Restored Flesh

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“But you aren’t self-centered. Instead you are in the Spirit, if in fact God’s Spirit lives in you. If anyone doesn’t have the Spirit of Christ, they don’t belong to him. If Christ is in you, the Spirit is your life because of God’s righteousness, but the body is dead because of sin. If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your human bodies also, through his Spirit that lives in you.”




If we live in the Spirit and the Spirit lives in us, our bodies will receive life. Christ, who lived in flesh restored it. Christ came to bring salvation and salvation is life giving! Therefore our flesh, originally made good, has been restored by the one who embodied flesh perfectly. Jesus truly was 100% divine and 100% human, and Paul does indeed affirm this. Jesus was absolutely of total humanity, but without sin. We know that we were not created sinful, and so sin is not necessary to genuine humanness. Jesus, the living Christ, is perfected humanity; humanity as it was made to be!
This passage of Romans calls us to live by the Spirit, the Spirit of Christ that lives in us. And so we are called to live out the gospel. Our whole bodies, flesh and all have been restored by love and so let us reflect that great love into the world! Let us welcome the orphan, the widow, the foreigner! Let’s remind our people that their bodies, their flesh is holy and good. May we treat our flesh accordingly, knowing that it is a holy thing, created and restored by God. Our flesh was intentionally, divinely created, inseparably connected to our spirits and holistically holy. The letter to the Romans calls out to us across centuries to remind us who we are; God’s restored, good creation, in the flesh and blood.

Read More: Romans 8:1-11 NRSV, Romans 8 NRSV

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