1-19-21    THOUGHTS

Chapter 8 in Romans is an awesome reading.  It’s about God’s Spirit in us! It’s for sure that God wants an ever-present relationship with His children.  
From the Message Bible    [study Romans 8 from a good translation]
Rom 7:25   The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.
Rom 8:1-9    With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. 2  A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death. 3  God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. 4  And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. 5  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! 6  Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. 7  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. 8  And God isn’t pleased at being ignored. 9  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.
John 15:4    "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither [can] you unless you abide in Me.
Gal 5:25   If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.
1John 2:24     As for you, let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father.

My Prayer:
Father God, thank you for dealing with the problem of our sin.  Jesus saves.  You chose to live in us if we will let you.  Help us to learn to absorb your presence that we may abide in you and you in us. May your Spirit ever be with us to bear fruit.    

In the name of Jesus       Amen