We are in our third week of a series of messages on the Holy Spirit that we’ve entitled He Has Not Left Us Orphans: God’s Spirit Among Us. We are contemplating what it means that Jesus has promised to always be present with us by his Spirit.

We have considered how the New Testament, and in particular the story we are given in Acts 2, emphasizes that this is the reality of this age after Jesus’s ascension. We have seen that one of the primary things that God’s Spirit among us intends to do is to unify, to bring people and things together that have been grievously separated by sin. God’s Holy Spirit is a unifying presence.

Today, I want us to consider the Spirit of God and the concept of holiness. He is called the Holy Spirit after all. And because being a Christian means being given God’s Holy Spirit, being a Christian also means becoming holy as God is holy. Holiness is what we were made for, it is what God expects of us, and it is what Christ has brought to us.

But do we want to be holy? The fact that there might be some hesitation suggests that we need to get a better understanding about what holiness is all about. Consider this morning the honor, wholeness, and life of holiness.

The Honor of Holiness

First, the honor of holiness. For God to give us his Holy Spirit, and so to be called to holiness ourselves, is an amazing honor. Holiness is not something unattractive or undesirable. It is a treasure of incomparable wealth and beauty.

Holy Like God

So, what is holiness? What does it mean to be holy? Let’s consider this from the perspective of the primary Hebrew (OT) and Greek (NT) words.

The Old Testament word is thought to come from a root word for cutting, which is what leads to the idea of separation.[1] If something is holy, it is cut out and set apart from common use. To speak of God himself as holy is to emphasize not only God’s absolute moral purity but also his distinctiveness from creatureliness. “God’s holiness expresses his divine perfection.”[2] In that sense, only God is holy. As the self-existent one, God is always distinct from creatures.

Nevertheless, the Old Testament is quite clear that God demands holiness of his people. Israel, as God’s chosen people, are to be “a people holy to the LORD” (Deut 7:6). That is, they are to be distinct from all other people, worshiping the God of Israel alone, following his commands, living by his instructions. They are to be cut away from the other nations, and they are to be holy, more like God himself than they are the nations surrounding them.

The New Testament word is very similar. Holiness is the appropriate word to describe who God is. God’s holiness “embraces omnipotence, eternity, and glory, and evokes awe.”[3] But in the New Testament God also calls for his people to be holy. “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” (1 Pet 1:15-16). As God’s people were to be in the Old Covenant, so God’s new covenant people (his church) are to be. The call to be holy is the call to be godly. To be like God in some way, well, why wouldn’t we want that?

The Genuine Fruit of Holiness

The reason we often revolt against the demand of holiness is because of the problem of sin, which we will come to in a moment. But it is also because of the problem of sinful distortions of holiness, perceptions that often go unaddressed which paint the wrong picture of what holiness is and what it ought to look like.

I’m talking here about the problem of hypocrisy, of self-righteousness, of the legal spirit which dominates so many who say they are striving after holiness. Who wants to be holy if holiness essentially requires strictness and suspicion, if to be holy means ones must be unhappy and always angry at the sinfulness they see everywhere they look? This conception of holiness says that this is in fact how God is, but it struggles to square it with the God made known to us in Jesus, the God who touched society’s untouchables, the God who made sure there was plenty of wine to go around for the wedding feast.

Of course, there is the opposite danger, the attempt to correct such joyless perceptions of God and his holiness by ignoring or (God forbid) celebrating the sinfulness which does, in fact, rob us of the holiness God desires us to have. But the point I want to emphasize now is that when a genuine holiness bears its fruit, the fruit is genuinely good. The culture that emerges from a genuine holiness is attractive. It is lovely and desirable. It is pure.  It is honorable. God is not interested in us having dull lives. In calling us to holiness, he is calling us to the greatest honor we could ever be given.

The Wholeness of Holiness

He is calling us to wholeness. And if it is an honor to be holy, it is because to be holy is to be whole, to be complete, to be all that we can be.

