The Indwelling of Christ

05 March 2011

Many good, caring believers find themselves trapped in a state described so very well in Romans 7:21-25.

21 I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good.
22 For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.
23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
24 O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
25 I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.

How to get out of this horrid state? The answer is right there in verse 25, "through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Romans 8 expands on this deliverance and shares both the means by which this happens and the freedom which it brings.

The means by which this happens, the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ, is found in Romans 8:9-11.

9 But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.
10 And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
11 But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

Do we just go on living with the hope that the Holy Spirit will someday come upon us?

No. Our part is to put ourselves in a place where we can receive this indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We cry out to the Lord to save us from this wretched state, rejoice that He will, and then remove distractions from our lives as they are revealed to us. Trust and obey.

We especially need to be freed from the lie that this new normal life will bore us to tears. Psalm 34:8 says, "Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good." (Exceedingly good) In fact, the adventures we will start to experience will sometimes scare us to death (so to speak). Later as we look back at them (in our journals), they'll blow us away. We will experience life to the full.

Larry Carroll


All scripture quoted is from the New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers.