Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

March 9, 2008

Flesh and Spirit

Romans 8:6-11

The passage of scripture from Romans 8 is one more passage from Paul in which he tends to repeat himself. It is a passage of scripture in which we find ourselves befuddled and not exactly sure how to listen to it, or even sure if we want to listen to it, for fear that it challenges so much about the way that we live.

At the core of this passage is a struggle which is a part of all major world faith traditions. It is described in different ways. It is not as simple as between good and evil, but in the Christian tradition, it is between life and only what we can see, accumulate, use, count, know, and touch vs. what we can only believe. It is a life that is the visible or trusting in the invisible.

Most of us have been around church, the Christian life or Christian people long enough to know that if you choose the invisible side—those things that can only be known by faith—sooner or later, there is inner temptation to want to choose the other. Sometimes, there is the scorn of friends who want to pooh-pooh our choices and say, “Don’t you know you are really cutting yourself off from a lot of fun, a lot of pleasure, to only live like that?” It is this conflict, this division, this choice in which way we will live which Paul addresses in the 8th chapter of Romans.

I have chosen to discuss the flesh and the spirit. The NIV version is trying to spread out the understanding of what flesh means and talks about the sinful nature. The King James translation, and perhaps the more common way that we have heard and remember it, is the flesh. The choice is between the flesh and the spirit. We know that this tension is there.

We can think of other Bible verses. Jesus catches the disciples sleeping while he is praying in Gethsemane and he says what? “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

We can think about Paul in his First Letter to the Church at Corinth when he is talking about the resurrection and the promise of what will be true for all Christians. He says, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” There is a difference somehow. There is an earthly and a spiritual element, and flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.

In our culture, when we begin talking about flesh and spirit, we run into a couple of problems right away. Our culture is very flesh driven. All you have to do is turn on cable TV, even on a Sunday afternoon, and you can see a lot of flesh. Fire up the computer and you can accidentally wind up in many websites where there is a lot of flesh. Our culture is based on flesh. We are so indoctrinated literally with flesh around us that to talk of the flesh in such a negative way seems a little out of date. We can almost imagine some old fashioned movie, maybe a Western, where some Bible-toting, thumping preacher is talking about the evils of the flesh. We hear that and roll our eyes and think, “OK. Whatever.” We seem to think that it doesn’t relate to us.

Another image is something out of the Middle Ages. A priest or a monk has seen the ankles of a woman and he takes off his robe and begins beating himself with a whip. We call that self-flagellation. People would whip themselves trying to subdue the flesh and, in some way, beat that desire or image out of themselves. At the very least, we think of that as pretty unhealthy. We find that the message of flesh and spirit falls on deaf ears, and it does.

It used to be that one of the ways you could mark between liberal Christians and fundamentalist Christians was whether or not someone drank. That used to be it. If you have not been to some weddings lately, it doesn’t matter. If you do any studies of surveys about attitudes, drinking that used to be a mark of the flesh and used to be hated by people who considered themselves the most conservative is much more acceptable. That’s really not part of the flesh that we reject any more.

Premarital sex. Do a study of college students. You will find that it doesn’t matter what their theology is. They can be the most rigid and conservative but there is a mental disconnect between what they believe and how stridently they believe it and whether or not they participate in premarital sex. Everyone is not in agreement with this conversation about flesh and spirit. A lot of times this falls on deaf ears.

I would like to get your attention on this by saying that if you really study all the things that Paul says about the flesh, the Apostle Paul does not say that the flesh is bad. Maybe that gets your attention because that runs contrary to what you are thinking. If you are now paying attention in hopes of finding a loophole, I am going to disappoint you on that.

The NIV translation talks about the sinful nature because it is trying to broaden what we understand as the flesh. It is probably an indictment on our culture that we immediately think of literal flesh because we see so much of it all around us, but it is more than that. It is more than simply trying to define taboo pleasures in things that we are not supposed to do. The flesh is human life. It is earthly life, and it is all the things that we try to gather to ourselves and measure ourselves by in earthly life. It includes pride. It includes power and trying to be able to make everybody else do what we want them to do. It does include pleasure. It does include wealth. We don’t like to hear that. The problem, according to the Apostle Paul, is when we take this part of life only and we trust in it. It is only when we think that the family we were born or married into, the address where we live, the status of our school or our clubs, the prominence of the boards on which we serve or the companies that we work in, the positions that we have, when we only think that what we do or what our parents do, what our spouse does, who our daddy is or was, how many square feet are in our home, whether or not we can dominate a meeting, it’s when we only trust in those things that we believe in the flesh. Those things are the flesh, and Paul says that when we trust in them and think that is the way to build a life and think those are the things that can justify or satisfy life, we are going to end up only with jealousy, envy, bitterness, retaliation, and a life totally dissatisfied because there is never enough. If you study it all, what Paul really says is that the flesh is inadequate. It is inadequate. It will not satisfy you and it certainly will not justify your life.

If the flesh is all human, the spirit is of God. It is all that God breathes, shapes, and puts into this world. Not only the Holy Spirit, in this particular case, although that is a great way of trying to get our hands and minds around it, but it is all the things of God. It is the belief that God did make us and we did sin. God did send Jesus Christ to die on the cross, and it is only through faith in Christ and coming to peace with God through that faith in Christ that we begin to find our lives on the right path. When we live according to the way that Christ leads us to, we begin to find that in our lives are things like graciousness, forgiveness, and thankfulness. These things result in kindness, compassion, gentleness, and self-control. This is the life built on the spirit. The other life is not all bad. It is only bad when we trust in it alone.

This is probably different from what you think you have read or what you have heard before. But if you will study all the teachings of Paul on the flesh, the flesh is not all bad in and of itself. A church member pointed out to me that we remember the Good Samaritan not only because the Good Samaritan stopped but because the Good Samaritan had the means to take care of the person who had fallen among thieves. The good use of that person’s wealth was a spiritual thing.

Sex, as designed by God as a gift for marriage, is not bad. It is a gift. It is only when these things are taken only for themselves and misused that they become bad. The flesh is not bad. It is trusting in the flesh and the flesh alone.

Paul brings us to this place in the 8th chapter of Romans where he puts a decision before us. What indeed will we choose? What indeed will we trust in? Does the life ever pay off where we accumulate for our own needs, manage selfishly, and accrue power for our own purposes so we can keep money and only spend it on ourselves? The answer is, “No.” It only pays off in anger, in being envious of one another, and in retaliation of things that have happened in the past. It never, ever works.

When you believe that this world is a demonstration of God’s love and that God has created us and placed us in this world, as sinful as we are, he has created a means to correct that sin in the death of Jesus Christ. When we recognize that Christ has died for us, we know it is only because of God’s grace that we have standing. As we live towards Christ and find ourselves moved towards compassion, gentleness, self-control, forgiveness, and generosity, all of a sudden these are the things that make the life that we have always wanted.

The way of the flesh, by itself, is death. But when the spirit invades this life so that life is more than flesh and includes the will, mind, and heart of God for each of us, that is when we find ourselves at peace knowing that we have indeed been saved, that God loves us, and we can begin to relate towards each other the same way that God has related towards us. We know this is right, don’t we?

Flesh is not about the pleasures that we think only other people are doing, and if we don’t find ourselves engaged in that, then it really doesn’t apply to us. Flesh is the way of self-centeredness, power, and trying to think that somehow, because of what we have done, we are somebody. That is just as much the way of flesh as all the great sins of the flesh that you can think of. It is not enough. It will never justify to ourselves or in front of God our lives. It will never make them seem worthy and it will certainly never satisfy.

But the way of the spirit, the way that God has placed before us through Jesus Christ, the way that God empowers us with his Holy Spirit, the way of God following that mind and that heart, leads us to the place where we can share, where we can love, where we can be gracious to one another, where we can forgive. It leads to all these things and that is life.

So choose – flesh by itself or life directed by the spirit that can even redeem the flesh for the purposes of God. Not much of a choice, is it?

Copyright 2008. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

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