"What are the things of the Spirit", continued

Matthew Henry’s interpretation worries me, because I don’t know that my thoughts move most often with pleasure to the welfare of my soul and the concerns of eternity. When I was in high school and liked very much to read plays, it was really a terrible difficulty to me, the thought that to really give my heart and mind entirely to Christ I would need to give up thinking about and liking Tom Stoppard, because I would just need to think about God all the time. When I am at work with a lot of manual labor to do in which my mind is left to its own devices for a couple hours, I could pray or listen to sermons or sing worship, but to be honest I don’t usually want to do any of those things, and would rather listen to novels. Does this mean that I am not setting my mind on the things of the Spirit? Is it evidence that my flesh is not being conformed to the life of God, that the graft is not taking?

It might, but I think that here we run back into question 2, about whether “walking according to the Spirit” consisted of discrete thoughts and actions. And I concluded that it does but it doesn’t… the actions and thoughts are the outward signs of the inward life..essentially, the only importance of a thought or action is in its motivation, from or against God. And so, if I read Tom Stoppard because I love God and want to further appreciate the depth of His creation and the beauty of His order, I am still setting my mind on the things of the Spirit. As Matthew Henry says, “Which way go our plans and contrivances?” It’s the direction of the action that matters, not the action itself.

But this doesn’t bring us any closer to answering the question of “what are the things of the Spirit?” I don’t know if it can be answered, because the Spirit is a Person. I think I can only know what they are by knowing Him and asking Him all the time. This makes sense with the interesting phrase, “walk according to the Spirit,” and with the beautiful image in Psalm 119 of the law as a path. When you walk “according to a path” you “set your mind on the things of the path” in that you don’t just start at the beginning, have in your head an idea of the end, and think about it. You pay attention to where the path is going during the whole journey. To “set your mind on the things of the Spirit” is to know the Spirit, and ask Him, where do I go and what do I do?

But this is kind of simplistic, because we all know that we can’t usually just ask him, Spirit, what’s the direction, and we hear a voice in our ears saying, go left. And it’s way better than that too! Because I really do believe that as he works in us, we are transformed. I think if I study and obey the word, and as I ask him where we should go and do it, by his mercy I really am a little bit changed into the sort of person whose will is in line with his and who wants what he wants… that is, my mind becomes a little more set on “the things of the Spirit.”

So here we are again, just like on question 2! I started out with works, but ended up with grace! Yes, to set our minds on the things of the Spirit is something that we do and needs conscious action and intention on our part, but its source and direction is this abstract and incomprehensible gift, the gift of life through the Spirit.

Romans 8:1-6...How to walk according to the spirit?

But getting down to what this means in practical terms. I think that when you try to walk according to the spirit and set you mind on the things of the spirit, you (or at least I) usually have a pretty good instinct of what that means in particular cases, but no idea in general. A couple of questions that I think are worth answering:

1. Is “to walk according to the Spirit” something we try to do and can succeed, something that we try to do and fail (but God’s mercy still regards us as his children), a free gift of God that we don’t have much to do with, growing in us and changing us, warring with and transforming our old nature, or just an name for the way we are once we accept Christ?

2. What does a life “lived according to the Spirit” look like? How is it different from the lives of moderately unselfish people with good intentions who don’t know God? Can it be made up of discrete actions (when I made my bed I was living according to the Spirit, but not when I put the extra sugar cube in my tea), or does it refer to a sort of abstract process, qualitatively different from our stream of actions and consciousness?

3. What does it mean to “set one’s mind on the things of the flesh/ spirit”? What are these things?

"I am the Vine, and you are the branches"--Romans 8:3-6

3 For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, 4 that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.6 For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

I like plant metaphors!
To have the life of the Spirit is, I think, another way of putting the same truth that’s expressed by saying you’re part of the Body of Christ or you are a branch on the vine. The sap that runs through you belongs to a larger organism than yourself, a complete function of itself, of which you aren’t the whole but to which you wholly belong. That function or direction of the larger organism is to be completely your function; ie, if you are a leaf on a plant you are entirely given over to producing photosynthetic material, to the greater end that the plant might flourish and produce fruit. Such is the law of the plant—what happens to a living leaf, just by the nature of the way things are. To the extent that you’re not doing this, you’re not acting like part of the plant and you’re in enmity to it—you’re a parasite and a disease. And if the sap isn’t in you, you’re not part of the plant and as far as the plant is concerned you are dead.. You might still perform actions suitable to not being part of the plant, such as cell breakdown and getting eaten by bugs, but you’re not part of the greater life anymore. And you’re really pathetic, and you’ll die really soon. Such is the law of decomposition—the way nature works on a detached leaf. I think John 15 is talking about this. In this way, the law that brings death is actually the same law that brings life.

But that’s a passive metaphor… you’re part of the plant, its sap circulates through you, etc. What I like so much about Romans 8 (or maybe it’s just this translation) is its combination of active and passive words. When you’re in the Spirit, you are “walking” according to the Spirit, and you “set your mind” on the things of the Spirit. That’s what bothered me about this passage; because it makes it seem like once you are, through Christ Jesus, filled with the life of the Spirit, you will automatically be transformed into a creature that is free from the ways of the flesh and doesn’t follow them anymore. This doesn’t go along with observation, either of myself or of other people. It’s way too easy to sometimes have your mind on the things of the spirit and on the things of the flesh.

Martin Luther says that Romans 8 “gives comfort to those who are engaged in this warfare (struggling against the flesh, I think), and says that the flesh shall not condemn them.” That is, that as long as they are struggling against it and towards God, in Christ Jesus they are pleasing to him even as they fail and fail. We are children of God as long as we strive to put the flesh to death. So my plant metaphor breaks down a bit here. Not really, though. Life is just a very long wait to see if a graft will take or fail, assuming that the severed branch has some choice in the matter of whether it will be transformed to the new parent plant or remain itself.