The Glory of God

There are a lot of passages we might consider as we think through the subject of holiness in Scripture. Our passage today is just one of many that speak to it. Romans 8 is one of the great mountaintops we find in the Bible, taking us to a summit that will take your breath away. It begins with the declaration that all “who are in Christ Jesus” are free from “condemnation” (Rom 8:1); it ends with the declaration that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:39). Think about that. To live free from condemnation, to live assured of God’s love. What kind of person would you be if you knew these to be true?

Right in the middle it tells us “that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” (Rom 8:18). Revealed into us, is one way to translate what he says there. The verse does not speak merely of a glory we are going to be shown but a glory we are going to be given, a glory that is not simply beheld but a glory that is bestowed. [Wright, 595] As the previous verse (v. 17) says, the promise is that we will be glorified along with Christ himself. And in case we missed it, verse 30 makes it clear. “Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

So, glory is the destiny of those who are in Christ. Destined for glory does not mean destined for heaven. This is not destiny as in a place, a destination.  This destiny is about an inevitability, the kind of persons we are sure to become.

How could it not be? In the first part of this magnificent chapter, which we focus on here, we can easily get the sense that God has done something (see verse 3), done something about sin, and the result, the destiny if you will, is that we are now set free. Sin has robbed us of our glory: “all have sinned and have come up short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). But because God has done something about that sin, we are back on track, destined for glory.

Forgiven and Free

This sense of inevitability permeates the whole chapter. While there is a future dimension to this glory to be sure, God’s decisive act has guaranteed its outcome, and nothing will be able to stop it from being fulfilled. So certain is this that the thing is as good as done. Consequently, we who are united to Christ are to live in light of this new reality. We are to live by this completely different story.

Easier said than done, I know. But let’s give it a shot. Try to follow this idea in our passage.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” That’s verse 1. But the next verse is critical. The reason why (“for) there is no condemnation is because “the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” Clearly the logic here is not merely that your sins are forgiven: you did something wrong, you were “condemned,” given a penalty for that wrong, but then forgiven or pardoned. That is true enough, but that is not what this passage is getting at. The problem that held us all under condemnation was our enslavement to “the law of sin and death.”

Yes, the law of which Paul is speaking here is God’s law, a law which, because of our sin, rightly condemns us. But notice that to be set free from this law does not mean set free to go on sinning anyway, only this time with impunity. The agent who has set us free from the law of sin and death is also a law, “the law of the Spirit of life.” These are not two different laws; rather, these are two different results from the same law.

Verse 3 begins with a further explanation. Verse 1 is true because verse 2 is true because verse 3 is true. God himself has done what the law could not do. What was it that the law could not do? Verse 4 gives us the answer, described as “the righteous requirement of the law.” Note that this is not a phrase that describes right behavior; it is a phrase that describes the right verdict.[4] The law offered life—in the fullest meaning of that term. Whole life, flourishing life, in a word, glory, but it could not deliver what it offered. Why? Because it had been weakened by the flesh, by “the present rebellious and corruptible state of humankind, within which sin had made its dwelling.”[5]

But God has delivered what the law could not deliver. And he did this by the sending of his Son, and the condemning of sin in the flesh of his Son. This is what God did on the cross, providing for us not only the forgiveness of our sins but also the freedom from the oppressive, enslaving power of Sin (capital S!) itself.

The Way of Freedom

It will help us understand the weight of this passage if we can see the picture it paints of a new exodus. Just as ancient Israel, enslaved in Egypt, was set free by God’s unilateral act, so God’s people have been set free from the slavery of Sin by God’s unilateral act in Jesus. What now? If you were among those who were rescued from slavery in Egypt, what did you do now that you were on the other side of the Red Sea, Pharaoh’s army buried beneath its waters? Well, you sang a song (Exodus 15), but then you set out to live in this freedom, led by God’s own presence right there in your midst.

So it is for us today. God has set us free from a much more sinister Pharaoh (Sin) by condemning it at the cross. That’s just the beginning of the story, however. We sing songs about this climactic moment, but then we must go live in this freedom, led by God’s own presence right here in our midst. See it there in verse 4? God has set us free from our slavery to Sin “in order that” the law’s righteous verdict, a verdict of life, whole life, would finally, at long last, “be fulfilled in us.” This is what God has wanted for us all along. It is what God has made a reality for us in and through Jesus.

The Life of Holiness

And so, if this is what God has done, if this is the gift that God has given, then why in the world would we ignore it and not make use of it? God offers to us, in Christ, the honor and wholeness of holiness. What, then, is the life of holiness to which we are called?

Living According to the Spirit

It is, first and foremost, life lived “according to the Spirit.” it is not automatic in the sense that the achievement of God in Christ is now universally enjoyed. Verses 5-6 say what we all know to be true, even if we describe it in different terms. There are those who live one way (the mind set on the flesh), the results of which are death. There are those who live another way (the mind set on the Spirit), the results of which are life and peace.

Which way do you want to live?

We all want “the good life.” For us as Christians there can only be one way. You must live according to the Spirit. This is the only way toward life, the life of holiness, the life of wholeness, the life of peace.

The Mindset of the Spirit

But know that even for us who call ourselves Christians, you do have a choice here. The life of holiness is not automatic. You must “set the mind” on the Spirit rather than setting the mind on the flesh.

The word sanctification is the theological term for the process or result of becoming holy. A process of sanctification implies that something common or unholy can be transformed. The way this transformation takes place is by a mindset. It starts by a concentrated effort to live by the family story, the story of Jesus and his cross and his resurrection.

As human beings, we are storied creatures. We can no more live detached from story than we can live without breathing. And we are being told all sorts of stories, encouraged to live by them. You might try not to listen—it would do us all some good to turn off some social media channels. But you’re going to hear plenty one way or the other.

The life of holiness, the path of sanctification, requires us to listen to the story the Spirit within us tells, and then to live in that story.

The Spirit of Resurrection

In verses 9-11, Paul wants to emphasize to his readers that this life of holiness is ours by right. Let no one say that it is not attainable. If you are united to Christ, you have been given the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God. You are “not in the flesh but in the Spirit.” (v. 9). So, let’s learn to live in the Spirit, together.

Drink in what we are told there in verse 9. To be a Christian is to have Christ himself living within us, by his Spirit. “Christ in you,” Paul says elsewhere, is “the hope of glory” (Col 1:27). This is your destiny and mine, so magnificent that, as C.S. Lewis has written

the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.[6]

And every single day we are to help each other toward this destination. Again Lewis:

It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.[7]

The proof and the power of all this is, as verses 10-11 say, the presence of “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead” within us, assuring us that what happened to Jesus on Easter Sunday will in fact happen to us as well “through his Spirit who dwells in you.”

So, the life of holiness has already begun. We are becoming now what we will be forever. That is a terrifyingly awesome reality, meant to wake us up from the hopeless stories we are constantly being told, and urging us onward to the hope-filled story of Jesus, his cross, his resurrection, and his inaugurated kingdom.

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[1] Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. Johann Jakob Stamm, trans. M. E. J. Richardson (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1994), 1072..

[2] Geoffrey William Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged in One Volume (TDNTA) (Grand Rapids; Exeter, Devok, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.; The Paternoster Press, 1985), 15.

[3] Bromiley, TDNTA, 16.

[4] N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” in Acts, Introduction to Epistolary Literature, Romans, 1 Corinthians, The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Leander E. Keck, vol. 10 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 577.

[5] Wright, “Letter to the Romans,” 577.

[6] C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (HarperOne, 2001), 45.

[7] Lewis, Weight of Glory, 46.