“Now if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through his Spirit who lives in you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When Jesus was talking with Nicodemus about the new life God was preparing to introduce to the world through the work He was going to do, He used the language of being born again. Nicodemus had a lot of trouble wrapping his mind around this, but Jesus wanted him to understand that the transformation this new life would work in a person would be like they were born entirely anew and starting life over again. In other words, it’s a pretty extreme transformation. Paul here uses another analogy to make the same point. This one is even more graphic. Let’s take a look.

In this last little section of Romans 8, we have seen Paul differentiate between the person who is in Christ and the person who is not. He used the language of having the Spirit versus being of (or in) the flesh. We have also seen Paul talk about how exactly we can know that we have the Spirit and are thus in Christ and because of that free from all condemnation of sin. That was yesterday. In these next couple of verses, now, Paul is telling us what happens to us when the Spirit comes to live in us.

Think back to the end of chapter 7 with me for a second. Remember the tension, the battle Paul described there. On the one hand, because of the Spirit in him, he said that he knows what he should be doing. He even desires to do that. But there’s this other side of him – his flesh, to use the metaphor for the presence and influence of sin in him that he uses so often – that resists this move toward righteousness. It pushes back and leads him again and again to do the thing he hates: sin. It’s like there’s this war raging inside of him. If you have followed Jesus for any significant amount of time, you understand exactly the experience and tension he described there.

Here in these two verses, Paul helps us better understand why we have these two sides pushing against each other and respectively pulling at us. “Now if Christ is in you the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit gives life because of righteousness.” Placing our faith in Christ and being made new in Him is the best decision we’ll ever make. But just because someone does that, doesn’t mean there are necessarily going to be any physical changes to their body. It’s an internal thing.

If you have a friend who isn’t following Jesus at all, but who, after an experience with God on the way home from work, gives her life to Christ before she comes in the next day, you aren’t going to be able to immediately tell anything has happened. She’ll look just the same as she did the day before. She is still going to be walking around in the same body that will eventually wear out and expire because of the impact of sin in the world and in her that she was walking around in yesterday.

But on the inside, she is completely different. On the inside, she has been made completely new. Whereas once – the day before even – she was dead in her sins on both the outside and the inside, now, with the Spirit who gives life dwelling inside of her, she is truly alive in the ways that matter most. Because of the righteousness of God, secured for us in Christ, and placed within us by the Spirit, she is now alive on the inside.

Well, Jesus told us that what comes out of a person is the result of what is inside a person. Righteousness isn’t something that can be achieved by external means if the inside is corrupted by sin and subsumed by evil. Yes, a person can put on a show, but you can only keep up a mask for so long before it wears or slips and the people around you begin to see who you really are. The external restraints of the law are not enough to save a person. You can’t behave your way into God’s kingdom. You have to be made new by the presence of Christ through the Spirit in you.

But once that Spirit has taken up residence in your heart, in your mind, in your life, what is now on the inside will eventually begin to work its way out. There will likely be some changes that will be immediate and obviously apparent to the people who know you best. There will be an initial surge of fruit like when you buy a new plant from the store that already has some fruit on it. The real and lasting fruit that has now been planted as seeds by the Spirit, however, will take their time to grow. But grow they will.

As you abide in Christ through His word, through prayer, through your active engagement with a local expression of His body, the church, the Spirit’s presence and impact will start to grow. The love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control that are the fruit of the Spirit will begin to manifest themselves in and through your life on an increasingly consistent basis.

And people will notice this. Where once when they were around you they tasted only the bitter fruits of unrighteousness that were all you could produce on your own, now they will experience the sweetness of the Spirit. The ones who knew you best before will undoubtedly take notice, and they will probably ask you about it. This is why Peter would later tell us to always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that you have, but to do this with gentleness and respect.

These changes that are internal, and a function of the Spirit in you, though, won’t remain only spiritual. When you change something on the inside, eventually those changes affect not only the behavior of the outside, but even the look of the outside. “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through his Spirit who lives in you.” Whereas once your physical body was set for death and in fact dead in the ways that matter most, in Christ and with the Spirit in you, it will be like you have come truly alive. We aren’t simply born again in Christ, we are raised from the dead like He was.

This last and most significant change won’t happen in full in this life. In this life, the body we currently have will still eventually wear out and expire. But as Paul wrote to the Corinthian believers, like Jesus received on His resurrection, when we are in Him, with the Spirit living in us, we will one day receive new bodies as well. We will receive new bodies that are going to be fit for eternity. They won’t wear out. They won’t break down. Their cells won’t tire or reproduce incorrectly. Our minds will be always sharp and clear. Our bones won’t grow brittle. Our joints will always be fresh and limber. Our lungs will be able to expand fully. Our hearts will always beat strong and steady. We will be new. Truly new.

If you are in Christ, this is the path you are on. Stand firm in it, and keep moving forward in it. It is the path that leads to life.