they will be actively offensive to us. Paul has explained why fairly well over the previous seven chapters. The basic premise of the ways of the Spirit is that we aren’t good or good enough on our own. We need someone else – namely, Jesus – to fix that.

Because of this, “the mindset of the flesh is hostile to God because it does not submit to God’s law. Indeed, it is unable to do so.” Those living apart from Christ not only don’t naturally lean in God’s direction, they can’t. We can’t walk the path of righteousness on our own. Period. We are incapable of it. Nothing in us compels or even allows us to move in that direction. Any movement in the direction of God’s kingdom comes from His working in us. It’s work we have to allow, but it’s all Him from start to finish. The result of this inability, though, is that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”

If you are trying to make yourself good enough for God by doing your own thing, by following your own path of righteousness, it’s not going to work. If you have bought into the delusion that your good is better than God’s good, that ship is going to wreck against the rocks of reality, and it isn’t going to be pretty when it does. The only way to please God is to meet with His standards of righteousness, and you can’t do that on your own. You definitely can’t do it when you are committed to walking according to the ways of this world. There’s only one way to accomplish that particular feat, and His name is Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t merely make it such that pleasing God is a possibility, He actively helps us do it. And when we actively wrap our minds and hearts around who Jesus actually is – God in a bod – the wonder of this exchange is magnified all the more. God sets the standard which results in our condemnation because of our total inability to keep it thanks to the brokenness of sin in us, but He also actively helps us meet the standard. In fact, He meets it for us. He sets the terms for pleasing Him, then He meets those terms on our behalf so that we can always please Him. He opens the doors to life, and then He ushers us inside so that, in Him, we can live.

More on that tomorrow. For now, reflect on our profound inability to achieve life or peace or pleasing God on our own. Reflect too with gratitude on the fact that He helps us get to the place – in Him – that we can.