5-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.

9-11 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

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Those who are in the realm of the flesh(A) cannot please God.

You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh(B) but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you.(C) And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ,(D) they do not belong to Christ. 10 But if Christ is in you,(E) then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life[a] because of righteousness.

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Footnotes

  1. Romans 8:10 Or you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive